Took a break from my Big Books to read John Scalzi’s Redshirts, because I saw a copy in the library, and there’s going to be a discussion of it at Arisias next weekend.
I’ve also started reading The Annotated Peter Pan as my bedside reading. I picked it up last summer, sand had to finish The Annotated Huckleberry Finn before I could start. ()Oddly enough, the book only came out a couple of years ago, but I didn’t know about it until last summer, when I came across reduced price copies in TWO bookstores in New Hampshire.)
I’m still reading the second volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, and the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.
In my car, I finished listening to the audiobook of Clive Cussler’s The Striker and have started his The Storm, which promises to be his most ludicrous book yet. I love these books – they’re ludicrously ridiculous Ear Candy. And te local libraries seem to have them by the ton.
Thank you! Of those, I particularly liked “Lindsay and the Red City Blues,” “More Than the Sum of His Parts,” “Seasons,” “The Hemingway Hoax” (which he later expanded into a novel of the same name), and “For White Hill.” You might also look up “Counterpoint,” “Armaja Das,” “A Separate War” (another The Forever War sidelight, focusing on what Marygay was up to during Mandella’s last mission), and my all-time favorite Haldeman short story, “Summer’s Lease.”
Having recently finished his masterful bio Churchill, I just started Roy Jenkins’s Afternoon on the Potomac?, a 1972 collection of lectures. It’s basically Jenkins’s advice, as a top British parliamentarian, to his friends in the U.S. as the Vietnam War wound down.
I just finished **Gentlemen and Players **by Joanne Harris. A very satisfying book in which I learned some interesting Latin phrases, such as “Pone ubi sol non lucet”, or “Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine”.
I am having a right proper Fables binge, which was what I was meaning to do so I could start following it. Finished up Vol. 6 (Homelands) last night. I hadn’t thought we got the big reveal on the Adversary’s identity this early (though it’s pretty obvious after the wooden soldiers show up). Bonus, I’m paying for it all by clearing out a paypal balance I’d had sitting around after making a short-term loan, so it feels like it’s not real money, heh.
I continue to plug along through Inferno/All Hell Broke Lose (US/UK titles), enjoying it a great deal. The heavy use of primary sources from the men and women on the ground gives me a newfound respect for those who lived through the hell that was WW2.
Just finished Badgerlands by Patrick Barkham which is an up-to-date look at the British badger (different from the American species) and the troubled relationship it has with some people, especially dairy and beef farmers (many of whom want it eradicated) and the conservationists.
Interesting stuff, and full of anecdotes as well as facts…
Now re-reading Araminta Station by Jack Vance, although this may be put on pause if I see something new I fancy.
It’s responsible to some degree (much argued about) for the spread of Bovine TB to dairy and beef herds, mainly in the SW of England. Both species can carry the disease and wiping out badgers (around 1 in 20 in affected areas has the disease) will, they say, cut the spread of the disease in cattle by 9% - 16%. This is apparently significant enough to justify the action.
I remember there was a minor controversy a few years ago when a British snack manufacturer introduced badger-flavored crisps, and then had to assure the public that the product didn’t actually have any badger in it.
I read one of Laurie King’s historical mysteries: *Touchstone *(which is not part of her Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series). This one is set in England just before the 1926 general strike, and has a lot of relevant politics in it. The book is kind of a mess, with unbelievable characters and too many points of view, but I liked it pretty well anyway. King is very readable, even with the odd storytelling style she chose for this book.
I read Jo Walton’s novel Among Others, which won the 2012 Hugo award. It’s about a lonely 15-yr-old Welsh girl who reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy. There are some magical elements in the background, but very little happens. When something did happen I rather wished it had not. I enjoyed the book, though. It seems a little young-adultish, except that it’s set in 1979 and the stuff the character reads is decidedly old-school sci-fi and fantasy: Heinlein, McCaffrey, Zelazny, Delaney. I was as annoyed by the book references I didn’t get as I was pleased by the ones I did.
The novel is partly autobiographical - Walton is Welsh, and a prolific reader, and the same age as her protagonist. She writes great columns about genre books for Tor.com, which are about to be published in a collection called What Makes This Book So Great.
Picked ***The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl***by Timothy Egan up on Kindle via the Amazon Prime Lending Library. Several friends (including AuntiePam) had recommended it, and I’d recently read All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, a historical fiction novel set in the Dust Bowl, and wanted to know more than what I’d learned in school.
I was blown away (pun intended). I had no idea how awful things got, and how many people stayed. Animals dying with a gut full of dust. People dying from silicosis - the same disease coal miners suffer from after years of exposure - but here it could take just a few months. The near-continual dust-filled wind, scouring away at everything it touched. This went on for years… and it was our fault. The cheap land, combined with easy lending practices led too many families to try their hand at producing wheat that wasn’t even needed in the marketplace. Their grain rotted in silos while the soil - no longer held in place by millenia of grass roots - blew away.
Egan’s research is wide-ranging; including interviews with survivors, (mostly children at the time, of course) but also diaries and other primary source material. The style is very readable, and compelling. Photos and a map are included; as are an index, Notes and Sources and Acknowledgements.
Recommended to anyone interested in the real-life situation behind novels like The Grapes of Wrath and the Lansdale novel I mentioned above, as well as stories of incredibly strong people facing disaster and surviving.
I’ve been plowing through Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, which aren’t great literature, but are certainly fun reads, at least so far. If you’re not familiar: Jack Reacher is about the closest thing you can get to a superhero in real life. He’s about 6’5", 240 pounds of pure muscle that can kill with a punch, with lightning reflexes and a phenomenal intellect. And, he’s a former military policeman, with the accompanying investigative skills, experience, and contacts. After leaving the Army voluntarily after 13 years, he’s decided to drop off the grid and live a life free of attachments, owning nothing but the clothes on his back. And so, like Kwai Chang Caine, he drifts from place to place, righting wrongs and fighting injustice wherever it may live. I’m up to the eleventh, Bad Luck and Trouble, and should finish it in a couple days, depending on how much free time I have.
I’ve also been listening to the Artemis Fowl books during my commute, just because I’ve heard they’re good. They’re not great, but I do like the characters. But, I’m up to the sixth book (The Time Paradox), and whoever has it checked out via Overdrive hasn’t returned it yet. So I went ahead and downloaded the twelfth Reacher book, Nothing To Lose, and started that on my commute this morning. They’re each kinda standalone anyway, so it won’t spoil anything.
For anyone interested, this is first-rate as an audiobook too. I listened to it and was quite as riveted as Politzania. I didn’t realize it until this fall, but apparently dust pneumonia’s become (or is still?) a problem, at least occasionally, in Oklahoma to this day. I spoke to a fellow who had recently gotten over his case of it.
I just finished a very dense historical fiction novel, Hild by Nicola Griffith. It was terrific, a fictional account of the childhood and young adulthood of St. Hilda of Whitby, so set in England in the 7th century.
It is very, very immersive … you are just plunged into the vocabulary of life in those times, so you would have to like reading a lot about alliances and kin relationships and that sort of thing.
I read that, and enjoyed it as well. It certainly felt true to the 7th century. Very immersive.
The parts I liked best about the book are, if you like, the historical scenery. The parts I didn’t like were some of the plot elements and character-building.
[spoiler]
I assume that this is the first in a series, as it sort of ends suddenly. That part I found a bit disconcerting.
My only real beef with Hild is that she’s a bit of a Mary Sue, in the original sense of the term - she’s simply good at everything from an improbably young age, from predicting stuff that will happen (as a seer, we as readers are shown that she is often simply making educated guesses … yet she’s never wrong), to hand-to-hand combat.
She is even given a posse of warriors and sent off to personally deal with bandits. How likely is that, for a young girl who is both the king’s close relative and valued seer?
In a lesser novel, I would just shrug it off, but the author of this one clearly has serious research and literary intentions. [/spoiler]
You guys would love Kristin Lavrandsdattar by Sigrid Undsett. I think it was written in the 1920’s, but it felt contemporary to the 13th (14th?) century. One of the best historical novels I’ve ever read.
I just finished Ben Yagoda’s biography of Will Rogers. I wanted to find out who exactly Rogers was–turns out he was one of the most popular entertainers of the early 20th century, but (as Yagoda posits) he was so tied to his times that he was forgotten after his death, save for a few pithy remarks that have been passed down.
It was all right. I kept thinking “This book has too many words in it.” It felt like Yagoda was trying to shove every little tidbit about Rogers and his articles and letters in the book until it just sat on my head. I got tired of all the name-dropping by the fifth (very long) chapter. Yes, Will Rogers was friends with a lot of celebrities. You don’t have to name them all.
So far I’ve finished;
Popcorn by Ben Elton - A good read, kept me gripped throughout
This Other Eden by Ben Elton - It was ok but I lost interest towards the end
The Dead Emcee Scrolls by Saul Williams - A different style to She and ,Said The Shotgun To The Head but the imagery is still so vibrant, I’ll pick it occasionally.
In my ‘To be read’ pile;
Blind Faith by Ben Elton
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams
The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
War Junkie by Jon Steele
The Adventure Of English by Melvyn Bragg
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (To read again)
The Seventh Octave by Saul Williams
…and I’ll most likely dig out the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy of 5 again
Finished The Last Man, Vince Flynn’s last novel. He was from the Twin Cities, and died recently. The book was OK as chewing gum for the mind, but the whole “Mitch Rapp is a loose cannon that can get away with murder” is a little stale.
Also Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi, about the JFK assassination. A massive work (it’s like 1500 pages), and he has an unfortunate habit of over-stating his certainty, which detracts from the impact, and he also seems to relish shooting fish in a barrel - he spends a lot of time blowing holes in theories that are quite implausible. Case Closed was better and more accessible.
I listened to Casino Royale, the first Bond book, on audiobooks on YouTube while walking the dog. Interesting, but now I am working thru From Russia With Love and I am coming to the conclusion that Bond is an idiot. Why does he go tearing off after Vesper Lynd when she is kidnapped alone? Call Rene Mathis and get the whole French security service to help him. Instead he gets captured and beat in the nuts. And Le Chiffre just happens to have spike strips in his car to cause Bond to crash his car, but not get killed.
Plus, the amount Bond drinks is incredible! I’d be drunk on my ass the whole time if I tried to keep up with him, and I am a much bigger guy than Bond was supposed to be. The passage where he describes his Vesper martini is prefaced where Bond says “when I’m concentrating, I only have one drink before dinner.” But it has something like five shots of liquor in it. Then he has vodka and wine with dinner and more champagne during the baccarat game and more champagne after he wins. And then drives a car - no wonder he crashed.
