Eastern Americans are pretty snowed in, meanwhile out here in the Intermountain West we are hitting mid fifties in temp. Crazy…
So I’m reading about vampire accountants and zombies, just another boring day at the office! How about you?
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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.
Well, I finished Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari last month; perfect timing, that.
I’m currently reading Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films. Lists like this tend to generate more heat than light, but this one is pretty good. At least for those movies I’ve seen I tend to agree with where the author has ranked them, which makes me want to see the ones I haven’t. My only criticism really is that for each movie he starts with a couple paragraphs listing a couple dozen crew and cast. It’s done in a style that seems to want to be academic, but it comes off as just padding the length of the book. I’d rather read more about why the movie is good, or groundbreaking in some way, than who played “third Morlock from the left” in The Time Machine.
Good stuff. I’ve been enjoying McCullough’s The American Spirit, a collection of his speeches about history, politics and what we should truly value about this country.
I’m about three-quarters through David Sedaris’s multiyear collection of diary excerpts, Theft By Finding, which is pure quirky goodness; the introduction alone is almost worth the price of admission. Of course I’m listening to it as an audiobook, because I’ve always thought his delivery is half the fun.
About halfway through Frank Herbert’s Dune, which isn’t as good as I remember. Great ideas; so-so writing.
Also just started Elmore Leonard’s 1961 Western, Hombre, which I like. A mismatched small group of people, led by a former Apache tribal policeman, tries to make it back to civilization after being stranded out in the middle of nowhere by robbers.
Reading Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes. It’s about policing in america and how poor area are essentially treated like a Colony in that Policing in poor areas’ gal is to maintain order but in other areas it is to promote safety. Interesting and sympathetic to the difficult job police have (he doesn’t blame police as much as American culture).
BTW his previous book Twilight of the the Elites was very good (better than this one I think maybe although like Colony in a Nation) and was prescient about the 2016 election.
One for the Road, by Tony Horwitz. Put simply, I love Tony Horwitz. This is his take on hitchhiking through the Australian Outback in the 80s. He’s hilarious and game.
Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books, by Michael Dirda. Short, mostly shallow essays on books Dirda is reading, collecting, recommending, or just thinking about. A little too ephemeral for me.
Murder at the Brightwell, by Ashley Weaver. Historical mystery with a Golden Age feel. Very enjoyable.
Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George. Newbery read. I DNFed. I hated this, but I have no idea why.
I finished The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes, last night at the planetarium ( I was participating in a Scavenger Hunt, they had to find me). It was a fun great, didn’t require a lot of thought but satisfying as a tube of honey mustard Pringles.
I finished reading The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett. It’s the picaresque story of a prostitute’s bastard son who tries to climb up in the world by being a con man, seducer and impostor. The first half (or so) is mostly amusing stories of a cheerfully immoral young man cheating his friends, hiding in closets from jealous husband and fathers, etc. but it takes a bit of a dark turn when he gets into attempted rape. Fortunately, through a series of increasingly implausible coincidences, there’s a happy ending for just about everyone.
I’m on page 110 of The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor. I keep thinking that it’s not really grabbing me, but it’s not really put me off either, so on I go. It’s a murder mystery involving a group of kids in England in the eighties, with flashforwards to the present day.
Gnomon, the latest from Nick Harkaway. The last time I had to look up this many words per page in a book, I was reading Eco. See you in a couple of months.
Finished 'em. McCullough’s book is slim but very worthwhile, Sedaris’s was enjoyable but not his best (he has a thing for retelling jokes he’s heard, sharing odd lists he wrote, and there are 'way too many stories of him being approached on the street by aggressive panhandlers and/or thieves), and Leonard’s was a good Western marred by an implausible ending.
I’m now rereading Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I’m enjoying all over again as an audiobook. It’s an alternative history about the return of magic to Regency England in the early 1800s; imagine Jane Austen crossed with Harry Potter (but quite a bit darker).
I’ve also started The Crown: The Official Companion, Volume 1: Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, and the Making of a Young Queen (1947-1955), by Robert Lacey. It’s pretty good, although I wish they’d more clearly distinguished in the captions between actual historic photos and production stills drawn from the (excellent) Netflix series.
I’m now reading How Democracies Die which is about Phineas Bushwick, Manchester’s greatest cobbler, as he navigates the ins and outs of 16th Century England. I’m kidding, it’s about how democracies die.
The Slave Dancer, by Paula Fox. For my Newbery reads. I was not immediately captivated, but I’m glad I stuck with it.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos. The hilarious diary of a gold-digging flapper. The film was based on this, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen the film, I can’t compare them.
Last night I finished Friend Request, which Dung Beetle inspired me to check out by posting about it last month. A woman in her mid-40s gets a friend request from someone who disappeared in high school (and was presumed dead). It was mostly enjoyable. It was well-written, and the mystery was intriguing. The first reveal was good, but the way the second one played out was…meh. And I found the main character to be a bit whiny/annoying, though I’m sure that was deliberate.
I stayed up too late finishing that, so I didn’t start a new one right away. Among this month’s Kindle First (now called Amazon First Reads) selections was a book by Christopher Rice – Anne Rice’s son – called Bone Music. It didn’t really catch my eye at first, but a friend on Facebook posted about it: he was very excited, and raved about Rice. The genre is mostly up my alley, and the book is free, so I figured I’d download it. That’s probably what I’ll read next. From Amazon:
*Charlotte Rowe spent the first seven years of her life in the hands of the only parents she knew—a pair of serial killers who murdered her mother and tried to shape Charlotte in their own twisted image. If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.
Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.*
I’ve got 3 books going, which will surely not end well for me, but what the heck. A Wrinkle in Time - reading with my kid because I wanted to do that before the movie comes out. Kid doesn’t like it so far, but only a few chapters in.
The Way of Kings - About 100 pages into Brandon Sanderson’s epic. So far, so good.
Altered Carbon - Richard K. Morgan, another case of I just want to read it before I watch it, as it is now a show on Netflix and the book has been on my shelf for years, along with its sequel, Broken Angels. So if the show spans both books, I guess I’ll have to read 'em both before watching.
How about you?