Well here we are, May at last. 2019 is one-third of the way to 2020… I have discovered the way to be a book hoarder without anyone else being the wiser, even the unfortunates living in your house. (My husband insists that we will die buried under piles of books …) Buy a tablet and sign up for free e-book newsletters! My poor tablet…
Anyway currently I am reading:
Follow him Home by P.W.Davies a MMM romance with a hitman, a lawyer, and a doctor… and the occasional bar
The Smuggler’s Gambit by Sara Whitford, it’s a little hit and miss being a YA, but an okay read.
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, while I adore Larsen and his writing style, the subject matter, Germany just after Hitler became chancellor, is a difficult subject to read. Horrible behavior is easier to deal with when its a millenium old. And Martha Dodd is an awful person…
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.
Just over halfway through an audiobook of Robert B. Parker’s 1981 novel A Savage Place, and digging it. Spenser is hired by a beautiful TV news reporter in LA to guard her and help with her investigation into labor racketeering in the film biz.
Forgot to post in last month’s thread this passage from Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 noir novel Red Harvest: “‘I’d have given the big umpchay [Pig Latin for “chump”] twice for that straight dope,’ Reno grumbled.”
I read and adored Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. Also read a couple other books that weren’t that good and don’t feel like they’re worth mentioning here. Re-read a childhood favorite on audio book, Chasing Redbird, which I am surprised to like at least as much now, as an awful, as I did as a child. All the themes about belonging and grief and becoming the person you want to be are still relevant in my thirties.
I’m 278 pages into The Clockmaker’s Daughter, which means I’m still less than halfway through since Kate Morton novels are always long. I’m enjoying it a lot so far, the storyline hasn’t picked up that much but her writing is just beautiful!
Finished it. A somewhat farfetched conclusion, but a good read.
Just started the next book in Patrick O’Brian’s masterful series of Napoleonic naval adventures, The Fortune of War. Capt. John “Lucky Jack” Aubrey has just reported to an admiral in the Dutch East Indies and been subjected, among other things, to an entertainingly fierce anti-American tirade.
The Library of America edition of Edmund Wilson’s literary essays and reviews from the 1920s and ‘30s.
I used to think of Wilson as a smug Princeton prick because he mocked detective novels and HP Lovecraft’s fiction…but his takes on more highbrow stuff are actually pretty good. I’ll just skip the essays on pop lit and stick to the ones on Yeats, Woolf, Eliot, and Joyce.
I’ve read a couple of books in the past week or so.
Nighttown is a “Junior Bender novel,” part of a mystery series starring a crackerjack burglar protagonist. It was fine, and if I were more of a mystery lover, I might’ve loved it more. Reasonably clever, reasonably funny, but didn’t blow me away.
The Light Brigade is Starship Troopers, if Starship Troopers instead of being a cryptofascist macho novel were a cryptosocialist feminist novel. It’s trippy time travel with space marines, which is all pretty fun, but the speechifying about the evils of megacorporations and the joy of peaceful socialism wore on me after awhile–and I’m a pretty freakin socialist monkey myself. This is the kind of book I thought I’d like more than I did.
Next up: Revenant Gun, the third in a series that I’ve enjoyed immensely. When I finish it, I’ll have read all the Hugo nominees for the year, and I dunno, earned a cookie or something.
Finished the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. I really liked it. I think fans of the Martha Wells Murderbot series would also enjoy them; they were similar to me in that the science stuff didn’t get in the way of the human plot. (Okay, the NOT-human plot).
Now I’m on to a murder mystery set in the Australian outback, The Lost Man by Jane Harper. I’ve read her other books and they’ve all been very solid.
I don’t have any new books to read so last night I started a re-read of All Creatures Great and Small. According to the bookplate, I bought it in 1980 but I read it long before that. It’s not as good as I remember. Forty years has made a difference.
I just finished Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey. It reminded me of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night quite a bit, in that it’s set at an English college for women, with a former student nostalgically reliving her younger days during a visit (while simultaneously solving a crime). But Tey doesn’t try to tackle as many complex social and personal issues as Sayers did, and this book is the better for it.
Tey was a great writer, and it’s a shame she wasn’t able to write more books (she devoted much of her time to writing plays and died young).
I think it’s been a while since I’ve posted in one of these threads! February, March, and April were just insane at work; I didn’t have as much time for reading as I would have liked. I vaguely remember posting about John Grisham’s The Brethren in Jan/Feb…here’s the list since then:
[ul]
[li]Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) – the 4th book in the Cormoran Strike series; I keep enjoying them[/li][li]Long Road To Mercy by David Baldacci – the 1st book in the Atlee Pine series; I wasn’t blown away, but I’ll probably read the next one[/li][li]Blood Echo by Christopher Rice (Anne’s son) – the 2nd book in the Burning Girl series; I keep feeling like I shouldn’t like these books, but I do[/li][/ul]
I’m currently reading Redemption by David Baldacci. It’s the 5th book in the Amos Decker (“Memory Man”) series, which I really enjoy.
I’ve diverted from my original list because I picked up a copy of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. It’s been heavily quoted from, so there aren’t any bombshells that I haven’t heard of, but this one quotation sums up what I’ve seen of the Trump residency. It’s Trump talking to someone about dealing with women, but applies to pretty much everything Trump does (p. 175):
I think a lot of people still haven’t truly realized that this is what he is and how he operates. If you add that he will readily and without hesitation lie brazenly to perform the above, and maybe even believe the lie himself, you have his reaction to unwanted stimulus in a nutshell. You say he colluded with Russia, he NEVER colluded with Russia. His opponents are the ones guilty of that!
My poor tablet…