I recently finished reading American War by Omar El Akkad
This was a very powerful book and I highly recommend it. But it’s brutal. The Amazon blurb compares it to Hunger Games and Divergent. I don’t agree.
There are no moral victories, no inspirational moments, no triumph of the soul and spirit. The war this book depicts is a series of brutal, hollow and short-lived victories and even more brutal defeats. Nothing is romanticized.
The reasons for the war are quietly understated because they have ceased to become important.
The protagonists do not rise above their situations, they are all corrupted and twisted and spiritually destroyed by their experiences. The only moment where the main character shows anything resembling mercy has horrific unintended consequences. It was a hard read in many ways and I’d be hard pressed to say I liked the book. But I was powerfully affected by it.
I started A Deadly Brew by Susanna Gregory a few days ago. This is the fourth Matthew Bartholomew book, the series is not so much a whoduunit as it is a slice of medieval life with a mystery thrown in.
I finishedA Dismal Thing to do by Alisa Craig. Not one of her better ones really, the motive was terribly contrived founded on a Temperance view of moonshining. Also the way she wrote the women was horribly dated in 1982 much less in 2017.
I read and enjoyed The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, which is a fun YA, with a historical setting but very modern in speech and attitude teenagers on a Grand Tour and then things go wrong. It’s not a perfectly constructed story but it’s a good time.
Midnight at the Electric is a short YA by Jodi Lynn Anderson, the stories of three young women in different eras (WWI, Great Depression, in the fairly near future) that intersect. This was pretty good.
And I read The Empty Grave, possibly the final Lockwood book (it feels final) and I thought it was a fitting and mostly satisfying end to the series. A few thoughts in spoilers:
[spoiler] Oh, Skull! I started to suspect that is what was going on with the fortune. I genuinely love Skull.
In a perfect world, there would be less “like a girl” in this series to indicate something being weak, that’s probably my main complaint.
I was a little surprised that the big reveal with Marissa involved this very sentient spirit, which seemed a bit all of a sudden – we haven’t seen that kind of spirit before, I guess I felt like it came out of nowhere in terms of the mythology of the series, and I would have liked to know more about his backstory and why he attached himself to Marissa when she was a child. [/spoiler]
I recently finished The Stone Sky, the capstone to NK Jemisin’s trilogy about a postapocalyptic apocalypse on a planet that undergoes apocalypses a couple of times a century.
It may surprise you to hear that these books are a teeny bit grim. But they’re amazing, with a great protagonist or two, a fascinating world, and some wonderful meditations on being human. This is the best that science fiction has to offer, in my opinion, and Jemisin is the successor to Le Guin.
I also read The Impossible Fortress. Granted, I’ve never read Ready Player One, but I still think this author did, and he thought, “If folks flip out over a video game novel full of self-indulgent nods to eighties culture, I bet they’ll SUPER flip out over a video game PROGRAMMING novel full of self-indulgent nods to eighties culture!” It was an easy read, nothing in it to slow you down, but very predictable and trite. Pass.
Started this morning on The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison. An odd coincidence that this book came to the top of the TBR pile right after Sleeping Beauties, since they’re both about a world without women. I have to say I think Meg Elison is nailing it better than Stephen King did.
Just finished Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain and enjoyed it very much. I recently heard about this series (just two books so far), which looks to be an American version of the O’Brian stories of the Age of Sail. Nice blurbs. Anyone here read 'em?: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B06Y94TY95/ref=dp_st_0425278174
They’re mentioned in the Series You Didn’t Finish thread. At least two of us couldn’t get into O’Brian’s books. I’m a huge fan of C,S, Forester books (not just Hornblower) and other writers of sea stories, but I just can’t get into O’Brian.
I’m almost finished with The Vampyre and other Stories. I’d read Polidori’s story before, but I bought the book for the supplemental material, and got hooked on the other horror stories from the first half of the 19th century. In particular, there’s this little bit from Allan Cunningham’s the Master of Logan:
The rest of the story is as beautifully written. The horror “twist” isn’t very surprising, but it’s a treat to read, nonetheless.
On audio, I’ve started a Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikert and Michael Allen. The original edition was subtitled “…from Columbus’ Great Discovery to the War on Terror”, but this later edition is “…From Columbus’ Great Discovery to the Age of Entitlement”. I’m not sure how far I’ll get into it. It’s not just that the book runs some 48 CDs (!), but it’s politically provocative and polarizing, on the other side of the fence from me. but I figure I ought to get the story from The Other Side.
The thing is, it’s an odd book. It clearly purports to be a response to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, but Zinn pretty clearly states that he wasn’t setting out to write a comprehensive history book – just to examine some cases in US history from the point of view of the underdog. His first chapter was on the way Columbus treated the Indians, and it was a real eye opener (and pretty provocative in its own right), getting more attention, I think, than the rest of the book. Schweikert and Allen, on the other hand, seem to be trying to write a comprehensive history of the US from a Conservative point of view, so to set it up as a response seems a bit weird. The bulk of the “response” has nothing to do with the original text they’re responding to.
There’s plenty I could say (and there’s quite a body of literature regarding this book out there), but I’ll limit my main comment to just one issue – seeing how it was the account of Columbus’ treatment of the Indians that got most people riled up in the first place, and since this book is clearly set up as a response to Zinn’s book, I was curious to see how Schweikert and Allen would respond to Zinn’s statements about Columbus. The answer is ---- they don’t! There’s not a word about Columbus’ setting up a quota system for paying tribute, of the badges he gave out to those who had paid, the penalties for not paying (including cutting off of hands), and the depopulation of villages by people fleeing or committing suicide. There IS a section refuting the notion that “Columbus Killed Off Almost all the Indians” (which I don’t think any historian ever claimed) which argues against European disease decimating American Indians (not just by Columbus), but it’s pretty crudely argued, with huge holes in the argument. But it addresses something that isn’t even Zinn’s point. It’s stuck in there without building context for it, and looks lie a smokescreen to deflect attention fro the fact that they haven’t addressed the question of Columbus’ behavior towards the Indians by making it appear that they have.
Just started The Albigensian Crusade (a birthday gift!), by Jonathon Sumption. Not necessarily a history buff, but this particular niche interests me. History of the losers, really. So far, much more detail than ever before.
Finished Post Captain, enjoyed it a lot, and am eager to read more O’Brian. For the moment, though, I’m reading Alan Dean Foster’s Mission to Moulokin, a sequel to Icerigger, a fun sf adventure set on a frozen world with a feudal sea-, er, ice-faring society. I’ve also started an audiobook of Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 detective story The Glass Key, which so far I’m not too wowed by.
Finished Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. An excellent read, and Goodwin is fully deserving of her Pulitzer. But as mentioned upthread, it suffered from my having read Ron Chernow’s biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, because he really is a better writer. She also could use a better editor/fact-checker. Just a few of the mistakes found are someone born in 1808 being 12 in 1819 (not possible); Henry Lane alternately identified correctly as a candidate for Indiana governor and incorrectly as a candidate for Pennsylvania governor; and John Eaton holding the rank of general in 1863 and then suddenly a colonel in 1864. (In fact, he was not a general until 1865, so the former reference was in error.) But still good. I recall learning from our 2012 visit to Washington’s Petersen House, where Lincoln died, that more books have been written about the 16th President than about any other American, and there is a pile supposedly of every one of them towering two or three stories inside the house.
Next up is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.
And speaking of Ron Chernow, his biography of Ulysses S. Grant is due out very soon. He’s one of the few authors I’ll buy the hardback version.
Just finished Dave Barry’s Big Trouble. Yawn. The best I can say for it is that it was mildly amusing and nowhere taxed my brain. He’s trying to be a funnier Elmore Leonard, only I don’t like Leonard enough to care how successful he is.
I am in a Book Club that I don’t like. I am trying to find a better one, but anyhoo…
I am reading **Before The Fall **by Noah Hawley. I hate it. It is waaaaay too wordy. The story could have been told in half the words. I am about 3/4 of the way through, and I don’t care what happens to these rich people.
It is a mystery about a network big wig of a conservative news network and his family whose private jet crashes on a shirt flight from Martha’s Vineyard to Manhattan. His wife had invited at the last minute a painter to join them instead of taking the ferry the next day. The painter and the 4 year old son of the big wig survive the crash and conspiracy theories ensue.
I can, however, see a parallel between the painter who survived the plane crash and is suddenly thrust into a politically charged limelight and gains fame he never wanted and the security guard at the Mandalay Bay hotel in this recent shooting in Las Vegas. They accused the painter of “hiding out” and being missing as well because he didn’t want to talk to the press.
This is NOT the kind of book I would normally read, but I am trying to make nice and fit in with this group at the book club, so I am sucking up and dealing. For now.
I want to find a club that read non-fiction, biographies, and historical fiction but no such animal exists in my neck of the woods.
Just finished The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, by Meg Elison. I really liked it (but don’t think I’ll try the sequel, prefer to leave well enough alone). Thanks to Glory for the recommendation!