So here we are… living the dream with little to do but read and binge Netflix? I hope everyone is being safe and as isolated as possible. Out here in the American West, Mother Nature looked around and thought “Oh you’re having a pandemic right now? Well then, have 6 more weeks of winter and a couple earthquakes for good measure.” And then there was a tornado down south… and an earthquake(s?) in Texas… Can we just reboot this year and try again?
Anyway!
I finished Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbo a couple days ago. I have such mixed feelings about Nesbo, when he’s good, he’s DAMN good, but the rest of the time his books are a slog.
I restarted **Snake Agent ** by Liz Williams. I think when I started it almost 2 years ago, it wasn’t the right time to read it. So we’ll see if it can compete with Netflix and Youtube for my attention this time.
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads way back in the Stone Age of the early 2000s. Consequently when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
Several months ago I started reading The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost. I only got a few chapters into it before finishing my MA thesis took over.
I hope to finish Troost’s book this week.
I also read last week Call the Midwife and Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth, which the BBC series was based off of. The first one was a gut-wrenching memoir, but I suspect the second one was semi-fiction. Still a good read, though.
Still reading* Old Man’s War* by John Scalzi (I’m one of the lucky ones who still gets to go to work, so no extra reading time for me). I didn’t realize it was a series, so with luck I’ll be able to get the other books as well. My library has them, I think, but of course they’re closed for the foreseeable future.
I could get Redshirts as well, but it might go over my head. I’ve seen a few original Star Trek episodes and that’s the extent of my knowledge.
I’m about to start How to Be a Hermit; or, A Bachelor Keeps House by Will Cuppy, a mostly-forgotten American humorist who spent most of the 1920s living alone in a shack on a small island off Long Island’s south shore.
Next up — Thirty Hours with a Corpse, and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol by Maurice Level, a Parisian writer who penned dozens of plays during the early 20th century for the infamous “horror theatre” on Montmartre.
Short contes cruels involving sadistic surgeons, gleeful public executions, bloodthirsty lunatics, flying gouged eyeballs, and lots of acid thrown in faces.
The Seep is a weird little alien-utopia book. The premise is that some sort of disembodied aliens come to earth and infiltrate us through our water supply, but they really just want to make things better for us. I love weird stuff like this. Unfortunately it got a little to didactic/glib for my tastes. I would’ve been happier if it didn’t have such a moral. It’s a fast read.
Gamechanger spends its first half being every single cyberpunk novel you’ve ever read since Neuromancer. In the second half, it takes an unexpected turn. It’s a chunk of a book at over 500 pages, and it suffers from a problem that’s too common in futuristic science fiction, in which the people of the future are obsessed with the culture of the time period in which the book was written. I kinda hate that. Past those flaws, though, it was readable enough that I finished it.
On the bright side, I finished reading Wintersmith to my fifth-grader. I’m not overall a huge Terry Pratchett fan, but I adore his YA Tiffany Aching series. They’re hilarious and clear-eyed and wise and exciting. This book is well worth rereading.
Now I’m reading Gideon the Ninth, a hilariously filthy book about necromancers in space. But I almost wish I hadn’t started it, because today a local bookstore (which has gone to deliveries in order to stay in business) dropped off my copy of The City We Became, NK Jemisin’s latest, and I’m super excited to get into it.
I’ve recently finished a couple of books. First was Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, about magic and ghosts and murder in the Yale secret societies. I enjoyed it Then I needed something more lighthearted, so I read T Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Grace. It was a little heavier on the romance than I prefer, but a nice fluffy distraction.
Not sure what’s up next, but probably the new Jemisen.
Finished Tales of Adventure and Medical Life by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which was okay. The ones in the latter group (particularly “The Third Generation”, about a man who discovers he has congenital syphilis the week before his wedding), were generally better than the ones in the former. However, “The Great Brown-Pericord Motor” is quite interesting, and could have been (with a little editing) turned into a good Sherlock Holmes story. (It was published in 1891, and is available on line.)
Now I’m reading Jerome Robbins, by Himself: Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir, edited and with commentary by Amanda Vaill.
I’m on the home stretch of the very big bio Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. A detailed and usually engaging profile of the famous painter, from his birth through his often-troubled and unhappy life, and on to his tragic end.
As to Old Man’s War, yes, indeed, and a pretty good series, too, I think.
Redshirts is worth a read even if you’re not a big Trekker, but you would certainly get more out of it the more you’re into that fandom, I’d say.
Ooh, nice! I didn’t see that, but I’ll have to look for it! I’m off Amazon until they stop being terrible to the warehouse workers (I think I could’ve ended this sentence after the first three words), but there’s a lovely little anarchist bookstore down the road from me that’s staying in business through mail order, so maybe I’ll give them a try.
I’m currently enjoying the hell out of NK Jemisin’s latest, The City We Became. It’s far more rollicking and badass than her brilliantly devastating Broken Earth trilogy, and man alive does she ever let her cordial loathing of HP Lovecraft show, even as she pays homage to Lovecraftian horror. It’s great.
And I’m listening on audiobook to David Copperfield, which is obviously great.
Finished reading Night Monsters and The Green Millennium, both by FRitz Leiber. They were flip sides of an old Ace Double. Green Millennium is a rather weird racy-at-the-time novel of one man’s adventures precipitated by his finding a green cat in a near-future world. It reminds me of an sf version of The Big Lebowski, with the lead guy as a kind of Dude being drawn into odd adventures with weird artists and gangsters, but with the addition of some odd aliens.
After that I read Understanding Mu by Hans Stefan Santesson. I’d never read James Churchward’s books on Mu, which were ubiquitous when I was a kid. Now they’re ridiculously expensive, but I picked up Santesson’s book for free. It’s a quick, pseudoscientific, pointless read, but it was fun. I am always anazed, when reading things like this (including the works of van Daniken and Immanuel Velikovsky and others) at how easily they pronounce on radically new and different concepts with almost nothing by way of proof or argument, and how easily they interpret the most esoteric things from drawings. Any real archaeologist would spend a lot of time justifying even a small part of any of their claims, but the pseudoscientists just breeze through their alternate universe without apparently realizing how much effort they should put into justifying their assertions.
Now I’m reading **Napoleon wasn’t Short and St. Patrick wasn’t Irish: When History gets it Wrong ** by Andrea Barham. Of course it isn’t “History” that gets it wrong, as she makes clear, or even most professional historians, but mainly popularizers. A quick read, and pretty good, with good attention to alternatives, but without the extensive bibliography of, say, Richard Shenkman’s books (Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, and three others I know of.)
Ooooh, Fritz Leiber is a good idea. Maybe I’ll re-read Conjure Wife.
Dickens would be comforting, too, but the wife made me give away all my old Penguin editions. Bleak House would certainly fill up a week, but it would be weird to read it online.
Finished Jerome Robbins, by Himself: Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir, edited and with commentary by Amanda Vaill. I wish there were more about his choreography in here. The editor makes it clear that there’s a ton of material to use, but wanted to present a more balanced picture of the whole man.
Now I’m reading The Secrets of the Pirate Inn by Wylly Folk St. John. My husband enjoyed it when he was a kid.
