we’re all burning a candle for that one. sigh
May Thread is BLOOMING!
The last episode when he takes about the common man never being able to access the computer, make me laugh. Especially then he talks about the impossibility of handing EVERYONE a computer and saying help yourself 
I finished reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I thought it was quite engrossing. The mood reminded me of “An American Tragedy” where it’s almost like watching an accident in slow motion.
I finished Fallen Man by Tony Hillerman, on the one hand I’m hapy because it was really good (and Janet has left town AGAIN) but on the other hand I’m hand knowing I am nearing the end of the book written before Hillerman died, 5 more by my count 
I have started the 10th Decius Metellus book, A Point of Law by John Maddox Roberts. As usual it is very dialogue heavy but you are dropped into the action pretty fast.
Like some others here, I finished Jonathan Howard’s Carter & Lovecraft, and enjoyed it. I am struck by how far tonally this novel is from Johannes Cabal: there’s almost nothing of the Cabal series’ whimsy, lighthearted blackness, and much more straightforward scares and suspense. Very good, anyway, and yes, it does look like it’s aimed to produce sequels. Wouldn’t be the worst thing, either.
Other recent finishes of note: James Corey’s Abbadon Gate, the third installment of the outstanding Expanse series. I’m really, really enjoying Corey’s series: it is extremely inventive, suspenseful, funny at times, and populated with believable characters. It’s great space opera, and it’s also good science-fiction, which isn’t really all that often the case.
Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. I’m late to this, obviously…it’s amazing. It’s perhaps even better than Wolf Hall. I’m flabbergasted by the way Mantel makes a story that is (plotwise) so barely fictionalized still exciting, but her writing is what drives this book. She writes with such grace and ease, and finds such outstanding images…that’s two Booker Prizes well deserved. Even the things that I think would seem odd to a workshop on fiction (such as writing, so frequently, “…he though; he, Cromwell”…and such constructions are amazingly right, conveying an immersion into the material that couldn’t but drag me in.
Right now, I’m taking off time from going into Corey’s fourth volume, and instead going back a bit. I’m reading H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which I never have and which is short but good, so far. And then I’ll be able to talk about Morlocks!
And I’m also reading, in the less classical vein, Ian Toll’s second volume in his Pacific War trilogy, The Conquering Tide. It’s passable. Toll’s struggling with the technical details quite frequently–1000lbs bombs dropped by Japanese dive bombers, heavy cruisers firing 6" shells, that sort of thing–which make me feel like he’s not really immersed enough in the material. Toll’s Six Frigates on the 1790s/1800s USN was outstanding, but technologies were simpler then; for WW2, where so much of the historical valuation needs to depend too on technology, I find it ever so slightly awkward to make such basic mistakes. But it’s also clear that this is a book for a reader new to the subject, rather than a Pacific War historian, hobby or not; it makes some good points, but it’s a bit too interested in the personal interest stories for my taste.
Read both A Storm Too Soon, Michael Tougias; and Dead Wake, Erik Larson. The first was the story of a sailing yacht caught in a monster storm in the Gulf Stream, and the subsequent survival/rescue of the crew. Gives you new respect for the Coast Guard.
The second is the story of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Very well written, with a lot of background on many of the parties involved.
I just got Dark Money, by Jane Mayer from the library. It promises to be one of those books that makes you madder than hell about our political process and the huge amounts of cash that determine how it’s run.
Once I finish that, I’ll come back to Philbrick’s Sea of Glory, which is about the 1838 exploratory expedition of the South Pacific, which has been largely forgotten by all but avid historians.
Dead Wake is on my list of books to pick up too.
I recenly enjoyed** The Berlin Conspiracy **by Tom Gabbay. Another JFK assassination story, this one set in West Berlin. Recommended.