Just finished All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. While there were some good things in it (my husband and I especially liked the fact that the head of the magic school didn’t believe in Patricia’s encounter with the Tree, and Dorothea, who cast spells by telling stories), the book as a whole felt like an outline of a story that was expanded, but not finished. Too short, not enough detail, in other words. And my husband recommended it before he finished it himself. He was disappointed in the ending.
And now for something completely different: Pancakes in Paris: Living the American Dream in France, by Craig Carlson. It’s about an American who opened a U.S. style diner in Paris.
I’ve got 24 books in my currently reading list on Goodreads, and I know I’ve started at least 10 others. There is some serious floundering happening over here. I have the attention span of my cat Cuthbert, which is very bad indeed.
Just finishing up Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson - a very readable account of the various governments and heads of state who fled to the UK in the wake of the Nazi invasions of their homelands, and their subsequent adventures in the War (boy, did the Poles ever get the short end of the stick or what?)
Wow - 18 or 24 books going at once! My head would explode. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than five.
Just finished DK’s The Sherlock Holmes Book, ed. by David Stuart Davies. A good, well-illustrated overview of all the Holmes short stories and novels, with interesting late-Victorian social and historical context. The omission of the very talented June Thomson from the section on Holmesian pastiches is unfortunate, though.
Still enjoying Smith’s Grace and Power, about JFK’s White House, and McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, about the digging of the Panama Canal.
Next up: the graphic novel of George R.R. Martin’s antebellum vampire novel, Fevre Dream, adapted by Daniel Abraham with art by Rafa Lopez.
My teenage son and I are also reading aloud from Tolkien’s LOTR in good summer weather in our backyard. The Fellowship has just left Lothlorien, gotten into Elven-built boats and set off south along Anduin, the Great River.
Even more ironic: during the War, the Poles aided the Allied victory in various ways, contributing fighter pilots (in the book, the claim is made that their contribution may have made the difference in the Battle of Britain); a whole army in exile that fought throughout the War; and they even cracked the early version of the Enigma Code, before handing everything over to the Brits.
In return, not only did they get to see Warsaw utterly destroyed without the Allies doing much to stop it, their whole country handed over to Stalin at Yalta - but adding insult to injury, in the victory parade, the Poles were specifically excluded! (to avoid upsetting Stalin).
To be fair, there was precious little the Brits in particular could do to avoid Stalin taking Poland.
I just finished Dan Gardner’s Future Babble, which was a really great non-fiction look at how pretty much everyone is wrong about predicting the future, but especially talking heads, pundits, and people famous for prognostication are almost always worse than chance. And yet, we keep demanding forecasts and talking heads’ take on how things will roll out in the future, and he goes into the whys and hows of that too. Finally, he talks about some of the very few empirical things that makes predictors better. I’d highly recommend it.
I also found a new author for those who like sci-fi and space operas - Neal Asher.
I read his The Technician, and am just finishing Hilldiggers, and both were well written with compelling characters and pacing and plots. He posits a pan-galactic culture peopled with AI’s, aliens, and humans in various stages of augmentation and development that he calls The Polity, along the lines of Banks’ Culture or Hamilton’s Commonwealth.
The overall story arcs were a little predictable, but there were little twists and unexpected turns (like an overpowered tank / hulk-like character getting debilitated and invalid-weak unexpectedly halfway through and having to deal with it in an environment where the stakes keep getting higher) throughout the narratives that kept things interesting, and the characterizations and pacing made it worth it. I’m definitely planning to get more by him.
Finished Craig Carlson’s Pancakes in Paris, a memoir of his starting an American-style diner in France. Reading about all his struggles with workers and the French legal system makes me never want to go to Paris, which I’m sure was the exact opposite of his intention. (The diner is quite successful, however.) The dystopian All the Birds in the Sky is a cheerier read.
Started Zany Afternoons, by Bruce McCall. It’s a collection of magazine humor pieces with hilarious illustrations.
After battling Thai regulations for almost a quarter of a century, I can sympathize but also know a country is worth visiting even if you have to get bogged down in various restrictions from time to time.
I’m going to Paris in two months. I just bookmarked the Breakfast in America web page: maybe my friends and I can check out one of the locations while we’re there. I might not bother with the book, but thank you!
I’ve been binge-reading Beverley Nichols’ domestic/memoir stuff, and I’m sadly nearing the end. All that’s left are Cat’s XYZ and Father Figure, which I expect to be not at all like the rest.
I think I’ll read his biography then. After all these books he feels like a friend, but there’s so much he never says.
