Today, more short Cabal tales (Ouroboros Ouzo, A Long Spoon*, The Death of Me) and most of Six Scary Stories, selected by Stephen King. Passable…I usually don’t dig his recommendations.
*Best of the lot - I hope we see Zarenyia again!
I think I’ll go for that Five Children book too. 
This morning, a Hap & Leonard story by Joe R. Lansdale, Briar Patch Boogie. It was okay, got a laugh out of Leonard’s line about someone needing a tow sack to drag his balls.
I see my library has The Fall of the House of Cabal waiting for me, and I also see Zarenyia is featured…yippee!
Apparently I’m not getting alerts! :eek:
Malthus so glad you liked the Lockwood & Co books! Here’s hoping your offspring loves them too.
wind of my soul I finished Soulless two days ago and am deep into Changeless now. It’s a little slower moving but I have decided that Biffy is my favorite secondary character EVER! I just adore the man!
I loved Blustery Day, it was funny and suspenseful and just a fabulous “restive” read.
Finished End of Watch, Stephen King’s latest. Not bad - not great, but not bad.
Also on paper - The Butcher’s Trail about hunting down Serbo-Croatian war criminals. Sort of meh - lots of people wanted to overlook/forget about it; I get it. Then there’s various machinations and they get caught.
On audiobook - finished The Scarlet Pimpernel, which was great fun. It was a dramatic reading, with accents, and fortunately the evil villain reminded me of the French insult guys in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Good adventurous fun - cliff hanger escapes, villainous villains, beautiful women, preposterousness in abundance - I liked it. Lots of “ha ha - now I will have zat accursed Pimpernel at mah mercy - ha ha” and nobody to ruin the moment by saying “Isn’t that what you said the last two times? Remember how you said we should be suspicious of anyone stooping over pretending not to be tall? And remember how the very next person you met was stooped over, and you didn’t think it was the Scarlet Pimepernel because he was wearing a hat?”
Currently I am listening to the very first issue of Astounding Stories from 1930. First up is a novel of a madman heading up a horde of giant beetles in the Antarctic who is going to destroy humanity, because he was driven mad by an archaeological disagreement about monotremes. Quintessential pulp - no ray guns, lots of bug-eyed monsters and cave women wearing nothing but their hair.
Regards,
Shodan
Plodding my way through Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, with investigation of 6 (I think) different pieces of post-Revolution history. It was suggested as a follow-up to Alexander Hamilton, and it dovetails very nicely. I think I’m going to head back to lighter reading, a la The Lost Fleet series. Or maybe go darker with some Pendergast novels.
Finished Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon. It’s a fun YA book, wherein the author gives a 12 year old girl a crumbling castle and a list of things to do, like find 1800 dollars to fix the plumbing and says “Well now what are you going to do?” It’s a pretty fast read and I enjoyed it a lot. Psst Dung Beetle! You might like it too!
I tried to read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I really tried but I just was bored as hell. I gave up halfway through. I’ve started The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which I’m really liking two chapters in. It’s a spy novel about a Vietnamese double agent at the end of the war and after. I’m really digging it. It has a cynical poetic style I’m enjoying.
Finally finished Straight Life. As expected, it was quite a slog. Pepper was an unrepentant junkie until the day he died and lived a pretty hard life. Still, an interesting look into that world and prison life at the time.
I’ve just started White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
That title piqued my interest. I downloaded a sample chapter to my Kindle, but it’ll be a while before I can get to it; I’ll be interested in your thoughts as you read/when you finish this book.
I would be interested as well, Chefguy, I have that one on my to read list at Goodreads.
My wife read it and found it very interesting. I’m hoping that the writing will pick up a bit after the preface.
Wow, you actually read prefaces…? 
Not usually. This one started out sounding like someone’s doctoral thesis.
I finished All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Science fiction meets fantasy (literally, it’s like a time travel tech guy meets a magic witch girl). It took me a long time to get into this. By the end, I liked it … but I’m not entirely sure it was worth reading 2/3 of a book I didn’t enjoy that much. It also made me feel old, because while I was slogging through the first part, I kept wondering “am I not getting this because it’s too millennial?”
In fun reading news, I started reading Ellen Tebbits to my daughter at bedtime. She’s five, and often loses patience with books that don’t have a lot of pictures, but she loved Ramona the Pest so I am hopeful about Ellen.
I think I might!
I just got hold of *The Fall of the House of Cabal *(and some other stuff) only to discover I have less than two hours for reading this week. I’ll have to wait and start it Monday…stupid Life, always interrupting…:mad:
How insufferably RUDE of your life! You need to sit it down and have a stern talk with it. 
I just began The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. It is a strange book; I guess it is what might be called magic realism. A thousands-of-years old minotaur is living in a small Southern town in a mobile home park and working as a cook at a local ribs place, and everyone seems to accept that he is…just another minotaur; half man and half bull, horns and all.
I have no idea where this is going, but…so far, so good.
I heard really good things about this when it came out, but I never got around to it … I look forward to hearing what you think when you’re finished!
I finished Changeless the second in Gail Carrigers Parasol Protectorate series. It was good, not as rolicking as the first but enjoyable never the less. THe ending was a kick in the gut that pretty much insured I started the third book immediately!
I am, point of fact, about 20 pages into Blameless