I loved Last Chance to See as well, SpazCat & Elendil’s Heir. In fact that’s my favorite Adams; I need to find a copy for my daughter’s friend for Christmas. In 2011, Carwardine returned with Stephen Fry to See’s species to check how they were faring; the expedition produced both a BBC tv series and a book. Haven’t seen the tv series but nothing can hold a candle to the original book. 
Finished The Summons, by John Grisham. Set in the fictional northern-Mississippi town of Clanton, scene of some of his other novels and short stories. Even has some recurring characters and not just from the Clanton stories. Old Judge Atlee is dying and summons his two sons to discuss the details of the family estate. But the meeting never occurs. The older son, the responsible one, a law professor at the U of Virginia, arrives first to find the old man dead. And he finds an astonishing secret. Very good despite a couple of plot holes.
Next up: A Bend in the River, by VS Naipaul.
I finished reading Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I liked it, although it was quite sad. I certainly thought it was much better than Jude the Obscure which I found rather boring.
Finished *The Gamal *today. I think maybe the phrase I was searching for was “narrative style”?Anyway, the narrative style was quite interesting and kept me going although the story itself got quite tedious. There were also a few annoying things, such as dictionary definitions thrown in for common words. Plus I think I was supposed to like a certain character and I really didn’t.
Next book in the queue is Black Hat Jack, by Joe R. Lansdale, about a black cowboy in the Old West. I can already tell you this is going to be a five-star book, with its main flaw being that it’s too short.
Finished Man-Kzin Wars XIII, now on to The Madness of Cthulhu, which was a gift.
I’m also almost through the audiobook The Greatest Journey, and will listen to more of The Gods of Mars before finding another library audiobook.
Scott Brick reads the story for Tantor Media, and, I know it sounds odd, but he gets the accent wrong. I know there are no martian races on Mars, so that statement sounds bizarre, but it’s true. I can say it because Brick uses the same “foreigner” accent for the Martians that he does for Russians and Mongolians and other such folk, and it seems unlikely that Therns would sound like bad movie Russian villains (given my druthers, they’d have cool evil British accents, like Mark Strong has in John Carter. Or in those Jaguar commercials)
Brick does what sounds to this Northerner like a decent Virginia accent for John Carter, and manages to keep it up for the entire audiobook without it getting old, but his repertoire of Bad Guy accents needs more variety.
Is he the same person who read the first John Carter book? I had to shut it off because I kept falling asleep at the wheel, he was so monotone.
I don’t have it, so I haven’t heard it (I have a different version from another audiobook company).
According to their website, it’s not – John Bolen reads A Princess of Mars.
Another Joe Lansdale is usually a treat. In Canada it comes out in - January? Damn.
Ahh okay. Thank you
I have to correct that – Tantor has evidently put out multiple versions. I DO have John Bolen reading Gods of Mars, not the other guy. And I agree – he can have a soporific effect.
My non-fiction pick of the month is Strong Curves: A Woman’s Guide to a Better Butt and Body. If you’re a female who’s into weight training, it’s one of the better weight training books I’ve come across. It’s more than a beginner’s guide; it really goes into depth on anatomy, nutrition, and physiology. The workouts are set up in such a way that if you’re lacking the proper equipment (or ability) to do a certain move, you can pick out another move that works you out in the same manner.
My fiction pick of the month is The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel. It’s more intellectual and depressing than I usually read, but it’s thought-provoking, and I’m very impressed with Kimmel’s command of language.
I’m also about to start the audio book for The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
I’m giving up on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It managed to piss me off royally at the halfway point and, after checking Wikipedia for the plot summary, it just doesn’t seem worth it to finish. On to The Three Pillars of Zen!
I’m rereading Jane Austen again. Just meant to stick with “Sense and Sensibility,” but having the complete works in one ebook makes it so easy to continue to the next…
Call me a philistine, but I prefer the Emma Thompson movie adaptation to the original.
I finally read The Hunger Games - my son is a fan. I liked the writing well enough, but I couldn’t get past the contrived premise. The author wasn’t able to convince me that this Capitol city would so enjoy watching children tortured on live television.
I read Ancillary Sword, the followup to Ann Leckie’s debut, Hugo-winning novel Ancillary Justice (it won all the things last year, actually). I think the plot of this second book is weaker, but the writing is even more compelling. I love the AIs, and I like the way the protagonist (who used to be the AI-brain of a spaceship, and is now confined to a single human body) is still parsing a constant stream of input from multiple data sources.
I just finished one of Hilary Mantel’s early novels, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is a novelization of her experiences living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980’s. The novel reads like a nightmare, which suits Mantel’s rather dreamy prose; she evidently did not enjoy herself there. I liked the book, but her writing style, which worked so well for me in Wolf Hall, was sometimes a little frustrating. I wanted less poetry and more details about the way she lived.
And I wrapped up C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series - all 15 books since May of this year. I read the last six of these nearly back-to-back; after all, they only cover only a few weeks of time, if that. From a sluggish start this series became very entertaining. I think I will check out her Chanur books next.
In the past week I picked up two ambitious books hoping to get me through the holidays when the college libary will be closed. Both were very disappointing.
I spent two hours working my way into Vikram Seth’s “A Suiable Boy”. About 30 pages in, I skipped ahead about 700 pages, near the middle, to see if it was all like that, and there seemed to be nothing to suggest that I had skipped anything. Life with the Chatterjis in India’s upper classes. I can watch Bollywood movies for that, effortlessly, with the music and dancing as a bonus…
So then I tried Wieslaw Mysliwski’s “Stone Upon Stone”, and soon started looking at middle of the book to see if i was all like that. Sure enough. Slightly jointed ramblings, reminding me of Sherman Alexie like-you-know-I-mean babble. “Till one day I’m sitting at the table having some cabbage soup.” Possibly very clever in Polish, but in English, only as clever as the translator can make it seem.
Ishould read the rst of the Foreigner books…On the other hand I blasted right through the Chanur books.
Christmas’s almost here and with it a long break, so I’m slowly trying to think up what books I could take to the family visits. I’m thinking I might give Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy another whirl, but we’ll see. For now, my recently-read stuff:
W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle, bought on the strength of my impulse to buy anything that says “the Catch-22 of X” on the cover. This one was “the Catch-22 of mountaineering”. It was fun, quick, and for lack of a better word sympathetic. It wasn’t Catch-22, but that’s okay. It was much more Catch-22 than the last book I bought for that reason, which was Denis Johnson’s godawful Tree of Smoke. The plot: a group of eight humerously realized nitwits undertake an expedition to climb Rum Doodle, at 40.000 1/2 feet the highest peak in the world, and hijinks ensue.
Richard Kadrey’s first Sandman Slim (whose title I’ve forgotten!). Fun! Like somebody said elsewhere, it’s the Dresden files meets L.A. noir, and a very nice read indeed.
Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Lovecraft. I’ve mixed feelings about this. The annotations are usually great, but it seems (I’m not perfectly sure) that its shtick is to appear to take Lovecraft seriously, so that some annotations are really helpful, while others just say “there seems to be no trace of this person anywhere” and stuff like that…plus, it’s not particularly well suited to reading, given its size. I’d buy it again for reference, I suppose.
Black Hat Jack was a treat, although not as witty as Lansdale is capable of. The afterword says a full-size novel will follow, yay!
Just starting on The Vanishing, by Wendy Webb. The writing so far seems a touch amateurish, but the story involves a beautiful Gothic mansion which may be haunted, so I’ll be sticking around for a while.
Just finished** Little Failure**, by Gary Sheyngart, which I recommend very highly. It’s the author’s blackly humorous autobiography. He immigrated to the USA from the USSR at age 7 and struggled in various ways to fit in for a very long time, many of which reminded me of my own childhood, not to overshare. It also reminds you of how devastated the (former) USSR was by WWII and how pretty much everyone there has some horrible trauma just a few generations back in their family tree. It made me want to look up his other books, although he says that his previous works (all fiction with protagonists who immigrated from the USSR as children) were basically about him trying to get up the courage to write the actual truth about his own experiences, so it might be kinda redundant.
Also working slowly (a chapter a night before bed, sometimes) through A.J. Heschel’s God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. It’s pretty deep, and he turns a lot of brilliant phrases. So far he has established that faith in God is an instinctive human response to contemplating the mystery and grandeur of the universe, which I can pretty much go along with. I will be interested to see if/how he addresses the issue of how we get from there to embracing a specific religious creed (though it seems pretty clear that he regards attachment to rigid dogmas as the antithesis of authentic religious experience, which I can totally agree with)
Also been a long time since I read it, although it is one of my favorite novels ever. It’s not a spoiler to say that there is a massive epidemic early in the book, and IIRC most of the re-added material was vignettes set during that epidemic, featuring mainly characters who die quickly and thus obviously don’t figure in the main plot. I enjoyed the expanded version, but other than being a couple hundred pages longer, it’s really not significantly different.