I’ve finally finished Ivanhoe. It was okay, but the only really interesting parts were when the story focused on Rebecca. Oh, and the scene where King Richard drank with Friar Tuck.
So now I’ve given up on Walter “Wordy” Scott and am giving Jane Austen one last chance to make me like her. I’m starting with Sense and Sensibility. So far she’s doing much better by comparison, despite her overuse of the passive voice.
Sense and Sensibility is, in my opinion, not the most lovable of Austen’s books. That prize would go to either the juggernaut Pride and Prejudice, or her final complete–and most mature–novel, Persuasion. Persuasion is *my *personal fave, not so much for the love story, but for the writing itself.
I couldn’t read Ivanhoe, BTW, but thought (and still think) that Hollywood is seriously missing out by not making a big-budget motion picture of Waverley. Especially with Outlander doing so well on Starz.
It made me laugh when I discovered that Rebecca was (allegedly) conciously inspired by an actual person Scott knew second-hand. Now, that must have been a very odd moment for her when it was published! 
I’m the opposite ;D I’d much rather read Scott then sleep to— I mean read Austen.
S&S is the only Austen novel I liked. I wasn’t impressed with P&P, but I might have been too young for it.
*Waverley *would be a good movie if it focused more on the MacIvors instead of the hopelessly insipid Edward. That would also make the book better.
Finished Red Sparrow, by Jason Matthews. Spying between the US and Russia continues in Putin’s post-Cold War Russia. Enjoyable. The author is a retired career CIA field agent and knows his stuff. A “sparrow” is slang for an agent trained in the art of the honey trap. But annoying is his shtick of mentioning a food dish in each chapter and then giving the recipe for that dish at the end of each chapter. Every single chapter. Maybe it’s because I’m not a cook but I could have done without that. And proportions are not included, so even if you are a cook, it would prove difficult to make the dish, I think. But still a good read. And this is the second novel I’ve read since staying at the venerable Tabard Inn in Washington three years ago that has scenes of intrigue set in the hotel. Makes me wonder what sort of shenanigans were going on right under my nose when I was there. The movie rights have been sold, and I hope they don’t intend to go into recipes at the end of each scene. I plan to read the sequel, which is already out but proving difficult to find over here.
Next up is a little nonfiction. One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson, about the effects of that particular season on the country. I’ve heard vague and passing mentions of Bryson before but don’t know much about him.
Prompted by the PBS series?
I’m skimming through Diane Carey’s Ship of the Line, a substandard Star Trek novel from 1997. Clunky dialogue, an amazingly omitted character, and a farfetched premise (even for ST).
Also still reading Salman Rushdie’s essay collection Imaginary Homelands, which is good but not particularly gripping. I have to admit I never feel in much of a rush to pick it back up again.
The latest Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Poldark spurred my interest in Winston Graham’s saga, which I’ll be reading for the first time - as soon as it arrives in my small town library, who had to order it. I asked for *Ross Poldark *and Demelza, to start.
But first I researched and read free chapters online to see if I liked it, and I do! Graham’s powerful and sometimes graceful prose ignites my imagination, painting a colorful picture of life in Cornwall in the late 18th century, right down to the dialect.
In the meantime I’m reading one Ruth Rendell mystery after another, trying to catch up - presently *Tigerlily’s Orchids *- so sorry that she died a few months ago. She was such a master of the British psychological thriller, so civilized. I like the way she describes murder without the stomach-turning gore, sex scenes without the sweaty four-letter words. A nice change.
I just finished In A Dark Dark Wood, by Ruth Ware. A very nice little murder mystery about a group of young people who are gathered together in a beautiful house in the middle of nowhere for a bachelorette party (or “hen do” as it’s referred to here. God, the Brits are so cute)! There were a couple of annoying elements, such as the protagonist’s emotional fragility and amnesia, and by the end I was feeling a few things lacked in credibility, but for the most part this was a good tale that dragged me in and made me happy to pick it up each day.
Next up, The Night Sister, by Jennifer McMahon.
I read a collection of short stories that were made into films. The usual standards were there, like Second Variety, but I had the pleasure of reading George R.R. Martin’s The Sandkings for the first time.
Also re-read all the Sherlock Holmes short stories, The Sign of Four, and halfway through the Hound of the Baskervilles. Note that all Sherlock stories are now in the public domain and are readily available through say the Guggenheim project.
Yeah, Sandkings is a great tale. 
I love “Sandkings”! “The Way of Cross and Dragon” and “The Stone City” are also very good GRRM short stories.
Toy’varen, if you want to read some more tales of Holmes and Watson, check out June Thomson’s books. Excellent pastiches - as good as Conan Doyle’s best, IMHO.
On Tuesday night, I finally finished Game Change. I was listening to it in my car on audio book, and since I drive so infrequently it took a couple months to get through. I enjoyed it but do have one complaint. The subtitle says “Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.” But almost the entire book was about Obama and the Clintons! Seems like it would have been more accurate to have some sort of subtitle to the effect of “Obama, the Clintons, and more!”
Having finished that, I returned to my audio book Naked Statistics, which I actually began before Game Change, but then lost in my car for a few weeks. It’s, well, good enough for me to finish, but the author irritates me in his attempts to be cool. His Introduction to the book is along the lines of “I bet you hate statistics. I get you. I did, too,” which is really odd when you consider that your intended audience is people who buy books about statistics. I assure you, if I hated statistics I would have simply bought a different book to read.
There was also one point in the book where he was using statistics to draw conclusions about sports (I forget which sport, probably football or baseball), and also about economics, and then made some sort of comment like “though I’m sure you’re more interested by the sports analogy.” Which was completely not true, I’m more interested in economics than sports and this author reminds me of a twelve-year old who uses “smart” as an insult.
But if you can get past the tone, there are some cool examples of applying statistics to real world situations.
I finished Armadale by Wilkie Collins. The premise would have been clever for a novella, but for a long novel it started to wear thin after a while: after the ill-fated meeting of Allan Armadale and Allan Armadale, will history repeat itself for Allan Jr. and Allan Jr.?
It was okay, but I liked it less than The Woman in White and I liked it much, much less than The Moonstone. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the character of Ozias Midwinter. He was pretty flaky (er, I mean “sensitive”) and it felt a bit racist (by modern standards) to have a mixed-race character be so superstitious. I also thought some of the evil plans people had seemed kind of over-elaborate, but YMMV.
I loved Game Change, and its sequel Double Down about the 2012 campaign, but I tend to agree. McCain and Palin get pretty short shrift (although, ironically, her selection was the part of the book that was made into the Julianne Moore movie).
Finished Carey’s Ship of the Line, which was very disappointing - hackneyed dialogue, stoopid plot, and (what ought to have been) a major character omitted.
Also just starting Robert Parker’s 1973 The Godwulf Manuscript, his first Spenser detective novel. I was in the mood for some Spenser, and thought I might just as well begin at the beginning.
I read that some years ago. The butler did it! (Just kidding. Don’t actually recall a butler in it.) I read a few of his early works and was never impressed enough to proceed further, but they were okay. One thing that struck me about those early books was Parker’s nonironic admiration of leisure suits. He seemed to think they really made the sharp-dressed man. Easy to tell he was writing in the '70s.
I finished The Search for King Tutankhamen’s Tomb, re-read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre after thirty + years.
Read the new Images of America book (the ones that are trying to hit every location in America at least once) on my home town.
Read Tom Purdom’s Romance on Four Worlds (a science fiction series sorta kinda based on the life of Casanova).
I’m almost through * Live Free or Sci-Fi*, a collection of New Hampshire-based science fiction stories, part of a neo-Pulp Fiction series of books published by PlaidSwede books in – where else? – New Hampshire. They have already done Zombies (Live Free or Undead), noir (Live Free or Die – Die – DIE!), and Romance (Love Free or Die). All the titles are plays on the NH state motto (“Live Free or Die”). Their next one is NH-based fantasy, but their creativity seems to have failed them (Live Free or Dragons). I have a soft spot for that one, though – they bought one of my stories for it. Not out until next year, though.
I also picked up a used copy of The Little Big Book of Playboy Party Jokes, a relatively recent publication in the style of the paperback collections of Playboy Party Jokes published in the late 1960s, but without any of the cartoons – only Leroy Heisen’s drawings of the Femlin. Trying to read it all in one go, I experienced the same feeling I did when trying to read all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books at one go. I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t enough substance there. To avoid literary heartburn I had to take it in steps. I was a little surprised at the casual racism and sexism, despite the fact that the collection had to have been edited recently (Pepper Mill was unsurprised – Sexism? In a Playboy Joke Book? Whoda thunk it? But I’m serious – only not enough to start a long discussion now)
Did anyone ever tell any of these jokes at a party?
Go on, give us an example!
Congrats on the published story too.
I thought American Gods was a really good premise, but the book didn’t quite work. He has another book set in the same world, Anansi Boys, that doesn’t have the problems that American Gods had.
Speaking of books that don’t quite work, I just finished A Tale for the Time Being. Interesting premise. The narrative switches back and forth between the diary of a teenage girl and the woman who found and is reading the diary. Unfortunately, I get the feeling the author doesn’t know any teenage girls, because the voice just doesn’t sound like a teenager - it’s off in weird ways. Also, the author doesn’t trust her audience - she’s worried several times that we won’t get the point, so she makes her characters randomly stupid at various times so that someone can explain something to them (and therefore to the audience) that we might have missed. And then the book just goes off the rails at the end.
Still enjoying the short essays in Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett. Full of info about little known pieces of secret and lost geography.
And, in contrast, I’m also well into Michael Swanwick’s latest novel, Chasing the Phoenix. It’s a sequel to Dancing with Bears and again features the con men Darger and Surplus, this time in China.
In the future the world is a chaotic mess of small kingdoms littered with advanced technology. The Singularity was imminent but failed and rogue AIs now lurk almost powerless beneath ruined cities. The style is a chinoserie reminiscent of Ernest Bramah or Barry Hughert, some Charles G. Finney or Alfred Doblin. A future post-catastrophe Old China. Ehjoyable fun.