April is nigh upon us… for some it’s flowers and for others we’re looking at turning another year older…Yeah me and Iron Man are 52 this year.
So what are y’all reading, writing and piling up in your room, because we all have pileitupitis to some degree.
I’m still happily plowing my way through Charlotte MacLeod’s Max and Sarah cozies. It’s like visiting with old friends I’ve not seen in years.
I also started Necropolis by James Silverstein today. Hooked me fastand I’m looking forward to where the story ends up. (I was a tiny bit ahead of the hero in this first story, perhaps I’m more cynical?)
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Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honor.
I started Earth Alone a couple days ago. It hasn’t exactly gripped me, so I doubt I’ll finish the series. It’s time to be less of a sci-fi failure and get into Ringworld.
After many years of hearing about it I am finally reading Maus (and Maus II). It lives up to the hype. As a Jewish person I am finding it very affecting but also funny in parts. The father reminds me of many of my older relatives. I also like how he isn’t portrayed as a saint or a victim. Just a man who had to figure out how to survive under horrible circumstances.
I ditched my self-help book (Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me). It was interesting, but a little depressing to read about how all my memories and opinions probably aren’t based on reality and that even when people are wrong, facts aren’t enough to change their minds.
Started this morning on a book of short horror stories by Richard Chizmar, A Long December. Chizmar co-authored a book with Stephen King that’s coming out soon, so I thought I’d familiarize myself with him a little bit.
Just finished the second of Mick Herron’s Slough House thrillers. This is a great series so far…MI-5 personnel who have fucked up on the job are assigned to the Slow Horses (Slough House). Wackiness ensues. Actually not wackiness, but very tense, well written taut thrillers. Starting on the third one this weekend.
Also picked up The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It’s been my bedside book couple of nights now. Really fun look at the English language, and how its used and abused, and how it’s evolved.
In my spare time, I’m re-reading Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nuevel as an intro to the new Themis Files book coming out this month.
I just finished The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It’s space opera set in a universe somewhat like Star Trek, with a Galactic Commons involving lots of different species.
There are some refreshing changes from the formula, though:
Humans are not only a fairly weak member of the commons, they’re also, due to some events in their future-history, among the most pacifist members. Other species are both older, more ambitious, and more violent.
The book does have a plot, but it’s more a picaresque through space, a series of vignettes. The focus isn’t on action so much as it’s on interspecies relationships, how folks from one species deal with and live alongside the peculiarities of folks from other species.
I enjoyed it a lot. Not a life-changing book, but a very fun perspective on a well-worn formula.
Finished Words on the Move, by John McWhorter. I’m interested in the history of the English language, and this had quite a bit of information I wasn’t familiar with.
I’m continuing to read Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata as part of my quest to read all of the Newbery winners. I’ve also started Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly. I think it’s very interesting, and I haven’t even gotten to the NASA part yet. (I liked the movie, too.)
Just finished an audiobook of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which draws heavily upon his service as an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI but is really more of a tragic, and almost entirely fictional, romance. I liked it very much; I’d read some of Hemingway’s short stories but this is the first novel of his that I’ve “read” (the reader was actor John Slattery, perhaps best known for Mad Men, who was very good, including doing convincing English, Scottish and Italian accents). I was interested to learn that the book was censored when it was first published in 1929 - his profanity was replaced with dashes by his publisher, and the book was banned in Italy for many years (the Italian military is not at all shown in a good light).
Just started Dan Chaon’s new thriller, Ill Will, and this week will also be starting an audiobook of Jojo Moyes’s novel Me Before You.
I’ve got to get around to reading the Maus series.
Meanwhile, I finished A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. A small boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s believes himself to be god’s instrument on Earth. The story is long and meandering and takes its time but very worthwhile. I was liking it okay but thought it not as good as the other two Irvings I’ve read – The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. But the last 50 or even 30 pages pack quite a wallop, with an ending I won’t even hint at except to say it ties up so many things, even matters you thought were mentioned just in passing and had forgotten completely about. I still rate those other two novels above this one, but you’ll realize just how good this book was one you reach the ending. Apparently this was made into a goofy Jim Carrey film called Simon Birch, with Carrey playing the narrator, who is Meany’s/Birch’s best friend. I hope I never see that.
Next up is Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, the acclaimed biography that was the inspiartion for the current hit Broadway musical, Hamilton.
Finished. It was just okay. I found the writing workmanlike, and (maybe because I was reading a whole pile of stories at once) predictable. I frequently found sentences I thought were oddly worded, such as “I almost slipped on my ass” when “I almost slipped and fell on my ass” would have been preferable to me. Also, “mantle” when it should have been “mantel” (possibly not Chizmar’s fault). I didn’t dread picking it up each day, but you can see I was nitpicking, which indicates I wasn’t swept up in the wonder of the tales.
I finished the anthology Murder Ink and am about to re-read an anthology I last read a quarter of a century ago – Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick. It’s a series of alternate history stories about what might have happened if the other guy (or even some third-party candidate) had won various elections. The book has one of my all-time favorite covers. It has a triumphant Thomas E. Dewey holding up a newspaper whose headline reads Truman Defeats Dewey
On audio, I just finished Rick Bowers’ Spies of Mississppi about the espionage system set up by the state of Mississippi in the 1960s when it was fighting to retain segregation. Fascinating stuff, and I see that they turned it into a documentary movie three years ago.
[Elendil’s Heir] Check out Founding Brothers - a series of vignettes about the Founding Fathers and the insanity that was early American politics. [/Elendil’s Heir]
Ill Will is slow to start but good so far. I’m giving up on Me Before You after the equivalent of my usual 50 pages - kind of an amateurish romance novel that just isn’t doing anything for me.
I’ve also begun Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776 by Richard R. Beeman, and A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon, both of which I like so far.
By Joseph Ellis, who won the Pulitzer for it - yes, I’ve read it and really liked it. I’ve even recommended it here myself!
I just read the first one! It was so good (it’s called Slow Horses). One of the reasons I liked it so much was that it was wacky, as well as being a thriller. It’s legitimately funny. The dialogue is a little too wry and snappy to be realistic, but it really works in the book. It reminds me of The Rook in terms of tone, minus the supernatural elements.
One unexpected thing, though, is that it made me feel very American. I am about as liberal and pro-gun control as you can get; I do want to take your guns away for the most part. But even so, when reading this book, I was often surprised when it became clear that the agents didn’t necessarily have guns.
