I finally plowed through to the end of White Trash. It had some interesting history, and covered the entire span from the Pilgrims to present day. But man, what a slog. The author often went into agonizing detail, and I admit to skimming parts of what is a very weighty tome.
So onward to something more fluffy, I’m now reading The Fireman, by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King). It’s another long read, but much quicker. I’m still reserving opinion on it, as it’s early going.
Coincidentally, I also just finished this again, after going back through the series on finishing Fall of the House of Cabal. Cabal is a fascinating character, but Howard, overall, seems about 3 for 5 to me. Fall and Fear Institute I thought really fell a bit short…but on the plus side, Fall also made me look up the short stories, which I thought were all fairly decent.
In other current readings, I have Austin Grossman’s Crooked, wherein we discover the true history of Richard Nixon (and the Cold War), which turns out to be vaguely Lovecraftian so far. I’m about a third in, and my one complaint would be that there’s very little supernatural happening yet. I’ll keep at it…
I’ve also cracked upon the rather massive The Nix, by Nathan Hill. Fun so far, and came highly recommended by friends. So I’m looking forward to that.
My favorite of all the classics I’ve read (admittedly not a humongous number, but not nothing either). It’s not a light read, though, with some of the slowest-moving character plots I’ve ever come across.
Still, I need to reread it.
I’ve started The President’s Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth, the second in a series about an American vampire bound by a blood oath - originally sworn to Andrew Johnson in 1866 - to serve the President and eternally counter supernatural threats to the nation. Farfetched but fun, with a clever Lovecraft connection.
Finished it. Not as good as Blood Oath, the first, but pretty good. Farnsworth weaves in all sorts of secret-history stuff from Lovecraft, the JFK assassination, Watergate and movies like The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even Gremlins.
I also finished Arthur Hertzberg’s The Jews in America, which was a bit of a slog, but from which I learned quite a bit. I hadn’t know much before about the struggles between German and Russian Jews in America, the post-WWII rise of Orthodoxy in NYC, the sometimes-fraught relations between American Jews and Israeli, etc.
Almost done with John Grisham’s The Appeal, and I’m enjoying it. An entertaining mix of mass-tort law and hardball politics.
Just starting Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, which I haven’t read in many years. Good to see Holmes’s and Watson’s first meeting again.
December thread: December: when I get jealous of Southerners in flip flops