Holding the new Wilson and Gibson for a sucky day that needs to be brightened.
Hi everybody! Back in here again. Just finished off the latest in the Expanse series, Cibola Burn, which is quite good, even if the ending doesn’t entirely make sense to me. I’m now out of book, and not quite sure what’s next–perhaps I’ll just dip back into my slow, slow march through the Nero Wolfe canon.
Another happy discovery in the LA-noir crime novel department: Richard Lange’s This Wicked World.On the basis of this book I would put him up there with T. Jefferson Parker and even Michael Connelly. Yeah, He’s that good.
I finished - more or less since no force on Earth can make me read anything written by Joyce Carol Oates - Black Hearts, Ivory Bones ed. Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling. The anthology is a retelling of fairy tales/ fairy tale motifs. For instance Rapunzel as a teen beauty pageant winner, Goldilocks & the Three Bears is a reality show… and an introduction to lesser known folklore such as golems. As with most anthologies, some of the stories shineand some do not.
Just finished Spook by Mary Roach. It’s a followup to her book Stiff which concerned the “life”, as it were, of cadavers. This one follows in the same investigative footsteps by examining scientific investigations into life after death. Now it’s rather obvious that if there had been an unequivocal scientific evidence of consciousness persisting after death, we would all have heard about it by now. So you have to go into the book expecting what you’re going to get, which is a meticulously researched and engagingly described series of goose eggs.
Given this, the book is an interesting and often humorous discussion of the various experiments, some quite painstaking, to determine whether anything lives on after death. Scientists weight dying people to measure the soul, interview children who might be reincarnates, attempt to measure spiritual energy with tape recorders and electromagnetic detectors.
There are some sobering lessons in there – scientists can be as prone to self-delusion and wishful thinking as the next person – is a medium’s pronouncements actual information from the grave or just successful guesses and cold readings?
There’s also a lot of enjoyable snark: “Every one seems to be in the gift shop, so I join them. People who enjoy fairies and dolphins have a wide range of purchase options here.”
So it’s a book where, if you’re a skeptic, you know where you’re going before you open it, but it’s an entertaining enough trip.
I’ve read a handful of good books lately.
I was pretty skeptical when a librarian friend recommended Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone. It could so easily be hokey: a young magic practitioner is assigned the mysterious ‘case’ of a god who has apparently died in a city called Alt Coulumb. I should have known better than to doubt a librarian! In this world of magic, vampires, gargoyles, and personified gods, main character Tara doesn’t disappoint as she attempts to apply her craft against big adversaries whilst simultaneously figuring out what happened to god Kos and how to reverse same. I’d recommend this to anyone who likes paranormal blended with fantasy and mystery. An interesting genre-bender that works well.
I recently finished The Buried Life by Carrie Patel. I really wanted to like this but somehow could not. This distinctly dystopian mystery is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic underground city called Recoletta. When an historian is murdered, Inspector Liesl Malone and her partner catch the case, initially, and recruit a laundress called Jane Lin to help them investigate the upper-crust neighborhood and society that appear to be hiding his killer. I liked the underground-city premise, as well as the reveal on the mysterious Prometheus project that ultimately cost the historian his life. Unfortunately, the characters never blossomed into life for me, nor did the city, Recoletta. This first novel seemed a composition mostly of stock elements and characters that I’d seen in other novels somewhere else. It could have been where I read the book - mostly overtired, mostly on an airplane - so I’d give the author another shot if the reviews of her next book are good. I will say that the ending went in a direction I absolutely did not expect, and I’m fairly sure that’s a good thing.
Still amidst The Aye-aye and I by Gerald Durrell. It’s not long, but I’m really savoring it. I love books about wildlife biology, especially on endangered species, and Durrell hits all those marks with humor and insight. Would absolutely recommend, especially to someone who loved Douglas Adam’s Last Chance to See. Same kind of vibe here (though not as long a book and not quite as humorous).
I feel the same way about Joyce Carol Oates, DZed.
Where I do my reading: Mostly sitting in my car in the parking lot at work. I get up an hour early on weekdays just for this purpose! However, the last few weeks I’ve been on vacation, so I did some reading on planes and trains.
I read some short stories on my Kindle app: A Face in the Crowd by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, and A Bone-Dead Sadness by Joe R. Lansdale being the best of them.
Others were Four Houses by Victoria Scott (an interesting try), Blink by Bradley Convissar (forgettable), and Ghastlie and Yule by Josh Malerman (ghastly and you’ll be bored if you read it).
Then a few books:
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: and other lessons from the crematory, by Caitlin Doughty. I’ve been avoiding this book because I’ve read a lot of similar stuff already, but I really liked it.
Then I went back to the classics and re-read Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. It was a great read until Tom Sawyer showed up. Dillhole. :mad:
I also read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for the first time. It made me stop thinking about Tom Sawyer and transfer all my daydreams of fictional ass-kicking onto Victor Frankenstein. Double dillhole! :mad::mad:
After that I needed something soothing, so I read Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Syrupy sweet. No, sweeter than that.
Currently I’m reading The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins. It’s a story about a woman who obsesses over a young couple whose house she passes every day on the commuter train to London. Riveting so far!
Here’s the BBC on the appeal (or not) of superlong books: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150507-the-never-ending-stories
I was hunting for Britcoms on DVD at my local library (all they have is *Fawlty Towers *which I had just watched :() when I discovered Keeping Up Appearances: Hyacinth Bucket’s Book of Etiquette for the Socially Less Fortunate. I’ll be ready to have tea with the vicar in no time!
oh good, I am not alone! 
YES!! Right? Quite the shift in attitude the last 200 years has brought about…
This sounds really good!
I finished a few recently …
The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. This was one of those odd reading experiences where I was loving it while I was reading, it’s a very compelling, and weird, story of a successful lawyer who develops a bizarre compulsion to walk – apparently aimlessly. After I finished, and thought back on it, a lot of it didn’t really hang together for me. A lot of interesting aspects, too many frustrating gaps.
The Children’s Crusade by Ann Packer. A novel about a family and the relationships within it, some a lot more functional than others. This was well-crafted, but just about every character annoyed me to distraction.
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. YA novel, teenagers with issues in love. It had its moments, but was maybe too melodramatic overall.
I’m just about to finish Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. This is a really good time, although it’s more an account of the world in which Cleopatra lived because there really isn’t THAT much on the historical record about actual Cleopatra. Given that, it’s a nice, general overview of that era, you don’t have to come into with with tons of knowledge, and (should you care to) it’s fairly easy to skim over a lot of the battles.
For the third time in my life, I tried to read A Clockwork Orange, and this time I succeeded.
On to Promised Land, the Robert B. Parker mystery novel.
I’ve been meaning to get back to Parker sometime. I might start with his first Spencer book, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), and just go through the series. I loved 'em back in the Eighties.
Sounds proper horrorshow, my droog.
If you’ve watched the movie, I’m curious what you think about the (in)famous 21st chapter that was omitted from the film. I’ve got my own thoughts on it, but I’ll save them for now.
The audiobook is horrorshow, my droogies.
I liked this one too. The second and third books in the series weren’t quite as good, the third was, IMHO, the better of the two. But there’s no reason not to just read the first one and stop.
You know, the first few times I tried to read it, I found the Nadsat too confusing. This time, after a few pages, it just clicked and mostly made sense.
As for the endings… I can appreciate both the movie ending AND the “happier” novella ending. The movie ending, in which the programming has worn off and Alec is obviously back to being the creep he was at the beginning, is very effective. On the other hand, the ending in which Alec just gets bored with thug life and leaves it behind on his own makes sense, too. Alec is too smart to want to stay a gang banger forever.
Either way, the moral is that you can’t make people change artificially- they have to WANT to change.
Finished Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Very good. An MGB officer in Stalinist Russia stumbles across a series of child murders. But how do you investigate when the official Party line is crime has been completely eliminated in the enlightened Soviet Union? This has been made into a film, and we saw the trailer recently. It looked good, then I spotted the book while browsing in a bookstore, so I bought it. But I’ve been reading nothing but bad things about the film, so I’ll skip that. But I highly recommend the book. It’s the first of a mystery trilogy featuring the agent, Leo Demidov, and I’ll look for the other two.
And speaking of superlong books, next up for me is It, by Stephen King.
I read a couple of the early ones around the turn of this century. One thing I found found them okay but never got around to reading more. One thing I thought amusing and which really dated them was Parker’s apparent admiration at that time of leisure suits.
This award-winning HBO movie about a later (and actual) Soviet serial-killer investigation is also worth a look: Citizen X (TV Movie 1995) - IMDb
Tom Rob Smith names that serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, as a partial inspiration for Child 44.