Finished “Flags of Our Fathers”, and now reading “The Boys in the Boat”, about the rowing crew that won the 1936 Olympics.
Happy Father’s Day to our reading dads.
I started The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey a couple days ago, sandmen appear to be my them right now
Is that good?
No, the book I was talking about was Midwinterblood, which won the Printz Award for YA fiction a few years ago … I didn’t think it was all that. Maybe I got off on the wrong foot with the tea. 
I finished the new Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife after seeing it mentioned in this thread – it was fun, enjoyable, a quick read.
I’m about halfway done with The Half-Brother, a novel that intentionally takes a rather contrived Southern-gothic-grotesque plot and moves it to a New England boarding school (love, death, forbidden sex, bizarre coincidences). I think the author is doing it really well … although I can tell that I might be enjoying it more if I was in the frame of mind to want to read something very fraught and full of anxiety.
Finishing The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martin Prechtel. People love this, but I find it poorly written, insulting, and exuding an air of Carlos Castaneda. There are some useful parts, and I found the premise interesting, but kept feeling that the author is contemptuous of his presumed reader.
My favourite Sandman is the one in Christopher Golden’s fantasy trilogy, The Veil. Part one is The Myth Hunters. Loved the books when they were coming out.
Disappointed by Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, bored by A Long Time Until Now by Michael Z. Williamson but currently loving first novel The Iron Ship by K. M. McKinley!
Having enjoyed the abridged audiobook of Scott Turow’s Ordinary Heroes, about a U.S. Army JAG lawyer caught up in the Battle of the Bulge and a maybe-rogue OSS operation, I just finished the unabridged book, which had some additional scenes and dialogue, and a little more background on two of the secondary characters. Glad I got the whole picture.
Just finished George Washington: A Brief Biography by William MacDonald, which was a good but very short introduction to the first President.
I’ve been listening to the unabridged audiobook of Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, an autobiography with a particular focus on the Satanic Verses controversy and the years he spent in hiding, protected by the London Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. The police asked Rushdie to pick a pseudonym for them to use and he chose one combining the first names of two of his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Rushdie is unstinting in his gratitude to those who stood by him, and pours scorn on those who backed away or, even if they had never been his friends, didn’t at least stand up for free speech. He also discusses his childhood in India and Great Britain, his literary ambitions and his messy romantic life (two divorces so far in the book).
I’m also now returning to The West Point History of the Civil War, ed. by Col. Ty Seidule, a big coffeetable book cowritten by West Point faculty and cadets, Wiki-style, lavishly illustrated and with great maps. So far I’m enjoying it.
Yay, I was looking to post in this thread for a while. 
Finished reading Shame by Salman Rushdie. I had picked it up in a used books store. I had not heard about this book earlier, and it was considerably darker than I had expected. Still, a fantastic read. The first third of the book was a slog (characters introduced abruptly, unreliable narrator, jumping between events in the past, present and the future, etc), but once the setting was clear, the pace picked up considerably.
I enjoyed the writing locally throughout the book, but I am not sure I can understand or appreciate the theme of the book. It’s as if the author forged many many fascinating metal links, but instead of linking them all together to form a coherent chain, he made a tangled heap of links. The narrator explains (and this point is repeated in many online reviews) that the book seems to be how shame and shamelessness lead to violence, but I remain unconvinced about this connection. Yes, they do lead to violence, but the book also portrays violence arising from other causes: jealousy, greed & political ambition, devoutness, mental illness, etc. Guess I will pick up more connections on a second reading…
I will definitely look it up. Gaiman’s work is underwhelming me… it’s just sort of juvenile, like slashing tires and kicking dogs, no point to it.
I’m in the middle of reading The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China, by Samuel Hawley.
It’s a very interesting read for all history types - it seems absolutely incredible that a gigantic army of over a hundred thousand men, more than half Christian (!), mostly armed with modern gunpowder weapons (!!), set out to take over the known world - only to be (in large part) defeated by even-more modern cannon-armed battleships led by Admiral Yi, Korea’s answer to Nelson … and that there is basically a single modern history in English on the topic.
As the author notes, the Japanese invasion fleet was at least five times the size of the “invincible Spanish Armada” with which it was roughly contemperanious, and Admiral Yi’s victories over it were far more lopsided (in one battle, he led 13 Korean ships against over a hundred Japanese ships - and crushed them).
The significance of the defeat of the Japanese invasion for the history of east Asia and the world is hard to overstate.
Thanks to Dung Beetle mentioning John Bellairs, I started to crave rereading the Johnny Dixon books. I had forgotten that the first one was a bit of a slog and not that scary - unlike Eyes of the Killer Robot which scared me enough to turn on the lights in my apartment and go sit by the then boyfriend. But The Curse of the Blue Figurine does an excellent job at setting the scene and introducing us to most of the major characters in the series.
Ha! Yeah, I do like the Lewis and Rose Rita ones best. 
I’m enjoying Paradise Sky, a novel about the adventures of a former slave who becomes a cowboy. Not his best, but entertaining as hell, like everything Lansdale writes. A typically amusing turn of phrase described rats in a barn as “big enough to straddle a turkey flatfooted”.
I picked up Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck from the library recently after having gotten Bill Steigerwald’s Dogging Steinbeck: How I Went in Search of John Steinbeck’s America, Found My Own America, and Exposed the Truth about ‘Travels with Charley’ as a Kindle freebie a month or two ago.
I don’t think I’ve read any Steinbeck since college (tho I did watch the Chaney/Burgess Of Mice and Men film adaptation last year - excellent!); after reading Travels with Charley, I think I’ll have to revisit his works, as I really enjoyed this book.
In 1960 Steinbeck crossed the United States in a custom camper pickup truck, and his standard poodle (the titular Charley) as companion, with the intent of reconnecting with his country and its people. This book - part travelogue, part essays on the state of America, part memoir/reflection is the result. The term “picaresque” comes to mind - he meets many colorful characters along the way, and enjoys the majority of his interactions. The overall tone is reflective, with the occasional dips into pessimism; Steinbeck doesn’t think much of so-called “Progress”. However, I got an overall positive vibe from the story - especially his travels through Montana and the Redwoods, where his appreciation of the outdoors pours from his pen. Even his return to Salinas, where he meets up with childhood friends and realizes that “you can’t go home again” came off more wistful and nostalgic than genuinely sad, at least to me.
Steinbeck seems to generally enjoy the experience and the people he meets over the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the book - until New Orleans. He goes to the William Frantz elementary school in the Ninth Ward, where young Ruby Bridges, the first black student to be admitted, is attending school escorted by U.S. Marshals. I had a basic understanding of this episode, and had seen the moving Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With”. But Steinbeck’s portrayal of the Cheerleaders - the women who gathered each day to spew their vicious, vile, verbal abuse at this child - made me heartsick; especially with the current events in Ferguson, Baltimore and now Charleston making me wonder what progress we have made in the past 50 years. The experience affected him as well - he made a beeline for home at that point, no longer savoring the journey.
Fifty years later, freelance journalist Bill Steigerwald decided to retrace Steinbeck’s journey across the United States to see how we as a people and the land itself had changed in a half-century, with the intent of writing some articles. However, as he prepared for the journey by doing research into Steinbeck’s route … he started finding discrepancies. Using letters Steinbeck wrote to his wife, along with other archival material, Steigerwald began to doubt some of Steinbeck’s story. So he embarked on the route in a Toyota Rav4 (totally alone - no dog) to see what the truth was out there.
Travels with Charley portrays Steinbeck as a man alone in his travels, sleeping in his camper alongside the road. But as Steigerwald pieced things together - it appears that of the 75 days Steinbeck spent away from home, over half of the time was spent with his wife. The stopovers he refers to briefly in his book - Seattle, California and Texas – were much more lengthy in reality, and Steinbeck was more likely to find a nice hotel than he was to “rough it” along the road. In fact, Steigerwald could only find good evidence of him spending 4 or 5 nights in the camper itself.
As a journalist, Steigerwald did his best to track down anyone who may have remembered/interacted with Steinbeck along his travels (and met some fairly colorful characters himself!). However, Steigerwald was unable to identify the majority of the people Steinbeck wrote of so evocatively. Along with this research, he had conversations with Steinbeck’s son, Thom (who thinks that his father “just sat in his camper and wrote all that [expletive].”) and came to the conclusion that many of these meetings and events were conflated at best, confabulated at worst.
Steigerwald published his findings in a few magazines - and what responses he did get from the Steinbeck scholars were … less than accepting. His self-published book is his way of reaching out to a larger audience and perhaps a bit of a nose-thumbing to the Steinbeck apologists.
When I followed Steinbeck’s work up with Steigerwald’s – it really didn’t change my opinion much of *Travels with Charley *. Perhaps it’s because I came to this work so recently, I don’t have much invested in it. I also tend to approach both travelogues and memoirs with a grain or two of salt - appreciating the story while not assuming everything is 100% accurate. However, I recognize that others may not feel that way - Steigerwald, as a journalist, is bound by his profession’s ethics and apparently thinks Steinbeck should have felt similarly. I enjoyed the writing styles of both men and would like to read more from both of them.
Now that I’m near the end of The Boys in the Boat, I can say that I recommend this without reservation for anybody who likes a good story about perseverance and people from humble beginnings. If you know nothing about the sport of rowing, it doesn’t matter. I can safely say the the chapter about the final race at the 1936 Olympics was the most intense nail biter in 60 years of reading; and I knew how the race would end going in. Phenomenal writing.
I finished The Sandman by neil Gaimon annnnnnd it was as Meh as I always supected it was. In all honesty, the first volume underwhelmed me. The art was chaotic and over sexualized, someone has issues if Hell is ALL about sex. I liked the first story and the last, most of the stuff in between felt gratuitous heavy handed.
So, a few Stephen Kings and a couple books recommended to me based on their perceived similarity to Stephen King. I’m quite comfy in my rut, thank you:).
The Ocean At The End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. First Gaiman I’ve read, pretty good, kind of a fairy-tale type flavor that reminded me of A Wrinkle In Time insofar as the protagonist is a small child brought into contact with cosmic forces he can barely begin to understand. I might read more Gaiman in the future, but it didn’t inspire me to rush right out and get more.
The Passage, by Justin Cronin, which has been compared to The Stand but isn’t really very similar except in that they are about the same length, have a large cast of characters, and most of humanity gets wiped out about a quarter of the way in (I don’t think that’s a spoiler because I think it was made pretty clear on the back cover blurb…apologies if I misremembered). It’s an exciting post-apocalyptic SF read with some really scary monsters (I don’t know if I’ll ever not flash on it when reading that something or someone has “gone viral” again!). I enjoyed it, but was kind of bummed out to realize toward the end that its 800+ pages aren’t a self-contained story but the first volume of a trilogy! That’s like almost two-thirds of a** Dark Tower!** Again, i will probably read the rest at some point but have no immediate plans to do so.
First reread of the last three books of the Dark Tower series (currently about 200 pages short of completion): Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah still awesomely great, I am starting to be more sympathetic to the view that the last book feels like King was rushing a bit too quickly to get it over with and seems more like a disjointed collection of vignettes than a real narrative. I have realized that what makes this series so great for me is the main characters and their relationships. As kind of a thought experiment, I was thinking while reading Wolves of the Calla about how I might adapt it into a screenplay. I think that I could cram all the plot into a film coming in at under three hours, but it wouldn’t be very good because there wouldn’t be time for all the banter between the protagonists, which is what really makes the story sing. Anyway, if you really want to make my day you can revive my Dark Tower zombie thread and give me an opening to keep going on and on about it… still haven’t read** The Wind Through the Keyhole** or the comics, so I can’t die yet.
I think my adulthood has derailed… I finished The Mummy, the Will and the Crypt by John Bellairs today. THis is the second Johnny Dixon book. Reading these books at age 50, I notice things I never noticed before: such as the underlying theme of lonliness and fear of abandonment that runs through his books. both Johnny and Lewis are young children not living with their parentmand their fear of being left alone forms as much of the plot as the supernatural fears do.
I’m beginning to reread The Cruel Sea, a 1951 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, about British corvette sailors fighting Nazi U-boats. Just as good as I remember - brilliant characterization, an epic backdrop, and horrible situations offset by occasional humor.
I’m almost done with Everything I Never Told You, up next I have to chose from:
What Alice Forgot
The Paying Guests
Don Quixote
I’ve also got a bunch of others in my unread stack, but one of those will be next. I’m leaning towards Don Quixote or The Paying Guests.
My first post on this thread:
I just finished Charming and Daring by Elliott James. These are the first two books in an urban fantasy series. The premise is presented as a play off of the “Prince Charming” name, which comes across as silly. The books themselves are well worth reading. The hero is a disgraced member of a group who maintains the peace between mystical beings and humans. It reminded me strongly of Jim Butcher, Ilona Andrews or Patricia Briggs. The first, Charming, was excellent. The second stumbled a bit in pacing in the middle, but still very good. I liked them quite a bit. It’s fun to find a new author.
Trying to pick what’s next.
I finished reading Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. I didn’t know what to expect, so I was a bit surprised when a funny satire on middle-class values took a serious turn. It was a good book, but I don’t know if it’s worth a Nobel prize. It must have really struck a chord at the time, considering how many copies it sold.