Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' Thread - May 2015 Edition

Cafe Society
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If you want to read more, I enjoyed Washington Irving’s account of it called originally Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize Beyond the Rocky Mountains but also known as Astoria: Adventure in the Pacific Northwest.
I commented on it, probably in the December 2013 thread…

Currently reading Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, a post-EU espionage novel set in a Europe splitting into ever smaller statelets. The plot was was very slow emerging and I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on, but is is enjoyable!
And the new Neal Stephenson doorstop, Seveneves arrived this morning, so I guess that’ll be next!

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Thanks! Hadn’t heard of that. Which is the better book, would you say, and why?

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Thanks. I’m a survival story junkie (oceans, mountains, deserts, jungles: you name it), but also love exploration and well-written history. I started a thread a long time ago looking for reccos on survival type books, as they’re not a search category on Amazon.

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Clarke’s. Sheffield’s a good writer, but I like Clarke’s style better. And Sheffield throws in some truly bizarre ideas I have a hard time getting into (although I love his idea of the water satellite). Besides that, his method of putting his “beanstalk” in place seems unworkable – as Clarke comments in his introduction. Dramatic, though.

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I was in need of some light escapist reading, so I just read Sebastien de Castel’s The Traitor’s Blade. It’s Three Musketeers-ish fantasy, and was just right for my mood.

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I finished 9 Dragons by Michael Connelly, DAMN YOU MICHAEL CONNELLY!!! MAKING ME CRY!!

Mickey Haller hearts emoticon

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OK, thanks. I’ll go with ACC, then.

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Right now, I’m deep into another book I had read in Classics Comics form as a kid: Willkie Collins’ The Moonstone.

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Just finished Impasse by Royce Scott Buckingham, who has been more of a juvenile author. This is his first adult literature piece. Fast paced read, about an attorney that gets himself in a pickle and has to figure his way out.

Just started **The Girl with all the Gifts**by M.R. Carey. Carey is the pen name for a British prose and comic book writer. I’m only about a 1/3 in, but it is very interesting. It is in a popular sub-fantasy genre. I don’t want to give too much away. It is well written.

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I finished Little Tiny Teeth by Aaron Elkins. The series isn’t a knock-your-socks-off but I enjoy it a lot. I love being able to nerd out on physical and cultural anthropology while reading a murder mystery. :smiley: This gets me caught up with the series.

Up next The Detachment by Barry Eisler

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I just finished a YA novel, Hit, by Delilah S. Dawson. It’s about a credit card company that takes over the American government and forces debtors to kill or be killed. So…the dystopia part was cool, if farfetched. However, the teen luuuuv story blew chunks. Although this is first of a series, I feel the author has already written herself into a corner and I don’t care if she gets out. Onward!

Next up, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.

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Finished the second volume of Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century; The Man Who Learned Better. An interesting and annoying book.

I’ve finished Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, a belated Christmas present from Pepper Mill. It was much better than I thought it would be. (And I see that Doescher thanks one of my old professors, the founder of MIT’s Shakespeare Ensemble, for suggestions with his pseudo-Sjhakespeare verse)

On audio, I finished the first volume of Twilight Zone re-dramatizations, and a Kathy Reichs mystery, Fatal Voyage. I’ve got more of both to listen to.

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Just finished this one. Because you’re still reading it:

An interesting take on the zombie apocalypse. Some small fraction of the zombies (all children) retain human intellectual capacities, while still manifesting the hunger for human flesh. The book focuses specifically on one 10 year old girl named Melanie by the humans who are studying her.

I really enjoyed the first 1/3 of the book, but unfortunately things go a bit downhill after that. The plot more or less degenerates into the classic “group of oddly assorted misfits with their own agendas have to make a hazardous journey through zombie-infested territory, but really, they’re their own worst enemies.” Still well-written, but it wasn’t covering a territory we haven’t seen before.

I also wasn’t too enthralled with the ending, which was essentially “I Am Legend” with zombies. It seemed like the waste of a good premise; it would have been more interesting to see if humans and human/zombie hybrids could have managed to get society back up and kicking again.

Side quibble: As usual in zombie mythology, the causal agent, in this case a fungus, seems to have made a impressive jump in evolution – the zombies, particularly the hybrids, are fast, durable, and are super-efficient users of protein without the need to excrete. Seems like quite the leap from simply influencing ants.

I also just finished reading “Star Island” by Carl Hiaasen. Not his best work – he brings the usual gang of crooks, sleazy opportunists, grotesques, and befuddled innocent bystanders, but it doesn’t come together, possibly because he forgot to also bring the plot and the suspense.

The concept, such as it is, is that Ann DeLusia is a double for a celebrity singer whenever the singer is too wasted to be seen in public. This impersonation leads to what should be merry hijinks, but it all falls sort of flat. Part of the problem is that the heroine never really seems to be in much peril; in fact, her reaction to being kidnapped (at least twice) is to make caustic comments and go along with the flow. You never get convinced that she’s worried or more than slightly inconvenienced by all the shenanigans going on around her. According to the other characters in the novel, Ann is likeable and spunky, but it doesn’t really come through – she’s more of an emotional cipher. Apparently it’s hard to combine flippant and suspenseful.

Hiaassen also brings back a couple of characters from previous books, his recurring sort-of environmental hero Skink, and the somewhat loathsome Chemo from Skin Tight. Problem is, Skink is totally incidental to the plot – things probably would have gone much the same without him. Chemo’s role is a bit more amusing – he may be a stone cold killer and a mortgage broker, but when it comes to dealing celebrity stardom, there are things even he can’t stomach.

As I said, plotwise, the book doesn’t cut it. The plot threads twist and wind but never come together in any sort of satisfying way, finally petering out in an anticlimax. Sure, a few bad guys get whacked off stage but really not much happens except that a bunch of amoral sleazebags screw each other over in mildly amusing and ironic ways.

Biggest problem: Hiaassen’s strength is writing about Florida’s decay, moral and ecological. Celebrity culture, and celebrity trainwrecks in particular, are too easy a target.

Side quibble: Digital cameras don’t have motor drives, and puking on a memory card won’t destroy it – it will just make it yucky. People have pulled cameras out of rivers and gotten useful data off the memory cards.

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I finished Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland yesterday. It’s a memoir written by two of the women who were held captive in a man’s house for ten years in Cleveland, Amanda Berry and Gina Dejesus. It’s all right, though the way it’s written is a little strange. I had expected it to alternate between Amanda and Gina’s point of view, but there’s also a third person omniscient viewpoint, which describes some other things, like Ariel Castro’s childhood and how the search for the women was progressing. TBH I skipped over a lot of those parts. Going from one person’s viewpoint to another was fine, but going from a girl’s viewpoint to the omniscient, emotionally detached viewpoint was a little too jarring for me.

(As an aside, I also read Michelle Knight’s memoir Finding Me when it came out, and that book was amazing – one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read!)

My current fiction pick is Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. I’m 3/4 of the way through and really like it so far. I also just love the cover art!

Oh, and I just bought Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime on audio book to start listening to. I thought it might be appropriate now that the primaries are ramping up; I’m sure I’ll learn a thing or two about Hillary. I haven’t started listening to it yet, though.

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One of my Olympus digitals spent about 2 hours in the bottom of the swamp cooler in several inches of water and it works just fine… :wink:

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Over the weekend I finished Edmund Morris’s terrific last-of-the-trilogy bio Colonel Roosevelt, about TR’s post-White House years. A detailed but very readable portrait of a fascinating man in his final years.

I also just zipped through Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, about building an orbital elevator on a (fictional) equatorial island. The political, religious and engineering challenges are huge but, if anything, I think Clarke understates them. I’d last read the book in high school and it still holds up pretty well.

Did they say why the third captive didn’t participate in their book? Was there a rift between them?

I devoured Game Change, and hope you like it too. Great behind-the-scenes stuff on the 2008 campaign (and be warned, Hillary doesn’t come off well). The authors’ book on the 2012 campaign, Double Down, is also very good.

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Oh I didn’t realize there was another one for the 2012 election! If I like this one I’ll check out the next one.

As for why Michelle Knight didn’t participate in the joint memoir, she was invited to participate but declined, and while the specific reasons why haven’t been made public, it is publicly known that Michelle and Amanda don’t get along that well.

I will say, having read Michelle’s memoir, that Michelle spent a good deal of time describing her childhood in her memoir. Normally I’m not a big fan of that, because if people know you for your ten year ordeal in captivity, then, as harsh as it sounds, that’s what people are interested in. But Michelle had such a horrific childhood that I burst into tears reading it before I even got to her kidnapping. (I have not encountered another book in my entire adult life that made me cry like that. My husband suggested to me that perhaps I should put the book down and read one that I was better prepared to handle emotionally, but I ignored his advice and finished the book.)

Anyways, the point I’m trying to make is that all the pages on her childhood would not have fit well into the flow of the joint memoir Amanda and Gina published, and I really think it made Michelle’s story better and more heartfelt.

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Thanks for the info. Didn’t know that about the three women.

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I’ve been reading some old-school Ellery Queen courtesy of some old Signet Double Mysteries on my “random books from the parents house” shelf. The first set, There Was an Old Woman/The Origin of Evil was the best. The first book was about the hateful matriarch of a shoe empire whose children kept getting murdered. I didn’t guess the right killer but I was pretty close if you go by physical proximity of the person I suspected to the actual mastermind when said mastermind was finally exposed. I did guess the killer in The Origin of Evil, but I didn’t guess the mastermind. This book was notable because Ellery actually noticed and reacted to a pretty woman to the point where he was almost caught in a compromising position with her. :eek:

The second books, The Door Between/The Devil to Pay were both 1930s novels and boy can you tell (the first books were written in the 40s and 50s). In both books the heroine was all wet, although Valerie (in “Devil”) had more of a spine and could take care of herself better than Eva (in “Door”). The Door Between got on my nerves due to the casual racism against the Japanese woman (her dialogue was horrendous) but the crime was clever and the last few paragraphs reveal Ellery’s pitch-black dark side. He did *not *want the mastermind to get away scot free. The Devil to Pay had an even more complex murder and once I had all the clues I totally nailed the identity of the murderer. But he had a good reason for what he did, so he didn’t get to see the black hole that Ellery calls a soul at the end. He just went to jail.

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I really liked this book, too, and I probably would have picked it up just for the cover art! In addition to its other merits, I was also very impressed by how well the author captured the culture of the time, it really brought me back.