My school district is out until next Monday. Hard on the paycheck but nice on my NaNo novel (s). 
Finished Revival, by Stephen King. A mad preacher man runs amok. It was okay. Held my interest throughout. The climax was kind of a fizzler, but there was a nice little twist right at the very end. Not up there with King’s best but certainly not his worst.
Have started Two Kinds of Truth, the latest Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly. Again, Connelly is one of the few writers whose books we’ll buy hardcover, although as a card-carrying member Barnes & Noble let me have it for 40% off.
Finished Tumble and Blue by Cassie Beasley, which I enjoyed. Before I said it was* Holes* meets Savvy. While not as good as the former, it’s considerably better than the latter. I recommend it.
Started The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.
I just completed Aurora by Kim Robinson, and I really enjoyed it. I can see why some people don’t like either this particular novel, or his writing style, or even sometimes his overt injections of environmental “preachiness”, but I wholly love it.
It’s funny how in the book, which is about a generational starship travelling to the Tau Ceti star system because of identified possible habitable planets and moons, does so by people living into seven generations travelling at .1c to get there, using recycling, reproduction control, biodomes and other cool shit, end up using cryonic sleep to return to Earth because they are approaching starvation due to the ship’s ecological systems breaking down because of unforeseen circumstances, wear and age on the ship, etc. .
I found it a well thought out example of what could happen were humans ever advanced enough to try such a thing, and being human, never fully anticipating all the consequences of their actions.
Finished The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. A well-written, thoughtful children’s book about a robot that gets stranded on an island. Very much recommended.
I just finished Brent Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy for the third or fourth time. I’ve just begun rereading Asimov’s body of work (I’m planning on getting my teenage son into Asimov and want to re-familiarize myself with it).
Just finished Norman Mailer’s Superman Comes to the Supermarket, a big Taschen 2017 coffee table book which includes Mailer’s 1960 New Journalism title essay about JFK’s political rise, his much shorter 1962 profile of Jackie Kennedy, and about a gazillion photos of the 1960 presidential campaign, both formal and candid. Great for any JFK fan or political junkie - and I am both - although I can’t say I’m a fan of Mailer’s writing.
Started Transplant, by Leonard Goldberg. It’s a medical thriller along the lines of Coma.
I’m finishing up The Devil in the White City, about the Chicago World Fair in 1892-3, which coincidentally, also had a serial killer, H.H. Holmes. Fascinating tale. How Holmes got away with his murders is chilling. He truly was the definition of a psychopath.
Margarito And The Snowman by REYoung. The Snowman’s musings on a America that, having consumed all that is beautiful, now consumes itself. Paranoid, alienated, disturbed, politically incorrect, but I’m a minor character in the book, go figure…
Also William Gibson’s short stories, Burning Chrome. How did they make such a bad movie out of Johnny Mnemonic?
I love Weeks’ penchant for strange magic systems, whether it was the ka’kari of the Night Angel trilogy or the chromaturgy of the Lightbringer series.
Finished Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon. Quirky characters and odd situations abound, it was enjoyable but I’m not raving over it like I was Castle Hangnail.
I read that years ago, and was astonished to find the World’s Fair stuff so much more interesting than the serial killer stuff. It seemed like the author had a good 150 pages of material on the fair, and about a dozen pages of material on the killer, and so was constantly padding the killer section with stuff like, “Nobody knows for certain, but it is likely that Holmes enjoyed putting orange marmalade on his toast,” or, “No doubt when Holmes saw the sign for the World’s Fair, his eyes lit up like a child at Christmas.”
But the world’s fair stuff was great!
People I Want To Punch In The Throat.
For me, a very long list , much longer than the one envisioned by this blogger.
but whatev.
Finished Transplant by Leonard Goldberg, a cheesy thriller from 1980. Started Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites, by Mitchell L. Stevens.
Downloaded a sample, because I like this kind of stuff, and bought the trilogy and started and finished it over Thanksgiving weekend. Lou Cadle appears to be a fast read, but enjoyable; I’ll check out more of his stuff in the future.
So, I don’t know where to go to next. I did just buy The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay because it was on sale for $3, so perhaps there.
I found them both fascinating. I had no idea the Ferris Wheel was invented for this world’s fair, and this tune as well. It seems like there were a lot of challenges, not including the weather, that made me wonder if they’d ever pull it off.
I like the author’s work enough that I’m reading another one now, In the Garden of Beasts.
Finished Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not a bad book, but it suffers from being a series of columns from a magazine, which means things get repeated and ideas get picked up and dropped in sometimes confusing patterns. But it is small and short and you will get a good background in astrophysics. Better than that would being able to hear Dr. Tyson explain it verbally.
Just about finished with The Great Halifax Explosion by John U. Bacon, dealing with the near-destruction of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917 due to the explosion of an Ammunition ship. Not a great read, but quite informative about how and why things like this happen due to the emergency nature of war and putting normal “rules and regulations” to the side to meet the overwhelming needs of speed. Worth reading if you’ve never heard of this/interested in disasters and how they come about.
Got great reviews, and it ought to be right down my alley, but I found it meh.
I finally finished** Rise & Fall of the Third Reich**, which as I have mentioned, is over 1600 pages in paperback. An excellent book, although I have read so many books, fiction and non-fiction, about the rise and fall of the Nazis that there was not all that much new in this one. Still, it is fascinating to read a book by a reporter who actually saw and heard Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Stalin, etc.
I remember the impact this book had when it came out in 1950, and in paperback in 1954. Even now, so many years later, it still fascinates, and maybe the I-was-there aspect of it is at least part of its appeal.
So now I am getting into The Billionaire’s Vinegar about the sale at auction of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. Was it owned by Thomas Jefferson? Was it part of a Nazi looting? Or is it a masterful forgery? Stay tuned.