Ah, thanks. Cell hasn’t opened here yet, but now that I look I’m seeing less-than-sterling reviews. The book was good, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see the film if it looks to be crappy.
Still reading Stiletto. I’m pretty sure I downloaded it to my kindle on the very day it came out, but I just moved nine days ago so I’ve been a bit distracted with packing and unpacking. Besides, it doesn’t hold my interest quite the way the first one did. (I mean, it’s still good enough to finish, and trust me, I will absolutely abandon a book if it really doesn’t hold my interest.)
Since my new house is a good deal further from my office, I’ve also resumed listening to audio books. I’m halfway done with Between the World and Me, which I learned of through the Straight Dope in the Top Ten Books of 2015 thread. It’s … not light reading. The first morning that I listened to it, I started crying on my way in to work, and am lucky that I didn’t arrive looking like a hot mess. It has to do with growing up black in the U.S. and has a lot to do with police and race relations.
The final book I’m reading is one I just started, called Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown. It was highly recommended in the best book I’ve read so far in 2016: Never Broken by Jewel. *Daring Greatly *has to do with the courage to be vulnerable and how that can transform your life. I can see where it would have inspired Jewel, as Jewel’s memoir was incredibly personal, which I think enabled her to reach her audience on a much richer level.
I’m finishing The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley, and I have to say it’s been an entertaining read and quite funny. It’s almost written in the zany style of Christopher Moore.
I also recently completed Off The Grid by CJ Box, another really good novel that I would recommend to anyone.
Also I’m re-reading Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly which I like. I can’t help but like Anthony Bourdain even if he comes across as a smug prick sometimes.
All three are worthy reads.
Okay, well, the hair book didn’t turn out so well. For the most part, the essays were just pointless ramblings.
I’m going to get back into my usual deep, meaty reading groove with My Best Friend’s Exorcism: a novel by Grady Hendrix. It’s a ton of fun so far, especially since I was a teenager in the eighties.
Me too… well until 1985
I’m being lazy, frying my brains on Youtube, but I did start The Pinball Effect by James Burke on Sunday and yesterday I read Demon Love Spell 4 & 5 and Don’t Be Cruel 1… my manga pile is only slightly less tottering now … 
Well, I flew right through My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and really liked it. It strikes that note of mixed horror/humor like the 80’s teen slasher movies (and has about the same plausibility). I actually found it kind of…sweet. 
*The Familiar: Volume 3 Honeysuckle & Pain *by Mark Z. Danielewski. If you haven’t heard of this series, the plan is to have be 27 volumes long. Each book is about 900 pages. This is going to be a shelf breaker when it’s done.
Reductively, the series so far could be summarized as Volume 1: Girl finds a Cat, Volume 2: Cat is hungry. Volume 3: Finding a name for the Cat.
There are multiple different characters, each with their own story line and separate chapters. There’s Xanther, the main protagonist who find a cat. “Les Parents”, Astair and Anwar. They are the easiest to read. Then there’s the wizard who scries with an orb, an Armenian cab driver named Shnorkh, Isandorno and Luther who are in the drug trade and whose chapters are in Spanglish, Ozgur the investigator, and Jingjing in Singlish which is probably the most difficult to decipher.
There are so many moving parts in these books and the pleasures come from the work. These books are definitely not summer reading but complex investments in something huge. Mysteries are casually tossed on the ground and if the reader is astute, a picture is slowly formed as to what is going on.
Volume 4 is set to be released in February 2017 and I’ve already got it pre-ordered.
I ordered my Kindle Oasis and got it earlier than expected (the day before I got the book above). I’m really loving the lightweight quality of it and the fact that I can easily sneak it into my pocket and take it with wherever I go (cough bathroom cough) The inaugural book that I’m now in the middle of (finally getting around to reading)is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. After seeing the recommendations by people I trust and wanting to read it before the show comes out, it’s been a bit of slog. Finishing up chapter 9 last night left me wondering where the sense of urgency is. The story just seems to meander along with no great goal. I can see how people like it and I’m still going to finish it, but so far I’m not particularly moved by it.
McGuire is currently writing a sequel called Down Among the Sticks and Bones. I enjoyed Every Heart too and will probably pick up Down, but the original stands well on its own in case I don’t. If you liked the ‘Being kicked out of my fantasy world messed me up’ vibe, you’d probably love Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy.
Guess I’ll have to read that one, although I think that Novik took a wrong turn halfway through the series and never really recovered from it.
Coincidentally, I’m reading “Uprooted”, an unrelated fantasy by Novik. Basic idea is that a young peasant girl is chosen to be the servant of a powerful wizard for ten years and of course she turns out to be a super-powerful witch herself and ends up teaching the powerful wizard about love and stuff like that while facing down an insidious eldritch threat with her six months of experience in spell casting. So, basically a well-written Harlequin romance with magic and the most Mary-Sue of Mary-Sues.
I finally finished Albert N’Yanza, Great Basin of The Nile, by Baker. It was a long slog, but ultimately a fascinating read. Baker was a detail man, and his descriptions of places and events during his three year search for the source of the Nile are interesting.
Next up: King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild. A history of the brutality and ultimate holocaust that took place in the Belgian Congo.
Interesting, I had predicted “no sequel” to Every Heart, because it felt like something that ends best when you don’t know more … although maybe it is the kind of sequel that is a different character’s story set in the same world.
I have been a huge fan of The Magicians, both the books and the TV show, and a fan of both Grossman brothers in general.
And sure enough, I didn’t. Quite bizarre in conception; plodding and mock-portentous in execution: The Urantia Book - Wikipedia
I finished Sherlock Chronicles by Steve Tribe and Mark Gatiss, a very interesting and well-illustrated behind-the-scenes book on the making of the British detective series. Any fan will want to check it out.
I’m past the halfway mark in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, and it’s not quite as good as I’d expected. I’ll press on.
Next up: Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy by Ian W. Toll, about which I’ve heard good things, and maybe some science fiction.
I’m so glad you said something! I read Soon I Will Be Invincible earlier this year - loved it - and never connected the dots between Lev and Austin. I might need to pick up You one of these days, too.
I finished Finders Keepers, by Stephen King. The second of a planned trilogy featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges. This was very good and a strong sequel to Mr. Mercedes. In this one, a reclusive writer, who is an amalgamation of John Updike, Philip Roth, and JD Salinger, is burgled and killed at his New Hampshire farm in 1978 by three men, one of whom is a rabid fan and really only wants the rumored notebooks the writer supposedly has written over the past 18 years. These notebooks would include two novels that would stretch out a famed trilogy. After hiding the notebooks, and the tens of thousands of dollars also found, the perp gets drunk in the Midwest and commits a rape that sends him to prison for life. Paroled in 2014, he tries to recover his treasure but discovers someone has beaten him to the punch. Chaos ensues. (None of this is a spoiler. It all happens early on and is detailed on the back cover of the book as well.) Hodges doesn’t even appear until a third of the way into the book, but the story is so engrossing, I didn’t care. The final installment in the trilogy, End of Watch, was supposed to come out in hardback last month, and I may have to look that up next month in Hawaii.
Meanwhile, I listed those books I’m taking along with me. However, while clearing out stuff I found a copy of Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, that someone gave me years ago. But it’s of humongous size, and I’ve never read Pynchon, so I squirreled it away thinking I might get to it someday. I’m nine days away from leaving (it’s Saturday now over here), so I’ll read some of it this next week and see how it grabs me.
And unfortunately I’m 40 pages into Against the Day, and it’s already fascinating. I say “unfortunately” because at 1220 pages, I’ll be lugging this phone book a quarter of the way around the world. Wish I’d gotten to it before. The doings of a large cast of characters in the period between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the years just after World War I.
I just finished High-Rise by J. G. Ballard. A short book, but tedious and overlong. It’s about the inhabitants of a large apartment building who fight a class war in which status is determined by what floor they live on. Everyone in the building starts to beat and rape each other, shit on the floor, and eat the pets. For no reason. They also go to work sometimes. :dubious: No one in the building calls the police, cleans up, or in any way behaves normally. I guess I should have put this in a spoiler box because I just told you the whole “plot”.
We just watched the film version not too long ago when it played in Bangkok. It had good reviews, but the wife and I were both left scratching our heads. I figured one must have had to read the book to make sense of it, but now I’m not so sure.
I don’t recommend it!
I’ve read a bit more than half of The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman, and I’m going to let myself off the hook now. It’s fantasy, which is a hit-or-miss genre with me, and I’m just not caring much what happens here.
Next up, Lost Among the Living, by Simone St. James. She writes basically the same ghost story over and over, but that’s how I already know I’ll like it!
Ender’s Game.
It’s good. It’s just so fucking depressing. Can I stop now? I should finish. I don’t finish books often enough. But Jesus, this one makes me want to shoot myself.