I just finished Michael Koryta’s Cypress House, and I am impressed with his writing. He brought supernatural aspects to a story of murder and corruption set in depression-era Florida and did it seamlessly.
I tore through the third Lockwood book, The Hollow Boy. This series continues to be impressive. For the most part, I like the callbacks to genre kids mystery books, and it’s really succeeded in sustaining its momentum over three books.
I also read a novel for adults, The World Before Us, by Aislinn Hunter, which I liked very much. An atmospheric story about two missing persons incidents, 100 years apart, that are obliquely related to each other. It’s not a thriller, though, or even really a mystery in the “solving a mystery” sense – it’s more about the impact of the events on those around them.
I’m currently about halfway through with We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, which follows the life of an Irish American woman and her family in NYC.
I usually am reading 1 nonfiction book and 1 fiction book at a time, with a smattering of comics in between.
Currently, I’m reading:
Fiction - The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I’m a huge fan of classic horror - though it’s hard to find good vampire books after it became a YA obsession. This is an exception. An excellent horror mystery. It started out slow but is picking up speed and I’m really enjoying it.
Non-Fiction - The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. Very good so far.
As for comics, I just caught myself up on Rat Queens (if you haven’t read it, DO IT). I’ll be starting Ravine tomorrow (I love Stjepan Šejić).
It wasn’t the premise of the book that I found weird - everything you mentioned is what appealed me and kept me interested in the book. It was more the writing-style that I had challenges with. I found too much of a chapter is about what goes on inside the characters mind and they sometimes act too irrational without any apparent reason especially given how much we know what’s going on inside their head…I hope that kind of makes sense
I just finished The Hollow Boy last night and agree completely with your comments, delphica. Dung Beetle, DZedandConfused, I know that wasn’t your reaction - you felt this was a lesser entry. Do you remember why - was it the Lucy and Lockwood relationship details? At any rate, I’m already pining to read the next one… it’ll be a long wait. 
I’ve recently finished Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling. It’s feather-light, for the most part, but very entertaining nonetheless. I’ve never seen The Mindy Project but might seek it out; I enjoyed Kaling’s humor.
I am taking my second stab at Hyperion by Dan Simmons, as my dog-walking audiobook. So far, so good - can’t remember why I didn’t get further the first time. Before that, on paper, was The Law of the Land on the US Constitution, which was too dry (big surprise, huh) and didn’t suit my mood at the time. Also The Conservative Heart by Arthur Brooks, which was also dull - many pages of “I’m nice, dammit” and addressing an issue that isn’t a problem.
I must get to the library this weekend - need bedtime reading.
Regards,
Shodan
Grrlbrarian, I’ve got nothing but love for the Lockwood books. You must have remembered me griping about something else. 
I didn’t know Hyperion existed as an audiobook. I read it in paperback, and loved it. The different sections are written in different styles, which might be what put you off, but it’s worth sticking with. Be advised, though, that it’s not a complete story. You have to read the Fall of Hyperion to get everything resolved.
Then, of course, there’s the sequel sequence Endymion and the Rise of Endymion, which must also be read as a pair.
I’m reading The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas). It’s dizzyingly good!
There’s no horrible dialect in it, is there? I still have the urge to throw Cloud Atlas across the room every time I get to Sloosha’s Crossin’.
Nope, wasn’t me. I loved the book. Read it in two days I think, Stroud is just getting better and better.
I finished The Shepard’s Crown by Terry Pratchett. The bits written BY him were great but the rest yeah, I don’t hold out high hopes for the continuation of Discworld under another writer…
Just finished a book, somewhere between a mystery and a thriller I suppose, called “Little Black Lies” by a British writer named Sharon Bolton. The book takes place over a five-day period in the mid-nineties. It is the only novel I have ever read that takes place in the Falkland Islands.
Three years earlier, there was a horrible tragedy in which Catrin’s best friend Rachel left Catrin’s two sons alone in her car while it was parked too close to a cliff…you can guess what happened. Catrin has been consumed with rage since and is plotting something (we don’t know exactly what) against Rachel. Rachel, for her own part, is not exactly the picture of mental health. The novel takes place against the backdrop of several children who have disappeared in the time since the accident, and brings in several other interesting characters–notably Callum, a veteran of the Falkland Islands conflict in 1982 who stayed on after the war and suffers from PTSD, flashbacks, and blackouts. The interactions between the three as the three-year anniversary of the accident approaches make up the bulk of the book.
The book is well-written and generally gripping, though some of the events toward the end seem implausible (it’s fiction, what can I say?). The Falklands setting is what really made it for me, though. Living in this harsh climate on these isolated, lightly populated islands seems at once extremely intriguing and well, about the last thing I’d ever want to do… Anyway, I now want to travel there, which I probably won’t do for all kinds of reasons, but then again vicarious travel is one of the reasons to read, yes?
Not yet, but I’m only about half way through.
I loved Cloud Atlas but the only way I could get through that dire vernacular bit was to listen to the audiobook. That excepted, Mr. Mitchell really knows how to tell a story!
I finished The Year of Living Biblically and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. That’s mainly due to the organization. If A.J. Jacobs had arranged it thematically rather than chronologically I think his point would have been better made. As it was, it tended too much towards navel-gazing.
I’m reading “1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies” by Eric Flint and Charles E. Gannon. It’s the 18th book in Flint’s “Ring of Fire” series. The first book, “1632”, was about a West Virginia town being mysteriously transported to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, and how the American culture and technology have transformed the world in the four years since.
This book deals with the Americans and their allies looking for easily-discovered oil in the West Indies, in particular Pitch Lake in Trinidad, which at this time was a Spanish possession (the Spanish don’t like the Americans).
As in our history, the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil has been kicked out of Brazil by the Portuguese; in our timeline, most of the Dutch went to New Amsterdam, but in this timeline, they’ve gone to the Dutch colonies in the West Indies, in particular St. Eustatia.
As with all of the books in this series, there is a mingling of fictional and real historical characters. There’s one passage when one of the Americans is talking to a real-history character, the Reverend Johannes Polhemius, who was a Dutch Reformed Church pastor in Recife. The Reverend Polhemius is one of my ancestors.
I just finished Design for Great-Day by Alan Dean Foster and Eric Frank Russell. When I saw it, I thought – "Neat! A story started or outlined by the underappreciated Eric Frank Russell, and finished by Foster. These haven’t generally been all that great, IMHO, but they’re worth having a look at. In general, though, the books feel like they’re not really a collaboration, but the work of the living author. Variable Star didn’t feel at all like Heinlein, despite it being his plot, and Spider Robinson being a downright worshipful fan of Heinlein – it feels like a Spider Robinson novel. Tarzan -=- The Lost Adventure didn’t feel like an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel – it felt like a Joe Lansdale novel. And so on.
This was no exception. Despite the trappings of a Russell novel, this book felt like an Alan Dean Foster novel. In fact, it reads like a bad Alan Dean Foster novel (No gibes – yes, there IS such a thing.) It is abysmally plotted and padded. Pushing myself through the last parts was torture, but I was determined to finish the damned thing.
Then I looked into it and learned that it’s NOT some “lost” Eric Frank Russell novel. Foster took a finished and published Russell short story and simply bloated it up into a full-length novel. I’d even read the short story before, only under its more common title, The Ultimate Invader. It’s in the NESFA Press collection Major Ingredients under that title. ("Design for Great-Day* was the original publication title, and I have to wonder if, like Asimov’s “Green Patches”, which was first published as “Misbegotten Missionary”, this was the result of editorial imposition).
Avoid at all costs. There’s a rave review on the cover from the Tampa Tribune-Times that I have to believe is the result of blackmail on someone’s part.
I started today on The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks. Very interesting so far, about a teenage psychopath who lives on a Scottish island. There are a lot of parts in this book where animals get hurt and killed, but I knew that going in and am skimming that stuff quickly. Nothing excessively detailed on that front so far. And the story itself is riveting.
Over the weekend, I zipped through Rick Beyer’s and Elizabeth Sayles’s The Ghost Army of World War II. It’s about the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, a U.S. Army unit dedicated to deceiving the Germans in Western Europe using loudspeakers, fake unit insignia, inflatable tanks and jeeps, and misleading radio transmissions. Many of the men were specially assigned because of their artistic and creative talents and went on to later fame, including fashion designer Bill Blass, painter Ellsworth Kelly and artist Art Kane. An interesting book and very well-illustrated.
Still enjoying Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a novel about a young African woman stolen into slavery. She’s getting settled into life in 1740s South Carolina, has made some friends among her fellow slaves, but is still yearning for freedom.
Kind of stalled with TS Hottle’s sf novella The First One’s Free, which just isn’t blowing me away.
People either love The Wasp Factory or it puts them off reading permanently. I’ve heard too many gross things about it to risk it.
I’m reading “The Secret in Their Eyes” before the movie comes out and ruins it. So far it seems a pretty decent police procedural with nothing in common with the movie trailer.
I like David Mitchell but I really disliked the “fantasy” portions of The Bone Clocks.