Wiki flat-out says that it’s a novel: Modoc (novel) - Wikipedia
Yes, I know. If you read their “Talk” page, you can see that they hashed it out, using the kind of internet resources I cite.
Finished Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. It’s a collection of short stories (plus a novella and a couple of poems). Not all of it is new; out of 20 tales, I had already read 5.
Some of the stories had no supernatural or horror slant at all, they were just harsh little slices of reality, populated with King characters. The second story, Premium Harmony, was one of these and a bit of a gut-punch. Serious downer. On the other hand, Herman Wouk Is Still Alive could be described the same way but I liked it much more. Likewise Batman and Robin Have an Altercation. Those two, and the poem The Bone Church were my favorites in this collection.
My Zola marathon continues. After the incestuous decadence of La Curée I read of the great foodhalls of Paris and their scheming denizens in Le Ventre de Paris (The Fat and the Thin) and have just started La Conquête de Plassans (The Conquest of Plassans). I’ve really enjoyed all the books so far (some of the descriptive passages go on a bit but many years of epic fantasy have kind of inured me to that), and I haven’t even reached the highly regarded ones in the series yet.
I am very streaky about my reading, but I recently discovered that Amazon had a number of classics available for free, so I decided to grab them for the next time I was in a reading mood.
As a result, I’m currently reading “Les Misérables.” I’ve never read or seen any iteration before, and I actually knew nothing about it going in other than the names of a couple of characters. I’m about 12% through it so far. There is…a lot of narration. 
I finished Paying the Piper by Sharyn McCrumb. I had forgotten she was Queen of the “Setting is more important than the plot” writers sigh I’ve never read a book with so many characters that I didn’t give a damn if they lived to the end or not. Not even the so-called heroine was very heroic, just stupidly lucky.
I had also forgotten that McCrumb mysteries are not really mysteries, people die and solutions are solved, but it’s all by accident or happenstance.
Finished The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx. Very good. Won a Pulitzer Prize. A small-town newspaperman in upstate New York moves to the ancestral home in Newfoundland with his two daughters and aunt after his cheating wife dies in a wreck. He gets put in charge of the Shipping News section of the weekly newspaper. I never saw the film version, because I heard that was one crappy movie. Kevin Spacey played the lead, but in the book the protagonist was described as looking more like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces than Kevin Spacey.
Next up: The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer.
I’ve read a bunch of dreck, which is too depressing to even list.
Worth mentioning is “Reap the Wind”, the most recent Cassie Palmer book by Karen Chance. I hadn’t read the last few books, but I enjoyed it anyway. Cassie seemed to finally be kicking butt and taking names.
Ilona Andrews has a new Innkeeper book out, “Sweep in Peace”. I’ll likely try that next.
Just finished Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I believe someone from this site recommended it. First two books were ok. The third sucked, IMHO.
It’s been a long time since I read it so can’t really remember the differences but just wanted to say I loved the movie and the book…didn’t think it was crappy at all and the acting performances by Spacey and Judi Dench plus the guy who ran the newspaper were very good.
I can’t remember if the film version played in Bangkok, but I’d read some pretty scathing reviews, so we never bothered to look for the video. And Kevin Spacey was certainly not a good physical resemblance for the character described in the book.
That was my first Proulx. Recently learned she’s the one who wrote Brokeback Mountain. That one we did see the film version, but I’ve not read the book.
I finished a collection of short stories called A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin.
These aren’t traditional short stories; every one of them features a protagonist very similar to the author. However, Lucia Berlin lived such a varied life that it never feels repetitive. She grew up in mining towns, in poverty in West Texas with sadistic in-laws, and in luxury in Chile. She then moved in with a series of disastrous men, jazz musicians, sculptors, heroin addicts. She raised four boys and had serious alcohol issues.
This is a really long book, but the stories are short and punchy and you never have time to get bored. You get glimpses of some really horrible things, a Mexican back-alley abortion clinic, heroin smugglers, child abusers, but it’s the little things that really stuck with me. In one story the laundromat is so packed that the narrator has to use three non-contiguous washing machines and she ends up putting her coins in the wrong ones. This restarts the laundry of a long-haul trucker, ruining his plans for his day off since he can’t stop the machine but has to wait it out. At this point she realizes that now she doesn’t have enough money to dry her own clothes, and will have to hang them up in her apartment and she starts crying which infuriates the trucker. I’m not explaining it well, but it was just a perfect story. There’s another heartbreaking story about trying to get to the early morning liquor store and back before her sons wake up and she has to go to work, all while seriously shaking from DTs.
It’s gritty but great.
I started The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, but abandoned it 130 pages in. I wanted to forget myself in a book, and I just couldn’t fall into the story and forget myself.
I then picked up The Secret Life of Bees at a friend’s recommendation. I’m two chapters in, and so far, it’s been much better than the last one. I’m easily able to lose myself in the story.
I read that awhile back and really liked it, although it’s not my usual kind of novel.
It’s been a few months since I’ve posted.
I’ve read At Risk and Secret Asset by Stella Rimington. Intelligence thrillers about MI5 agent, Liz Carlyle. I gather they must be a least partially accurate since Stella Rimington was the director of MI5.
Also read The Last Kashmiri Rose by Beverly Cleverly, murder mystery set in 1920’s Calcutta with Scotland Yard inspector Joe Sandilands. I’m now reading another one, *Folly Du Jour[/I], set in Paris. For a Scotland Yard inspector, he certainly seems to get around.
And I read Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch, the third of the PC Grant books. I liked it more than the second, but not as much as the first. I like that Lesley was more involved in this one.
Also read the library big read, In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters. Odd story set in 1918 San Diego during the flu epidemic with spirtualists trying to contact the dead.
My favourite Proulx novel is Accordion Crimes, but all of her novels have been enjoyable (I haven’t read the last few though).
I am just finishing up **Adobe Days ** by Sarah Bixby Smith. She was a small girl from Maine who came to California with her family just after the Civil War. They raised sheep and cattle and settled in Los Angeles when it was a striving little town of 2500. She was a bright, adventurous child who enjoyed living on a ranch and exploring her world. Her descriptions of Los Angeles in the 1870s are priceless, especially to those of us who grew up there.
I have always considered my self fairly knowledgeable about the city of my birth, but I have learned a great deal about the history and growth of LA. The family’s rancho, Los Cerritos, is now a restored museum in north Long Beach and well worth visiting. The Bixby name is well established in the area, of course.
Bill Bixby was from San Francisco. Was he part of the extended family?
I recently finished The Other Side of Midnight by Simone St. James. All of her books are about plucky single girls in 1920’s England, and have a supernatural slant with just a little bit of romance. She’s become one of my “dependably good” authors.
I’m currently reading The Hired Girl, a YA novel by Laura Amy Schlitz, as recommended by one of you guys (delphica?). Absolutely loving it. It’s about a young girl in 1911 who runs away from the farm where she lives. She wants to be like the characters in her beloved books, such as Jane Eyre (which is so great, because I love Jane too).
Forgot to mention, my library has amusingly miscategorized *The Hired Girl *as science fiction. So I’m keeping a sharp eye out for aliens.