“Gone through most of it, and it is a great read.” Forgot to take that part out when I copied from before. I assure you I’ve finished it. It is a great read though.
Finished Out to Lunch, by Stacey Ballis. I enjoyed it.
Now I’m reading The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, by Stewart Brand. Coincidentally, Out to Lunch features a character who used to own a company called Stewart/Brand. (This company did catering.)
I just finished A Pale Light in the Black, by KB Wagers.
Not everything in this book makes perfect sense, and it’s got the Current Pop Culture Is The Best of All Times syndrome in spades (seriously, NOBODY 400 years from now is going to derive their nickname from a 2005 World of Warcraft meme, come on).
But it’s quick-moving and action-packed, and some days you just want to read about bad guys getting punched in the face by space cops.
Finished The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, by Stewart Brand. Much of it was interesting, sometimes fascinating reading.
Now I’m reading A Maggot from John Fowles.
Finished Lullaby Town, by Robert Crais. A high-powered moviemaker, known as the King of Adventure, hires PIs Elvis Cole and Joe Pike to find the wife and son he ran out on 12 years before when he was just a struggling film student. The search takes them to New York City and Connecticut and entangles them with the Mafia. Crais’ third novel, it’s very good, but there are a few editing and spelling errors, plus he incorrectly states Elvis Presley died in 1978. He died the year before that. But those are minor quibbles. I highly recommend this book.
Next up is more Crais with his fourth novel, Free Fall.
New Stephen King out tomorrow! I hope it delivers on time…
I just finished The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, and I loved it.
It’s young-adult, but one of the more sexual books I’ve read in a long time, an eighteenth-century noble rake with an abusive father, and the biracial best friend he has an enormous crush on, and his brilliant cynical sister, and every adventure possible with this setup. Enormous fun, of course; what I wasn’t expecting was the character growth over the book.
I have that one in my Goodreads Want to Read list as well. It sounds like a lot of fun.
It’s not here yet! <runs frantically to and fro>
Okay, so anyway, I did get some interesting news the other day - someone is going to set up a Little Free Library right across the road from my house! It’s an extremely unlikely place to find one, since I live in a very rural area. It’s also going to be inside a gated community of about 20 farms. So I expect it’ll turn out to be more like a one-time neighborly book-swap than a thriving and variable concern, but still. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
I finished re-reading Larry Niven’s A Gift from Earth. I read this the first time back in the Paleozoic, but the copy I had was missing some key pages – they mistakenly bound in two identical “signatures”, so I was missing one. I never did read the missing pages, until now. I saw a “free” copy at a recent con and picked it up for precisely that reason.
I’m proud to say that I could tell, without checking, which section I hadn’t read before, even after a period of time equal to a geologic era, with new continents having formed in the interim.
Now I’m on to Into the Bottomlands. The cover reads “Harry Turtledove and L. Sprague de Camp”, but the title story is by Turtledove alone. de Camp gets his name on the cover because he was a big inspiration to Turtledove (all those alternate history stories) and because they added a copy of de Camp’s story “The Wheels of If”. There’s also another Turtledove story bound in there.
I’ve also got a copy of an old SF magazine with the Jack Williamson story “Hocus Pocus Universe”. I saw the cover in the original edition of the Science fiction Encyclopedia and have wondered about it ever since.
Finished Free Fall, by Robert Crais. LA detective noir in which Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are hired by the fiancee of a cop who is a member of an elite Los Angeles REACT squad. The fiancee thinks her man has gotten mixed up in something bad and wants Cole and Pike to find out what it is. Before long, the pair on the run, framed for a murder they did not commit. Very good.
Next up is Apropos of Nothing, Woody Allen’s autobiography. Recently released, I ordered it from Barnes and Noble last week, and it arrived this past Monday.
The only Wimsey book I’ve read is Clouds of Witness, which I liked well enough but not so much as to make me eager to read the others. It includes a trial in the House of Lords, which was particularly interesting.
I’ve read all of the Wimsey novels, and I think Clouds of Witness is the best, although I also liked Lord Peter, a collection of his short stories.
Finished A Maggot from John Fowles. It had some good points–I was pleased that I guessed the ending. But I thought it was too long, and got off to a sluggish start.
Now I’m reading Circe, by Madeline Miller.
I just finished Ghost, by Jason Reynolds, a middle-grade novel.
I’ve been hearing how good Jason Reynolds is for awhile now, and finally picked this one up. It’s a very fast read, and reminds me of Bud, Not Buddy in the best possible way. The protagonist is a semi-self-aware kid navigating a not-always-friendly world, and the novels veer between deep trauma and hilarity without pausing for breath. I look forward to the next in the series!
Just started the third volume in the Tales from the Gas Station series. I haven’t read a lot of books in the humor-horror genre, but this is definitely the best of them.
Just finished this. A bit slow in parts, but well worth a read. It has a helluva twist that I partially figured out before the author revealed it; then I went back and enjoyed figuring out how he concealed it for so long.
Next up: Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard, a novel about a kidnapping.
Finally finished Jade War, by Fonda Lee.
I listened to this on audiobook, and the reader’s voice was just a little too sneering and swaggering for me. The protagonist is a terrible person, and it took me awhile to adjust to that. But once I started listening to this less as a Noble Warrior story, and more as a supernatural Sopranos, I liked it a lot more. The writing is very good, the action is melodramatic, and if I enjoyed pages of worldbuilding exposition half as much as Fonda Lee does (everything you’ve never wondered about shifting trade policies between two minor nations that don’t exist is covered in enough depths that you could pass a midterm on the subject), I would’ve loved this book.
Started Ask Me Anything: A Year of Advice from Dear Annie, by Annie Lane with Courtney Davison.
Finished Circe, by Madeline Miller. It was excellent–one of the best books I’ve read this year, and the best novel. Strongly recommended.
Started Away with Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions, by Joe Berkowitz. (He competes as “Punter S. Thompson.”)
I finished Gideon the Ninth a few days ago. It took me a while to get into it - I’m just not that keen on necromancy, you know? But I was hooked by the end and will be looking for the sequel.
I’ve started in on Scalzi’s The Last Emperox. The writing is excessively breezy, but I am on edge waiting to find out how coups are averted and billions of lives are saved.