Starting today on The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson. A bit like The House With A Clock In Its Walls, told by a grown-up Lewis.
I just finished Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate. It was the last book she wrote, and it is astonishingly bad (and I say that as a big Christie fan). I don’t know how on earth it got published without a complete editing overhaul. There’s very little in the way of plot, and most of the book is vague, repetitive dialogue that never goes anywhere. Thank goodness she wrote Curtain and Sleeping Murder in the 1940s and arranged to have them published after she stopped writing. They are much better capstones to her career than this sad document.
I’ve started Richard Patterson and Peter de Jonge’s The Beach House, a murder mystery set in a wealthy Long Island beach community. So far it’s meh.
Just so you know, it’s not a good likeness.
I’m sure the snout is too long.
Good news for fans of Martha Wells’ Murderbot. 
Goody!
Gave it my obligatory 50 pages and then gave up. It started meh and it stayed meh.
I’m about halfway through John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream and am really enjoying it. Some particularly clever scenes of near-future computer hacking and U.S. Government bureaucratic infighting.
I’ve begun an audiobook of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, a British novel spanning several decades but rooted in World War II counterespionage. So far, so good.
:eek:
Devour??!!!? We’ve been married since 1981! She changed my outlook on life! 
Kate Atkinson is such a good writer that any of her books are worth reading, but sometimes her genre choices don’t agree with my tastes. I really like the Jackson Brody mysteries but didn’t care for the “magical realism” (for lack of a better term) of some of her other novels. And I was a little disappointed that in Transcription she opted to delve into the International Espionage genre, which I don’t care for at all. But if you like that sort of subject matter, you may really enjoy the book.
Finished We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. (Translated by Mirra Ginsburg). It’s a very early SF dystopia, and I can see the influence on later ones.
Started A Long Time Coming by Aaron Elkins.
I’m pretty sure I remember correctly that she was one of my high school teachers’ aunts.
“Just a few more decades of outraging and I’ll move on to the killing part, I swear! I can stop any time!”
Oh, good – you’re here. Since you are, maybe you can answer something. Do you actually have a snout, or is that a detail the concordance got wrong?
I’m enjoying it so far, although her protagonist is not an especially interesting or lively figure.
Good Gravy, the book is only six months old and already being scalped. 32.50 for a copy? Sheesh…
Yeah…I finished it and have to say…meh. I already offered my copy to someone else but if they don’t take it I’ll be happy to send it on to you!
I’m on now to I Remember You: A Ghost Story by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. Liking it so far.
Excellent
Finished A Long Time Coming by Aaron Elkins. It was pretty good.
Now I’m reading No Sunscreen for the Dead, by Tim Dorsey.
Finished Dreamcatcher, by Stephen King. Twenty-three years after saving a Down’s syndrome kid from bullies, four friends, now men, reunite for their annual hunting trip in Maine. A stranger stumbles into their camp disoriented and babbling about lights in the sky. It seems at least some of those UFO reports over the decades may have been true after all. I liked it, but King himself reportedly does not think much of it. He wrote it in longhand while recovering from being hit by a car, similar to one of the four friends in this book. King also again revisits the fictional town of Derry, the setting of It, and there are references to that novel. I think anyone who reads any of King’s post-1986 work really should read It first, he makes so many references to it. King’s timing on this novel was a bit unfortunate, as it came out in 2001 and is set largely in November of that year in an America at peace. No sign of 9/11 at all. But how was he to know? Still, he wrote it from 1999-2000, and it may have been a little less awkward had he set it in, say, 2000. But I enjoyed it despite King’s own reservations.
Next up is one more Stephen King: Needful Things.
The Derry of Dreamcatcher could easily be in a parallel universe, as it was in some parts of 11/22/63. Perhaps 9/11 never happened there.
Just finished The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi, a pretty good tale of interstellar diplomacy, murderous alien dynastic ambition, bureaucratic infighting and genetic engineering. Some great action scenes, including an attempted kidnapping in a shopping mall and the hostile boarding of a starliner. The death of a major character was written in such a way that I found it surprisingly touching. The ending was not quite up to Scalzi’s usual standards, but overall I enjoyed the book.
Next up: Nathaniel Philbrick’s history In the Hurricane’s Eye, about Gen. Washington coordinating with the French army and navy to bottle up and defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown in late 1781.