Finished Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, which was cozy and fun.
This morning, I skimmed through about 60 pages worth of Chris Crutcher’s Period 8, which I thought was just awful. I had read Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes ages ago (plus a couple others) and didn’t recall Crutcher’s stuff being this bad.
I borrowed this from the library and was about on Page 30 when I decided I needed to buy it. I am now on Page 182 and when it arrives, I will take this one back to the library for someone else and then I will own it forever.
Gah, I am #43 on my library’s waiting list for this one … now I am thinking I should just go ahead and buy it.
I just started Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household, which is a collection of diaries and letters from some of the people who had royal appointments under Queen Victoria, which reveal a lot about daily life. It’s great if you like reading a lot of period diaries and letters about daily life, which I do.
I’m third! 
I just started Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris. I’ll let you know what I think of it after I’ve done, and by that I mean “did it make me want to go on Jeopardy! more or less?”
I just ordered it on Amazon myself. Have you read We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill? I thought it was one of the most insightful books I’ve ever read on the two of them. She has a lot more admiration for Victoria than many of the people who’ve written about her. Victoria is shown as a conscientious, thoughtful ruler in touch with her people. By contrast she implies Albert, while a fundamentally decent, intelligent and hard working man was something of a prig with a hypocritical sense of morality who did not respect his wife enough.
I just finished reading Middlemarch; once I got past the overly flowery introduction, I quite liked it. It wasn’t as good as Vanity Fair, but it was close.
I’m reading The Darkling by R. B. Chesterton, aka Carolyn Haines. I haven’t read this author before, and picked this up with no recommendation, but am enjoying it so far. It’s just the kind of ghost-y tale I like.
I’m only about a hundred pages into Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright and there’s already enough crazy for nine kinds of Pit threads.
I have finished The Golem and the Jinni, and now I don’t know what to do with myself or where to go or how to live or how to sleep at night. Come back, Jinni! Come back!
That was my feeling. The ending left room for a sequel. Spoiler about one of the characters – Sophia was left hanging. She’s traveled to a desert climate so she won’t be cold all the time, but what did the Jinni put inside her? Can it be fixed?
It’s a flame, I think – not a demon flame like with Fadwa or a baby like the one she lost in Paris, but like a pilot light that always has to be kept burning, which is why she always has to be warm. Maybe she will meet another jinni and they will be together – or better, another man who has a flame from a jinniyeh!
I caved and told my husband to pick it up for me today. Now I have to wait until he gets home from work.
Finally close to finishing John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle. I’ll be due for another mystery after that.
Saw a poster at my son’s school library tonight which read, “I’m reading a book about anti-gravity, and I just can’t put it down!”
Just finished Robert A. Heinlein’s Space Cadet with my son - still an adventurous and fun book, but dated (he wrote it in 1948), most glaringly for the absence of any female cadets. You can see where Gene Roddenberry might’ve gotten a lot of his ideas for Starfleet. Heinlein refers to microwave cooking of food (brand new at the time), and to a “mother ship,” which might’ve been one of the earliest uses of that phrase.
Also finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Sloot, an interesting nonfiction book about medical research, institutional racism, and the ethical and legal questions about tissue donation and research. I recommend it.
I’ll soon be returning to Ron Chernow’s excellent and detailed Washington: A Life, and I think I may also try The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (I’ve seen both the original Swedish movie and the American remake, and liked them).
I’ve read that book! I liked it, b/c it made me think about stuff. Yeah, that makes me sound smart. And by ‘stuff’ I mean colonialism, racial equality, and the times that she grew up in.
Right now, I’m re-reading Confederacy of Dunces. I had to pick it up after a thread here where people talked about how much they hated it.
I’m being blown away by The Unwinding. If I had the money, I’d buy a copy for everyone I know. I’m learning a lot, and it’s even fun.
I’ve been struggling through the Keegan book on World War I, and now I’m wishing Packard had written it. He makes complicated issues clear without too much simplifying.
Hope you like it. The films are very faithful to the books, but I think they’re still worthwhile even if you’ve seen the films first.
Got a buncha reading done during vacation earlier this month; however I made a minor mistake by reading two detective noir books at the same time: Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem and Avery Nolan, Private Dick of the Strange: The Case of the Zombie Menace by Tony Faville. Even though they had very different settings and plots, at times elements from one novel bled over in my mind to the other.
The Avery Nolan novel is set in the 1950’s, with the title character being a Korean War vet. He gets pulled into what seems to be a missing-persons case, but turns into a government coverup with KGB turncoats and (as you might guess from the title) the undead. While Faville revels in the vocabulary, turns of phrase and the cliches of the genre, the underlying story moves along nicely, with some fun twists in the plot and an exciting, well-written (IMHO) fight scene near the end. While I’m not a regular reader of this type of book, I did enjoy it for what it was. Recommended to fans of genre novels looking for something a little different.
The Lethem novel is set in the not-too-distant future, where evolved animals fill menial roles, citizens’ karma levels are controlled by the government, and it’s socially acceptable (darned near mandatory) to take designer amnesiac/mood altering drugs. An infidelity suspicion case that involves murder pits our gumshoe against his old co-workers and gangsters. Fascinating world-building, with compelling characters and a plot that captured and held my interest throughout. I think this is the first Lethem novel I’ve read, tho it certainly won’t be my last.
I finally got around to reading Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison courtesy of the Kindle Daily Deal back in February. While not quite noir, it still falls into the detective genre IMHO. A very bleak novel that I guess is more dystopian than post-apocalyptic, as there wasn’t a specific disaster, just a population explosion. Is it just me, or does the story play a secondary role to the world-building and philosophical points Harrison was trying to make? In that respect, it felt a lot like a Heinlein novel, but without quite as engaging a story. It also felt dated, but I can’t quite put my finger on how at the moment.
I agree with my GoodReads friends that the ending was anti-climactic, and (tho I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the entire film) has very little to do with Soylent Green, the film supposedly based on the novel.
On the non-fiction side, I picked up Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre thanks to friedo’s recommendation. I’d recently read For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming And James Bond by the same author, and was interested to read more specifics about this audacious disinformation plan that the Fleming bio only hinted at.
Macintyre’s book is extremely well-researched and detailed; but reads like fiction. The main characters - Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley and Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu - could easily be James Bond’s colleagues back at MI6, and the actual rollout of the plan, where the faked documents slowly made their way to the Germans, was as tense as the climax of many a Bond film. Even knowing that it was successful didn’t detract from the sense of suspense. I think I may have to track down the first book referencing this operation, written by Montagu himself, The Man Who Never Was, to see his take on the events, as well as the movie based on the book.