I was amused by Nancy Mitford’s semi-autobiographical novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. I also liked her breezy, gossipy book about Louis XIV’s life at Versailles.
The middle book in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy, which is an alternate history set shortly after Britain makes peace with Nazi Germany, features a family based on the Mitfords.
I’ve gotten a little burnt out on urban fantasy, but I enjoyed Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot, which is set in modern-day London (the original U.K. name is Rivers of London). It’s lighter than Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books, which are also set in London, and it’s humorous without being as relentlessly goofy and snarky as Harry Dresden.
Now I’m reading One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, the second of her Jackson Brodie mysteries, which have a contemporary British setting. They aren’t as interesting as her novel Life After Life, but I like her writing.
Coming to the end of Joe Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade, a great Cold War sf spy novel that I’m reading aloud with my teenage son. Still a terrific book after all these years.
Finished Conspirata, by Robert Harris. It is a sequel to Imperium, but Harris is correct that you don’t need to have read the earlier work. It’s good but not as good as the earlier work. Just a a tad slow and plodding. The ending leaves room for another sequel.
Now it’s back to John Grisham and his first novel, A Time to Kill. In the fictional Ford County, Mississippi in the 1980s (based on the mention of May 15 being a Wednesday, I’ve been able to place the exact year as 1985), two white redneck scumbags rape a 10-year-old black girl, the girl’s father takes justice into his own hands, and it falls to the local liberal white lawyer to defend him. Some people think The Firm was Grisham’s first novel, but A Time to Kill was published two years earlier in 1989. But that first novel was poorly marketed by a crappy publisher, and the print run of 5000 copies didn’t even sell out. Then following the runaway success of The Firm, the new publisher reprinted A Time to Kill and marketed it properly, and it became a bestseller.
I’ve read several books this month that I’ve seen discussed here, and glad to have read all of them: The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams Bad Guys by Linwood Barclay Mind’s Eye: An Inspector Van Vetteren Mystery by Hakan Nesser
Currently on: Defending Jacob by William Landay
and in the car: Paris: A Love Story by Kati Marton
Just started reading How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker. Recommended to me for my job. It sounds interesting to me so far, but others may find it dry.
Haven’t read the book, but the movie is fantastic, and could be described with all of those adjectives, too. The actor who plays Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones costars. One of my favorite thrillers - highly recommended: Headhunters (film) - Wikipedia
Continuing my longstanding alternation between detective novels and selections from the Modern Library’s 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century, I’m now reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Finished both Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas tonight. The first was just about good as I remembered, but the second didn’t quite click for me by the end. I don’t often say this, but I actually liked the movie better…
Ung does a good job of capturing the experience in her first two books (I haven’t read the third yet). I needed Bizot’s The Gate to fill in some details (like why the KR cadres took everyone’s watches)–he was an adult at the time, where Ung, Chanrithy Him, and some others give a child’s perspective.
Both had their virtues. I enjoyed the ambitious structure of the book, which would not work in movie form; I enjoyed the way they adapted it into a movie.
Me, too. The edition of Cloud Atlas that I have includes a postscript by the author, discussing the process of adapting the book into a movie. He was very pleased by what they did. During an early cast read-through he turned to the screenwriter from time to time when he heard a particularly good line and whispered, “Was that mine or yours?” The final tally was about 50/50.
BTW, Malthus, did you notice the passing reference to “Saint Malthus” in the future-Korea section of the book?
I just checked - it’s actually “Prophet Malthus,” on p. 328 of my 2012 Random House trade paperback edition. It’s in the second Sonmi chapter, as she and Hae-Joo Im are fleeing to Pusan. Near Ch’unju Lake she notes, “A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl.”
