Picked up and put down: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, and judging from the reviews at Goodreads, it was definitely the right decision. It only took me two pages to hate it. I see that Stephen King blurbed it; if I had known that earlier, I’d never have picked it up. His recommendations have been uniformly terrible, to me.
Picked up and put down: Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall. This time I made it almost 50 pages before a seemingly endless text message exchange wore me out. Also, I was still upset about this sentence on page 15: “She wears black jeans, a black tank top, and a black sweater that has slipped down one shoulder, baring a freckled shoulder.”
I’m not sure what’s next, but I don’t get too much time to read around the holidays, so I’ll probably catch up with you guys again in January.
Finished an audiobook of Logan’s Run, which I realized about halfway through was abridged. Now I’d like to read the whole thing.
Just started Richard Bachman’s (Stephen King’s) The Running Man, about a desperate man who goes on a near-future lethal reality TV show. So far, so good.
Finished Magic for Liars, and really liked it. It’s a noir murder mystery set at a high school for mages, and all that was fine, but what made it really work is the author’s keen eye for characters. The emotional beats all worked for me, and I wasn’t expecting that.
Finished The Psychology of Time Travel, by Kate Mascarenhas. I enjoyed it, but there was a problem with (I presume) the typesetting in the hardcover edition I read. In dozens of paragraphs, either there should be an indentation to start a new paragraph and it’s not there, or there shouldn’t be one, but there is. Sometimes this makes figuring out who said what a little tricky. I’ve never seen this problem in a book before. It doesn’t seem to be plot-related at all.
Now I’m reading A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Fiction, by Suzette Field.
DNF Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. I really wanted to like it–we need more middle-school fantasies that aren’t centered around Northern Europe mythologies–but this one was so paint-by-numbers, just swapping out Brer Rabbit and John Henry for Merlin and Thor, that I couldn’t stay interested.
I’m in the early chapters of Rick Atkinson’s The British are Coming, the first in his Revolutionary War trilogy. I read Atkinson’s WWII trilogy and was very impressed with his research and writing skills. This one grabbed me right away. It’s a weighty tome, though; even subtracting the 200 pages of footnotes and references, it’s over 500 pages.
If Cats Disappeared from the World, by Genki Kawamura. Read in one sitting today. It wanted so much to be profound, but it read like that book your best friend was writing in the eighth grade and you had to pretend you liked it. A few times it made me remember all too clearly the loss of beloved pets…who needs that?
I finished Stephen King’s The Running Man and was unimpressed. Several big plot holes and a generally sour tone.
Better was Robert Parker’s Valediction, a 1984 Spenser novel in which the Boston private eye goes looking for a dancer allegedly kidnapped by a conservative Christian sect.
On the home stretch of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Next up: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, a well-reviewed bio of the troubled painter.
Finished Monsters Among Us: A Bianca Jones Collection, by John L. French, which was okay.
Now I’m reading The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe, by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon.
I’ve got a STACK of new books to read, between ones I picked up and Christmas gifts. Right now I’m reading Nicholas J. Higham’s King Arthur: The Making of the Legend. I’ve got a huge collection of books on King Arthur, including a subset I’ve been collecting since the 1980s in which people claim to have identified the “real” King Arthur. Each author excoriates his predecessors roundly before putting forth his or her new claimant.
This book looks at all the claims, including the Dalmatian and Sarmatian theories (the basis for the 2004 film King Arthur, and something that irks me because, in all my previous readings about the Big A I had never before encountered this idea. Higham doesn’t believe them, but he explains and dissects the claims with painstaking and exquisite care. This book is a great read, if you’re into Arthurian mythology. Otherwise, it’s probably extended boredom.
I also picked up quite a few audiobooks for my morning and evening commute.
Lots of time to read over the holidays, fortunately. I finished Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which is a bit too polemical but makes some good points and is worth a read for anyone interested in criminal justice reform.
I also read, in a day, the new graphic novel The Handmaid’s Tale, with text adapted from her own book by Margaret Atwood and artwork by Renee Nault. I haven’t read the original book or seen the TV series, but thought this was pretty good - scary, unsettling and hopeful in appropriate measure.
Hope you’ll check out Arthur Rex by Thomas Berger, if you haven’t already. A clever, engrossing take on Arthurian legend; his retelling of Sir Gawaine’s tale is particularly good.
No spoilers! 