Just finished The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would, despite some logical flaws. I reserved the sequel right away.
Just started The Wild Robot Escapes, by Peter Brown, the sequel to The Wild Robot, one of the best books I read last year.
Valente is completely in love with her own voice. About half the time, I am too: she throws great fistfuls of metaphors everywhere like they’re confetti, and it can be glorious. The other half the time I give up on her books after a chapter or two of that nonsense.
Even when I don’t finish one of her books, though, I respect what she’s doing. I’d much rather have an author try too hard than not try hard enough.
I’m reading Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, MD. Nice to have another facet of the business to regard with an extremely jaundiced eye. And it’s not the price gouging, it’s the fudging of the clinical trials when sponsored by the manufacturers. Studies that aren’t favorable are never published, so the ones that are favorable are the only ones doctors and patients see. Pretty damned devious.
Just finished it. I figured out the secret at the center of the plot pretty early on, but it’s a good detective story with some LOL moments.
Just started The Quartet by Joseph Ellis, one of my favorite contemporary American historians. It’s about the benign elitism of Washington, Hamilton, Jay and Madison in building a stronger nation-state by working towards a new U.S. Constitution. Thoughtful, assured and well-written.
i thought the whole book was blah, blah, blah…horrific acts, blah, blah, blah…horrific acts, lather rinse repeat.
The Quartet?
Recently finished Horrorstör, which was really fun IMHO. It’s basically about a haunted IKEA-type store. A strange mix of dark humor and just plain dark. Starts off light, ends pretty black, but it felt like it needed to.
About a third of the way into The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland, and I’m…reserving judgment still, I guess. I feel like I’m a long way into it to still be unsure about so much, if that makes sense. So far it seems like not a lot has happened, and stuff is quirky for the sake of quirky, but there’s still a lot of room for it to be really good.
Finished The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, by David McCullough. An excellent history of Americans in the French capital from 1830-1900. The title refers to the “greater journey” made internally once there following the arduous trip across the Atlantic, particularly before the advent of steam travel in I think it was 1858. The focus was on artists, but early on Paris was miles ahead in medical training, and some of the foremost 19th-centrury American doctors had trained in Paris. The descriptions of pulling up stakes and settling in a strange and faraway land were especially meaningful to me. Some of the Americans in the book returned repeatedly to Paris throughout their lives, living there again or just visiting, and it will be the same for me and Thailand. Ah, if I could but experience moving to Thailand for the first time again.
Have started The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. The story of murderer Gary Gilmore and his execution by firing squad in Utah in 1977. Fascinating so far. Man, what a bunch of lowlifes, and they all sound exactly like the lowlife trash I was surrounded by in West Texas.
Gilmore or Utahns? I wasonly 12 in 1977but I remember the controversy and moral wrangling back and forth. Personally, I was all for handing him a gun and saying, “Knock yourself out sport.”
I can’t speak for all Utahanians, but man, all these people Gilmore took up with in the months between the time he was let out of prison and when he committed the murders that got him executed would have been right at home in West Texas. I guess it’s true that like attracts like.
Finished The Wild Robot Escapes, by Peter Brown. I enjoyed it, but not as much as The Wild Robot. Still recommended, but only for readers of the first one.
Just started World Without Stars, by Poul Anderson.
Ah yes, I see. Utah has much in common with the Redneck South. I’m guessing a lot of early Mormon converts were people dissatisfied with the religions and political climates they had around them, not too mention men who wanted to spread their libido far and wide, but I might be biased there being female, and so had a large redneck component.
Started today on Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poole, a novel about a guy who (you guessed it) gets reincarnated a lot.
Let’s see, I have quite a few updates since I last posted.
I read The Witch House of Persimmon Point by Suzanne Palmieri. It’s my fourth book that I’ve read by her. The author made me think about the distinction between being a writer and being a story-teller. Palmieri writes beautifully, but her books suffer from going off in too many directions: too many characters, too many mysteries, resolutions that feel incomplete and implausible. I enjoyed this book, but the only book by Palmieri where I really finished it and thought “Damn, that was a really good book” was The Witch of Belladonna Bay.
I read Life After Darkness: Finding Healing and Happiness After the Cleveland Kidnappings by Michelle Knight. (She’s changed her name to Lilian Rose Lee, but her byline still says Michelle Knight.) This was a tremendous book. This woman has gone through more shit in her life than anyone I know: Her childhood was filled with rape and abuse, but no authority figures believed her when she asked for help. She eventually became homeless to escape the abuse, and man did I cry when I read about how she felt safer on the streets because at least she knew she wouldn’t be abused that night. What kind of horrible home life do you have to have to be safer on the streets???
Anyways, then of course she was chained and held captive in a psycho’s basement for eleven years, and even there, the permanent physical damage she has as a result makes her experience sound even worse than other victims of kidnapping. Permanent nerve damage in her jaw, her ear, her eyes, her back; an inability to have children because of all the violence Ariel Castro inflicted on her to force her to miscarry five babies. And then to come out of all that, be near death (she came out with a viral infection that nearly killed her), and not even have a support system to go home to?? Her story of how she found the strength to keep moving forward is incredibly inspiring and fascinating.
Speaking of inspiring, I also recently finished my audio book re-read of Life Without Limits by Nick Vujicic, a Christian Evangelist born without limbs. I still love this book to pieces. I listened to it in about 20-minute chunks to and from work. The big disadvantage of listening on audio book is that I couldn’t stop to highlight passages or copy them down. The big advantage was that I could get an inspirational pick-me-up on my way to and from work that did a wonderful job of realigning my focus and reminding me of how I want to live my life.
I read All the Missing Girls, about two women in a small town who go missing, ten years apart. I enjoyed the book, it reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s work (though I like Gillian Flynn better). It was written from Day 15 down to Day 1 (i.e., backwards), and I do think the book suffered for that. It would have been easier to get into the groove and follow along if the author hadn’t tried that gimmick. Still worth reading in my opinion, though.
And finally, I read Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty. It’s a memoir written by a young woman who works in the funeral industry, but the memoir is much more rich in historical facts than most memoirs I’ve read. She talks a lot about cultural traditions in handling death, both currently and throughout human history, and also talks about what she currently dislikes about American cultural attitudes towards death. I almost cheered aloud towards the end of the book, when she espoused a viewpoint that I have been arguing for myself: that the cultural obsession with keeping people alive as long as possible, even when their bodies are actively shutting down, is a poor attitude to have. I volunteer as an EMT, and we are taught to encourage these sorts of people to go to the hospital, and I hate those calls. When a person is clearly going to die soon, and they’d rather stay at home in peace than go to the hospital to prolong their lives a few more months, I hate standing around for the better part of an hour while my crew members try to change the person’s mind.
Finished reading Christopher Moore’s Noir – much better than his last book, Second Hand Souls, which seemed to have a lot of padding in it. It’s typical Moore book, but he angled it so that he gave his characters a lot of opportunities to use 1940s slang.
Also finished James Comey’s a Higher Loyalty – very well-written account by Comey himself explaining where he was coming from. I still disagree with his action, but I see it from his side now.
I’m still working through Robert E. Howard’s El Borak and other Eastern Tales. I think I’ve read them all before, but this is a concentration of them in newly edited edition.
I picked up Dan Beard’s Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties, a Dover reprint of the 1920 original. Beard’s books are always interesting.
also got Dive! by Lincoln Diamant, about Bushnell’s submersible The Turtle.
On audio, I finished Douglas Preston’s The Kraken Project, about an escaped AI by someone whose specialty really isn’t AI. The Douglas Preston/ Lincoln Childs books are in my stack of Guilty Pleasures, along with the Clive Cussler books, and I’ve finished all the CC books I’ve been able to find on audio in the libraries.
I also listened to Harry Harrson’s The Stainless Steel Rate in Born and Stephen King’s Guns. Now I’m listening to …And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer, which is advertised as “the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy” Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl books) mostly succeeds in capturing Adams’ sense of weird whimsy, but there are things that make it obvious you aren’t reading Adams, such as the use of atrociously obvious punning names. Interesting, and mostly harmless.
After this, I have another Stainless Steel Rat book on audio. I hit a bookstore outlet that had a lot of audiobooks on CD on sale.
You might also like Mary Roach’s Stiff, about cadavers and their medical, scientific, social, legal and religious treatment over the years. Quite interesting - offbeat, well-researched and surprisingly funny.
Yeah, once I finished Smoke Gets in Your Eyes on my Kindle, Amazon informed me that I might like that book!
Finished World Without Stars by Poul Anderson, which I enjoyed, although I wish there had been more about the alien cultures, which were more interesting than the humans.
Now I’m reading Grimspace by Ann Aguirre.
If you haven’t read them before, I highly recommend Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
It’s the trilogy most famous for it’s first book The Three Body Problem. I’ve finished that and am two thirds of the second book The Dark Forest.
The titles don’t sound like it, but this is science fiction, but it’s esoteric and cerebral in a good way and hard science isn’t dwelled on too much but it’s adequately explained.
I really love these books and I find describing them to be a bit of a challenge. But trust me, if you like sci-fi you’ll love these.
If you have a few hours to spare, you could do worse than to check out “Ask a Mortician”. Very addictive! 