I meant to mention this before but plumb forgot. There was one very odd occurrence in the book. If you didn’t know the Bosch books, you’d never notice it. But once or twice in previous books, he flashes back to when he was about 11 years old, and a detective comes to the juvenile hall where he’s being held to tell him his mother has died. He’s in the juvenile hall because a court took him away from his mother, who was a prostitute. This especially comes to light in the book where Bosch sets out to track down his mother’s killer after all these years. He even obtains the case records of the detective who went to tell him that day. Maybe one other time he mentions it too. But in The Burning Room, suddenly it becomes a nun in his memory who comes to tell him. The nun was the resident house mother.
This did not take away my enjoyment of the book. Not at all. But it’s very odd. The memory being a nun is a little pertinent to what is going on in this book, but only a little. Very little. It was not at all necessary for the memory to become a nun. I can’t believe Connelly would have just forgotten what he’d written before, but I don’t know what he’s up to in this regard.
Despite the hot weather here in LA, the leaves on the trees are starting to look like they are thinking about calling it quits, and I am thinking about Hallowe’en, and re-reading HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, a real chiller. Now I have to find a copy of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward also by HPL, one of the creepiest stories I have ever read.
Thanks, Joey P. My book club met to discuss GSAW and with one exception, we were all disappointed in the book to one degree or another. The exception was a guy who loved both TKAM and GSAW and saw them as complimentary. Echoing Uncle Jack, he also thought that Atticus needed knocking from his pedestal in his daughter’s eyes.
Although Harper Lee (probably) won’t be the one to write it, I’d almost like to see a third book (making this a trilogy) about the elderly Jean Louise today, musing on how much the South has - and hasn’t changed - since her childhood.
No idea how true it is, but since this all started there’s been rumors that Lee wrote a third book (or second, I guess), so we may someday see another one.
Once again a mid-century white male American author has defeated me. I was trying to read The Eighth Day, but by the end of the second section I had to face the fact that I was bored senseless and didn’t care about the mystery of who killed Breckenridge Lansing and who helped John Ashley escape his death sentence. That’s a sign it’s time for me to give up on mid-century white male American authors.
So I’m reading Jane Austen instead. I’m up to Mansfield Park now.
I haven’t thought of that book in decades. I read it for a class on Thornton Wilder where we read his plays, plays by his contemporaries, and a couple of his other works. I remember it being really long. Also a discussion over what types of stories are good books v. good plays v. good movies and how some stories couldn’t crossover and whether this story was any of the above. But I don’t remember a thing about the plot of the book itself.
I’m back to trying to read Wolf Hall. I just can’t seem to get into it, even though I think it’s a book that I should enjoy.
Reading Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Montefiore. Very interesting, I, Claudius-like account of the inner workings of the Soviet system under its worst monster.
Favorite anecdote: during the Great Terror, Soviet high officials anxiously noted who the accused were accused of wanting to assassinate (it was always Stalin, plus a list of other Soviet notables). The reason: being on the list of purported “victims” was an infallible guide to the otherwise-inscruitable workings of Stalinist favoritism. If there was a big show trial on, and you were not on ‘the list’, you were out of favour … and, often, soon to be in the dock yourself!
The “balls of brass, brain of air” award goes to the 40 year old guy who attempted to seduce Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, when she was 16 (when Stalin found out, he got 10 years slave labour … and was damn lucky!).
Just started The Race for Timbuktu: In search of Africa’s city of gold. This is the true story of Scotsman Gordon Laing’s trek across the Sahara to attempt to be the first white man to find Timbuktu and return to tell the story. He was also determined to satisfy Britain’s burning desire to know the location of the mouth of the Niger River. I love these books of exploration and survival, and particularly the ones that took place in Africa, which has rightly been referred to as “white man’s grave” for centuries. Britain’s history is full of larger than life characters, and England’s tendency to casually send them to their deaths in the name of Empire is staggering.
Jesus, the Final Days, What Really Happened by Craig A. Evans and N. T. Wright. From lectures, but while Evans is unusually informative on the first two sections (on the Crucifixion and the Burial), Wright (who is an otherwise fine scholar) veers from the Resurrection of Jesus to what the early church thought Resurrection meant. It’s an interesting subject but here, it’s a misfire.
I took a course on Soviet history in college. Interesting factoid: Molotov was so scared of Stalin that, whenever he was called to a meeting with his boss, he had an aide bring along a suitcase with a change of clothes in case he (as he sometimes did) shat himself.
Just finished William Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969, which was full of fascinating information (Gary Cooper was gay? Holy smoke!) but didn’t hang together too well as a narrative history.
Started Stephen Spender’s roman a clef The Temple, which is excellent, better writing than I expected from Spender, but after 30 pages I’m thinking “too many gay history books in a row.” SO I’m setting it aside for a while and picking up the enormous Grant Wood: A Life biography.
Also dipping into The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition by Susan Solomon. But I’ve already read WAY too many books on Robert Falcon S., and I’m getting the impression that Susie is trying to rehabilitate his image, which would make me sad. I love the blundering moron Scott I met 30 years ago in Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen, which was the basis of the excellent PBS miniseries The Last Place on Earth.
I’m about about halfway through this via audiobook, and I absolutely love it so far. It is exactly weird enough to hold my interest.
IMO, when scifi reaches for biological inspiration for alien things, the results are usually unimpressive. So much of it boils down to “bugs are icky!” Even Lovecraft (to be entirely uncharitable) can often be reduced to “tentacles and brown people are so icky that you will go INSANE!”
It’s even worse when many authors put in some kind of scientist character, who is somehow unable to put together the blindingly obvious clues the non-expert author gives to the non-expert reader.
The Southern Reach (at least through the first book and halfway through the second) succeeds at portraying truly alien phenomenon and the human attempts at understanding them. The result is a profound sense of epistemological terror. What if we are simply unable to understand part of the natural world, even with our best methods and approaches? What if we are actively opposed by the phenomenon in question?
Given my own tiny attempts at understanding the unknown, some failed and some successful, all these ideas resonate rather profoundly with me. Especially since I’ve been trapped in a small dark room with a microscope for the past week, with nothing but a stack of my own slides of samples and these audiobooks…
If you like African Exploration, have you read the classics? – First Footsteps in East Africa by Sir Richard Burton and How I Found Livingstone by Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
Just finished Secondhand Souls, Christoper Moore’s latest comic fantasy set in San Francisco. It’s the sequel to A Dirty Job, and isn’t quite as good, but is still pretty good. Note that I read almost exclusively through audiobooks, because I am mostly blind. Fisher Stevens is the narrator for this one, as he was for the earlier book (and Lamb) , and he does an excellent job of bringing the characters to life.
Also just finished Company by Max Barry (author of Jennifer Government). If you work in corporate America, you may find this satire hits a little close to home.
Currently in the middle of The Aeronaut’s Windlass, the first book of Jim Butcher’s new series. It’s a little hacky, but not terrible. Not sure if I will end up sticking with the series when the next one comes out.
Next in the queue, which I will probably start in the next week, is David McCullough’s new history, The Wright Brothers (read by him on the audiobook). Very much looking forward to this one.
The reviews were mixed. Much as I like and admire McCullough (he’s the most famous graduate of my prep school), I wonder if it’s time for him to hang it up?
I tend to read reviews after I read the book, which I know is slightly backwards. For me, it’s still worth listening to the man’s voice for a few hours while I do chores around the house, walk to work, etc. I expect I’ll enjoy it, even if it has flaws.
