Finished Freewheel: #HonoluluLaw, #FamousTriathlete, & a #Charity, by Katharine M. Nohr, the second of her Tri-Angles trilogy and sequel to the first installment, Land Sharks. The author is a local attorney and writer. You may remember she’s the one whose Land Sharks I got from her at a Christmas-party gift exchange last December. The friend of a friend, and when she heard I liked the first book, she loaned me a copy of the second through our mutual friend. The heroine of the series is a young lawyer/triathlete in Honolulu who solves sports-related crimes while dating a TV star of a show in the vein of Hawaii Five-0 or Magnum PI. It was okay. I’d rate the first one a little better. The soppy romance in this one could have been toned down some, as they seemed more like high schoolers than young attorneys and even middle-aged men. To the author’s credit, one of the characters at one point even says the situation “sounds too much like a bad soap opera.” And I easily guessed the real killer. But it was okay. I always like reading stories set in Hawaii, with its familiar place names. Not sure I would recommend it to anyone who does not have an interest in Hawaii. But if you are interested in Hawaii, I would cautiously recommend it. And same as before, she desperately needs a better editor to iron out the mistakes.
Next up is The Pioneers: The Historic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, the latest from my favorite historian, David McCullough.
I am reading a Harry Turtledove Alternate History from last year called In Darkest Europe. It’s set in an alternate near present where North African and Middle Eastern Muslim nations are a progressive and relatively peaceful First Word and Europe is backward, hyper violent and fundamentalist. Only just started but good so far and an easier read than I expected.
Got about halfway through Desolation Mountain by William Kent Krueger. It’s part of a series of suspense/mystery novels set in Minnesota’s North Country. I read one or two of the earlier ones and they were all right, but this one I’m giving up on. There’s a little too much “I can tell what kind of man he is by shaking his hand and looking him in the eye,” for one thing, and there are a few other problems with the book…
But the main issue is the Ojibway interpreter-of-visions who speaks in Yoda-like riddles using slightly off-center English, is over 100 years old but stands up straight and tall when he shakes hands with people, seems to have Wonderful Native Insight into the character of everyone who comes along (exactly who the Bad Guys are isn’t entirely clear yet), and is listened to and obeyed by all the other characters. None of it works for me, at all. Also, he calls men by their full names (“We may not be given to understand, Corcoran O’Connor”) while calling women by their relationship to him (“Bring me a little water, Niece”). The final straw for me was a page where he speaks two times to said niece. The first line is “Stay, Niece.” The second is “Sit, Niece.” I suspect the author did not intend to imply that the character (or the author himself) sees women as dogs, but that surely is the implication I got.
Too bad; it’s reasonably well written and the setting is interesting, but I’m movin’ on. There’s a biography of Dr. Seuss with my name on it for next.
I finished Verses for the Dead and then Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams on a long car trip this weekend. (The segment “Drunken Fireworks” is a hoot. Told in a broad Maine dialect, with no horror whatsoever in it.) The next audiobook up was donated to me – Genghis: Rise of an Empire by Conn Igulden, co-author of The Dangerous Book for Boys, which makes this kind of interesting. It’s the first installment of a historical novel series, it turns out, not a history. Interesting so far.
I’m well into Tales of the Marvellous and Strange, but I’ve taken a break for Dave Barry’s Lessons from Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog. Barry wrote Dave Barry Turns 40 thirty years ago, and Dave Barry Turns 50 a decade later. Then, I noticed, there was no Dave Barry turns 60. This book is sorta Dave Barry Turns 70. As Bill Maher remarked on his show recently, Dave Barry is one of those people who seems to barely age, but Dave is clearly feeling his mortality now, and this book is his response to that. Funny, of course, (“I’m not saying professional humor is grueling work, like mining coal or cleaning toilets or being a personal assistant to a Kardashian…”), but you can sense the darkness under it.
I’ve also picked up Mysterious Stone Sites – in the Hudson Valley of New York and Northern New Jersey by Linda Zimmermann. It’s a revealing book about what appear to be rather elaborately constructed stone chambers, dolmens, and the like in the Hudson valley, by someone who is convinced there’s something interesting here, but isn’t a Barry Fell worshipper. Having visited Mystery Hill in New Hampshire and knowing about Gungywamp in Connecticut, I’ve been curious about these massive stone constructions in the Northeast, and skeptical of both orthodox dismissers (“root cellars” and the like) and damned near pan-spermic theorizers who suggest that everyone and his brother came to the Northeast just to build enigmatic stone structures.
Finished The Sun Smasher by Ed Hamilton. No better than it needed to be - pulp sci-fi, with a semi-standard plot but Hamilton rang the changes on it as well as might be. It ended pretty much as I expected, and reminded me of Ender’s Game, and for many of the same motivations. Currently audiobook-reading Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy for many of the same reasons - I want to see Christie do her thing with stock characters and plot twists and a standard-issue Christie whodunit.
On dead trees, I am reading American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the OJ Simpson Defense as sort of a flip side of a whodunit - I am only a bit into it, but it’s already clear whodunit, and the defense appears to realize this. OJ is claiming he hasn’t been to Nicole’s house for a week, and his blood got there from a cut finger that he sustained that morning. And OJ has said not one single, solitary word about any concern for who “really” killed Nicole - only self-pitying “why me” and acting suicidal. It’s kind of obvious.
Also got an Andrew Vachss novel called Haiku, which is another incarnation of his Burke novels. It appears I am reading only things with which I am familiar - maybe I need to stretch myself next.
Started today on The Witch of Willow Hall, by Hester Fox. For some reason, it didn’t look very appealing to me and I couldn’t remember why I had chosen it. Then, in the first chapter, death of a kitten. Ditched.
Finished The Nickel-Plated Beauty, a historical novel for children by Patricia Beatty. It was okay, although it was written in 1964 (and set in the 1880’s) and parts of it have dated badly.
Now I’m reading A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis.
I just finished the latest Anthony Horowitz murder mystery, The Sentence is Death. All of his books are good reads, and this one is no different. I don’t really care for the Daniel Hawthorne character, but otherwise Horowitz has a great gimmick going here (making himself and other real people characters in the story) and I’ll read them as long as he keeps writing them.
I’m about three-quarters of the way through Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In The World, about the building of the US Transcontinental Railroad in the late 1860s. Key takeaways: (1) it was an amazing engineering achievement, especially tunneling through the solid granite of the Sierra Madre mountains, and (2) jeez oh man was just about everybody racist against both the Indians who raided camps and work parties along the line, and the Chinese laborers who overwhelmingly did the hard work on the Central Pacific portion of the road. Pretty ugly stuff.
I also just zipped through *Old Man’s War *by John Scalzi - terrific military sf with a deep core of humanism and love. Third time I’ve read it, I think.
I’m a huge fan of audiobooks read by John Lee. Not only does he have a great voice, but he chooses very interesting books to narrate.
I’ve been switching between two novels that I’m very happy with: By Gaslight and 131 Days. The first is a complex, 19th-century mystery involving the son of Allan Pinkerton. The second is about a group of gladiators fighting in a city similar to ancient Rome.
Finished The Pioneers: The Historic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, the latest from my favorite historian, David McCullough. Covering the years 1787-1863, this is nominally about the Northwest Territory ceded to the US by the 1783 Treaty of Versailles ending the Revolutionary War and which eventually became the five states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. But the focus is the state of Ohio itself, specifically the area surrounding Marietta, the first American settlement in the territory. Despite the other four states being left by the wayside, this is a very informative and satisfying read. I urge Elendil’s Heir to pick up a copy. And I would ask him if he has heard before of the colorful Irish immigrant Harman Blennerhassett and his involvement in the Aaron Burr conspiracy.
Have started reading The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, by CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta. I’m 63 pages in and finding it fantastic.
In addition to the other books I’ve mention upstream, I have a couple of new ones:
The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein – I got this one for free, in excellent condition. I’m pretty sure I’ve read them all, but it’s been few years. Hard to believe this book came out 20 years ago.
Gilgamesh – I’ve read multiple translations already, but this one caught my eye in a bookstore on Friday. There were two Penguin editions, side by side, and one was three times as thick as the other. The thin one was the Sandars prose translation I’ve already read (more than once), but the thicker one was a newer and verse translation* that I hadn’t read. It had lot of newer supporting material, too, including the Sumerian poems about “Bilgamesh”. I’ve read the introductory material. Again, this one came out twenty years ago, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.
For Father’s Day, my wife got me a copy of David McCulloch’s The Pioneers, which I’ll hold of reading until I plow through more of the stack I’m already reading.
*Penguin did something similar with Beowulf – they simultaneously sold both a prose and a verse translation. I’ve got both.
