Oooo! Come on, inter-library loan system…
Right now I’m in Shivers VII, edited by Richard Chizmar.
I’m reading Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy collection. I bought a nice omnibus which contains the novel Too Many Magicians plus all of the short stories. These were written in the 1960’s-70’s, and the novel was a 1967 Hugo nominee.
They are straightforward detective stories, mostly locked room mysteries, but they’re set in an alternate 20th century where an Anglo-French empire is still ruled by the Plantagenets. (It seems that Richard I survived that arrow wound back in 1199, fought off brother John, and left the throne to their nephew Arthur, who lived up to his namesake.) This world uses magic, strictly regulated by the church, in place of science. So the mysteries are being solved with the aid of “forensic sorcery”. Lord Darcy is a dashing man of action with a Sherlock Holmes intellect.
It’s not great literature by any means, but so far the stories are fun, if a bit hokey. The modern feudalism reminds me a little bit of the society in the Honor Harrington books: a hereditary nobility which wields real power in a benevolent, regulated sort of way.
Fixed the link. The SDMB software always leaves the closed-parenthesis outside the URL bracket, for some reason.
Just finished David Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, his latest collection of funny and/or cutting essays. I got the audiobook as a Christmas present - as I’ve said before, I like Sedaris’s delivery so much that I only get his stuff as audiobooks these days. I enjoyed it quite a bit - standouts were “Easy, Tiger,” about learning new languages; “Obama!!!,” about the election of 2008, when countless foreigners confidently assured Sedaris that Obama would never be elected, and then irritated him by claiming the President-elect as their own; “Standing By,” on how airports bring out the worst in people; “Day In, Day Out,” about his inveterate diary-writing; and “The Happy Place,” about his surprisingly pleasant colonoscopy.
If you get the audiobook (and I encourage you to), be sure to listen to the end of the credits on the last track of the last disc; there’s a clever little surprise there that refers back to “Easy, Tiger.”
They want $20 for me to borrow the Binscombe book. :eek: So I hied me over to Amazon and got some of the tales on Kindle for next to nothing. It will be very interesting when I go on a trip this spring, to open up my Kindle and see all these juicy little things I’ve collected!
I just checked, and I can loan this book. PM me with your e-mail if you’d like to have it. The only problem is that it can only be loaned for 14 days.
Fenris warned me that the stories might get stale if I read them without a break. I’m halfway through and they’re not feeling stale. I have four other books on the nightstand, calling to me, but every night I read another couple of Binscombes.
Thanks for the offer, AuntiePam, but I won’t put you to the trouble…my reading time has shrunk to nearly nothing lately! I appreciate the lead on the author though. I may go back and gather up some more of his stuff on down the road.
Finished The Racketeer, by John Grisham. A federal judge in Virginia is murdered. The FBI can’t find a suspect or determine a motive. A lawyer imprisoned in Maryland for a crime he did not commit knows the murderer and the motive and wants to cut a deal. An excellent read, highly recommended. And by an odd coincidence, this is the second book in a row I’ve read, after John le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor, in which Antigua features prominently.
Now it’s back to George RR Martin. Next up is A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in his series A Song of Ice and Fire. (I’m pretty sure Antigua won’t be in there.)
I was deeply disappointed in That Day the Rabbi Left Town. The story was 95% gossip, 3% discussion of Jewish life and beliefs, and 2% murder mystery. Thumbs all the way down.
I ventured out today once the temperatures got into the 20s and used up a Barnes & Noble gift card I got for Christmas. It went to acquiring the second volume of Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life and Robin McKinley’s latest book, Shadows. They’ve been added to the alluvial plain of Mt. ToBeRead. I also went to the library and got The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken, the third Vish Puri mystery. Now that’s a series that doesn’t disappoint in the convoluted yet satisfying mystery angle!
Siam Sam, I hope the Antigua you’re talking about isn’t this one. Or should I phrase it “this one!” Seriously, check out the Look Inside feature. (!) Reading just a few paragraphs makes me tired. (!)
Well, I’ve never been to Antigua, so I can’t say whether it’s like that. 
If you’re interested in some fictional Judaica, check out the Coen Bros. movie A Serious Man. Lots to say about faith, fate, misfortune and hope. Just saw it last night and really liked it.
I finished Araminta Station by Jack Vance, and then read the other two in the trilogy. Some great sections throughout the series but volume 3 is pretty weak and the whole set could almost be classed as YA. He’s one of my favourite authors but this definitely isn’t his best.
Now reading slightly strange Finnish novel The Rabbit Back Literary Society, by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen set in the little town of Rabbit Back (to explain the name). On the night the Society welcomes a new member (almost unheard of) it’s founder and sponsor dies mysteriously. Ella, the new member, decides to investigate the Society’s history.
I’m almost half way through and it’s interesting, if not totally gripping.
Back i the sixties I read, and kept, two books by John Sladek, The Reproductive System and The Muller-Fokker Effect. I was so knocked out by them that I could never part with them.
Last month I found out he’d written more, I thought he’d died ages ago!
I’m halfway through The Complete Roderick (it’s a long book) and it is just as funny, witty and deeply profound as I remember his early works.
Sadly, John Sladek died back in 2000.
As I guess you know, or willl soon realise(!), The Complete Roderick is actually an omnibus edition of two books that appeared in the early 1980s - Roderick and Roderick at Random; for further reading, Tik-Tok, written around the same time, was similar in theme.
And some of his short stories were excellent.
Thank you for that.
I realised on reading that the technology was a bit outdated, but noticed he’d had the foresight to consider that a good AI system could not just spring from the box and would require nurturing - in Roderick’s case all of the wrong sort:eek:.
I finished both The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. II and the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf over the weekend, and started Nancy Marie Brown’s Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. I’ve known about Snorri Struleson for years, of course, but I hadn’t realized that:
1.) we know so much about his life. (There’s an even more complete bio than this out there)
2.) that, in addition to writing the Prose Edda, he also wrote the Heinskringla* and Egil’s saga (Saga-readers, take note!) and may have written some of the other sagas.
3.) That some of the material in the Prose Edda, upon which a good portion of our knowledge of Norse mythology rests, can be demonstrated to probably be Snorri’s own invention, so a lot of things we have been assuming was ancient myth and folklore might not be.
The book is filled with weird and interesting asides (“…twenty freebord men chose to accompany her (including everyone’s favorite Viking, Eystein Foul-Fart).”)**
I’ve finished the audio book of Clive Cussler’s The Storm, and am halfwat through Zero Hour, which promises to be even more ludicrous.
I’ve taken a break from my bedside reading of The Annotated Peter Pan to re-read The MST3K’ed Eye of Argon. I had participated for the first time in a reading of The Eye of Argon a week ago, and the MST3K ed version is the best thing if you can’t actually attend a live reading. I highly recommend it.
http://www.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/books/Eye_of_Argon.html
*Known to million of readers of Jules Verne as the volume in which Professor Lindenbrock found the parchment from Arne Saknussem in A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
**You know you want to read more: Eystein Halfdansson - Wikipedia
http://homepages.rpi.edu/~holmes/Hobbies/Genealogy2/ps05/ps05_090.htm
From Ms. Brown’s blog:
I finished “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson over the weekend. In my opinion, it didn’t live up to the hype at all. Great concept, but not executed all that well, I didn’t think. I also finally finished “The Three Musketeers”! I liked it, but not as much as “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
I’m now reading “Eleanor & Park,” which I am loving so far. I had to make myself stop reading it last night, or I probably would have stayed up all night.
I continue to plug along through Inferno/All Hell Broke Lose; as is fitting for a history of the greatest armed conflict the world has yet seen (and, we may hope, will ever see), it’s rather long–but so very worth it. This is a “warts-and-all” history of the war that that pulls no punches; it does not hesitate to shine light on the cowardly, unwise, cruel and generally less than heroic actions of individuals or nations, while still respecting the enormous sacrifices and heroism displayed throughout the war. In fact, by showing just how miserable the war was, the true acts of glory shine all that much brighter. Given the white-washing WWII tends to get, this kind of gloves-off treatment is refreshing and enlightening.
I also continue catching up with Fables, currently at its most meta with Vol. 13, The Great Fables Crossover. I’d forgotten all about Babe, the [del]Big[/del]Little Blue Ox. His single page flights of fancy were one of the highlights of Jack of Fables for me, so it’s nice to see him again. 
Pondering continuing in the war history whenever I emerge from WWII–perhaps going back to The Great War w/ Tuchman’s Guns of August. We’ll see if I can stomach more military history by then.
I am re-reading “Earth Abides” by George Stewart. I read it a long time ago and thought it was awesome. On rereading I’m finding that the narrator and his fellow survivors are basically lazy, anti-intellectual, plodders who don’t raise a finger to plot out or influence the future of their children. The biggest thing he does is teach the children to use bows and arrows when he is in his dotage.
I read it as a teenager and liked it a lot. Now…not so much.
I liked it, but it certainly wasn’t perfect. And I admit the shooting-Hitler subplot is a pretty tired one by now.
Is it tired? I’m not reading enough time travel, because I can only think of two that have used that plot – Life After Life and Elleander Morning. I’d love to read more of those.