Oh dear. My dependable Jennifer wrote a turd. And I read the whole thing!
The character Suz, who supposedly motivated all the other characters with her charisma, was just loathsome. Plus she called everyone “babycakes” all the time. That’s a shootin’ offense right there, if you ask me. Actually every character was loathsome, except possibly the little girl, who just needed to see a doctor ASAP. And when the plot twists started, things got less and less and less believable until the whole thing was just a big pile of NOOOOOOO.
I will read another Jennifer McMahon book. Someday.
On a recent trip to Alaska, I met a sweet doggie named Truce. His owner, a nice girl named Carrie, let me pet him for upwards of ten minutes because she was so engrossed in this book, literally laughing out loud from time to time. It is Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman. I’m only a few pages in and it is veddy veddy British, which I consider a point in its favor.
I’ve never read much from the Beat set, so I’m only now reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. About 10% of the way into it, I understand BOTH why so many people think it’s brilliant AND why Truman Capote sneered, “This isn’t writing, it’s TYPING.”
Just finished up Tarzan of the Apes and had a roaring good time of it. Usually I only read on my lunch breaks anymore but Tarzan had me reading at home too. Burroughs was really a businessman and it shows in how he finished the novel. It just leaves you slavering for the next one to find out what happens next. Sadly, the library system here does not have any other books in the series so I will have to hunt it out in a bookshop or online. There’s no used bookstores nearby so it’s a pain to travel far only to find yet again, it’s a used bookstore that only stocks modern straight fiction…but I may have found one the next state over. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m trying out The Far Side of the World by O’Brian. I wasn’t too enthused by Master & Commander (he cut out all the fun ship battles but left in the dry dinner conversations!) but I’m giving it another whirl. If I don’t like this one much I don’t think I’ll search out any more of the novels. Loved the Horatio Hornblower books so I thought I’d get more of the same here (just with more laydeeeees bedroom eyes) but…we’ll see.
I picked up American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church by Alex Beam at the local library. So far rather engaging.
I read that recently. Never have I come across a more loathsomely manipulative set of people. To paraphrase one Mr. Michael J. Nelson, “If there was ever a book I wanted to put into a stump grinder…”
Good to finally see this book mentioned. I read it right after it came out - I’ll admit I scheduled my annual 4 day All By Myself Beach Getaway around its release, so I finished it less than a week after it came out. I kind of figured I may have been the first around here to finish it so I’ve been biding my time.
Not my favorite in the series either, but I liked it better than the last couple of books – it was good to see some new twists in the time travel aspect of the story.
I’m not going to say too much more I don’t feel like dealing with spoiler boxes at the moment. I’m looking forward to some discussion once more fans have finished it.
I had a similar mixed reaction. I was glad I’d read it, to get a sense of the Beat generation and simply to have experienced such an iconic work, but if I never read another word of it that’d be OK.
I’ve finished the section on prodigies in Solomon’s Far from the Tree, and am now beginning the one on children of rape. Slow going, very sad, but interesting.
I liked those books. Carey has a new novel out, not part of that series, called The Girl With All the Gifts. I’m looking forward to it.
At the end of Master and Commander, I was unsure if I wanted to continue the series. After finishing the third book, I went out and bought the entire 20 volume set.
(Written in My Own Heart’s Blood) I liked the second half of it much better than the first half. For the first few hundred pages I felt like everyone was wandering aimlessly around New England with the Revolutionary War as a backdrop. The book has a lovely ending, much better than the annoying cliffhangers in the last book.
I finished John Scalzi’s Redshirtsand I was highly disappointed. For one thing, I didn’t expect it to get so meta so quickly. When the truth about the Narrative was revealed, I was intrigued but it got old quick. But I think I could have dealt with that if I had stopped reading at the end of the main story. Heck, I even laughed at the ending. Then I read the Codas.
If you ever read this book, close it at the end of chapter 24 and do not reopen it.
The main story is light-hearted and fond of poking fun at itself (except when Scalzi gets too fond of his own cleverness). The Codas are just depressing. Oh, they have happy endings, but this is happy in the way that a third-degree burn isn’t as bad as being caught in a combine.
I’m willing to admit that part of my problem with this book is that I’ve always hated the time-travel episodes of Star Trek and that’s what this book is based on.
Finished The Comedians, by Graham Greene. A British hotelier in Port-au-Prince, an American vegetarian couple and a mysterious Englishman with a shady past all have doings in Papa Doc’s Haiti of the mid-1960s. Good but not one of his best. The message was something about comedy amid tragedy, but that was kind of forced. Still a decent read.
BTW: Greene fans, or at least fans of The Quiet American, may be interested to know that the Brodard Cafe, which Greene immortalized in the novel, is still open in Saigon. It’s kept it name but is now actually a part of the Australian coffee-shop chain Gloria Jean’s. There’s a shot of it nowadays here; and as Greene knew it in the 1950s here. The wife and I have been inside for a snack.
Now it’s back to John Grisham, this time The Rainmaker.
This is definitely a series that improves on re-reading. You start seeing all the dry humor that you missed the first time out. I would suggest reading them in order, though.
Do we have a July Thread? Would you like me to start it?
I finished Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb and Of the two books I have read of JD Robb’s in Death series, this one is so superior that I have to conclude it was written by an entirely different person. Everything from the plot to the conversations to the characters was smoother, more realistic and a good deal more fun to read. Please keep this ghost writer, ma’am.
The story wasn’t so much a whodunnit, since we already knew who, but it was an interesting and very readable path to proving that the criminals had dunnit. The dialog was smooth and informational with none of the previous banter. The situations were tense and towards the end cause to hold one’s breath in anticipation. The lack of creepy, awkward sex fetishment in all characters was an intense improvement over Origin in Death.
I’m halfway through Scott Lynch’s long-awaited novel, The Republic of Thieves. It’s great fun! It’s the third book in this series, the first of which is called The Lies of Locke Lamora. These are caper novels with a fantasy setting - sort of like Ocean’s Eleven meets Oliver Twist.
