I almost read the Goldfinch for my BSB last year, but it just didn’t appeal to me when I read a sample. Sorry to hear that ‘City on Fire’ is slow-moving… I really need a lot to make up for a slow-moving plot these days.
I’m close to the end of this, but not going to finish. It’s just too terribly depressing and gets me to worrying about my kids. I can do that without help! A fine book, though, you should read it if you’re interested.
Mount ToBeRead is at a record high right now. For some reason, much the stuff I had on hold at the library came in all at once. I think next up is The Most of Nora Ephron, which looks cheerful.
I also read Stiletto over the long weekend. Like Dung Beetle, I really enjoyed the intricacies of the Checquy world, and the Grafters lent an interesting perspective as well. I still like Myfanwy the best, so I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t set from her point of view, but I can see why O’Malley chose a Grafter and Pawn perspective for the majority of the book. A rollicking good time just as The Rook was. Also, did anyone else notice that if you take a photo of the book (for Litsy, in my case), the dagger in the cover looks 3D? Or maybe I’m just eating too much sugar these days. 
I also finished Kraken: An Anatomy by China Mieville directly before Stiletto. A fascinating premise - vintage Mieville - that somehow involved a squid-worshipping cult, a biological specimen preparer, an unionizing shabti, two or more horrifying villains, numerous versions of the end of the world, and much, much more. The middle dragged a bit with lots of pursuit-evasion around London, but ultimately it was like Mieville’s Splendid Surreal Undersea Ride, and I (mostly) enjoyed it.
Right now I’m reading Marie Brennan’s The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent. The neo-Victorianism here is a nice counterpoint to Mieville’s acid-trip dystopia, and of course dragons are always welcome (so long as they are virtual and don’t come too close).
I just ordered Connie Willis’ “All Clear” but after reading a few pages, I realized that I’ve forgotten who everyone is and that I’ll have to re-read “Blackout”. But my recollection of “Blackout” was that it mostly consisted 100’s of pages of confused people running around refusing to believe that their time portals weren’t working. So hopefully I can find a Cliff notes version.
So, I picked up Ancillary Justice about a far future society in which human beings can be turned into “ancillaries” – essentially drone bodies for computer AIs in which the original personality is lost forever. The protagonist is, or used to be, one of these ancillaries and is now on a mission of revenge against a galaxy spanning empire. I’m liking it well enough, except that the author has chosen to make the protagonist unable to distinguish gender, so all characters are referred to as “she”. Which, I guess, would be fine except that the author lampshades the decision by having her character discuss the gender requirements of the various languages she speaks. So there’s apparently some literary, political, or sociological motivation for this decision, but the net result is that I’m reading the book with no mental picture of any of the characters, their physical capabilities, or their probable reactions to one another.
Let’s just say that I don’t buy a sentient living in close proximity with humans, and not being able to determine what gender they identify as, even if it’s far enough in the future for gender to be pretty damned fluid.
I just finished Edward Rutherfurd’s LONDON. Now I’m re-reading Ann Rule’s AND NEVER LET HER GO.
I believe those are the ones I’m thinking of. Thanks. I plan to look them up once stateside.
I finished reading “The House of the Seven Gables” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (After 30 years in prison and a mental breakdown, a man returns to a crumbling house full of family secrets.) I liked the wry narration, but I thought the ending was a bit abrupt and anti-climactic.
I think I have made a decision on my BSB – partially because I remembered I had a copy of the book here already. I keep trying to curtail my new-book/ebook purchases, but it’s a vice.
I’ll make a second attempt at ‘Mulligan Stew’ by Gilbert Sorrentino. It’s a bit of an experimental, metafictional novel about a (bad) writer, a sort of thing which I almost always enjoy. My previous attempt was derailed by life circumstances rather than a lack of enjoyment of the book.
This board’s on a bit of a Stiletto roll, I also finished this the other day. Thumbs up–well-managed transition from Myfany’s view to the Grafters, though (like a previous poster) the whole “this is why we hate you” angle seems a bit of a stretch. But it was a very enjoyable read, and until we found out who the enemy was, quite a bit tense. Good work, worth the wait.
I also finished, in the department of recently published follow ons, The Nightmare Stacks, the most recent addition to Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files. Another change in point of view for this one–Bob’s been gone for the last (not so great) installment, and here we follow Alex, one of the vampires from two books back. I enjoyed reading it, but Alex is less interesting as a lead, and truth be told, the central relationship in the book didn’t really seem well established. There’s room for getting better again!
And a novel that’s been out a while, but held to the promise of its series: James Corey’s fourth installment in the Eclipse series, Cibola Burn. Builds from the previous installments, but the action is now virtually all planet-side. Corey writes, I think, great characters–really fairly well-shaded, no straight good-and-evil people who you’re willing to believe in. The whole story gets more and more interesting, in fact, and I’ve already downloaded the fifth installment.
This will have to wait awhile, though, while I read James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. I thoroughly recommend Shapiro’s Who Wrote Shakespeare as the most readable, rounded view of the various authorship controversies, and I was looking forward to seeing Shapiro make his own arguments. I’m not far in, but already torn–there’s already a bit of the godawful (for a nonfiction text) “Shakespeare must have…he would in all likelihood…he could not but have felt…” that was so thoroughly annoying in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. I’m sure it’ll get better…or else I’ll just have to abstain from popular literary history and get back to straightforward litcrit as far as Shakespeare is concerned.
Finally, cracked open but awfully disregarded (because not on a Kindle): David Means’s Hystopia. It’s a great book, don’t get me wrong: an althistory in which a powerful drug enables Vietnam veterans to thoroughly eliminate any trauma, at the expense of most other related memories; when this process, called an enfolding, goes wrong, it produces a psychopathic killer, the chase for whom we follow. This is set within a frame narrative that is itself althistory–so that the novel plays on several levels with Vietnam, trauma, history, memory. I need to get back to this one!
Extreme Prey by John Sandford
one of his usual thrillers
I would agree too, that was the weakest part of the story. I read it thinking “C’mon, don’t we all grow out of being scared of ghost stories?”
In the Lake of the Woods is a spooky, unsettling novel by Tim O’Brien (himself a Vietnam vet, and perhaps better known for The Things They Carried) which addresses many of those issues. Highly recommended.
Right now I’m reading the novella “The Princess and the Queen” by George R.R. Martin, a 2013 prequel of sorts to A Game of Thrones, about an earlier dynastic struggle in Westeros. It’s pretty good - written as a historical account, with little dialogue. It’s in the anthology Dangerous Women 1, edited by GRRM and Gardner Dozois.
I just finished Ghostbusters: The Ultimate Visual History, written by Daniel Wallace, with a foreword by Dan Aykroyd and an intro by director IVan Reitman. It’s a lot of fun. Any fan of the franchise should check it out - lots of production drawings, interviews by cast and crew, sfx explanations, behind-the-scenes photos, etc.
A friend just lent me The Urantia Book, a New-Agey book from 1955 - no author named - which has more than a whiff of Scientology. I doubt I’ll read it all the way through.
I really liked Ancillary Justice, but I wasn’t impressed by the gender thing, either. I thought it was handled much better in the next couple of books - Breq just calls everybody “she” without any discussion of gender at all, which makes it seem much more natural.
Connie Willis has a new book coming out in October, called Crosstalk. The description doesn’t sound appealing, but I’m a huge fan of her work, and I’m sure it will be better than it sounds.
I’ve fallen in love with the Alexander Hamilton musical, so I finally picked up the Chernow biography, which has been sitting on my shelf for years. It’s an intimidating 800 pages of small print, but I’m entertaining myself by sourcing songs - I’m just up to “Farmer Refuted”. It’s actually a pretty good read, so far. I’ve read a lot about the founding of America now, and each book gets easier as I become more familiar with the background and the players.
I just read the last book in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, League of Dragons, and it was a nice wrap-up. It’s a fairly light-hearted book, not nearly as bleak as some of the later books have been. For one thing, it’s focused on defeating Napoleon as opposed to giving the reader a tour of Dragons of the World. The only sour note was the hatching of The Egg - the new dragon is oddly unlikable, having inherited Temeraire’s eloquence and Iskierka’s haughtiness but none of their endearing qualities.
Just finished Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach. Interesting as always, though not one of my faves. It actually grossed me out more than some of the others!
Just started on another non-fiction book, Me, My Hair, and I: 27 women untangle an obsession, a collection of essays. I feel like I should apologize for my interest in such a seemingly light topic, but I ain’t gonna, so there. This is really fascinating so far. (Did you know some people go to aestheticians about their pubes? Well, it was news to me).
I finished** Dead Wake** and really enjoyed it, if I can say “enjoyed” a book about such a disaster. I am now embarked on a re-reading of Flashman and the Tiger, which I think was Fraser’s last book.
I’m having a hard time with it. I think it’s a combination of pacing, the actual disaster coming and this moment in my life.
Last night I finished Mary Beard’s The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. This is an expert examination of all facets of Pompeii’s life and people written for the layperson with care. Nothing was over my head but it wasn’t over-simplified either, and Beard’s wry humor put a grin on my face at least once a chapter. A must-read for any layperson curious about Roman life in the first century CE or Pompeii in general.
In keeping with my reading streak, I’ve been co-reading T**he Graveyard of the Hesperides**, the latest Flavia Albia mystery from Lindsey Davis. Like her previous entries, this is set during Domitian’s reign. Flavia (who is surely an anachronism but a very like-able one) works to discover the murderer of Rufia, whose presumed skeleton has been unearthed in the courtyard of a dive bar that her fiance is renovating. They’re supposed to be married in a week, but Flavia is frankly more concerned with the crime and the realities of what true partnership will mean with her aedile-cum-renovator husband. No one writes Rome and Roman characters like Davis, and this holds up beautifully so far.
Finished Cell, by Stephen King. Bad cellphone signals destroy people’s brains, turning them into violent zombies. Pretty good. Great ending, one I hope they keep in the upcoming film version. That film version will star John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, and I note with interest that in the book, Jackson’s character is a white, rather small gay man. Should be interesting. I read also that during the writing of the book, a charity auction was held, with the winner to be included as a minor character. The winner gave the honor to her brother, Ray Huizenga, who is indeed a minor character in the book.
Next up is Finders Keepers, also by Stephen King, the sequel to his Mr. Mercedes and the second of a planned trilogy featuring retired detective Bill Hodges. I have about two weeks to finish it so I can leave it with the wife when I leave for Hawaii. She enjoyed Mr. Mercedes and wants to read this one.
To keep me company on my journey to America, I’ll be taking along three books I bought this weekend:
The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story behind the Legend, by historian David McCullough.
The Vanishing Witch, by Karen Maitland, centering on England’s Peasant’s Revolt of 1381.
The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang, by Stephen Leather, set in Singapore.
Finished two YA novels:
Wolf Hollow, by Lauren Wolk (I have seen this described as a middle reader as well), which I thought was really well-written, although it’s a little grim and one of those “how a young person learns about the tragedies of the world” kind of thing. Set in during WWII, a young girl sees how a small town closes ranks against an outsider.
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire, which was fabulous, about the aftermath of what happens to teenagers after they visit a magical fantasy world and then have to come back to the boring normal world. I get the feeling that maybe some of it was intended as an allegory about fitting in and identities … but I opted to take it at straight up face value and enjoyed it immensely. Short, atmospheric, slightly haunting.
Should be in the past tense; the reviews haven’t been great, unfortunately: Cell (film) - Wikipedia
I read that recently and really liked it. McCullough hasn’t lost his touch, although it’s shorter than most of his books.