Truth! Looking forward to your review also, Dung Beetle. 
Can’t believe we have to wait until September 13th for The Creeping Shadow. 
Loving those tidbits, DZed. Stiletto cannot get in my hands fast enough!
The last time I read it, I skipped the pirate segments and then read them all in sequence at the end. I thought that worked out well. I did a similar thing with the Daenerys segments from “A Dance with Dragons” as well.
I finished reading “Bliss & Other Stories”, a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. Some of them were quite good and all of them were nicely atmospheric.
Reading Watchmen’s the thing. How you do it is your call. So wonderful.
I am reading a book called ***The Jazz of Physics ***by Stephon Alexander, a guy who’s both a theoretical physicist and tenor saxophonist. It sounded so badass but is only meh. Too Mathy, not enough vivid descriptions of music and improvisation, the heart of jazz - he basically makes some assertions about how sound wave-like characteristics influenced the distribution of particles in the immediate post-Big Bang. Those minuscule perturbations put in motion the anti-symmetries that led to stars, planets etc.
Should be a lot more fascinating than it is.
Psst! Dung Beetle:
I believe I know “who” the blond attacker is, soon as he said “Little Myfanwy” I went “OH SHIT!”
So Stiletto is NOT letting up for a moment! The action is nonstop and the humour is excellent. The editing is a little iffy in places, I found one instance of Odette being in a room she wasn’t actually in… but overall I’m enthralled.
I gave up on Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich after my customary 50 pages. Tedious and only mildly interesting.
However, I’m really enjoying my re-read of George R.R. Martin’s vampire novel Fevre Dream. Memorable characters, well-written dialogue, and great descriptions of steamboat life before the Civil War.
Next up: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest, a well-reviewed novel about four NYC siblings fighting over an inheritance.
Sounds like maybe The Physics of Jazz would have been a better book? 
It’s an intermediate Physics book, with some allusions to music. Fine, but not an integrated viewpoint across the two. Stuff like the Tao of Physics or The Black Swan are fun; this is didactic.
This is Your Brain on Music, or Music, the Brain and Ecstasy are great books looking at music scientifically. I really didn’t like Sacks’ Musicology; read like a collection of shaggy-dog recollections whose ultimate point was “Humans is weird when it comes to sound.” Cool, got it.
I’ve also begun, after a long hiatus, re-reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings with my teenage son. We’ve gotten to the point where the Fellowship has just left Rivendell.
Finished all 583 pages of Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley! Two and a half days, that book doesn’t let up!
The book is non stop one of those Do I HAVE to put it down to sleep? read. The action is smooth and blends well with the narrative, the characters are believable and the main ones sympathetic. The motivations and actions of everyone, good and bad, are plausible and at no time does anyone have a forced moment.
If I had to make a couple criticisms, I would say that O’Malley fails in making Odette “the most hated person in the Grafters”, there really isn’t enough set up and interaction for her to be set apart for extra hatred.
And there was entirely NOT enough Bishop Alrich in the book. This needs to be fixed, sir. I may have to take matters into my own hands if this continues 
I finished Before Watchmen: Comedian/Rorschach. Not as good as the original, by a long shot, but I’m glad I read it. In the Sixties, Comedian mixes it up with the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe and Angela Davis, among others, while Rorschach fights a hulking pimp and his mob during the 1977 NYC blackout. Several in-jokes and amusing cameos by movie characters from Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever.
I had some time yesterday afternoon and zipped through the first third of Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s novel of self-centered New Yorkers, The Nest, surprising myself. Good characterization and dialogue; I found I was always interested in seeing what happens next.
Funny, I loved Musicophilia because it helped allay one of my deepest fears: sustaining a head injury that robs me of music. I know that such a loss is still possible, but that book left me with the impression that it isn’t likely. I found it comforting. But I guess I wasn’t really reading it for the science.
I am sooooo close to being done with End of Watch (less than 10% to go) and Stiletto is next! I’m hoping to start it tomorrow or Wednesday night!
Don’t plan on sleeping
Finished The Gallows Curse, by Karen Maitland. A “cunning woman,” the term for a healer/witch, is framed for the murder of a noblewoman in England in 1160 and hanged. Her last words are a curse on the man responsible and all his descendants. Fifty years later, the curse gets caught up in the intrigue between England, France and the Papal Court. Very good. A couple of nice twists at the end. This was my first Maitland, and I understand she writes a lot of novels set in medieval England. I like that sort of story and will have to look for more of her.
Meanwhile, next up is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco.
I finished Agorafabulous by Sara Benincasa, which is a memoir about the author’s history with anxiety disorders. She is a professional comedian, and she tells a really good story, even when the story is disturbing and sad.
I also whipped through a middle reader, Tuesdays at the Castle, which was super cute and fun (magic castle), and the first in a series that I think has about five out now. That’s that balance to strike, you know – find a new-ish series, but not SO new you get stuck waiting a long time for each book to come out. 
I am ALMOST done A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horowitz, which I am liking a lot.
Finished End if Watch, which was okay in an X-Files monster-of -the-week kind of way. I doubt I’ll remember much of it in a month, though. Except the earworm. Thanks, Unca Steve.
July thread… done before I forgot again 
It’s hot, sticky and I’m ready for a vacation in Tierra del Fuego!