I finished The Casebook of Simon Feximal by KJ Charles. It’s her paean To M.R. James and the ghost story tellers of the late 18th century, early 19th. A nice read but it felt incomplete.
I also read How to Marry a Werewolf the latest novella from Gail Carriger. It’s sent in her Parasoverse and involves my second favorite werewolf of all time, Major Channing. Engrossing, wry and a lot of fun.
City Primeval, Elmore Leonard
How do you like it? The title’s always intrigued me.
Last night I finished The Quartet by Joseph Ellis, about the efforts of Washington, Hamilton, Jay and Madison in building support for, and then winning ratification of, the U.S. Constitution. I didn’t agree with all of Ellis’s arguments, but he tells the story well.
I’ve now returned to The Great Bridge by David McCullough, about the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m up to 1877 - construction is well underway but now they’re realizing there are problems with the metal wire being provided by a politically-connected contractor.
Finished Grover Cleveland, it turned out well. It’s basically a teen summer romance book, where the protagonist (and the titular Grover Cleveland) and others are campers at a summer camp for seriously troubled kids; cutters, eating disorders, attempted suicide, and other mental health issues. The narrator comes around to some good self-realizations eventually.
In anticipation of the Starz series which I hear will start sometime this year, I’m rereading The Rook, up to Chapter 5 now. If you haven’t read it, give yourself a treat.
So far it’s very much in the mood and style of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”. Same sort of hard-boiled dialog between bad guys and cops. Leonard always said that Eddie Coyle was an inspiration for his own writing. Too early to say that it’s grabbed me, but is a good read so far.
Finished Grimspace by Ann Aguirre. Not recommended. When you have a group of characters who are all tough, experienced, widely traveled, and cynical, yet still somehow so naive it doesn’t occur to any of them that a crash of a spaceship might be due to sabotage, not incompetence or bad luck on the heroine’s part. And even when the heroine remembers something suspicious, it doesn’t occur to her to wonder why the sabotage occurred until someone asks her. The only reason I finished it was to find out when somebody would figure out the obvious. It took almost nine tenths of the book for that to happen…and he was a brand new character. Oh, and he did a little research on publicly available information, broadcast it, and the villains gave up immediately, with no protests of innocence or claims that the information was fraudulent. And the main characters all got away with the numerous crimes they’d committed.
Onward, to a book I hope has a more intelligent cast: Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp.
IfinishedThe Judges of Hades by Edward Hoch. I used to wait for Mom to finish her Ellery Queen magazines just so I could read Ed Hoch’s latest story. The Simon Ark stories haven’t aged as well as I’d like, the casual dismissal of female characters is a bit grating and his constant harping on the Devil this and Devil that is a bit tiresome. I get that this is the character but when one woman says “This guy looks familiar” and your answer is “the Devil always looks familiar, he was in laundry list of historical villian’s names” you might be a tad tooooooo one dimensional.
Thanks. I hope to get to it someday; I like Leonard’s modern stuff better than his Westerns.
Last night I FINALLY finished Gnomon, Nick Harkaway’s latest. I love Harkaway’s first two book. This one?
Huh.
On the bright side, it’s undeniably brilliant, a puzzlebox of a novel that feels like it turns in at least five dimensions. There are bits of beautiful prose scattered throughout. Its ambiguous dystopia is really, really well done.
On the downside–and this may be more of my personal flaws than the novel’s–it was really hard for me to get through. There are at least six major interlocking plots, and a fair number of characters, and names and words are used in different ways in the different interlocking plots. And I’m still not completely clear on the conclusion.
It reminds me a very little bit of Cloud Atlas in its structure–just a bit, mind you. I don’t know to what degree I’d recommend it to folks. I know some folks will be absolutely enchanted by it, but it’s not to everyone’s taste, and after finishing it, I can’t quite decide if it’s to mine.
O’Malley’s Rook series, which I’m actually reading backwards but AFAICT so far there’s only two books. I bought the second one at the airport, enjoyed it, got the first one in electronic version and now reading it. Supernatural cloak and dagger stuff, without any actual attempt to explain the “super” part; in fact, the people themselves have no idea what, why or how do those powers appear. I like that much better than coming up with some sort of Marvel Science that’s got more holes than a store’s worth of fishnet stockings.
The writer is Australian and lives there but went to college in the US; not sure where he grew up. I’ve found a number of little details which to me scream “American!” but which are likely to be invisible to anybody who hasn’t lived and worked in Western Europe; to many people who have but who haven’t worked in the US, they might at most seem strange.
I’m just about finished The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis; from the book - “Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.” It’s been a very informative read, looking at how they figured out so much of the errors humans make when we try to think about things and make decisions.
I adore the series. Some of the best I’ve read, Gestalt fascinates me to NO end.
Finished Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp. Kind of interesting from a strategic point of view, but the characters didn’t interest me that much.
Started Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.
Finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. I enjoyed it, although I found the “whodunnit” rather obvious.
Started Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany.
Finished El Borak and other Desert Adventures by Robert E. Howard, and am now almost halfway through Glenn Shirley’s Pawnee Bill: A Biography of Major Gordon W. Lillie, about a mostly-forgotten Wild West Show operator. He sounds like a cut-rate Buffalo Bill, but the truth is that he was more successful than Buffalo Bill (who had been Lilie’s idol), and Lillie “rescued” Buffalo Bill from bankruptcy, buying out Bailey’s share of Buffalo Bill’s show and combining the shows in 1908.
I’ve got a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels up next, ones I hadn’t read – Outlaw of Torn and I am a Barbarian.
On audio, I’m finishing up Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!
Last night I finished The Fallen, the latest in David Baldacci’s “Memory Man” series featuring Amos Decker. If you like Baldacci you’ll like this series, so there’s not much point in providing a review. But on top of the usual well-written mystery, it was nice to see some character growth in this fourth book.
I started Sarai Walker’s Dietland, which I only know about because I’ve been seeing ads for the upcoming TV adaptation (on AMC). Figured I’d check out the book first, so I downloaded a free sample to my Kindle. I’m only a few pages in, so it’s too soon to have an opinion – or know if I’ll wind up buying/reading the entire book – but at the very least I’m glad the narrator isn’t annoying. Yet. 
Some of these are from April. Still completely obsessed with cozy mysteries. At some point, I’ll run out.
Murder at the Puppy Fest, by Laurien Berenson. The 20th and penultimate book in this cozy series so far. The pacing was weird, but I tend to like these characters and Berenson is like the fluffy bunny slippers of cozy mysteries.
Wagging Through the Snow, by Laurien Berenson. The 21st and last book in this series so far. Incredibly short. It only took me about 1.5 hours to read. Good, but a little unsatisfying.
Liver Let Die, by Liz Lipperman. Cozy. First in a series. Not terrible, but not great. A silly main character.
Twelve Drummers Drumming, by CC Benison. A cozy with a little more of an edge (that wouldn’t be hard to do). A vicar in England is… vicarish and solves mysteries. First in a series.
Button Holed, by Kylie Logan. Cozy. Clunky writing, but I was feeling forgiving. First in a series.
Death at Gallows Green, by Robin Paige. Second in a historical mystery series. I don’t remember anything about the first one. Entertaining.
Murder Most Malicious, by Alyssa Maxwell. Historical cozy. Everyone blended together, including the main characters. But the setting was a bit interesting. First in a series.
Murder in the Lincoln White House, by CM Gleason. Historical mystery. Quite a bit better than I expected. First in a series.
Murder on Washington Square, by Victoria Thompson. Fourth in a historical series. The writing is much more accomplished than many modern-day cozies.
The Quick and the Thread, by Amanda Lee. Terrible writing. First in a cozy series.
Mariner’s Compass, by Earlene Fowler. Sixth in a cozy series with some interesting series plot and character development.
Them Bones, by Carolyn Haines. First in a goofy cozy series. There’s a ghost in it. I don’t know why.
The Body in the Vestibule, by Katherine Hall Page. Fourth in a cozy series. Not as engaging. I had to restart.
The Eagle Catcher, by Margeret Coel. Mystery set in Arapaho Nation. Enjoyable, but it feels like a first book.
The Ghost Walker, by Margaret Coel. Too many coincidences. Not enough continuity with the first book. But it’s an improvement and quite entertaining.
Mortal Arts, by Anna Lee Huber. Historical mystery. I’ll let part of my goodreads review do the talking: “It really is possible to have people romantically interested without them turning stupid.”
A Grave Matter, by Anna Lee Huber. Historical mystery. Meh.
What the Dead Leave Behind, by Rosemary Simpson. Written in a weird, stilted style. DNF historical. Bleh.
Buried in a Book, by Lucy Arlington. DNF cozy. Bleh.
Keepsake Crimes, by Laura Childs. DNF cozy. Bleh.
Alpine for You, by Maddy Hunter. DNF cozy that is TRYING TOO DAMNED HARD.
I forgot at least one:
A Question of Honor, by Charles Todd. Fifth in a historical series. I really like the WWI setting, but this entire series has so many coincidences, it’s ridiculous.
And I just finished:
Plotting at the PTA, by Laura Alden. Alden writes characters and dialogue well and can’t plot her way out of a sack. Third in a cozy series.
Finished up Reincarnation Blues today. It was a story about a man being reincarnated over and over in his quest for perfection, and his love affair with Death (who prefers to be called Suzie). I actively disliked Suzie and was pretty much bored by any events that took place in the afterlife, but reading about the different lives themselves was the really fun part.
Also had a page or two left on The Inimitable Jeeves; I tidied that up and now the decks are cleared for today’s delivery of Stephen King’s latest, The Outsider. Yay!
I’ve had a recent run of picking books I didn’t like and not finishing them.
I tried Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance, which, from reading reviews, seemed to be a well-researched exploration of the modern social construct of dating and not just a book written by a comedian. To my disappointment, this was not nearly as far on the “academic literature” end of the spectrum as I was hoping. This is the sort of book that would probably be described as “accessible” because it has short sentences, small sections, dumb jokes, and making fun of awkward people. I gave it two chapters before giving up.
I tried The Paper Magician by Charlie Holmberg and abandoned it without even buying the book, just from reading the Kindle sample. I’ve had it on my to-read list for a while, since I really enjoyed the author’s book Followed by Frost. I wanted to read more books by her, and I figured that her most popular book would be the best place to start. The reviews warned about the slow pacing, and when I read the sample – agh. Main character approaches a building and gives a full description of the outside. Main character rings the doorbell and describes the sounds she hears waiting for the door to be answered. Butler opens the door and she gives a full description of how the butler looks and acts. They walk into the living room and she gives a full description of that room. Main character says a sentence. Main character moves into the next room and gives a full description. New character is introduced. Lengthy description of the physical appearance and mannerisms of new character. No way am I reading an entire book of that.
After that, I tried The Screaming Staircase, which I blame entirely on the Straight Dope. At least, these threads are why I attempted to read the book, but I will accept the blame for not liking it. I’ve seen quite a few people rave about this series, and so I’ve had it on my to-read list for several years, but didn’t pick it up because it didn’t exactly seem like my sort of book. So I finally tried it, and I was right, it’s not my sort of book. It seems geared towards the sort of person who likes action movies, as there’s a lot of action and some snark, but not a lot of personal reflection or relationship building, at least in the first part of the book. I don’t like my books to be quite so heavy on the action.
In all these failures, there was one book that I found delightful: Sourdough by Robin Sloan. The book is quite weird, featuring a woman who works in software who is gifted a magical bread starter that sings and makes faces at you. The woman starts bringing it to this weird farmer’s market that works in incorporating food with technology, and they request that she incorporate a robot into the cooking process, so she does. This is the third book I’ve read by Sloan, and he’s not like any other author I’ve read. He can tell a good story, and his sense of humor is the sort where you’ll be laughing out loud in public places (or maybe that’s just me).