Oh, I am. I didn’t get a chance to read as much as I wanted to this holiday weekend though but will finish it this week. It’s great.
As for The Johnstown Flood, that one was good too. That may have been my first McCullough, not sure. That or John Adams. I recall at the end of Flood, he mentions someone who had been presumed dead showing back up years and years later. He’d taken advantage of the flood to disappear and start a whole new life elsewhere under a new name and everything. I guess that would not be possible now, what with computer databases and fingerprinting and such.
I’m reading “Against a Dark Background” by Iain M. Banks. His books are very highly regarded in the SF community, but I read “Consider Phlebas” a number of years back and remember nothing about it except that it was somewhat unpleasant and left me feeling “meh” about the experience. But I found this one at a book sale so figured why not?
The basic plot is that Sharrow, a retired antiquities hunter, has had a contract put on her by a community of monks and will be killed unless she retrieves a rare artifact. In the context of the book, artifacts are items of great cultural or technological significance developed by previous civilizations on the planet over the course of 6000 years of settlement. In this case, the MacGuffin is a “lazy gun”; a weapon with a sense of humor that apparently manipulates probability to do its dirty work.
So this is basically a “heist” book – Sharrow gets the team back together and they try to retrieve the artifact before the contract (and Sharrow) can be executed. As in most heist-fiction, there’s a mysterious adversary that’s always one or two steps ahead of them. We don’t know who it is. It could be a stranger, or Sharrow’s deranged and jealous sister, or her obsessed cousin. Or maybe one of her crew? I haven’t finished the book yet, so I dunno.
World building: good, but occasionally too much travelogue.
Character building: Mostly good, except that we don’t actually end up liking any of them. In particular, Sharrow is somewhat amoral, not particularly likeable (or unlikeable) and, aside from not wanting to die, seems emotionally distant from just about everything. So, it’s a bit hard to care one way or another which way the plot goes.
Still, liking this more than Consider Phlebas, and I wouldn’t object too much if another Banks book fell into my lap.
Note: Still working on “Dream of Scipio” from last month. As I predicted, it’s becoming harder to pick that one up as my interest fades.
I finished two lovely books over the long weekend.
Fangirl follows an awkward, anxious girl through her first year of college. I don’t think many books take place in college, but the setting made for a cool reading experience. Every location that was mentioned in the book (dorm room, for example, or the dining hall or the library), I was picturing the book taking place on my college campus, and that was fun. The book was nicely written, the sort of book that’s story-driven and doesn’t waste too much time waxing poetic.
The other book I finished is Mara Wilson’s Where Am I Now?. Mara Wilson comes across as so likeable. I’ve read other celebrity memoirs before, and often, celebrities try so hard to come across as intelligent and gracious and relatable that they miss the mark, and wind up just coming across as trying too hard. Mara is open about her struggles and insecurities, and her essays are insightful. One thing that surprised me was how few duds were in this collection. I have read some essay collections from famous writers – think Ann Patchett and Barbara Kingsolver. Most essay collections (or short story collections) contain a few duds, and are successful because of the strength of the stronger pieces in this collection. But I think I was 80% of the way through this book before I found an essay that I would consider a dud. Her writing was consistently engaging. After coming in with admittedly low expectation (because come on, it’s written by a celebrity who became famous for her acting, not her writing), I was impressed.
I am still lurking in these threads, but I’m not posting (much) because I’m not reading anything other than my usual legal/criminal thrillers. I just got caught up on David Baldacci’s Will Robie series (the new book comes out in November), and I had a Mickey Haller book already purchased and downloaded on my Kindle so I dove back into that series over the weekend (I have a feeling I was working my way through the Haller books when I learned about the new Robie book).
If I read anything interesting, I’ll definitely let you guys know. In the meantime, I’m enjoying your posts!
I’ve sometimes wondered if someone thought to be lost in the fall of the World Trade Center might have been walking towards the towers, saw them fall then turned on his (or her) heel and walked away, to start a new life somewhere else. Certainly it’d be a bit harder to do in 2001 than in 1889.
Just finished Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, as recommended by jsgoddess. It’s about a girl in the 1960’s who time-travels to the 1860’s and lives as a slave. I was a little irritated at the main character when she read Gone With the Wind and didn’t love it, and I thought her mother was something of a cartoon character, but loved the time travel and the story she lived in the past. I was laying awake at night trying to figure out what was going to happen next. Really good!
Read a very short time ago, what I envisage as being Ben Elton’s most recent novel – Time And Time Again. I usually find this author’s offerings to be compulsive reading – this was the case here. I enjoy his relatively terse and non-flowery writing style, and his deploying of his fertile imagination.
Not to “spoil” this novel for future readers – will just say that it features an interesting and to me, new, angle on the time-travel theme. Of all things, a discovery by Sir Isaac Newton, makes possible a very narrow, restricted and specific “window” for someone to go back in time. Novel’s premise involves going back to 1914, to forestall World War I from taking place. Ingenious – and to this reader anyway, totally unexpected – twists on the aforesaid, come about.
And just a couple of days back – found on sale (at an almost give-away price), Val McDermid’s latest thriller. This lady’s prolifically produced works are to me, a “crack” equivalent – usually when I become aware of a new one, I buy and devour it. Am a bit puzzled by this addiction: IMO she writes competently, but not with that wonderful a talent. Would reckon, it’s just that I love her characters (different sets of same, in different milieux – a series of novels for each milieu, with the occasional total stand-alone) – especially her two-sexes “odd couple” in the police detective / criminal profiling field, Carol Jordan and Tony Hill. This latest, * Insidious Intent *, is a Carol-and-Tony one – for me, certainly gripping: read it at one sitting, which I usually do with anything by McDerrmid.
(One thing which I don’t like about VMcD, is the titles she gives her novels: she seems bent on making them vague and “abstract” and un-memorable: I have a hard time recalling which book belongs with which title.)
Finished Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow. Excellent. Reading this and his Alexander Hamilton close together has given me some good insights into the period. And both books mention Dr. Samuel Bard of New York, a possible ancestor or distant relative of mine. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Bard, and she came from the Albany area.
Have started The Late Show, by Michael Connelly. The wife has already read it and loved it. We bought it shortly after it came out, and Connelly is one of the few authors I’ll buy the hardcover copy instead of wait for the paperback. The title references the graveyard shift at the LAPD, specifically in Hollywood. This novel introduces a new protagonist in the Connelly pantheon, Detective Renee Ballard.
Florida and Carribean Dopers STAY SAFE! Please, take care if you’re going to be in the path of Irma. Additionally, please, check in after Irma passes and you get power back. The internet isa great thing, it gives us friends all over the world,but the other side is it gives us more people to worry about. So please let us know you are safe.
On with the reading, might as well get a few books wrapped while sitting out the storm.
I finished reading “Dombey and Son” by Charles Dickens. I thought it was pretty good; it’s from his middle period where his stories start to be less loosey-goosey but where he’s still putting in plenty of humourous characters (Cap’en Cuttle and his sagacious friend Bunsby, Mr. Toots and the Game Chicken, Major Bagstock). At this point, the only Dickens novels that I haven’t read are “Barnaby Rudge” and “Hard Times” (and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”).
I took a brief break to re-read (for the 3rd or 4th time) “The Legacy of Heorot” by Larry Niven, Steve Barnes and the late Jerry Pournelle. The human vs. monster scenes were just as fun as the last time I read it.
Because it is a stupid plot with a long drawn out nonsensical ending. It’s considered a psychological thriller. That genre is overdone these days, with Gone Girl as the seminal work. Someone disappears, only the plucky heroine is concerned, yaddayaddayadda. I’m done with those. Picked up The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes at the library yesterday.
I finally got around to reading *The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements *by Sam Kean, and I enjoyed it. I like cute anecdotes about science, and I thought it reasonably presented a somewhat deeper set of information about quantum science, but not so technical that you (I) couldn’t follow the thread.
Another one that had been languishing on my pile was Gwendy’s Button Box, by Stephen King and some guy. It was okay enough for SK fans, although it was barely more than a short story.
The other thing I’ve been doing is working through Hilary McKay’s Casson family books – it’s a YA series and I wasn’t nuts about the first few I read when they originally came out. They left me cold, and a lot of the humor seemed mean. But some people adore them, and my book club was doing the first one. The second time around, I still don’t love them, but I can see more of what appeals to people. Sometimes there’s something about reading a book for a set purpose like book club where I don’t feel as invested in it, which actually let me see its merits in a more objective way, I guess.
Finished John Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing, which I enjoyed. I’m currently reading Rachel Swaby’s Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science–and the World.
On Saturday, on a camping trip, I finally finished reading Castle Hangnail to my daughters, based on a recommendation here (jsgoddess?) Thank you for the recommendation–it was excellent! More than a touch of Pratchett without being derivative, my wife would often snort with laughter as she listened in on the reading, and there were times I had to stop my own giggling in order to continue.
I’m currently reading Wild Things: the Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult. It’s a fun, breezy read. The author has a bit more patience with Freudian criticism than I do, and I find some of his conclusions suspect; but I don’t mind an author with an opinion, even when I think it’s wrong, and it’s also got plenty of fascinating tidbits in it. I never new Beatrix Potter was such a naturalist, for example.
Finished Iain Banks “Against a Dark Background”. And…still not a fan of Banks. The plot didn’t take exactly the route I expected it to take, but it more or less ended up where I thought it would, but the conclusion left me feeling “Eh?”. It all seemed sort of pointless, especially considering the actions of the book trigger off what appears to be a small war.
Essentially, as the heroine stands fighting the bad guy, she’s asked “Are you really that selfish a person?” And she decides that yes, yes she is. Maybe that’s the philosophical point that Banks was trying to make. Or maybe there was just no actual point to the whole plot – it was just something that happened somewhere; isn’t this interesting?
There’s also a point in the book where our trained team of rogues finds themselves outgunned. outmanned, and pitifully equipped to continue their mission, but with a method of aborting and trying again another day. And do they do the intelligent thing? No…they do a Frodo and Samwise deathcrawl into Mordor scenario, for no good reason. Although their actions are no less poorly motivated than several other characters in the book, who do bizarrely complex things for no apparent reason.
So, shrug. Kind of a bleak read with no real payoff.
