Finished A House at the Bottom of a Lake. One, it’s not horror although it’s marketed that way. And two, I had a feeling throughout that the author was writing himself into a corner and sure enough he did. Damn Josh Malerman, he almost writes good books! I have one more by him in the TBR pile and I sure hope I’m impressed.
This is one of those rare books for me where the writing is so good, every once in a while I pick it up and open it at random just to read the language for a little bit.
I just saw this recently, but haven’t picked it up yet.
A while ago on these threads I recommended Norse Mythology according to Uncle Einar by J.T. Sibley. It’s a real hoot
“J.T. Sibley” is known as “Auntie Arwen” at the cons. She used to run a brief “minicon” on myth every year. She’s also been known to sell copies of my book alongside her flavored salts and grill rubs and used books at the cons.
For those who did enjoy Three Men in a Boat, you might also like Three in Norway by Two of Them, a humorous travelogue published in 1882 which served as the inspiration for Jerome’s book and is similar in tone. It’s about three British men spending a summer hunting and fishing in Norway.
I read Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, which has been getting a lot of press lately. It’s very well written, and I liked her lyrical passages about the lives of plants. It’s not quite the memoir of a female scientist I was expecting, however. It’s largely about her friendship with her eccentric lab partner and their joint struggles with mental illness - mostly hers, but he is “wounded”, as the blurb says. For instance, despite a degree from Berkeley, he becomes homeless and destitute in order to work in Jahren’s lab in Atlanta for little or no salary. It’s an interesting read.
I’m reading the Poldark books: I just finished the third one, Jeremy Poldark. So far they are one long novel; one continuous story. They’re good, but they would certainly cure any notion you might have about the past being a more romantic time to live. The miseries of poverty and illness, as well as the specter of a brutal, primitive system of justice, are on full display.
I do that with Anna Karenina. It will last forever.
I keep a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations by the TV – sometimes I just read a random page of quotes during a commercial break.
I’m about halfway through The Sixth Extinction, a depressing book about how we are killing our planet, and have been since we arrived on the scene all those millennia ago. I’m going to read The Blood of Emmett Till after I finish.
Just started Laura Lippman’s new novel Wilde Lake. I thought the first line was a bit…familiar, or perhaps evocative of a certain other literary work:
“When my brother was eighteen, he broke his arm in an accident…”
The prologue goes on for about nine pages, during which we encounter an adult narrator looking back at her childhood; she grew up, we discover, in a family consisting of her, her older brother, and their father, who works in the legal field. There’s a black man falsely accused of rape, and a sudden and violent attack on an unsuspecting victim, and of course the aforementioned broken arm which never quite heals properly.
Hmmm…
(I like Lippman’s work a lot and expect I’ll like this one too. I’m just surprised at how obvious the parallels are!)
I continued earlier this month, my love-hate (chiefly hate) relationship with Nevil Shute. One thing the chap was, is prolific: the novel of his involved, is one I’d never heard of before – The Chequer Board – published 1947, basically about what became of several guys in the aftermath of their service in World War II. A slight personal saga came about, of my borrowing it from a relative on a whim; shortly after, losing it; and replacing it via Amazon, to make amends.
On the whole. my feelings about Shute are: a very few of his novels, I’ve found impressive; many more, though, strike me as cringe-makingly trite, sententious, and simplistic about humans and their motives for doing what they do. Starting on The Chequer Board before I managed to lose the first copy, it initially seemed to me above-average for this author; on reading further, though, I came to reckon it – while by no means his worst – as becoming, after all, pretty much characterised by his faults as described above.
Recent “reading-around”, surprised my by how much Shute in his not-hugely-long life (1899 – 1960) got around, and the variety of different stuff he did; including, to my surprise, serving in the British Army at the tail-end of World War I. (Likely enough to have happened to someone born in 1899; just, not hitherto realised by me.)
I am trying to work my way thru Marvel: 1602, and although I like the art work, I am about halfway thru and nothing has happened. OK, I see Peter Parker and Daredevil and Nick Fury and Dr. Strange. And OK, they are in 1602. Let’s get going!
I also am trying A Little Thing Called Life about the woman who lived with Elvis Presley and married Caitlyn Jenner. Not gossipy enough, at least so far.
And on audio/dog-walking book, I just finished Book 2 of The Wealth of Nations. I am reminded of the criticism of Shakespeare - “I don’t see why he is so famous, all he does is string together a lot of well-known quotes”. It’s not easy to keep in mind how revolutionary Smith’s ideas were. It’s surprisingly easy to read/listen to - Smith is not given to eighteenth century flowery prose.
Regards,
Shodan
I believe it. I learned, reading up on Robert Penn Warren on Wiki, that he is the only person to have won Pulitzers for both prose and poetry (the latter, twice!). A remarkably talented man.
I loved seveneves, recommended by my son in law, but I was infuriated at a couple of places that seemed to me extremely duh. But overall liked the book.
Just started on this. I’ll admit I don’t know my Norse a 10th as much as I know my Greek mythology, so it’s a sheer delight to be exploring these stories again. What really stuck with me is in the preface where Gaiman points out how certain stories have been lost to time, so that there are gods who get mentioned by name but have little to no back story. Really sad to think that once epic tales back in the day can only be speculated on…
Good grief I’m plowing through a lot of books right now. And it’s going to get worse over the next few weeks since my husband is out of town.
Finished:
Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, by Dorothy Gilman. A little darker than the earlier Mrs. Pollifax novels. Still as compulsively readable.
Sit, Stay, Slay, by Linda O. Johnson. A cozy that just didn’t work for me. I hated the protagonist and the mystery was just so-so.
Ginger Pye, by Eleanor Estes. Newbery winner. Eh, it left me strangely cold.
Set Sail for Murder, by Carolyn Hart. The last of the Henrie O novels and I’m done with my reread. Boo. I really like this series so much, and find it hard to believe this is the same author who does the Death on Demand series that I am so unimpressed with.
I liked the first couple of Death on Demand books pretty well, actually, then continued reading them as they came out more out of habit than anything else. Until I got to the book where the main character’s love interest, Max (“Joe Hardy, all grown up!”–handsome, debonair, immensely wealthy, and given to making a long dossier of all the suspects at some point during the novel) is arrested early on on suspicion of having murdered somebody. I realized I wanted him to be guilty, because he was so damn annoying, and decided maybe I’d best stop reading the series.
The Henrie O books, on the other hand…I saw no redeeming features there at all. Read the first one, said “The next one can’t be this bad,” read the second, said “Oh yes it can,” and gave up. Funny how tastes differ.
Started this morning on a Hap & Leonard book, Rusty Puppy by Joe R. Lansdale. I don’t know if the quality of these has gone down or if I’ve just read too many. I still get a mild enjoyment out of them, though. It’s what I expected it to be.
The first Henrie O book has an INSANE ending. None of the others are like that. But if you don’t like them, you don’t like them!
I just finished “reading” the audiobook over the weekend. Sadly, she doesn’t discuss the Ergot theory at all. There’s only that tantalizing reference in the intro.
Her take on it seems to be that, under various types of pressure, the afflicted girls were really victims of clinical hysteria. Chadwick Hansen had already taken this line in his book Witchcraft in Salem back in the 1970s. Both Schiff and Hansen cite Charcot’s initial work with hysterics in the 1800s, where he explicitly drew the parallel between hysterical persons and Witchcraft victims. Both Schiff and Hansen reproduce images from Charcot to bolster their case (I couldn’t see this in the audio version, of course, but I looked into a printed copy and verified it).
Having finished that, I’m reading a lot of other books that I’ll write about , probably in next month’s thread. But one title I’m definitely reading is Murder Ink 2, which was released on Saturday. I haven’t read the other contributors’ entries yet.
March thread is active!
I’m about halfway through it myself. I think the author’s self-disclosure is an explanation for why he was fascinated enough with the story to research and write a book about it.
I had never heard of it (that I know of) until a few months ago, when I was noodling around on You Tube and found a video mentioning it, and did a little search here to see if there was any further discussion about it.