Welcome to July! Or as Seth Meyers put it: PSTD month for dogs. Goes double for Utah dogs as we have two fireworks holidays this month…for those of you way down South welcome to midwinter.
I am currently reading a stack of books, I think Hellblazer and A Dirty Job are top of the list…until all my Kindle preorders come out this month sigh I can’t die, I have BOOKS TO READ!!!
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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.
Last night I finished Lincoln in the Bardo: very enjoyable! I’m glad my co-worker recommended it back in March/April.
I tend to use Amazon Kindle free samples as my reading “to do” list, and after finishing *Lincoln *I spent some going through all of the samples I’d collected and deleting the ones that no longer interested me. From the remaining list I decided to start Laura Lippman’s Wilde Lake, described as “a modern twist on To Kill A Mockingbird.” I no longer remember how I learned about this book, but it’s set in Columbia, MD – very close to where I grew up. That is probably primarily why I downloaded a sample, plus the legal thriller plotline. I’m only a chapter or two in at this point, but I’m struggling with Lippman’s writing style: I think I’m used to more polished and eloquent writers, like Baldacci and Grisham. So, there’s no guarantee that I’ll buy/finish this book. I’ll be interested to see how I feel when I finish reading the sample.
Funny; I would say that Lippman is a better stylist than Grisham, and much better and much more polished than Baldacci. And I think Grisham is a much more adept stylist than many other people do, so there’s that.
I really liked Wilde Lake–plot, characters, and setting as well as writing style :)–uand I would imagine that the Columbia setting would be of particular interest to you; the town and its origins and sensibilities essentially form a character driving the story forward.
I will only say that it is not a happy book. But I thought it was very well done, and for what it’s worth would recommend it highly.
Still enjoying the DK-issued The Sherlock Holmes Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained), a very good overview of all the SH novels and short stories, with good context on Conan Doyle’s life and times.
I’m also now about two-thirds through David McCullough’s very engaging The Path Between the Seas, about the construction of the Panama Canal. I’m up to 1905 and a new chief engineer, John F. Stevens, has just been appointed, promising to reenergize the U.S. effort.
I’m not far into Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power, about the Kennedy White House. It’s getting better as it goes. It has more on JFK’s advisors and social circle than most such books.
Yes, I probably should have just said that I was used to *different *writing styles. My inital impression was that of less-polished writer, but when I finished the sample last night I decided to buy it and keep reading…so, I seem to have adjusted.
That’s definitely one of the reasons I chose to give the book a try!
Finished The Wrong Side of Goodbye, by Michael Connelly, who just gets better and better. A worthy successor for the wife and I both to the late Tony Hillerman. In this installment, Harry Bosch, who now has a PI license, is tasked with determining if an old and ailing billionaire industrialist has ever sired an heir. At the same time, as a volunteer reservist detective in the San Fernando Police Department, he is pursuing a serial rapist known as the Screen Cutter, named for his MO, before the perp can graduate to murder like the profilers predict will happen.
At the end of that book is the first four chapters of his latest one coming out, The Late Show, featuring a new character, LAPD Detective Renee Ballard. Looks good and is set for this month. I may just have to break down and buy the hardcover copy, as I don’t want to wait a year. Another Harry Bosch novel is due out by year-end also.
Next up is Four Past Midnight, by Stephen King. A collection of four short stories.
One of my favorite King short stories is in that collection: “The Langoliers.” It was adapated into a two-part TV movie in 1995, and I seem to recall it wasn’t horrible, but the short story is better.
I just finished Dr. Knox, a thriller about a doctor with a martyr complex running an urgent care clinic in a skid row section of LA, and what happens when he gets tangled up with the Russian mob and worse characters. It’s a pretty tight thriller with well-written characters, some pretty grim moments but all in all a fun read. The sidekick in this book would be the protagonist of most other thrillers–an ex-special forces operative–and I think the book benefits by putting him in sidekick mode.
Not really, since it’s explicitly called out in the book: the secondary characters are plenty annoyed by it so I don’t have to be :).
Agreed. She’s written several books starring a wonderful heroine, Calpurnia Tate, including The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate. I liked those a lot more than her Willows book. Set in 1899 and 1900 on a farm in Texas, lots of dry humor, lots of science. Good stuff.
I know a lot of folks loved it, but it kind of left me flat. Curious what you think about it.
I read a novella today (yay vacation!), Down Among the Sticks and Bones. It’s got a dark fairy tale thing going on, well-enough written, but–spoiler alert!–it turns out that girls don’t have to be just tomboys or girly girls, they can be more complicated than that. That’s the subtle message of the book. Kidding! The author says that message about half a dozen times per chapter, and sets up her heroes and villains to form a giant sledgehammer with which to drive the point home. Not one of my favorites.
I just finished Ghost Boy yesterday. It’s the true story of a man who was trapped inside his body. He couldn’t move or speak, but was conscious. His family and care-givers weren’t aware of his level of mental awareness, because doctors had diagnosed him as having severe brain damage. It was a creepy story, and really not my favorite. He was depressed throughout the book until a woman came along and knocked him out of the depression by falling in love and marrying him. It wasn’t pleasant to spend so much time in the headspace of a helpless, depressed person, and the fact that his “happy ending” seemed to be completely in the hands of another person, rather than something he himself was able to orchestrate, didn’t make for a very inspirational book.
I recently read The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives. This was a fascinating, informative book about the anatomy and function of sleep. I do think the book was rather uneven, though. It started out with an enlightening explanation of what your body and brain do when you go to sleep. But then the book focuses on one particular man. There was a gentleman who committed murder in his sleep, and the author testified as a sleep expert in his trial. And the book suddenly morphs from an informative book about sleep to a book detailing the specifics of his case. Then it goes on for pages and pages about the disorder of sleepwalking, which is odd because all other sleep disorders were discussed only briefly, but sleepwalking had several chapters devoted to it. I was also disappointed that the author did not touch on the sleep disorder I sometimes have: false awakenings. But I would recommend this book, because there’s some cool information here that I had not heard anywhere else.
I’m about 1/3 of the way through David Sedaris’ *Theft by Finding. * It’s…, I’m not sure. Usually with his writings, I can hear his voice reading it. That’s how defined his wordplay typically is. Really, it’s a collection of his publishable diary entries. There’s a voyeuristic quality, especially since I’ve consumed most of his materials. So when he mentions his parents’ great dane, it feels more like completing a jigsaw puzzle.
Usually, I’ll get the audiobook too. They’re great for car trips and since we’ve got a big one coming up next month, this might fit the bill. Unfortunately, I don’t see how this could translate.
Finished MaCulloch’s The Wright Brothers. Very good, but weirdly dismissive of the efforts of others. At one point he writes about the Wrights being the first to design an aerial propeller, and absurd statement. As he wrote in the bginning of the book, the Wrights’ interest in flying was sparked by a spring-driven Fench toy helicopter, which clearly had a propeller on it. Even if he was writing about modern aerial designers, there’s Stringfellow’s counter-rotating propellors (which he had to design). And there’s Langley’s model flyer and his ultimately failed Aerodrome, which he obviously designed propellors for. (MacCullough doesn’t mention Stringfellow, of course, or Wilhelm Kress, whose Drachenflieger almost beat the Wrights into the air. Nor, of course, Gustave Whitehead.)
A very good book, nonetheless, although it pretty much stops shortly after the Wrights’ initial flights and Wilbur’s death.
I read Shawn Peterson’s Pez: From Austrian Invention to American Icon, a history of both the candy company and its iconic dispensers.
Now I’m reading L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring, one of his fantasies that I’d never read before. I’m about 1/3 of the way through.
After that, I’ve got Murray Leinster’s the Wailing Asteroid (the basis for the motion picture The Terrornauts, a terrible movie with a great poster:
I’ve been absurdly busy recently and haven’t had much reading time. (Summer is the worst.) I did recently start Maria Semple’s This One is Mine. I picked it up because people have told me her other books are funny and that was the one available in paperback in the bookstore I was in right then. It also claims to be funny, but I am not finding it amusing at all, but kind of depressing. We’ll see if I can power through. Maybe it gets better? I’m only about 25% of the way into it.
Cat Sebastian’s third book The Ruin of a Rake arrived and was dutifully devoured yesterday. It’s a good wrap up for her m/m Regency romance series, but ultimately was a bit flat in comparison to her previous two works. The character development was nearly non existant and the story really lacked much conflict to drive the plot.
Winston Churchill’s history of WWII, first volume, The Gathering Storm. I have been reading about FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower and WWII. England and France didn’t to much to stop Germany from rearming and expanding until it was too late.
