Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, by David Yaffe is exhaustive, fascinating, dishy and awesome! If you’re going to read a Joni book (and seeing as how we’re unlikely to get an autobiography) read this one.
Have you started or finished 2140 yet?
Started it but didn’t get very far before I had problems with the library audiobook CDs. I’ll try again eventually - might buy my own copy.
Just finished Gray by Lou Cadle. I rank it as one of the best I’ve read in a while.
It’s a 3 volume set about a hiker caught in an end-of-the-world scenario and who must make do with only her backpack and the few items salvageable from her vehicle.
Itsy-bitsy spoil* I guess, but whatever caused the EOTW involved burning everything for days – she was exploring a cave and managed to go deep enough to avoid getting killed. The book goes into a lot of detail about her attempts to survive in a burned out landscape and MacGyvering stuff to locate/capture food and survive the growing cold as winter approaches.
*This information is in the Amazon summary, so I’m not spoiling much.
I’m actually taking a break from legal thrillers! :eek:
The other night I finished Grisham’s The Rooster Bar. I enjoyed his writing, as always, and the story was interesting, but the ending fell a little flat for me. I only gave it 3 stars on Goodreads.
Based on a comment on a FB post, I picked up Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel) and started reading it last night. It’s a few years old, and I’m generally not much for postapocalyptic stuff unless it’s by Stephen King, but people with good taste recommended it so I figured I’d give it a shot. I only just started it, but here’s the Goodreads synopsis (which I like better than the Amazon synopsis):
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as The Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
A friend is a huge Joni Mitchell fan, and hadn’t been aware of this book until I mentioned it to her after seeing this. Thank you!!
Iam finally getting around to reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I first encountered this book in1954 in junior high when it came out in paperback form. It was and still is a huge book, well over 1,600 pages in paperback, mind you.
I realize thousands of books have been written about the Third Reich, but this was probably the first serious one, written by an eye-witness to Hitler’s rise and the subsequent war. It is startling to read the author’s remarks about what he personally saw and heard as Hitler came to power.
Finished The Whistler, by John Grisham. A decent read. Florida’s Board on Judicial Conduct is alerted by an anonymous whistleblower, the whistler of the title, about a federal judge so corrupt that her graft surpasses that in all other cases combined in US history. Organized crime and an Indian casino are involved. Takes place mostly in summer and autumn 2011. A decent read.
Next up is Revival, by Stephen King.
Went back to some easy-reading fantasy fluff - the Godling series by Brian D. Anderson. Nothing challenging, just a wandering storyline, some decent action description, and an annoying habit of calling magic the flow, even after characters say things like, “Magic?”. Hadn’t read it in a few years, thought I’d go back - the author wrote the books with help from his young son, which lends it a very strong father/son bias through the series. The main character’s human mother is virtually non-existent, and his supernatural mother is so far beyond everything else in creation as to be simply a plot point.
Which brings me to my big question - I’m looking for a book, and I don’t remember the name, the author, or the exact plot (it was an airport read a decade or so ago). The protagonist was a man, possibly kidnapped as a child, and raised as an assassin specializing in sniping. There was definitely a religious aspect to “assassin group”, probably Christian, and the hero was part of a group of three. Betrayal and revenge ensue, and hell if I remember anything else. Anyone of the teeming millions have an idea?
That doesn’t ring a bell, Chis. Sorry.
I may have told this story here before: my sister once lent that book to a friend and, without looking closely at it, stuck in an old bookmark as she did so. The friend later called her, laughing, to report that the bookmark must have been inserted in another book before. My sister had written on it, “This has a wacky cast of characters and is pretty implausible at times, but I think you’ll get some laughs out of it.”
I finished reading “The Old Wives’ Tale” by Arnold Bennett. It follows the lives of two sisters from 1861(ish) to 1907: first, the story of the obedient sister who stays at home and takes over the family business, and then the story of the rebellious sister who runs off to Paris with a travelling salesman.
In March I finished reading Emile Zola’s “La Debacle” which covers some of the events of the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, so I was interested to compare that with the same period in this book. But then I had a meta moment when one of the characters in the book mentions he read “La Debacle” and he wants to compare it with the personal experience of the rebellious sister!
Overall it was a fairly entertaining book, with a good mix of pathos and dry humour.
All together now:
“And now it’s…
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!”
Finishing up The Rocket Experimenter’s Handbook (which isn’t some clever fiction title, but literally what it says) and reading several other books at various places:
Frankenstein’s Electrician by Harry Goldman. The biography of Kenneth Strickfaden, who designed and built the electrical equipment for Universal’s Frankenstein movies, and a whole slew of others. He continued to be active and his stuff used in the movies for years afterwards, but most people didn’t notice until he loaned the original equipment to Mel Brooks for Young Frankenstein. One piece of his stuff is currently on view at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem as part of a temporary exhibit of horror movie posters. Strickfaden’s career extended well beyond the movies. He gave lectures on electricity, knew Hugo Gernsbach, and worked with Willard’s Temple of Music on Coney Island, where he worked with electrically-charged rotating buzz saws that could be played with a bow, and gave off both music and sparks. During the show, they were played by women wearing the period equivalent of bikinis and wearing welding goggles – a Steampunk vision I would definitely pay to see.
Nero Wolfe of West 35th Street by William S. Baring-Gould. I picked this up yesterday and am halfway through it. I’ve read enough Rex Stout to be familiar with most of what he writes about, but have missed enough of the books so that there are revelations in this one for me. A quick and fun read.
The People’s Playground by Michael Immerso – a history of Coney Island, lavishly illustrated. I need this as background (like the Strickfaden book) for a project I’m working on.
Beyond the Ice Limit – I’m reading this on audio during my commute. When I can’t get Clive Cussler, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs are my guilty pleasure reads. My complaint about them is that, if you haven’t read all the previous books in their series, you are irretrievably lost. You don’t get that problem with Clive Cussler and his collaborators (or Terry Pratchett, for that matter) – their adventure novels can stand on their own. I thought I was safe because I’d already read the Ice Limit, which this is clearly a sequel to, but it turns out that you had to have read the latest of the Gideon Crew series (which I’ve given up on) as well. The Ice Limit was clearly Douglas Preston – who used to work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York – fanrtasizing about the historical case of the AMNH bringing back the Ahnighito meteorite (biggest frangment of the Cape York meteorite) from Greenland in 1897 – a major undertaking, as it weighs 34 tons. They turned it into a story about trying to bring back and even bigger meteorite from Cape Horn that has a couple of deadly secrets. This sequel reads as if they also threw in a mishmash of stuff from horror films of the past couple of decades – Aliens, Slither, etc. It’s sleazy slumming fun, but sort of grossly predictable.
Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie. Watched the movie a few weeks ago on TCM. I read the book years ago and was impressed by how well it read. It reads almost like a novel. Massie has a smooth writing style and doesn’t put in a lot of boring junk. But like Gone With The Wind, I always hope the ending changes. I still don’t understand how the Romanovs could have been so out of touch with their empire.
Finished this. Despite glowing reviews, I thought it sucked. The title character, repeatedly described as a smart, millionaire businessman, manages his CIA subordinates by either insulting or threatening them. He lets a likely-traitorous subordinate, whom he has already ordered arrested, remain in his Langley office overnight when the guy returns after weeks in hiding. A major plot thread about the security of the CIA’s communications is raised and then simply dropped. The ending was disappointingly flat. Blechhh.
Next up: Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, about a cheery, unflappable, aristocratic poet confined to the attic room of a hotel after the Bolshevik Revolution. Not sure yet what I think of it.
Just finished Ken Follett’s A Column of Fire, which I found far less satisfying than the first two books of the Kingsbridge trilogy. Next up is probably The Girl who… got into some kind of mischief, I lose track, but the latest Lisbeth Salander novel.
I finished Forged in Blood II by Lindsay Buroker. I had put it down for several weeks when she dropped own of my dearly hated tropes into the story: mind control. It’s just to Deus ex Machina for me, but thankfully she didn’t keep it there for long and the solution to that part was well written, tense and action packed. Over all I’ve reallyenjoyed the series, they’re not deep but like a chocolate fountain, they’re fun to consume and leave you feeling happy afterwards.
I am currently reading Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathon L. Howard. As always I love the Cabal Bros, the rest is feeling a bit precious, but I’m enjoying it nevertheless.
Finished Renee Patrick’s Design for Dying, set in 1930’s Hollywood, with Edith Head as the detective. I liked the characters and atmosphere, but the mystery itself was easy to figure out.
Now I’m reading Tumble and Blue by Cassie Beasley. It’s Holes meets Savvy. I mean that in a good way.
I am slogging through Kim Robinson’s 2312 and I very much admire the book. The science in his science fiction makes sense and is realized by the 21st century reader as not that far away, but yet the planets and their moons are colonized.
Read this review, it’s great, and what a great book too.
I’m about halfway through Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. It’s a novel about a retired professor of classics in Berlin who becomes involved with a group of refugees from various African countries. So far it’s very good indeed.
I had really looked forward to Release by Patrick Ness, but after reading over half of it I have to admit it’s just not working for me. I’ll look forward to his next one.
I’m going to try wedging in at least the first story from Joe Hill’s Strange Weather before the (ugh) long weekend…