Finished Martians, Go Home! by Fredric Brown. I thought the premise was interesting, but the ending was a little flat.
Now I’m reading The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book: The Winners, the Losers, and Everybody In Between, edited by Robert Mankoff.
I love McCullough, too, and certainly intend to read the book - didn’t know so much of it is about Ohio! And I have indeed heard of Blennerhassett before, and have even been to the Ohio River island named after him: Blennerhassett Island Historical State Park - Wikipedia
Finished Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie. Didn’t spot whodunnit, possibly because I was trying to be too clever and meta. It wasn’t the female romantic lead, IOW.Also finished Haiku by Andrew Vachss. I didn’t care for it - I guess I am tired of endless rewrites of the Burke stories. If homeless people had near-superhuman powers like his do, they would be running the world. And I abandoned the book about the OJ Simpson defense - it’s too depressing to realize that he is walking around loose.
Next on the paper list is Vince Flynn Act of Treason. Audiobook is The Adventures of Doctor Syn, because of an adaptation I loved of it on the old “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” when I was a wee Shodan.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve started the first book of George R. R. Martin’s saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. No idea if this will hold my interest or not.
That would’ve been The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, starring Patrick McGoohan. Just about the same time that came out, Hammer films did an adaptation called (in the US) Night Creatures, evidently hoping to rope in horror fans with a little false advertising. (In the UK, it was called Captain Clegg).
The original book was published in 1915, and there had been a 1937 film based on it.
I was familiar with all of this. I hadn’t realized that there had ben several audio adaptations. They’re listed on the Wikipedia site – Doctor Syn - Wikipedia
Yup, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. I suppose “Dr. Syn” would be too risque for Disney.
It’s been more than fifty years, and I can still remember bits of the Disney show. Dr. Syn is a parson or the equivalent, and his assistant is the sexton. The British press gang is coming during a church service, and the assistant slips into church and sings along with the hymn “The naval press gang’s o-on the roooooad”. So the parishioners scatter.
Then there was a scene where the Scarecrow is pretending to hang a villain, but ties the rope around the back of his chair so he is only choked unconscious. They revive him, and the Scarecrow growls at him something that was intensely funny at the time - “You’re dead! Run for your life!”
And the theme song -
*Scarecrow, Scarecrow,
The soldiers of the King feared his name.
Scarecrow, Scarecrow,
But the country folk all loved him just the same.
So the King told all his soldiers,
"Hang him high or hang him low!
But never return,
'Til the day I learn,
That he rides in flames below.
Or you’ll hang!
With the great Scarecrow!"*
Cripes, I’m old.
Regards,
Shodan
Damn, I read that one just last December and I still had to look it up on Wikipedia to remind me of the plot.
Having read nearly all of Christie’s mysteries, I don’t know if that’s a curse or a blessing. It’s very frustrating that the plots and characters are so easily forgotten once you launch into the next one, but on the other hand I guess they’ll all seem new again if I decide to go back and read them a second time.
I just finished one of Ruth Rendell’s early Inspector Wexford novels, A Guilty Thing Surprised. It has a clever plot, but all of the characters are so unpleasant that it wasn’t much fun to read.
Have you read Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone? Not exactly a mystery, but very much a tragedy, and very, very good.
But you are correct about Christie - her characters, apart from Poirot and Miss Marple, are interchangeable and the plots just puzzle pieces. Her books are almost pure whodunnits, and not much literary merit apart from that. Of course, in several cases (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Curtain, arguably Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None) that is quite enough.
Regards,
Shodan
Finished it. A good but not great history. I learned quite a bit about Lincoln’s early role in approving and encouraging the project, and also all the financial chicanery involved to later raise the necessary piles of money for it (Credit Mobilier, anyone?).
Next up: Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel, Live and Let Die.
I’ll have to read that one, thanks. I have to be careful with Rendell, because she seems overly fond of extremely grim story lines. So far I have mostly been limiting myself to the Inspector Wexford series, because they don’t tend to be quite as depressing as her stand-alone novels* (the downside of Wexford: his extremely irritating daughters).
*Although I have to admit I found the out-of-control sugar-free candy addict in Portobello to be pretty humorous.
Be warned, then - A Judgment in Stone is grim indeed. I haven’t read all of Rendell, but off the top of my head I can’t name one of her works that is as non-grim as Christie. That’s not to say that Rendell is better or worse than Christie, but the experience of reading each is going to be different.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m about a third of the way through Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel, Live and Let Die. Very different from the movie, not surprisingly, and even for 1954 quite openly racist (including a chapter that includes the N-word in its title). Can’t say I’m wowed so far. The villain, Mr. Big, is described as a criminal mastermind but just did something pretty stupid.
I’ve also begun Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek, about JFK’s Cabinet and White House staff, their clashes of views and personalities, and how they did - or didn’t - serve the President well through various foreign and domestic crises.
Finished The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book: The Winners, the Losers, and Everybody In Between, edited by Robert Mankoff. This book was a lot of fun.
Now I’m reading The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl.
I finished Bossypants on Monday night, and started reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I’d downloaded a Kindle sample a couple of weeks ago, after zimaane posted about it. 
This gentile finds the yiddish terminology a little distracting at times, but last night I got to the end of the sample and decided to buy the book so I could keep reading it.
I’ve finished two books this week (yay summer!):
Ruin of Kings. I once described a David Weber novel as ordnance porn, given how much salacious detail he used in writing about missiles, bullets, and other ways to kill people. This book isn’t ordnance porn, but halfway through I decided it was family tree porn.
Lots of epic fantasies revolve around characters discovering that they’re the third cousin twice removed of the emperor’s butler’s seamstress, and I’m always like, yeah yeah yeah, yer gonna turn out to be the emperor’s secret daughter by the climactic scene. I don’t care about family tree stuff. But it’s rarely been done to such a rococo degree as it was in this book. There was a serviceable bog-standard fantasy story under there, but it was hard to get at, given all the angsting and double-twist-twice-removed dialog about who was related to whom and how.
Not my favorite.
Contrast that against Winter of the Witch, the third book in the trilogy started with The Bear and the Nightingale. The trilogy is set in a mythologized 19th-century Russia. I freaking LOVED it. The writing is lovely, the characters are compelling, the plotting is brisk.
It’s got a lot in common with another of my favorite books this year, Spinning Silver: both set in mythologized pre-revolutionary Russia, drawing on the same myths for the primary supernatural conflicts, starring a strong-willed witchy girl working against a crappy society. I’m curious about how well these books have been received in Russia.
Next up: Tiamat’s Wrath. It’s been awhile since I’ve read the other Expanse novels, and I wish I had a “When we left off…” one-page synopsis to read.
Left Hand, you should be able to look up the individual books for their summaries on Wikipedia.
I believe there is an American version that is slightly but not-very-much better. It leaves out about a page and a half when Bond and Leiter are in the night club in Harlem and overhearing a conversation between a girl and her pimpish boyfriend that is rather much. But it leaves in some other nasty stuff about how you can’t hurt a black guy by hitting him on the head, and one of the minions’ head gives off a metallic klong when Bond hits him on the back of the head with a gun.
Yeah, letting enemy agents go because you are bored after you’ve captured them with your incredible disappearing table is pretty implausible.
I did like the “In Case of Atomic Attack Get Off the Bridge” signs, though.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks! It looks like the last couple of books just give preludes, which may be enough–but now I’m not sure if I read the immediate prequel to Tiamat. I’ll dig some more.
Finished The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl. Not recommended.
Next up: Tart of Darkness, which is a cozy mystery by Denise Swanson.
Just finished Fleming’s Live and Let Die. It was OK but not great. Some of the stuff you mentioned, Shodan, even the non-racist stuff, wasn’t in my audiobook, although it was listed as unabridged.
I’m taking a break from Dallek’s Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, and will next be turning to Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet. I’m in the mood for some noir.