A couple of books from the bargain pile – I finished Brian J. Robb’s a Brief Guide to Star Wars, which has a lot of info in it. I’m halfway through Helmut and Alison Gershman’s L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype. Fascinating stuff. I’m surprised no one has turned this into a movie or TV drama.
Next up is The Three Manuscripts of The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, a book I’ve been looking for for a while. The published version of The Mysterious Stranger is, as this book points out, a Literary Fraud, like Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Both books were assembled posthumously by Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, by the judicious picking and choosing of what Twain left behind, ignoring a vast pile of other material. Twain’s REAL autobiography has been in the process of being published since the centennial of his death, with two volumes out thus far. The Mysterious Stranger, however, exists as four different compositions, written at different times and set in widely different times and places. Paine cobbled together two of them, with some rewriting, to get the complete novel that we’ve been reading for most of the past century. This edition gives you the original, raw stuff.
On audio I just finished Howie Carr’s The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century, and am on the last volume of the radio edition of The Twilight Zone.
I absolutely LOVED this book. And there’s a sequel out too, The Whispering Skull, that I loved every bit as much. I see The Dagger in the Desk is the next up in the series but didn’t see a release date.
Definitely enjoyable! My main complaint, honestly, is that I would have liked to get to know more about the world/setting. I like specifics about how things work, so I would have enjoyed learning more about the functioning of these underground cities, but I also understand that that really wasn’t the focus of the book. Oh well! It was a fun and easy read, and I would recommend it to people who enjoy various fantasy/steampunk/mystery genres.
Grabbed it since I had to go to the library anyway to pick up The Sandman Vol 1. Should fitin with that one and The Detachment by Barry Eisler (I’m half way through, I read manga all weekend instead)
** The Girl on the Train **by Paula Hawkins. It is no doubt being compared to Gone Girl as they are both suspense tales, but not much alike. A real page-turner, if you’ve got a long flight or spending a weekend at the beach, it would be a good book to take along.
Redeployment by Phil Klay which is a collection of gut wretching short stories about being a Marine in Iran during the surge. Highly recommend it.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. The book is winning all sorts of awards and most people love it. I thought it was OK, but not all that great. I can say the same thing for The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It’s a very engaging tale, but hardly great literature. It needed a heartless editor to trim about 300 pages.
I enjoyed it too; this is epic fantasy, all right. Was a little startled by the death of a pivotal character early on, but the story ultimately didn’t suffer from it, to my surprise. It’s less gritty and bloody than the Song of Ice and Fire, but the scope seems similar. I’ve got Madouc on hold. It was surprisingly tough to locate a copy. Vance deserves to be remembered for this series, so I hope it gets reissued soon!
I finally bailed on And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. Sadly he just isn’t Douglas Adams. Eoin Colfer thinks he’s edgy, but he’s not. When he’s not writing Artemis Fowl he’s prententious and worse of all boring as hell. I got to page 80 and things are going to hell and people are bouncing off of walls and each other, literally in a few instances, Zaphod’s being an obstinate ass and it’s general chaos personified and and and it’s boring. How he can make a classical Douglas Adams set up like that boring, I do not know but it was.
And just to show he isn’t all boring, he is creepy. Really I NEVER wanted or needed bestiality in my interstellar hijinks… ever.
The stupidest things kick me out of a story… but seriously NO ONE IN LONDON EATS COOKIES! I’m from freaking UTAH and I know that. To be fair though, that’s probably an idiot at the publishing company’s fault…
I think **The Screaming Staircase ** is more like Miss Peregrine than Bellairs or even a very watered down The Rook.
Having heard Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes as an abridged audiobook, I’m now reading the whole uncut book and am nearly done. Good stuff, about a WWII Army JAG lawyer caught up in the Battle of the Bulge and a maybe-rogue OSS operation.
I’ve also just started listening to an (unabridged) audiobook of Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, a memoir of his time in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against him. It’s pretty good so far, although he namedrops shamelessly.
Does he discuss the Chinese government and its alleged purposeful matching of male and female athletes to breed super-athletic kids?
I have to admit, it bored me. I was surprised that Ambrose could make what ought to have been a gripping adventure so tedious.
I loved Gone Girl, and have been meaning to get to Sharp Objects someday. I know some of her fans think it’s actually the better book.
Sorry to hear that. My mom, who grew up in Elizabeth, N.J. during the time the book is set, briefly corresponded with Blume about it.
In the late Eighties, Billy Bulger, the Massachusetts politician and the more respectable of the two, was a guest teacher for a college seminar of which I was a student (about practical politics), and I got to meet him. He said not a word about his brother, the on-the-lam thug. Did you know there’s a movie coming out about them?: Black Mass (2015) - IMDb
That reminds me of the copy of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 that I read. Published in London, it had Texans in the early 1960s calling cigarettes “fags” and using other Britishisms. Why oh why do they do that?
I just finished Valley Of The Dolls. I really liked it and I’m kind of excited to watch the movie*. It’s probably been 10 years since I’ve seen it. I just started All The The Things I Never Told You tonight. Based on the first 25 pages, it might be a quick read.
*funny thing about that, I read The Princess Bride a month or two ago and recorded the movie because I wanted my daughter, I couldn’t believe when I yelled at the screen ‘OMG, the movie is different almost from the first line!’. My kid wandered off after about 5 minutes so that’s as far as I got, but Westly left under slightly different circumstances and Buttercup was presented as the Queen from the back of the crowed instead of the balcony…the horrors.
ETA, RE Valley of the Dolls, for a book written in the 60’s they sure used a lot of “modern” slang. I actually checked the date a few times to make sure it wasn’t a period piece (I knew it wasn’t), but saying things like ‘oh balls’ (and a handful of others) caught me off guard. The book could have been written today, almost word for word, slightly updated with different meds, removing the vaudeville references, and changing up obsolete mental institute procedures and no one would know that it’s a book from the 60’s.
Yes, I know it’s based on Judy Garland and Ethel Merman and I know people have compared it to Lindsey Lohan, but, word for word, it could have been written today, set in 2015, and it would still be a great book.
I grew up in Texas. Trust me when I say a “fag” is something very different from a cigarette. The book also had other Britishisms that Texans just don’t use.
Yeah. Black Mass has been in the news for the past year, with pictures of Johnny Depp made up extraordinarily well to look like Whitey Bulger. The film is based on the book of the same name by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, which I haven’t read (yet). Carr is definitely his own unique voice. He and that other Boston columnist, Mike Barnicle, hate each other (it clearly shows in Carr’s book, who loses no opportunities to take shots at Barnicle).
