I’m rereading some old stuff.
Just finished Rapture of the Nerds so now I’m wending my way through the Deathstalker series.
Just finished One of Us is Lying, a YA murder mystery by Karen McManus. As a lover of the eighties, I was drawn in by all the reviews mentioning The Breakfast Club. The book is nothing like that except that all the characters were in detention together for about two minutes at the beginning. And they’re all the different high school stereotypes: the jock, the brain, etc. The story is told by alternating characters, but they all sounded so much alike I kept forgetting which one was narrating and having to check the chapter titles for the names. Anyway, it passed the time this week and didn’t put any undue stress on my weary brain cells.
Finished Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Very good, but I wish more of it had been set on the Moors, not in “real life”, even though I understand the author wanted to show why the twins were the way they were.
Just started Return to the Willows, a sequel to The Wind in the Willows. It’s by another author, Jacqueline Kelly.
My brain cells are degenerating into gibberish when I’m not on the job. I think my reading level is regressing as we speak. I’ll be reading only board books soon.
Times have definitely changed regarding language and social mores. I just finished reading Fredric Brown’s His Name was Death*, a murder thriller written in and set in the 1950s. Part of the plot concerns a young man and a young woman about to be engaged and their mental gymnastics and actions about the possibility of sex. They’re both horny as hell but have furious inner dialogues about whether they should go to bed together before marriage. Changing social mores (and effective birth control) changed a lot of that a decade later. I wonder if kids today can even understand the tensions in a book like that.
It’s similar with Neil Simon’s first real success, the comedy Come Blow your Horn, in which we follow the goings-on in an apartment shared by two brothers, the younger one having just jumped from the nest. At one point the older one’s girlfriend, having gotten herself drunk, threatens to go to the bedroom , strip, and have sex with the older brother. He tries to talk her out of it, even though they both want to, really. In a modern play she wouldn’t need to bolster her courage with alcohol, and they probably would’ve slept together long before this.
(They turned this into a film in the 1960s with an outrageously miscast Frank Sinatra as the older brother, a part he was way too old for)
*I’m a very big Brown fan, but I’d never read this one before. I stumbled across it in an antique store.
It has been a while since I read something new and remarkable, but I just finished a new science fiction novel, Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which is worth mentioning. It features large, intelligent spiders on a terraformed planet where insect life was accidentally targeted by a nanovirus meant to speed the process of evolution. The depiction of the spider civilization is really brilliant. The book also tells the rather depressing story of the last remnants of humanity, traveling in an ark ship looking for a new home, but the human part of the book is not nearly as good as the stuff about the spiders.
I like the movie Enigma, starring Kate Winslet: a spy thriller set at Bletchley Park in 1943. I went looking for the Robert Harris book it’s based on, and I really enjoyed it. My only complaint is that it’s relatively short, and there’s not a lot more substance than what appears in the movie. It does offer a nice glimpse of wartime England: shortages, blackouts, and especially bad food - every meal the protagonist eats sounds terrible. I’m also fascinated by the “girls” who worked at Bletchley and at the intercept stations, listening to Morse code all day:
I think that jobs women have done in the backgrounds while men hogged the glory is all kinds of fascinating. I was unaware of the human computers at NASA until I saw Hidden Heroes and that’s just a tiny bit of what we’ve done behind the scenes through history
His alternative-history novel Fatherland, about Germany winning WWII in Western Europe and facing off against the U.S. by 1964 in a different kind of Cold War, is also excellent. I also enjoyed his recent Conclave, about a near-future Vatican conference to choose the successor to a Pope very much like Francis.
Finished A Dreamer’s Tales by Lord Dunsany. I don’t usually like fantasy that is almost all atmosphere and little plot, but it is very good atmosphere, so I finished it.
Also read 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Which confirmed that I no longer like Stephen King. He has been too successful, and ISTM that editors are afraid to cut anything. This one was 30% longer than it needed to be, and it wandered all over, from the expected “fish out of water” to “the past doesn’t want to be changed” to a love story (a fairly unconvincing love story). I got the same feeling that I got when I read the un-edited version of The Stand - there is a reasonable novel buried in here somewhere.
Next up is The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton. Then, I don’t know what.
Regards,
Shodan
I loved Lincoln in the Bardo as an audiobook. But then George Saunders is my favorite, so I’m biased.
I finished Blood and Betrayal by Lindsay Buroker today. Read in two days, I believe, highly implausible that they survived those adventures but a fun read nevertheless. I think I will take a slight breather before going onto the next book in the series and finish up a few of the other ones I’m reading.
I need to read some of this manga I have stacked up here too… my hubby would like to use his closet again. 
Did not know he had a new one out. Will definitely look for that.
Now see, I’m the opposite. I loved 11/22/63, every word of it, as well as the unedited version of The Stand. An English friend did not like the former for the reason you cite, saying that whole school-teacher interlude could have been cut out. But it really played well for me. And he had to have been doing something during those years. Sure, the time portal could have been closer to the event than six years, but I liked it that he had to stay so long and that he did not just skip a few years.
I just read his Pompeii, and I was less impressed with it. The setting was good, as was the depiction of the eruption, but the plot and characterizations were lacking. I’m not used to short, shallow historical novels. It felt like it was written to be turned into a screenplay.