Khadaji's Whatcha Reading Thread - December 2019 edition

Cafe Society
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how is it almost ecember? I just posted November’s thread a few days ago! What a fast month this was… and not much reading for me. With a new job and National Novel Reading Month, it was slim readings…

Currently I am reading The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon. This is pure Ursula without the kid controls craziness! I still think The Seventh Bride is the better crafted story but this one has Bongo!
So any holiday reading planned?


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.
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November is gone!

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In last month’s thread, I mentioned the author of the Tri Angles mystery trilogy set here in Honolulu and which I’ve mentioned before said she would lend me the third book. But we did not meet at Thanksgiving after all. So now I have returned to Sharon Kay Penman’s Welsh Princes trilogy with her final installment, The Reckoning. Historical fiction involving intrigue in 13th-century England and Wales. This is the second book this year with that title, the other being the latest by John Grisham.

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I’ve set aside At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen, a novel picked by one of my book clubs, for the moment. It’s about an American couple who move to Scotland early in WWII, and all their problems. Not especially interesting, and the protagonist is kind of whiny and annoying.

I’m about a third of the way through Patrick O’Brian’s tenth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Far Side of the World, in which HMS Surprise is racing to stop a U.S. Navy frigate before it can prey on British whaling ships in the Pacific. Good stuff as usual from O’Brian.

Still working my way through The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which is a bit too preachy and not exactly a page-turner, but she makes some good points about a conservative Supreme Court, mass incarceration and the War on Drugs.

Also returning now and then to a Joe Haldeman sf collection, A Separate War and Other Stories. The title story (about what really happened to a key secondary character from Haldeman’s masterpiece, The Forever War) and “For White Hill” (about an art competition on a distant-future Earth ravaged by nanobots unleashed by hostile aliens) are both excellent.

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I started Ibi Zoboi’s My Life as a Ice Cream Sandwich, a Young Reader novel about a young African-American girl sent from Huntsville Alabama to live for the summer with her father in Harlem. Her parents are divorced, she adores her engineer grandfather who works for NASA, and she’s a huge science fiction fan. An interesting mix, although the heroine, Ebony-Grace, is a little too divorced from reality for my tastes.

I’ve got a tack of other books afterwards, and I’m expecting some new ones today.

On audio, I’m finishing up Sharyn McCrumb’s The Ballad of Tom Dula. I hadn’t even realized that Tom Dula was a real person. All I knew was that the KIngston TRio sang a song about him circa 1960, and all I could remember was part of a line (“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley…”) (Appalachia pronunciation sometimes turns a final “a” into “ey”, as in “Grand Old Opry”). Apparently he was the murder suspect in a cause celebre, with the former (Civil War) governor of Virginia as his pro bono counsel. McCrumb’s novel draws on the historical facts, including some she says she dug up herself.

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Started today on Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia. It’s about a goth(ish) weird lady and some of her weird friends participating in a citywide scavenger hunt. So far so good; I wish the title was a little less goofy. It looks like a YA book, which it isn’t. I like YA but I feel I have to justify it to the other grownups sometimes.

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I remember when the first Harry Potter book became really popular in the UK, the publisher printed an edition with more understated cover art so that grownups wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading them on the Underground.

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I just finished Peace Like A River by Leif Enger (2001) and really enjoyed it-- which surprised me as I believe it is considered a “spiritual” book and I’m not generally interested in "spiritual books”.
This book is written from the perspective of 11-year old Rueben Land about his motherless family falling on hard times. The father, Jeremiah, is very religious, as is Rueben. Rueben lists what he sees as several miracles his father has caused or been a part of throughout the story. The younger child in the family is a daughter named Swede, 9, and the oldest son is Davy, 16.

The family was harassed by two school bullies of Davy’s and Davy shoots and kills them in the family home. Davy is tried and sentenced to prison but escapes jail that night. The family then acquires an Airstream trailer and goes to look for Davy, apparently using a bit of divine guidance (with a little human assistance) to do so.
The characters are interesting, even if the children are a bit precocious. Rueben is religiously well informed and thoughtful for an 11 year old and Swede, who is interested in all things western, is writing an Epic Western Poem that parallels the story in many ways.

The plot is good, too. You understand how the family and its individuals got into the position they find themselves in and are curious about what will happen to them.

But this book is really beautifully written. The author’s (well, Ruben’s) style of speaking is a bit unusual- a little old fashioned at times, a little formal at times, kind of humorous in odd ways, and with interesting use of words.
Great sentences by Rueben include:
“It’s true. No grudge ever had a better nurse.”
“…-oh, how I wanted to kill Holgren! I wanted him dead and his grave unkempt!”
“It was as pleasant a mirage as any I’d occupied.”

Odd word usage includes:
“Stan’s sister Margery, the famous aunt, had just hove into view down the hall.”
“I looked an appeal at Dad but got no help.”
““I smouched some gingersnaps” I told Davy.”
“But I’d lain the morning in a sump of self pity…”
“We supposed over that obituary for most of the day…”

Plus, I found a new word in this book: aspraddle

P 173: The family is traveling in an Airstream trailer looking for the escaped Davy. Swede was given a saddle by Davy and likes to sit on it while typing. The saddle was placed “aspraddle” on a sawhorse in the Airstream so Swede had both her gift from Davy and comfortable place to sit while typing.

The writing could be described as “flowery” at times but doesn’t tip over into “purple prose”, or overelaboration. This author’s imagery uses sometimes unusual vivid and descriptive language to describe things, even if it requires creating a new word, which is fun! But the story and characters are interesting too.

Highly recommended!

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Savvy. :cool:

Oh good, I hope you’re liking it! The Seventh Bride is in my TBR pile but I have to read in the proper order for a while to keep my books from becoming overdue at the library.

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It was a bit slow to start, but once the hippies across the street got involved, it’s really taken off.

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Finished Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball, by Adam Ruben, which was a lot of fun. Made me want to play pinball again, which I haven’t done since high school.

Now I’m reading a cozy mystery, Lark! The Herald Angels Sing, by Donna Andrews.

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The Return of a King - The Battle for Afghanistan 1839 - 1842 William Dalrymple

The king in question was Shah Shuja, who ruled Afghanistan in the early 1800s. He was forced out by the leader of a rival clan and lived in exile for decades in India.

In the 1830s the British colonial government decided that they needed a puppet ruler on the throne in Kabul to counter the threat from Russia in Central Asia (the beginning of the Great Game), so they mustered an army of British and Indian troops and invaded Afghanistan. To give you an idea of how it went here are some of the chapter titles - “the Mouth of Hell” and “All Order is at an End”. Of the perhaps 80,000 soldiers who started the war, a few hundred or thousand survived.

The book is extensively researched and quite well written, with lots of nice illustrations as well.

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I read Dust of Snow a novella by Indra Vaughn today, a sweet m/m office romance and Love in 24 Frames by C.S. Poe, her annual Christmas short story; a m/m romance between a shy photographer and the receptionist at his studio.

I discovered I have several Christmas themed romance novellas, m/m and m/f, on my KIndle so what better way to get into the holiday spirit?

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They offered dual covers in Thailand too, for all the books in the series.

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Finished Lark! The Herald Angels Sing, by Donna Andrews, which I enjoyed.

Now I’m reading Mysteries and Lore of Western Maryland: Snallygasters, Dogmen and Other Mountain Tales, by Susan Fair.

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Finished Mysteries and Lore of Western Maryland: Snallygasters, Dogmen and Other Mountain Tales, by Susan Fair. I liked it a lot. It’s a mix of fact and folk tales, and sometimes it’s a toss up as to which is more unbelievable.

Now I’m reading The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley.

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Gather the Fortunes is a pretty decent modern fantasy set in New Orleans. It’s a sequel to City of Lost Fortunes, but works as a standalone novel. The author has definitely got a lot to say about the city itself and loves it thoroughly.

Sal and Gabi Break the Universe should win the Newbery this year, IMHO. If I tell you it stars a kid with diabetes whose mom died, whose best friend’s baby brother is on the verge of death, who nearly gets beat up in the first chapter, and who discovers that another kid at school is being abused so badly that the police get involved, you’d get totally the wrong idea about the book. All that is true, and all of that is taken seriously, but the book is also ridiculously funny.

There’s a passage in the book where the narrator talks about how, after his Mami died, everyone kept asking him to talk about his feelings, and how frustrating that was–how he only was able to cope with her death when he discovered stage magic and comedy, that being silly and awesome was how he healed. It’s a great passage, and it’s something that wayyyyyy to many children’s authors profoundly don’t get, especially during Newbery season. You can have books that deal with serious issues without making them all weepy and depressing.

I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at a book since Terry Pratchett. If you have any love for kid’s books, check it out!

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I started reading Dickens’s Bleak House earlier this year, and finally finished it after a couple of longish breaks. Really enjoyed it. Probably my favorite of his books (well, of the ones that I’ve read, anyway).

Also read Woodward and bernstein, All the President’s Men. Interesting to hear the events described from the POV of the reporters who had so much to do with breaking the story and bringing the president down. That being said, the story seemed to bog down a lot, or maybe I was just less interested than some readers might be in the ins and outs of investigative journalism–knocking on this door, calling that person, meetings with editors about whether to run a story–I wanted less of a procedural, I guess, but I suppose that would’ve been a different book.

Fascinating to read the book at this particular point in US history, though. So many parallels between the Nixon White House and that of Trump–the constant drumbeat of “the so-called ‘scandal’,” and “no one outside the beltway cares,” and “the media is just persecuting the president,” and rumblings about “hearsay” and “anonymous sources” and, well, we’re hearing it now and we’ve heard it all before. The book ends with a description of nixon’s “five wars.” The first, against the anti-Vietnam war movement, isn;t quite relevant today, but the others are awfully familiar:

–the war on the news media
–the war against the Democrats
–the war on the justice system; and
–the war on history.

Wow.

Couple of quotes:

“On [the tapes], he is heard to talk endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history, and above all his grudges, animosities, and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.”

Watergate was “a brazen and daring assault, led by [the president] himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.”

The more things change…

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Finished My LIfe as an Ice Cream Sandwich. Ultimately I didn’t care for it, and found it hard going, because her protagonist was so coimpletely out-of-touch and unaccommodating. It was painful to read.

Now I’m reading The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham, with notes by Leslie Klinger. But it’s a big, heavy book, unsuited to carrying around. So when I go out I take a used copy of Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, which I have not previously read. It contains three of his Nicholas van Rijn stories, about a futuristic Hanseatic League.

On audio, I’ve finished The Ballad of Tom Dooley and am re-reading Clive Cussler’s Piranha until I can find a new audiobook.

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I finished the O’Brian book - not his best, I’d have to say, but still pretty good.

I’m now almost halfway through Stephen King’s Thinner, about a very fat lawyer placed under a Gypsy curse to waste away after his accidentally hits and kills a Gypsy woman. At first he’s pleased with his weight loss, but when it shows no sign of stopping, he gets just a bit worried. At one point the author has a character say, “This all sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel!” Ha.