I’ve taken the liberty of starting a new one now that we have reached Double Groundhog Day. Hope no one minds me doing it! A little late, to be sure, but hey–February’s short enough, and if it gets shrunk on both ends who’ll notice?
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 2005. Consequently when he suddenly and quite unexpectantly passed away, January of 2013 we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I just finished Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. It’s a short novel about a family and some students re-enacting Iron Age British traditions (basically, really roughing it in the woods) with much potential for Bad Things to happen. I liked it very much although I think the book ended before the story did.
Next up, a recommendation from a friend, The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware. It’s off to a promising start.
I was just trying (unsuccessfully) to quote from the January thread. I can always cross-quote when I’m not trying…
But I wanted to respond to the poster who was looking for a new series, mentioning Jack Reacher and Harry Bosch.
I would highly recommend F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series, which I’ve described as Jack Reacher with a supernatural twist. Sort of like if Reacher became the middleman for the existential struggle between the forces of good and evil in the universe. Repairman Jack longs to be a loner like Reacher, in large part because of those pesky existential forces of good and evil that seek to weaponize his relationships, but all his friends and family keep getting in the way of that goal.
There are sixteen books in the series ( plus some YA books dealing with Jack as a teen, some short stories and a couple of prequel novels) so if you like them you’re set for awhile. Here a link to the first.
I am still struggling through Madeleine L’Engle’s Wind the Door. It’s still pretty dreadful. I’m still wondering how it can be so bad when its predecessor, A Wrinkle in Time, was so good. Go figure!
On the brighter side, I read a recent nonfiction book by a writer named Earl Swift. It’s called Chesapeake Requiem, and it’s about Tangier Island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Home for generations to people who catch oysters and crabs, under the twin pressures of demographic loss (older people dying, younger people getting older, still-younger people leaving the island in search of opportunities somewhere else; population is down to under 500 from a peak of over a thousand not that long ago) and dry land loss (due to rising sea levels and other factors, the island is considerably smaller than it was even a generation ago, and may be uninhabitable in as little as 25 years if something isn’t done).
Swift lived on the island for most of a year and functioned mostly as a fly on the wall. He’s an excellent observer and a careful listener, and the book is fascinating. The islanders tend toward the very conservative and it’s interesting to see the tension between “the government is evil” and “we need government help.” There’s a lot about religion (there have been big schisms), which I found fascinating, and of course there’s the reality of living on an island that you love, that’s always been home, that’s been a part of your family going back six or seven generations–and that is probably going to disappear, one way or another, before too much longer. (One “fun” thing is that the islanders, as a group, refuse to accept the reality of climate change and say it’s all about erosion.)
Anyway, I understand there are a bunch of other books and articles about this island, most of which I haven’t read; but this one is really excellent and comes highly recommended (by me anyway :)).
I’ve finished the other books I listed last month, but I’m still on Jeff Hecht’s ** Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon**. I noticed that the copy I have is autographed – Jeff must’ve signed them at Arisia after he showed me his initial copy Friday night. But it’s just his name. He agreed to add a more personal inscription when next I saw him.
I still have Operation: Luna by Poul Anderson which I haven’t yet read, but I wasn’t al that thrilled with operation: Chaos, so I might hold off for a while on that one. I have other books I need to get through, like in Joy Still Felt, the second volume of Asimov’s autobiography.
I have a new computer game (XCom2 War of the Chosen if anyone cares), and it’s sucked my brain in, so I’ve read very little over the past month. But I just finished Ramsey Campbell’s Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, an odd, literate horror novel that’s very big on the slow burn and family dynamics. Rarely have I so wanted a major character in a book to meet a grisly death.
Overall I’m not sure if it worked: some of the conflict seemed artificial, and the climactic scene was a little off for my tastes. But there were big sections of the book that were beautifully written, and even the most murderable character was rounded and plausible.
Oh, on audio I’m finishing up Bob Woodward’s Fear, about inside the Trump White House. Gives me an opportunity to cringe over Trump White House Past as I hear about Trump White House Present and fear for Trump White House Future.
After that, the new Clive Cussler (plus co-author du jour Boyd Morrison) Oregon Files novel Shadow Tyrants. My guilty pleasure, but I’ll have earned it, slogging through Trump’s world.
Turns out I’ve read 12 books since I last participated in one of these threads. There were an awful lot of three-star books in there, so I’ll only mention the ones that stood out as exceptionally good:
When Never Comes by Barbara Davis starts with the main character discovering that her husband has been killed in a car accident. With him in the car was an unidentified woman with her shirt off. The woman attempts to begin a new life for herself, but the unresolved details of his murder bothers her and she begins to search for answers. The story is engrossing and the writing is excellent. And I think I fell for the love interest in this book. I’m ashamed to admit it, because I think it’s so weird that people would feel anything for characters in a book, but god damn, I need to find a real-life version of that guy!
Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn is a great balance of action, snark, emotions, relationship building, character development, and world-building. It features a werewolf who hosts a radio show on the supernatural. The book had me on the edge of my seat, I zipped through it in two days, and it’s the only book out of this batch of twelve that earned five stars from me. And I’m not even the sort of person who typically reads books on werewolves.
Hunger by Roxane Gay is a memoir about one woman’s experience with being – I think the term she used was “super morbidly obese”? It’s a term reserved for people with a BMI over 50. The author has a great way of writing; her prose is fluid and reading her words seems to take so little effort. I think feeling self-conscious and super-aware of your body is a pretty common phenomena, but the author is so large that she faced some unique challenges that I’ve never thought much about (for example, she has to worry about whether she will have a chair to sit in when she goes out somewhere, because chairs with arms are sometimes too small for her to fit into, and some chairs aren’t built to support a woman as large as her).
I just finished the last book of P. N. Elrod’s vampire files that I’m going to read. In general, I really enjoyed it, but nearly every book, the author tortures the main character. And the torture is written from the POV of the person being tortured. Since he is a vampire, he can be tortured pretty intensely - in one of the later books he is skinned alive.
Just a little too much for me. My theory is that she writes those scenes whenever she’s mad at her SO.
What I’m reading now is romantic dreck. I have low expectations
Finished Dreams of Gods and Monsters, so I’m all done with Laini Taylor’s trilogy. It was okay, but it never seemed to reach its full potential, and there’s a bunch of stuff needlessly thrown in at the end that could have been done more neatly to tie everything up, or even left out entirely. Still, it wasn’t a waste of time; there were a lot of likeable characters.
Started Happy Doomsday, which I picked up a while back on sale. At least now I’m reading new stuff instead of re-reading things; I was really in a rut for a while there.
This has been on my to-read list for a long time. I keep hesitating to pick it up, because I know it’s about baseball and statistics, and I like statistics but I’m not a fan of baseball, so I can’t tell whether I’d like it or not. Please let me know if it’s more of a statistics book or a baseball book!
I didn’t finish How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu because man that was some booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooring crap.I think Mr Yu fancies himself the next Douglas Adams but he doesn’t have the talent or the snark. And what is it with Asian writers and their parent issues?
I more or less finished The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Like some kind of demented Energizer bunny it just kept going and going…
I’ll be interested to see what non-baseball folks think of it. I don’t think you have to follow baseball to enjoy or appreciate it, and maybe in some ways it will be helpful not to bring your own preconceived notions to the book… You do have to be pretty knowledgeable about baseball to see some of the book’s flaws (without going into too much detail, the main issue is the book pretty much ignores Oakland’s best players at the time because they don’t fit the narrative). Whether that’s a plus or a minus, again, I’m not sure.
The book’s not really about statistics, specifically; to the extent it’s about stats it’s mostly about the philosophy behind statistics. Which stats tell you what’s important? Which stats look good but don’t actually inform your thinking? Which stats DO inform your thinking…but shouldn’t? Most of all, how do you determine how to use stats in a way that other people aren’t using them, in a way that will give you an edge? That kind of thing. It’s certainly an interesting way of looking at the issue, and while the book has its flaws (see above, plus a couple of other things), it does raise provocative ideas. As I said, interested to see how non-fans react!
I’m taking a break from A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Bachman, a novel about a Swedish old fart. My sister loved it, but at about a hundred pages in, I’m underwhelmed. The author clearly wants Ove to be a lovable curmudgeon but to me he’s simply a crotchety asshole.
I’ve been enjoying Michelle Obama’s Becoming, her memoir. She has a clear, straightforward writing style and tells her story well. Quite a bit about growing up middle class in a decaying South Side Chicago neighborhood, but only two paragraphs (!) about Harvard Law School. I’m up to her early law career in a well-heeled Chicago firm; she’s just been asked to mentor a bright young summer associate, a guy from Hawaii named… hang on, what was it?.. damn. Oh, it’ll come to me. Or read the book yourself.
And I’m also now on the home stretch of an audiobook of Tara Westover’s Educated, another memoir, about the daughter of a fundamentalist/survivalist Idaho Mormon family who is (very cursorily) homeschooled but finds surprising academic success at Brigham Young University and then Cambridge. Pretty good, but often frustrating as, time after time, she puts up with and tries to please her physically-abusive brother and Bible-thumping, mentally-ill dad.
Just finished Blood for Blood, a free book from Amazon Prime, and I liked the story enough to pre-order the second in the series. It’s about Ziba Mackenzie, a former British special forces, now now a profiler, who’s helping to hunt down a serial killer. Well-paced, with twists and turns I was not expecting.
I’m reading The Forgotten Hours right now, but I’m still at the beginning so we’re still getting the set-up. It appears to be one of those books like Sharp Objects, ie, small-town-girl-comes-home-to-face-her-past-demons sort of thing. So far, so good.
I DNFed Geek Love by Katharine Dunn at page 40. I’m definitely not the target demographic since I’ve worked with Special Needs kids for 30+ years. The book was creepy and I felt intensely uncomfortable reading it.
Digging through my pile of to-be-read books I encountered Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero before I reached the second volume of Asimov’s autobio. Pepper Mill had already read it, and left it on my stack. So I think I’ll read that after I finish Hecht’s book instead of Asimov.