This has been an odd year, Mother Nature must have read her calendar upside down. Two weeks ago, I had laundry on the line, this week we have snow… my daffodills are in shock.
Anybody else feeling backwards?
I am currently reading, more things than I care to admit honestly…
Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathon L. Howard. I had started it the week before Thanksgiving and got about halfway before putting it down, a combination of being behind on NaNo and having surgery in December. So I decided to start over since I could only recall Leonie’s adventure with any clarity.
Undeath & Taxes by Drew Hayes. It’s the second vampire accountant book and since it’s tax season…
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honor.
Just finished The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel about the Battle of Gettysburg and the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg. Very good, especially since I believe it was my great-great grandfather who fought there, with a New York regiment. The wife and I visited the battlefield five years ago, and the names of him and everyone in his regiment were on a plaque up somewhere on Cemetery Ridge.
Next up is David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.
As for the winter, I dunno. Been pretty steady here. 70s, 80s. It has occasionally dipped to the upper 60s at night. Brrrr. I’m showing 77 degrees at 7:41pm right now.
Started this morning on Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. That link isn’t the most descriptive one, but it shows the cover of the version I have, which is the nicest by far.
I am reading the complete Oz series by L. Frank Baum. I had the books as a child and loved them. I recently discovered he had written two separate books about Trot and Cap’n Bill and those are in my queue.
Just finished Time for the Stars, by Robert A. Heinlein. Somehow I’ve never read it before. It had its moments, but didn’t really interest me overall. And I found the ending really disturbing.
Started Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I’m doing a reading challenge this year, and for March, I’m supposed to pick a book with a one-word title. For book challenges, I choose books I wouldn’t normally read. I’ve found some really good ones that way. Reading the thread about this book and Frankenstein (which I have read before) made me choose this one.
It’s interesting so far. One moment that really stood out is Harker seeing the Count make his (Harker’s) bed. I haven’t seen many Dracula movies, but I bet this isn’t included in any. Do vampires do hospital corners?
I finished reading The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells, one of several semi-autobiographical books (like Kipps or the first half of Tono-Bungay) that detail how much it sucks to be apprenticed as a shop clerk. It had some funny parts, but there is also a clear undercurrent of bitterness towards his first wife, in that he keeps writing about a young dreamer who gets trapped in marriage to a small-minded, humourless bourgeois woman.
Every so often you discover an author and a series, and you’re afraid to read the 2nd one in the series because it couldn’t possibly be as good as the first. That’s where I am now.
The author’s unprepossessing name is Harry Dolan. Remember that name. It might be big some day.
The book I read is called “Bad Things Happen” and it is the first in a series named after its main character, David Loogan (many advance points if you know the origin of that last name). At present there are three in the series plus a supposed prequel.
Many, many career points if you can predict even one of the ways that the plot resolves itself in the last few chapters. This book is in the mystery genre (definitely in the noir end), and so the plot is paramount. But this book is so much more. The writing is really good, as far as I can tell (I never studied literature but I have read a lot of it). Some of the characters are fairly stock, and one of the most interesting characters is one we never meet alive. The main character is good, a man who has multiple competencies but who is not any kind of super hero. Someone who can think on his feet. Someone I would really like to know.
Finally, the setting or background is very clever. It revolves around a magazine that publishes literary mystery stories. So things get a little recursive from time to time.
Anyway, I don’t want to give any more away. Read this even if you don’t normally read mysteries. I think you’ll like it.
Next, on to some silly-ass MC Beaton nonsense. I need to relax after the intensity of this experience.
Finished Cold Comfort Farm, a bizarre but nice little book. One of the Amazon reviews described the Starkadders as being like the Addams family, which I think hit the nail on the head. The story is about a young lady who moves in with them and effects changes for the better. It’s not rip-roaringly funny, but very cute and I liked it a lot.
Next up, Force of Nature by Jane Harper. Her first novel, The Dry, was very good and could stand alone, but this second novel also concerns the detective Aaron Falk. It’s about a woman who goes missing while on a corporate retreat in the outback.
I’m about three-quarters through my second reading of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I’m again enjoying it immensely. It’s kinda sorta like Jane Austen wrote a Harry Potter book - wry, witty, detailed, with memorable characters and a terrific take on the return of magic to Regency England. Highly recommended.
Just starting Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, about mass incarceration and the toll the War on Drugs is taking on black America.
Next up: Richard W. Smith’s Bishop McIlvaine, Slavery, Britain & the Civil War, about a prominent Episcopal cleric in the 1860s.
I love that book, but I think I know what you’re referring to. Want to discuss it here? Do we need spoiler boxes for a book which came out in 1956?
I just finished The Three Coffins (AKA The Hollow Man) by John Dickson Carr.
Holy Cow, is Carr ever an awkward writer! It’s as if some editor told him his locked room mysteries were too schematic and needed to have better developed characters, settings, and dialogue if he want to get published, so he went about doing that, but in a completely inept way. His characters are undeveloped but overly talkative without saying much of anything, and he throws as many adjectives and as much punctuation (including his favorite, ellipses) as he can into every sentence.
This is supposedly one of the best locked room mysteries ever written, but for me the slog through all that crappy prose to get to the solution just wasn’t worth it. I’m going back to Agatha Christie.
I finished Undeath and Taxes by Drew Hayes last night. This book focused more on messes Fred, the vampire accountant, got himself into and out of, which made for decent character development for him.
I started Jackdaw by K J Charles this morning, it’s a sidestory to her Magpie Series.
I also started Murder and Magic by Randall Garrett yesterday. It’s a classic in the urban fantasy genre. His writing style isn’t my favorite but the book is short so I’ll get through it.
I’m reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has been on my to-read list since, like, 2010 or something. It’s about the food we eat: where it originates and the process it goes through to get from its raw form to our dinner plate. I kept thinking it would be good for me to read it, but in all honesty, I didn’t really want to know that stuff. I figured I’d rather be ignorant about it. Now that I’m about halfway through it, well, the good news is it’s actually written in much more engaging prose than I was expecting. I didn’t expect to be able to “curl up” with this book as well as I can. But there’s part of me that still is kind of repulsed at knowing some of this stuff. It’s making me feel motivated to make some changes in my diet, but it remains to be seen how much motivation I’ll have once I’m done with this book and onto the next shiny thing.
I’m also reading The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin. It’s pretty good, though I do think it fell prey to the same error that so many other books I’ve read have fallen prey to: the writing is superb, but the plotline could be tighter. There are a few subplots that I think detract from the main story, but overall, it’s holding my interest, so it’s a win overall.
I’m about halfway through A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad. It’s interesting, but the past month has been busy and I’m a little more tired than usual, so I’m only reading a few pages each night. Things should calm down after this weekend, and I’m hoping to start putting more of a dent into it each time I pick it up.
You talked me into it: I downloaded a free sample to my Kindle.
I just read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, who was a well-known playwright and also the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Many people have raved to me over the years about I Capture the Castle so I finally read it. Mixed response. I really liked the narrative voice and found some scenes to be brilliantly written. The love story was utterly predictable, though. The comic scenes were excruciatingly unfunny. And the character of the father (presented as an eccentric genius, though not uncritically) was so irritating I wanted to reach through the pages and throttle him. Perhaps I read this book at the wrong time. I might be too old for it (depressing thought).
Now I’m reading Birdcage Walk, Helen Dunmore’s final book.
