Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. Pretty frightening stuff!
Discworld fans, it’s up!The last Discworld book is available for pre-order at Amazon!
Yay, thanks for the heads-up!
Welcome! At least it sort of makes up for Stiletto being pushed back to January…
I finished Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey today. Surprisingly I liked it a lot more than I did the first book. I’m not sure what’s up next, maybe the third Mickey Haller book…
Also started Frank Norris’s McTeague, about San Francisco low-lifes circa 1899. It’s a book club selection and I can’t say I’m thrilled with it just yet.
I just started (in June) Don Quixote. Just cleared the first hundred pages, out of about a thousand. Gonna take me a while to finish this one, it’s not exactly an easy read. I’ve got Cliff’s Notes pulled up online to make sure I don’t miss anything. I’m surprised they’re free (at least for this book, but they’re based on a different translation I think).
I have Go Set A Watchman preordered so I’ll have that next week. As soon as that comes I’ll either stop DQ and move to that one or go back and forth.
If you haven’t yet (and are still curious about it), read *Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape *by Jenna Miscavige Hill and Lisa Pulitzer. It’s great autobiography that talks about growing up in the CoS. The picture is not flattering of neither the Church nor her parents.
I just finished The Familiar Vol 1 by Mark Z Danielewski and OH. MAH. GAH. I feel like a fanboy for the author as I really appreciate the lengths he goes to make an immersive experience for the reader. If you were a fan of the show “Lost”'s first couple seasons, where the mystery and intrigue and character development was building, this is the book for you. (And hopefully, the coming volumes won’t go south like the show did.) I’m still digesting what happened and joined the forums over on his website to learn more about what I actually read. There’s a lot I missed, some stuff I still don’t understand, and some other opinions that just shine a light on what I thought. It’s definitely going to be re-read right before the next volume comes out, maybe even while taking notes as if the book were a class.
The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time by Jeff Deck & Benjamin D. Herson is what I’m currently reading and about 20% into. It’s a good sherbet after reading The Familiar to clean my mental palate and I’ve learned a couple things that I hadn’t before like that possessive apostrophes are there as the English language used to have an E in its stead. So “Stpauler’s books” would have been written formerly as “Stpauleres books”.
I’m less than a hundred pages from finishing Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson…Book 9 of the 10-part epic, and I mean epic, Malazan Book of the Fallen series (over 3.3 millions words and about 10 thousands pages).
I started and then quickly gave up on Guy Mannering. I cannot take the incomprehensible Scottish dialect. Especially since the edition I picked up at the library was a crappy Everyman’s edition that does not have any decent endnotes or translations.
I might as well just go ahead and get *Ivanhoe *since that’s the Scott novel I wanted to read the most.
I finished reading Wuthering Heights. I had only a very hazy idea of what the story was about, so I was quite surprised to find that Heathcliff wasn’t merely a slightly moody romantic lead, but instead was a sadistic wife-beating child abuser. Yikes! It was pretty gripping stuff, but I thought it fizzled out at the end.
Perhaps you’d like the semaphore version…?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91_jymgH8QY
I just finished “Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Longworth Roosevelt” by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer. It was very insightful. In their own way, both were rebels. Alice started young as the eldest child of TR. She then sort of sat around and managed to live to the expectations of woman of her class in the sense that she did not work and she looked pretty. Eleanor became the dutiful wife who was plain and had been married because she was TR’s niece and then broke free to become a radical who stood up for civil rights.
I am left with a sense of two facinating women both so very alike and so different at the same time. I am also left to conceded that while Eleanor is the person I like better, Alice is the one I really want to have dinner with. There is such sadness in both women. Alice lost her mother essentially from birth and did not learn until later just how much her father had loved his first wife. Eleanor lost her mother and father by the time she was ten and was never really loved by anyone even Franklin who did not keep his promise not to cheat on her. It was very much the same for Alice who was not loved by anyone even her husband and only child who committed suicide and left with a granddaughter to raise.
For all the riches they had, the connections and the power, they were still lonely women ultimately confined by the world they had been born into. Very insightful book IMO and well worth a read.
Excellent book, but the explorer was Percy Fawcett, a truly amazing man who was seemingly immune to everything the jungle can throw at a person.
I’m presently reading Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk
by Gregory A. Freeman
I’m still in the background portion of the book. I remember the racial tension and the drug use in the 70s military very vividly, and remember hearing about the Kitty Hawk incident. Well written and well researched, from what I can tell so far.
Really enjoyed the audiobook version of Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes - Will Patton also narrated Doctor Sleep and did an excellent version with that as well - his voice lends itself well to the protagonists on both these novels.
Bill Hodges is a Ret Det - retired police detective in a midsized northern Ohio city*. Divorced and estranged from his adult daughter, he spends too much time alone, with not much to look forward to. Until a letter with no return address arrives - a taunting confession from “the Mercedes killer” - an individual who, about 6 months previously, drove a stolen car into a crowd of job seekers, killing 8 people and wounding many more. Hodges was the lead detective on that open case, and this letter (intended to drive him into despair and possibly suicide) galvanizes him to try to track the perp (or as the letter writer phrases it - “perk”) down.
I’m enjoying this new direction that Uncle Stevie is exploring - police procedural lite with an exploration of the all too real “monsters” that walk among us. The introduction job fair scene sucked me in; living in the Midwest Rust Belt - I saw how hard the recession hit around here and it rang pretty damn true.
While there are a few plot holes/conveniences - IMHO, King still spins a suspenseful tale with memorable characters. Brady Hartfield is truly creepy; reminded me a lot of Annie Wilkes. Jerome and Holly are also well-drawn and engaging. And I gotta wonder if Grandpa Steve has gotten dragged to a boyband concert - as his take on “Round Here” also seems very spot on! If you enjoyed Joyland, you might want to give this novel a whirl as well.
** one minor factual error - an event is said to have happened at “[time] Central Standard Time” - Ohio is in the Eastern time zone.*
I’m reading The Whispering Skull, second in the Lockwood & Company series. Pure pleasure! I’ll be sad to finish it because the next one doesn’t come out until September.
I need to snag that one next time I go to the library.
I’m reading The Long Mars by Pratchett and Baxter. This is from the “Long Earth” series which postulates that humans have found a way to “step” from our Earth to adjacent parallel universes. As the title of “The Long Mars” indicates, it’s not just Earth that has parallels.
So my current impression, about 90% of the way through is, “How do you make this big a concept so dry?” It’s the same problem that all the mega-world/mega-structure books (e.g. Ringworld, The Fabulous Riverboat, Rendezvous with Rama) have – when faced by vastness, the author has to resort to travelogue. Instead of exploring one location in detail, you get abstraction:
“Well, we passed another 1,000 worlds today. Not much interesting, warring crustaceans, sentient dogs, and pink slime.”
And you focus on a handful of characters and flash back and forth between their stories (which, condensed, is “More pink slime. Crustaceans! Mutants! Science!”)
And, for some reason, having a multitude of alternate Earths isn’t exciting enough for the authors so they have to throw in cataclysm on the “original” Earth and new genetic mutations. This may all tie together at the end of the series, but I’m not optimistic.
Also somewhat disappointing, but not surprising is that Pratchett’s voice is virtually absent from the writing. He clearly was responsible for the inspiration of the character Lobsang, but I’m not sure what else he contributed. Whatever else might exist on the various worlds of the Long Earth, it’s not whimsey.
As is the HBO documentary of the same name.
I gave up after the first book for pretty much the same reasons. Baxter, I’m sure he’s the actual writer, tried to cram way too much into one book, instead of sticking with one world. And the whole sense of menace - why are these creatures running away so frantically? What horror could be chasing them? - fell so flat I literally looked at the book and said “What the fuck? That’s all it is?”
And as you said it was boring…
I’m reading Quiller Solitaire by Adam Hall.
I’m surprised by how few people know about the Quiller novels. They’re like James Bond novels, but Quiller has no gadgets or ladykilling charm. He’s just very resilient and resourceful.