I finished The Carnelian Crow by Colleen Gleason. This is the fourth book about Mina Holmes and Evaline Stoker, it terms of depth it’s the weakest of the four, but she put a lot more into character and relationship development, which is a plus for me. We areleft, as usual, with more questions than answers…
I’m not a Stephen King fan (read The Shining and It), but so many here recommended 11/22/63 that I picked it up from the library. It hooked me from page 1. I really hate sci-fi/fantasy/am not crazy about time travel cuz I don’t believe in it, but I really liked the characters in this book. It could have lost about 200 pages and still have been coherent–I skipped over sections about the Oswald stalk. Really really liked it.
Yes, I liked 11/22/63 very much, too. The James Franco miniseries made some major changes (not all for the best) but is worth a look.
I just finished David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, an epic, readable, sometimes even gripping historical account of man vs. nature. My favorite factoids: Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the works marked the first time a U.S. president left the country during his term in office. The dirt and rock dug for the Panama Canal would fill enough train cars to go around the Earth four times, or to build sixty-three Great Pyramids at Giza. Although four times as expensive to build as the Suez Canal, it was through much more difficult and disease-ridden terrain, opened six months early and several million dollars under-budget. And at least as of the time of publication, only one person had ever swum all the way through the locks and lakes of the canal; he was charged, on the same basis as cargo ship tonnage, just 36 cents.
Also recently finished Max Ehrlich’s The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, a pretty good supernatural novel that left me with some interesting what-happens-next questions; Michael Crichton’s long-out-of-print paperback screenplay for the 1973 movie Westworld, which was just OK, although it was good to see the roots of the recent HBO remake; and An Indispensable Liberty, a collection of essays edited by Mary M. Cronin about free speech in 19th C. America. The most interesting stuff was on newspapers, censorship and mob action during the Civil War.
Next up: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi, a collection of his snarky blog columns.
I finished de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring and started Mark Klein’s How the Stares got their Shapes.
I just finished Last Bus to Wisdom, by the late Ivan Doig, his last book and I think one of his best. Set as most of his books are in Montana in the early fifties, it is a delightful story of a young boy and an elderly German man both in search of freedom from an intolerably bossy woman. We meet rodeo bronc busters, pickpockets, hoboes,vengeful sheriffs, sexy waitresses, cheerful jail escapees and Greyhound bus passengers on their way to the little town of Wisdom, Montana.
I finished The Golem’s Eye, the second Bartimaeus book by Jonathon Stroud today. It was quite as gripping as the first one, but the action at the end was engaging and I’ve grown to like the character of Kitty just a bit more.
I’m working my way through Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series. I read a book about every three days, and I’ve made it to 18.
I am presently obsessed with all things Italy, so i will pretty much read anything that takes place there. Preferably Rome, but Venice works in a pinch.
I’m also using duolingo for Italian, have worked my way through Michel Thomas, and i have Italian easy readers that i study every day as well. On our last trip to Rome(couple months ago) i picked up a Sherlock Holmes book in italian(obviously) I’m hoping because I’ve read the stories so so many times that it will be easier to understand. However, I’m not going to start that until I’m done duolingo.
Just finished Black Mad Wheel, and now I’m finished with author Josh Malerman as well. He writes well, he has good ideas, he just can’t ever seem to make them into a story. The blurb says he plays in a band; I think he should go and concentrate on his music.
I had never heard of this book, Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale, but it was on the “give away” table at my job, so I picked it up. I’m about a third of the way through, and it’s very entertaining. It’s kind of earthy, with lots of colorful characters. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a murder mystery yet, but it could be going that way. Set in Depression times in Texas. I hadn’t even read the blurb on the dust jacket when I started reading it.
Joe Lansdale is an awesome writer.
He’s written several more serious period pieces, like Sunset and Sawdust, which are excellent.
He’s best known, though, for his more - eclectic? - series, Hap and Leonard (which is currently being adapted as a TV series!).
I really recommend reading those; they are a hoot. Funny and gruesome in equal measure, they are perhaps the ultimate Texas Gothic buddy story - they feature Hap (White, straight, and small-l liberal) and Leonard (Black, gay and small-c conservative) battling it out together as they get sucked into one ugly scenario after another.
I’d start with Mucho Mojo, even if it isn’t actually the first in the series.
What makes them great isn’t the mystery aspect - it is the characters. They are just a delight.
I’m in the middle of three (and I’ve been jonesin’ to re-read Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables before finishing any of the following):
[ul]
[li]Last November I made a conscious decision to never not be reading a Wodehouse book; I’m in the middle of The Luck of the Bodkins.[/li][li]I’m re-reading Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism; I read it about 10 years ago, and I’m picking up on many additional nuances now.[/li][li]I picked up a paperback copy of The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield; they’re really, really good. Perhaps his best-known short story is Blind Man’s Buff – I’d read it before in several different ghost story anthologies and just read it again last night in this book. His other stories in this collection have been really enjoyable. Wakefield’s work deserves to be better known, at least here in the United States. Part of my interest in the book stems from this thread from last October, in which I was totally useless.[/li][/ul]
Is your cat named after Cuthbert Allgood? 
Some recent reads:
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a YA novel about a senior in high school, from a Mexican-American family. He is raised by his adoptive father, and is having some personal churn about not knowing his biological father. I loved this a lot, it reminded me of John Green’s books.
Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman, this was disappointing. It’s a thriller about a serial killer v. a retired FBI agent, and I had read about on an NPR list of books that are better, or more nuanced, I suppose, than the typical genre novel. I didn’t find that to be true. The agent is an older woman, so I guess that’s the hook, but it seemed like there was a lot of missed potential there.
The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary by John Simpson, a memoir by the editor of the OED. I enjoyed this – it seems like a very SDMB book, with lots of trivia about lexicography and etymology. One cute thing is that he tries to reassure the reader several times that you don’t have to be a nerdy dictionary fan to understand the book, and I was always like “awww, buddy, nobody who isn’t a nerdy dictionary fan has picked up this book to begin with.”
The Harlem Crusade, by Natasha Tarplay. This is a great middle reader, a bunch of kids get together to solve a mystery, and it’s set in Harlem (in NYC) so all the clues and motivations are related to the history and culture of Harlem. Strong recommendation for kids who enjoy books like The London Eye Mystery or even From the Mixed Up Files.
Right now I’m about halfway through A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World, by Alex Jones. This is terrific, it’s very detailed but the author is great at explaining things. I predict I might skim the chapter about the mechanics of the gears (I assume they go around? I feel good with that level of knowledge), but he also has sections on the discover process, and the history of the Greeks’ understanding of astronomy and how it impacted their culture.
I had to look up who that was!
No, I just gave him a name I like. At the time, he was my third long-haired white cat, and the other two were Albert and Bertram.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’m reading The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate now, ad I’m enjoying it.
Glad you’re liking it!
I just realized who her literary best friend would be: Tiffany Aching.
Went to Readercon over the weekend picked up a STACK of cheap, free, and other books.
I’m reading Murray Leinster’s The Wailing Asteroid now (the basis for the awful movie The Terrornauts and The Columbus of Space by Gerritt P. Serviss, the guy who wrote the unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (while Wells was still alive). This book, according to the modern editor, was the first to use nuclear power for space travel – in 1894. Interesting, so far.
I’m still reading Laura Lippman’s Wilde Lake. I’ve been going to bed later than usual, so I’m not reading as much. I’m a little more than halfway through, and I’m growing weary of the flipping between present and past. Perhaps I’m really just weary of pre-pubescent Lu: understanding that know-it-all tendencies aren’t unusual in little girls that age doesn’t make the character any less annoying. I also feel like not much is happening – at least, so far. It’s still interesting enough, though, so I’ll keep at it.
I’m not generally into YA stuff, but I might have to check this out. My “nephew,” who is about to turn 16, was adopted by white people and had Mexican-American biological parents. He doesn’t ask about them much, and he knows a little about his biological mother, but he was just asking about his biological father over the weekend (we don’t know much about him; he raped the mother).
Wow, okay, it might be a good match for your nephew. The book is the opposite situation, a white kid adopted by a Mexican-American family, but the bio father was a bad piece of business and the character in the book is having a lot of anxiety about whether he is predisposed to being violent. But overall, it is a very hopeful and affirming kind of a story.
I’m about a hundred pages into Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi, a collection of his snarky blog columns from 1998-2008. It’s funny but not uproariously so, and I wish it had an index.
Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power, about life in the Kennedy White House, is a pretty interesting mix of history, policy and gossip, but mostly the latter. Not a political-science tome by any means.
I’ve also begun an audiobook of Elmore Leonard’s 1956 Western Escape from Five Shadows, about a wrongfully-convicted man stuck in a brutal Arizona work camp and the young woman who falls in love with him. So far, so good.
Just finished The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Very good book. Another literary best friend for her would be Molly, from Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon. Molly’s also interested in botany.
I’ve started Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, by Nathalia Holt. It’s excellent. People who enjoyed Hidden Figures are likely to want to read this as well.