Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' thread - November 2016 Edition

Cafe Society
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So autumn is upon us, unless you’re on the bottom of the planet in which case, bust out the shorts! But up here in the American Wild West things are all orange and red and pumpkin flavored everything… and for a few of us National Novel Writing Month is upon us. Good luck all!

Meanwhile I am ready to start the last Parasol Protectorate book Timeless, am also working on Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute and The Complete Raffles.

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Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honor.

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Last month’s thread: All’s Hallowed Eve

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Kate Grenville’s “The Secret River”. I really liked the first part, which took place in London, but the Australia part is starting to read like a ‘sweeping saga’. About convicts in early Australia, and by pure coincidence, I picked up this book right after finishing “Gould’s Book of Fish”.

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I have started March Violets, by Philip Kerr. This is part of a book of three novels featuring detective Bernie Gunther, titled Berlin Noir, and also includes **The Pale Criminal **and A German Requiem.

March violets were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler and the Nazis when all was going well for Germany, but lost heart as the war began to go badly; in other words, front runners or sunshine patriots.

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A little over two-thirds through The Vanishing Witch, by Karen Maitland. Set in the late 14th century and includes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Very good, but I’m still getting settled in and just don’t have as much time for reading. Hopefully, I’ll have a more regular reading schedule soon.

I’ll have been back in Hawaii for three months as of this coming Tuesday, while the wife has been here one month today (Saturday).

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Thanks for the new thread, DZed! I appreciate you putting these up and the slightly different flavor you give them each month.

This morning I finished The Fall of the House of Cabal. I wasn’t terribly interested in the main story, but loved the interplay of the characters, and then towards the end some extremely interesting things happened. I don’t want this to be the end of the series, but if it is…it’s okay.

Next up, some old-school spookiness, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane by Laird Koenig. Apparently this was made into a movie with Jodie Foster, though I haven’t seen it. It’s about a young girl, new in town, who may or may not be living all by herself.

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It’s an awesome series. One of the rare series that only gets better in future books.

Edit: I should explain that Kerr initially wrote the three “Berlin Noir” novels you have, and later wrote more books in the same series - and they are good.

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I’m maybe a little more than halfway through Johannes Cabal The Necromancer*. So far I am really, really enjoying it. :slight_smile: Thank you, Straight Dope! I will almost definitely continue with the series, though not immediately. I think up next will be the new Grisham, The Whistler. I also have new P.D. James short stories to get into.

*I love my Kindle Oasis, but whether/when it displays my reading progress at the bottom of the screen seems to be out of my control. I’ve seen that info both displayed and not within the same book, and no amount of Google searching or poking through the Kindle’s settings can show me how to make it visible all of the time. I downloaded the newest firmware, and the “dots” indicating how long a book is have returned to the main library view under each title (along with reading progress), but while I’m reading a book I hardly ever go back to the main screen. I don’t know why it matters, but it frustrates me some. One advantage of a physical book is that you always know exactly how much is left!

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This month I am not reading Infinite Jest. I tried, but I only made it through about 80 pages before I had to admit to myself that I just didn’t care enough to slog through it. It’s still on my shelf (being an actual dead-tree edition)…maybe I’ll give it another shot somewhere down the line…

For the moment, I’ve cracked open The Fellowship of the Ring for the eleventeenth time :slight_smile:

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I’m reading Moloka’i. I got it via the library on my Kindle, and it’s what I call a “popcorn” book, something I’m reading because I thought it sounded interesting but not enough to put the author on my Automatic Buy Whatever S/He writes.

It’s about a native Hawaiian girl at the turn of the 20th century who’s diagnosed with leprosy when she’s seven, and how her life unfolds, being taken away from her family, growing up, leaving the orphanage but still living on the island, etc. It’s an intriguing story so far.

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I just abandoned Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch at 180 pages in. I’m so disappointed because the book started out as a five star book: laugh out loud funny, nicely paced, unique and engaging.

Then after a while, I started to that thing where you read a few pages, then realize that you hadn’t actually retained anything you’d just read. It just stopped holding my interest.

So now I’m going to try Middlesex, and hope that its wild success is an indication of the book’s ability to hold a person’s interest.

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It’s been quite a while since I contributed to this thread, and I’ve read a stack og books since.

The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt. Written in 1901, it depicts race relations and a fictionalized view of the Wilmington, North Carolina Insurrection of 1898. What’s fantastic about it is that the author was black. His depiction of both black and white characters is amazingly well done and realistic, free of heavy-handed propagandizing. Even in the case of the white supremacists. Chesnutt had a great ability to get inside his characters’ heads, quite believably. This is a book my daughter had to read for a college course, and she recommended it to me.

Japanese Mythology by Juliet Piggott and Celtic Mythology by Proinsias MacCana, both parts of the Paul Hamlyn series on World Mythology that I’ve been picking up in book stores and used book places for the past almost 50 years (!)

The Everything Vampire Book by Barb Karg, Arjean Spaite, and Rick Sutherland. A quick read I bought at the closing sale at a going-out-of-business used book store. Mostly stuff I’m familiar with, but one interesting nugget is a possible origin for the word “Nosferatu” Bram stoker and his source Emily Girard to the contrary, “nosferatu” DOESN’T mean “vampire” or “the Undead” in any Slavic tongue. Horror specialist David J. Skal has spent a lot of time looking into this, and as he reports in his books (including V is for Vampire and the newly-released bio of Bram Stoker, Something in the Blood), he can’t find anything to support this even after an exhaustive search. Karg and company claim that it actually bderives from the Grek nosophoros, meaning “plague carrier”, which became nosufuratu in Slavonic. They don’t give any citations for this. The issue is, it turns out, a great deal more complicated ( see Nosferatu (word) - Wikipedia ) .

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the political book by Thomas Frank

Asterix and Obelix All at Sea – I didn’t know Uderzo was churning these out as late as 1997 (Goscinny died a long time ago), and I hadn’t heard of this one. It features a caricature of Kirk Douglas a Spartacus (a little out of his time), and a visit to a colony of Atlantis.

Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler – published about the time he started farming out the writing of his books to other authors, this is one of his last solo-authored Dirk Pitt books. As wonderfully ludicrous as ever. (Atlantis! Again!)

The Autobiography of Ben Franklin – by Guess Who. I’ve had a copy of this for years, but hadn’t read it, but I saw a Penguin edition (cheap at a used book shop) with footnotes and had to pick it up. At times, Franklin’s prose is heavy going, but he’s unbelievably interesting. Why has no one done a proper movie bio of him? (There was a TV series, but it wasn’t that great). I swear , we Americans don’t know enough about people like him, despite his being on the half dollar and the $50 bill, and being lionized in plays and movies like 1776, Jefferson in Paris and John Adams. The portrait they paint is off -center and misleading (in particular, Franklin wasn’t like the bot mot-spouting, talkative character Howard da Silva portrays in 1776 at all). Besides, they all concentrate on the end of his life. In his youth Franklin was a champion swimmer (who wrote on the topic), a founder of secret societies, a captain in war, in addition to being a printer who retired early. You never hear about his wife or most of his children. I didn’t know until I saw 1776 that his son was, at the time of the revolution, the Royal Governor of New Jersey (!) 1776 gives the impression that they were estranged, but the autobiography has him writing kindly of him. A very complex man, deserving of better treatment than the demigod printer/lightning rod inventor/kite flyer/stove inventor/bifocal maker we have been presented with.

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker – I’ve wanted to read this, Stoker’s resurrected mummy book, for years. A little disappointing, but interesting

Murder in Canton by Robert H. van Gulik – I read all the Judge Dee mysteries years ago, but copies of this volume have been the most elusive. I originally read it in a hardcover copy from the library. I didn’t see a paperback edition until about 15 years ago, but I just picked up a copy from the same series as the other Dee books in my collection, and am taking the opportunity to re-read it. Chronologically the last of Van Gulik’s Dee books.

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I am reading the first volume of The 50 Year Mission: an Oral history of Star Trek. Enjoying it. Seeing Star Trek Beyond and then going to my first Star Trek Convention really rekindled my love of Trek. I rewatched a lot of TOS over the summer so it is interesting reading the warts and all story of how it was made.

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Finished The Vanishing Witch, by Karen Maitland. Set in the late 14th century and includes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Mysterious deaths follow the appearance in Lincoln of a beautiful widow and her two uncommonly attractive children. Very good, but I liked The Gallows Curse better. What I really want to read of hers is Company of Liars. Will have to look for that soon.

For now, I’ve started the last book I brought with me from Bangkok, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story behind the Legend, by my favorite historian, David McCullough.

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I’m on the home stretch with The Trouble With Testosterone by Robert M. Sapolsky. It’s a pop-science essay collection and frankly not that great. As I mentioned in previous book threads, Sapolsky wants to be funny but usually misses the mark. I was impressed, though, that he includes a letter by several scientists critical of his response to their research on whether animals purposefully eat medicinal plants.

And I’m now about halfway through The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter by Arthur Hertzberg. Readable but a bit dry. I had no idea leading European rabbis for many years ordered, or cajoled, their people not to come to the U.S., which they thought was a godless hellhole [insert NYC joke here], even as pogroms and anti-Semitism worsened in Europe.

He was indeed, and I enjoyed the book. I love the image of him when he first arrived in Philadelphia - young, poor, scruffy and munching on a loaf of bread as he walked down the street.

Hope you like it. Although it’s shorter than his usual tomes, I don’t think he’s missed a step in research skills or writing style.

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Finished The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, a very quick read. I was disappointed. For one thing, there’s a horrific animal abuse scene. After reading that, I kind of skimmed the next hundred pages in a daze. It certainly affected me more than it did any of the book characters, who never reacted or referred to it again.
For another thing, the book doesn’t end, it just stops. Of course it stops at an important point, with two possibilities, and you’re not told which way it went. I read some online reviews afterward and most people seem to think things turned out…well…so I’ll just assume it was that. Perhaps the movie version clarifies.

Anyway. Started Five Children on the Western Frontthis morning and there have already been tears. Can’t say I wasn’t warned. :slight_smile:

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Forgot to add, I’m nearly done with the audiobook of Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow, loosely based on the story of an actual pair of reclusive brothers, the Collyers, who died alone in their run-down and overstuffed (one became a hoarder) Manhattan townhouse.

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*The Lost Fleet *series. Space war with a decent attempt at real physics involvement and politics, which happen to be two of my greatest passions? There’s a little romance too, but that’s just part of the politics at this point. Jack Campbell may lose some things in translation, but he’s pretty damn good at helping you visualize how everything is arranged.

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I took my car to the shop this morning, and finished Johannes Cabal The Necromancer in the waiting room. I liked it enough that I immediately bought/downloaded the next book in the series, but it’s gonna have to wait because instead I started The Whistler (John Grisham’s newest).

I’m firmly on track to successfully finish my Goodreads 2016 reading challenge. In past years I have aspired to read more books than I could finish, so at the start of this year I set a goal of just 20 books. Johannes was #19. When I finish the Grisham I’ll be happy to finally meet a reading challenge goal, but ashamed at how low I had to set the bar.

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I was saddened today to see that this was a low-numbers year for me, too. A few years ago I had to decide to carve out time for reading and defend it. If not for scheduling that time, I’d never get to read at all!