I recently finished Fool Proof, by our very own DMark. It was great! Well-written, entertaining, and a quick read. I’m looking forward to reading his next book, Fool’s Gold.
I’m currently reading Jason Mott’s The Returned, thanks to recommendations from a few Dopers several threads ago. I finished reading Fool Proof right before the premiere of Resurrection – the TV show based on Mott’s book, which I’d had on my Kindle for a while – and when I realized the connection I decided to read the book before watching the series.
I’m also reading The Piano Book, by Larry Fine, because I might be in the market for a used piano and a professional pianist friend recommended this book.
How are they holding up? I’ve always had a vague interest in that series, but haven’t read any of them yet.
I just added that to my Amazon wish list; thanks!
I’ve read Scottoline in the past and enjoyed her, but haven’t read anything of hers in years; another add to my wish list. And the Kindle version is only $1.99!
Finished Panic, and I hate to say it, but it was lame. Now I’m looking back at the author’s previous books which I enjoyed and wondering if they were lame too and I just didn’t notice at the time…that’s how disappointed I was. I willingly suspended belief a hundred times during this novel but at the end it was still a turd. And I’m left with a loose end…I care far more about what happened to a certain animal than what happened to certain people. Bad Lauren Oliver! Bad!
I read Kate Atkinson’s novel Case Histories, which is contemporary detective fiction set in Cambridge, England. The story was pretty good, if a little too melodramatic for my taste, but I like Atkinson’s writing style very much. I even liked the back-and-forth timeline (there aren’t two scenes in chronological order in the whole book). I’ve ordered the next in the series. I’m not sure I would like the TV adaptation, since it would be the melodrama without the prose, but I wonder if it tells the stories straight, or has constant flashbacks.
I read and enjoyed another of Jude Morgan’s Regency romances: A Little Folly. I highly recommend this, as well as Indiscretion, to fans of Georgette Heyer. Most books described as “Austen-lite” are terrible, but Heyer did a good job, and so has Morgan.
I also enjoyed Kage Baker’s novel The Anvil of the World. Baker was best known for her science fiction series about The Company, but this is a fantasy novel - actually three novelettes pieced together. It was quirky and amusing, but as usual, the story eventually went in a direction I didn’t like. I really like Baker’s small-scope stuff, and her sense of humor, but she generally loses me when she launches into grand schemes.
I finished The Messenger by Daniel Silva and I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’m not cut out for the whole spy genre… or I’m not reading the right stuff in the genre. The book is decently well paced and populated with a reasonably interesting cast of characters and DOES start with a boom, literally, but ultimately for me it fell flat at the two thirds make when one of the main charactes’ cover is blown for no adequately explained reasons. Just suddenly the bad guys “knew” each and every intelligence spy around them and every time they passed the main character. This level of omniscience was just a bit too deus ex machina to me, and the wrap up at the end was so anticlimatic it was almost Looney Tunes. And once again, like the first book, it all seemed so pointless. There will just be more violence served up in the name of revenge.
I really liked the tv series- there were often flashbacks to the drama that happened in Brodie’s early life and crime flashbacks for the cases he was investigating but otherwise it followed a reasonable timeline. I thought it brought a lot of the dry humor I liked from the books plus the gorgeous Edinburgh scenery. The only complaint I had was that Louise was such an interesting character in the books but they change her relationship to Brodie too much and it falls a bit flat IMHO.
Edited to add… now that I think of it, Louise may have shown up in the 2nd book, but I really liked her
I finished it, and it never got any better. Kind of meh. At least she struck a bit of a balance between different Palestinian points of view, and somewhat humanized the few Israeli characters - it wasn’t just a PLO screed.
Finally read The Lost World by Sir Arthur C. Doyle. It was OK, but how does a cliff stop pterodactyls and insects from migrating out to the outside world?
Currently on a Murray Leinster kick, since I discovered many of his works on audiobooks on YouTube, and I can listen while walking the dog. So far, I have “read” Pariah Planet, Operation Terror, and The Aliens, and am nearly done with Creatures of the Abyss. I should have split up Operation Terror and The Aliens, because the plots are too close together and I guessed what was going on about halfway thru. If the same happens with Creatures of the Abyss I am going to be ticked off.
Also re-listened to Spacehounds of IPC, by E.E. “Doc” Smith, the Lensman and Skylark author. Great fun, and full of the “Gee whiz technology is wonderful” and “give me a minute and I will rewire the generator so we can go faster than light/read minds/implement perpetual motion” that makes pre-WWII sci-fi fun.
I’m giving The Kindly Ones by Robert Littell a second try. I bought it when it first came out – big fat book about WWII from the POV of a SS Oberst-whatever. Got bored with it early on, checked reviews where many readers classified it as Holocaust porn, donated my copy to the library. Recently heard it described quite differently, checked Amazon Matchbook and found I could get the Kindle version for $3. So I’m trying again.
The reviewer did warn against the penultimate chapter, which he says is thoroughly vile and disgusting and probably unnecessary.
Answer: You wouldn’t think ot would.
If you liked The Lost World, see if you can find a copy of The Annotated Lost World. I’m a big fan of the “Annotated” books series, and this one’s a great entry. The problem is that it’s hard to find. I own the only copy I’ve ever seen.
Doyle really got into this one. He made up mocked up pictures of the plateau/Maple White Land, and also dressed himself up as Professor Challenger, complete with a huge false beard (and his friends as Roxton and Summerlee) and did a photoshoot of the main characters. He based his “Lost World” on the real upthrust plateau of Roarima. When they finally examined the plateau, they did indeed find different life that in the surrounding jungle – the separation was enough to prevent mixing with nearby life, even when you’d think it would be easy to go between the two zones. No prehistoric life or dinosaurs, though. (They even did a TV special about the real-life expedition).
I’m almost done with White Fire, by Preston and Child. I read the whole thing yesterday, except the last chapter, which I made myself save until I was, well, …awake. It’s an entertaining little cheesy-poof of a snack-book. A Pendergast stand alone with repulsive murders present and past, Corrie Whatsherface bumbling around in a thinly disguised Aspen Colorado, Pendergast more than living up to expectations with hardly any of the goofy mythology that had me almost give up on the series. Best book of theirs in a while, IMO.
I finished Zadig by Voltaire. I liked it better than Candide; it was the same sort of plot (various misfortunes happen to a virtuous young man), but I thought the anecdotes hung together better and the Sherlock Holmes-style reasoning in the story of the horse and the dog was fun. It’s strange that the moral of the story (God makes bad things happen for a reason) is basically the opposite of Candide’s moral, though!
Dumped The Kindly Ones for the second and probably last time.
Am about halfway through The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust (non-fiction). It’s riveting. It has details about slave labor that I hadn’t seen before. It’s not a wallow and there are some incidents of bravery and kindness that give me hope (but not much) for humanity.
Finished Twisted by Jonathan kellerman. I really enjoyed it, one of his best from just before that period of trying to make his mysteries as wfty and twisty as possible. Nice and reasonably straightforward.
Starting Trunk Music by Michael Connelly next… I think some light manga reading for this evening though
I just finished Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson. I very much enjoyed “Grand Stand-In” and the story matching the title; reminiscent of Bradbury. I now want to re-read one of Wilson’s inspirations, Civilwarland in Bad Decline but can’t find it in my stacks of books.
I finished The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers. Non-fiction, about the events and political issues leading up to the assassination of Crazy Horse in 1877. I feel like it took me forever to read it – it was good, I was interested, but it was A LOT of detailed information that only made sense if you put a lot of effort into keeping track of it. The funny thing is that I have a pretty decent working knowledge of this general topic in U.S. history, so I was thinking it would be a fairly easy read for me. It did not play out this way.
Following up with some quick reads, two YA novels. The Whole Stupid Way We Are by N. Griffin is a contemporary story about two quirky teenagers in New England, I enjoyed this but it’s the kind of novel that is more of a glimpse into the lives of its characters, and several issues were left open at the end of the book. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente is a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale in an Old West setting - I thought it was clever and nicely written, but it’s almost more like a series of vignettes. The whole concept was cool … but it never really felt like a story were I was immersed in the setting and the characters.
Finished The Nazi Officer’s Wife by Edith Hahn Beer. I’ve read a lot of WWII and Holocaust (fiction and non-fiction). What I got from this that I didn’t get from those other books was a look at what it was like to be a slave laborer. That’s not surprising, since so many of those people didn’t survive, and like Edith Hahn, if they did survive, they didn’t want to re-live that experience by writing a memoir.
The “Nazi Officer” part of the title is a bit misleading. Edith’s husband was a low-ranking member of the Nazi party who had a supervisory job in an airplane factory. He was blind in one eye so wasn’t even drafted into the army until 1943.
He was an odd guy. Edith told him before they married that she was Jewish. He had no problem with this. He seemed to get a kick out of fooling people. (He’d lie to his employers to get time off work for holidays.) Edith doesn’t say so but that might be one reason why he married her – it was another example of him getting one over. Even after they divorced – and not amicably – he didn’t blow the whistle on her.
Anyway, I’d definitely recommend the book, as one Jewish woman’s experience in Austria and Germany from the 30’s to the late 40’s.
I am tackling Trollope’s Palliser novels. The series starts with “Can You Forgive Her”, which posits a situation that was dire in Victorian times but which is so trivial nowadays that it is hard to get in the spirit.
The second novel that I am about 10% of the way through now is “Phineas Finn” which seems to be about a young and rather foolish Irish MP. It is not clear at this point where the Pallisers come into this novel except as deep background, but maybe they turn up later.
There are four more novels, none of which are very well known any more. I think I liked the Barsetshire series better, at least there was some gentle humor in there from time to time.
About 80% done with “The Great Hunt” by Robert Jordan. I read the first 5 books of the series as they came out, and then gave up as they were being written too slowly. (And I remember them declining in quality.) I’ve heard this continues for some time in the series, but I’ve got a year or two to kill, and the series is finally done. So far, I like this book better than the first, which was just merely good.
Just finished, with my youngest son, a collection of the late James Marshall’s deliriously funny kids’ stories about two hippo chums, George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends, from 1972-1988. His deceptively simple drawing style and deadpan wit always tickle my funny bone. Nice foreword by Maurice Sendak, too.
And the Kindle version is only $1.99!
