Khadaji's Whatcha Reading Thread - February 2020 edition

Cafe Society
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February, 1/12 of the way through this year! We had spring in the Rocky Mountains for two days now winter is back. Dammit Demeter get a grip!

I am reading, and being terribly underwhelmed by, The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas.

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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Last month’s thread:Bye January! Hello longer days!

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Three-fourths of the way through Napoleon: A Life, by British historian Andrew Roberts. The original British version was entitled Napoleon the Great. A fascinating look at the French dictator, although the author could have used a better editor.

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Finished This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us, by Edgar Cantero, which was a lot of fun. It has a similar style to the Serge Storms books by Tim Dorsey.

Now I’m reading Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton.

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I’m currently reading The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. I’ll probably have to dip in and out of it, as it’s quite a doorstop and I’ve got other books that will be due back at the library.

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I needed something fun and cheerful, so I reread Pratchett’s Wee Free Men. It’s still charming. On a similar quest, I also read The Bookshop on the Shore by Jenny Colgan. I’ve read one other book of hers and it was a nice cheerful romance with good scenery. This felt very unpolished, like it hadn’t had a good copyedit or a thorough read by anyone before publication. It was a bit of a bummer.

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Finished Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. Many of these were very powerful.

Now I’m reading The Robots of Gotham, by Todd McAulty. It’s a science fiction novel.

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I finished two books tonight!

First I finished The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 2: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious, as a read-aloud for my first-grader. It was her Christmas present, and while it ain’t great literature, it’s really damn funny and charming, as Squirrel Girl always is. If you have any interest in middle-grade literature, these are worth picking up. They’re light and silly and great fun.

On the other end of the spectrum I finished Dead Astronauts, Jeff Vandermeer’s latest.

Holy shit. And not necessarily a good holy shit.

This is one of the toughest-to-finish books I’ve ever actually finished. Vandermeer has gone into full experimental mode. If I tell you that the novel is about a one-eyed future-seeing astronaut who returns to an apocalyptic world, an escaped slave who’s a mathematical genius who constantly wants to dissolve into a precipitation of salamanders, and a sentient moss named Moss who takes on human form but also is the mathematician’s girlfriend and also a science experiment, I’ll have done you a disservice, because I’ll have made the book sound far more straightforward than it actually is.

It’s very nonlinear. Character points-of-view shift constantly. Tenses and persons shift. Some chapters have a single paragraph per page. Some chapters have version numbers in the margins, counting down or up. Some chapters are written in a faded font except for key words. Some chapters comprise a dozen short sentences repeated over and over for many pages.

It’s a work of art, no doubt, and Vandermeer absolutely knows what he’s doing. But it took me nearly a month to make it through the book, and I found myself dreading returning to it. My wife kept asking me, “Is it fun?” and I was like, “What the hell kind of question is that?” which isn’t fair to her, because no, this book isn’t fun.

But I think it’s probably brilliant.

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I finished The Moving Target, the first in the hard-boiled Lew Archer private eye series by Ross Macdonald (1949). It was OK but not great. Archer is hired by a rich woman to find her alcoholic husband, who may be off for a weekend of heavy drinking, or may be cheating on her, or just maybe is the victim of foul play. Noir hijinks ensue.

On the home stretch of For One More Day by Mitch Albom, a kinda-sappy short novel picked by my book club. Not wowed so far.

Just started Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, a pop-economics look at such topics at tax fraud, test cheating, the real estate biz and the downfall of the Ku Klux Klan. Breezy and interesting.

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I finished my reread of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series and I’m now reading a true crime story about Shelly Knotek called If You Tell. Holy crap, this woman was all kinds of crazy from an early age.

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Finished The Robots of Gotham, by Todd McAulty. I enjoyed it, but more the world building than the plot. I’m hoping he writes more novels (or stories) set in that universe.

Now I’m reading Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems, by Eloise Greenfield.

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I agree. The writing was breezy and fun, and the world was interesting. I have almost no memory of the plot at all, but I think it was pretty paint-by-numbers action-movie plot. Good action scenes, though!

These are great! I’ve used several of them with kids for teaching poetry, including the title poem and one about building sand castles and eating candy.

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Sounds like House of Leaves, ugh.
I read the Southern Reach trilogy and thought it was a lot of slog for not enough payoff. Jeff Vandermeer may be brilliant, but I’m not, so I don’t have to try to read his books anymore. Yay!

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:smiley: I’m kind of reaching that point myself. His books are growing progressively less straightforward, and I think I’m done with reading him unless I hear he’s decided to return to a slightly more traditional model.

Of course, two years from now I’m gonna see his book on the New Book shelf at the library and think, “Oooh, Jeff Vandermeer! He’s always interesting!” and then two weeks later curse myself.

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Finished Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems, by Eloise Greenfield. I enjoyed the poems, and my favorite was “Harriet Tubman”.

Now I’m reading White Teeth, by Zadie Smith.

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Finished White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, which was excellent.

Now I’m reading Frances Warde and the First Sisters of Mercy, by Marie Christopher.

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Finished Stella by Starlight, a middle-grade historical fiction novel set in North Carolinaj in 1932. The protagonist is a black girl living in a small town that’s being terrorized by the Klan. It’s a pretty good look at the time period. The girl’s life is complex and full of issues not centering around her white neighbors, but racism isn’t minimized. Nor are all white people faceless villains, even though some literally are (or at least their faces are hidden by hoods).

Also, it doesn’t kill a dog or sibling as a Very Important Lesson, which is a remarkable feat for a serious kidlit book.

I’m currently reading it to my fourth graders, who are really enjoying it and moaning in protest every day when I finish read-aloud. (The fact that we go straight into math after read-aloud is surely coincidental).

Definitely recommended if children’s historical fiction is your jam.

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The ornament of the world : how Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain - María Rosa Menocal A short history of the Arab control of Andalusia, which lasted from 700 AD to the fateful year 1492. The book focuses on intellectual culture of the period. The history is quite fascinating. The book itself is interesting.

Elemental : how the periodic table can now explain (nearly) everything - Tim James. A short series of essays on how chemistry works and how it effects everyday life, with illustrations and writing style clearly inspired by xkcd. Informative stuff, but so short that a lot of interesting stuff was explained only briefly. Dmitri Mendelev only gets about a page, for example.

Permafrost - Alastair Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, a writer of superb space operas, has penned a short time travel novel. It’s the year 2080 and humanity is doomed. Some sort of plague has wiped out most life on earth and rendered agriculture impossible. In desperation, a group of scientists determine to go back in time, retrieve some seeds, and bring them forward to restore farming and save the world. But they can’t send physical bodies back, they can only project their consciousnesses into people living in the past and take over their bodies.

The book is tense, atmospheric, and suspenseful and at 150 short pages, it moves quickly. The prose is crisp and the ideas are well thought out. Highly recommended.

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Absolutely coincidence :smiley:

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Finished Frances Warde and the First Sisters of Mercy, by Marie Christopher, which was okay.

Now I’m reading Blanche Among the Talented Tenth, by Barbara Neely. It’s a cozy mystery.