My copy is rumored to be arriving tomorrow!
Finished The Late Show, by Michael Connelly, 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. Detective Renee Ballard is the newest protagonist in the Connelly pantheon. Recommended. And Praise Be! Connelly’s next Bosch book is due out by year-end.
After reading an excerpt of that Bosch book at the end of The Late Show, next up will be Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This book was the inspiration for the Daniel Day-Lewis film Lincoln.
It was, but be warned that the movie covers only a tiny, tiny portion of the book, the last few months of Lincoln’s life in early 1865 as he fights for passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The book (which is well worth a read) starts with the 1860 presidential campaign, IIRC, and then goes all the way through the secession crisis and the Civil War.
I started The American Revolution in Indian Country by Colin Calloway. It’s very well written, moves along, but it is a difficult subject since it does deal with genocide and the wholesale exploitation of the natives.
So for a breather, I started A Pint of Murder by Alisa Craig aka Charlotte MacLeod. Cozies are wonderful, turn your emotions and brain off reads and was just what I needed…
HOWEVER!
The Empty Grave by Jonathon Stroud arrived today. The rumored to be LAST Lockwood & Co book is sitting here on my bed taunting me. I am so weak… 
Tonight’s chapter involved–minor spoiler–a 13th-century peasant woman tricking a bunch of knights into searching for her daughter by plunging their arms up to their shoulders into a giant heap of rotting human shit. That’s…not something I’ve seen in children’s literature before.
Love love love all of Sam Kean’s books. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons might be my next favorite, although it’s a close race with The Violinist’s Thumb. I haven’t read Caesar’s Last Breath yet, but it’s on my TBR!
I just read Caesar’s Last Breath, and I think it’s his second best after The Disappearing Spoon.
Hurrah! I’m glad you liked it.
I wish I could take credit, but I’ve never read it. Of course, not knowing anything doesn’t always stop me from talking… 
My recent reads (with apologies if I duplicate one from last month’s thread):
A Purely Private Matter, by Darcie Wilde. Historical mystery set in the Regency. The blurb says they are inspired by the works of Jane Austen, which seems utterly inaccurate, but they are done surprisingly well.
After the Armistice Ball, by Catriona McPherson. Historical mystery set between the World Wars. I loved this book. LOVED it. The protagonist is ditzy but smart, and her interactions with everyone around her just delighted me.
The King’s Spy, by Andrew Swanston. Historical mystery set during the English Civil War. The first half is pretty good, with a strong sense of place. The second half goes silly.
Murder Between the Lines, by Radha Vatsal. Historical mystery (damn, I get into ruts, don’t I?) set during WWI. Likeable characters and happenings with a somewhat immaterial mystery.
Kira-Kira, by Cynthia Kadohata. Newbery read. It’s good, but bah.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, by Joanne Fluke. Cozy mystery with a lot of goofy elements but written well enough to work.
A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck. Newbery read that was actually pleasant. Whee!
The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. Newbery re-read that didn’t click with me as much as previous times I’ve read it, but still enjoyable and clever.
A Fatal Waltz, by Tasha Alexander. Historical mystery set in Victorian England and Germany. Very silly, but I finished it. I’ve been dnf-ing a lot lately, so that’s saying something.
A Season of Daring Greatly, by Ellen Emerson White. YA of a young woman who is drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates into their minor league system. I love how White tackles the realities of various situations, without acting like everything would be wonderful because it should all work out well. But her president’s daughter series remains the real standout.
I started on The Empty Grave this morning. I couldn’t be happier (unless Mr. Stroud were going to write some more of these).
Anybody want a copy of The Special Ones? I didn’t like it well enough to finish, but my dogs thought it made a fine toy, and so I had to buy it from the library. It’s roughed up but totally readable. PM me your address and I’ll send it on!
YES! Started off with a bang and hasn’t stopped moving. (I’m about halfway now)
Read The Masked City over the weekend, a sequel to The Invisible Library. It’s a fantasy cozy, a genre I think I just made up, about plucky librarians who go to alternate universes to acquire rare books, and the faeries and dragons and whatnot that they encounter along the way. Not great literature, but pretty fun reads, both.
Last week I abandoned Meddling Kids, a cross between Scooby Doo, Lovecraft, and It. Didn’t work at all for me: the author isn’t a native English speaker, and he uses a lot of big words about 5 degrees off from their correct usage, and the writing just really threw me off. Besides that, some of the sequences are preposterous and not in a good way, and I kinda think he missed the entire point of Scooby Doo, which sounds like the biggest Comics Nerds Guy thing to say ever, but whatcha gonna do? But my wife is reading it and enjoying it, so de gustibus and all.
And I started reading Be Free or Die: the Amazing Story of Robert Smalls. Real quick: nonfiction about a slave who commandeered a 150’ wheel ship from Charleston in 1862 and piloted it past Fort Sumter to bring himself, his family, his crew, and his crew’s families, to freedom. It really is an amazing true story, and the book, while not exactly written in an objective historian’s voice, is pretty damn fun.
Well, I’m learning that I perhaps let online ratings influence my book choices more than I should. I just finished up two popular, highly rated books that disappointed me, then followed up with a much less popular and more poorly rated book that I’m liking far better.
The first highly rated book that disappointed me was When Breath Becomes Air. Premise is that a neurosurgeon in his forties contracts cancer, and pontificates about his life and life in general in his dying days. It ended up mainly being stories about the surgeries he performed, which were interesting at first but started to lose their luster after a while. The guy seems to be a of a mindset that a life well spent is one full of visible accomplishments, so rather than spend his dying days working on his marriage or being around his friends, he works long hours at the hospital and writes his book. His values just seemed to be so starkly at odds with my own that I found it creepy.
The other disappointing book was Black Swan Green, which I first learned of in one of these threads. The book wasn’t nearly as disappointing as When Breath Becomes Air. In fact, there wasn’t anything really wrong with it, it just didn’t suck me in the way a good book should. The book is from the point of view of a 13-year old boy who desperately wants to be popular but isn’t, and let me tell you, if there is one point in my life I never want to think back to, it’s the period where popularity is all that matters. So it was an uncomfortable book to get through.
The less popular book that I am greatly enjoying, which was also recommended in one of these threads, is Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, about a boy with magical powers who steals thoughts and emotions from other people, ostensibly to keep a cliff from caving in on a certain town. It’s an interesting premise that so far seems to be well executed, with a good mixture of plot movement and appealing to the reader’s emotions.
Also recently finished Bad Science on audio book (yet another book I discovered in these threads). I learned enough from the book that I think I can recommend it, but not enthusiastically, and certainly not on audio book. The author’s tone can be a lot to take, as he is often angry, patronizing, and snarky.
Finally, I am currently reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. It’s a book about probability and statistics, and includes a lot about the history of those fields of mathematics. The author, Leonard Mlodinow, does an excellent job of engaging the reader and making the book interesting and fun without reducing it to a pop-psych book.
Just finished 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Fascinating and heartbreaking. I strongly recommend it.
Next up: * Quest for a Maid*, by Frances M. Hendry.
I finished re-reading Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s a classic disaster novel, although the very ending falls a little flat.
Honestly, I’ve neverread anything by either gentleman that didn’t have a flat ending.
Don’t know if you saw this thread on Pournelle’s recent death: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=835800
I finally re-started Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy after a bit of a hiatus. It really is an fascinating story and it is somewhat heartening to see that the US government was almost as messed up and disfunctional back then as it is today. The books goes into the personalities and disputes behind the decisions made in financing and manning the early navy. It’s all very early 1800’s – impassioned oratory, hard decisions, bitter grudges, duels, sacrifice, noble victories and crushing defeats.
The author does tend to oscillate back and forth in time now and then (ha), which makes the history a bit harder to follow – that is, he’ll discuss events in 1809, then backtrack a few years and follow another thread. And, although this is a work of non-fiction, I found it very annoying to have the plates in the middle depicting scenes such as the burning of the USS Philadelphia in Tripoli before the recounting of the history. I knew the history of some of the naval battles, but hadn’t heard of some of the others, so it was kind of a spoiler to know in advance how they turned out.
One somewhat interesting feature of this book is that fans of Horatio Hornblower and Captain Aubrey are somewhat used to thinking of the British sailors as the good guys, and from the point of view of the early United States, this was most emphatically not the case.
Not terribly fond of press gangs were they? Me either.
I finished The Empty Grave byJonathon Stroud and all I can say is WOW! Actually there’s a LOT more I want to say but it’s all spoilery so maybe I’ll just start a separate thread. 
I’m about halfway through and almost afraid to read further…but I must. 