Please report back with your review of this. I’m always looking for a good haunted house story!
Finished The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which I thought was excellent—one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Next up: The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds.
I could not find it either, but I have a memory of it. Someone specifically asking about Hitler’s supposed sexual relation with his murdered niece, and all the rumors afterward of his alleged involvement in the murder. That was before he came to power, and supposedly such an affair was thought to have been an embarrassment even for a Nazi. If I didn’t read it from Cecil, then I don’t know where it could have been.
Whew–finally finished this. I liked the others in the series better, but it was still pretty good. In addition to having a nonlinear plot, it had nonlinear characters, in a way that I can’t explain without spoilers, but that made it pretty hard for me to follow in places. Still, good stuff.
I love this book, and its third sequel (Record of a Spaceborn Few) is my favorite SF of the past few years. Chambers is amazing.
Have just finished Fall Out by Sara Paretsky – the ?eighteenth? V.I. Warshawski mystery. Have read most if not all of the “Warshawskis”. In the main I like the whole thing, and the characters – V.I. particularly – except that for me, some of the novels get too complicated to be easy to handle (and rightly or wrongly, I’m ready to expend only a limited amount of “skull sweat” on fiction read for entertainment) – multiple plot threads, and a huge cast of characters: I can experience a good deal of puzzlement as to “who’s this bod, and that one; how does this, that and the other, fit into the scheme of things?”
Fall Out – while basically readable – was for me, thus complication-bedevilled. It’s her penultimate Warshawski novel to date; the most recent so far, Shell Game (which as it happened, I read before Fall Out) was a good deal more easily comprehensible.
Re the Sayers / Wimsey discussions upthread: I’m quite a fan of the Wimsey novels, but harbour a total detestation of Harriet Vane – bloody professional misery-merchant: for me, the series went into a sharp decline when she showed up. OK, life has given her a hard time; but she wallows in it to the max… For the period of Murder Must Advertise, Peter is unsuccessfully courting Harriet, but she’s out of the picture for the whole of the novel – I was praying that the incognito Wimsey’s interaction with his advertising-agency colleague, the tough-fibred and cynical Miss Meteyard, would lead to his concluding that he’s on a hiding to nothing with the miserable HV biddy, and to his taking-up with Meteyard instead.
One gathers that romance-novel buffs have the highest of praise for Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon. I’m no big fan of either book (have read each, once – never again). Apart from the “Harriet factor” – I see assorted faults in GN, as touched on by folk upthread; plus (at the risk of sounding like Harriet myself) I have not-too-happy personal issues with the university involved. And BH was, so far as I was concerned, utter “cornball” throughout.
Anyone read Liane Moriarty? I read The Husband’s Secret and enjoyed it tremendously, and now I’m reading Big Little Lies and it’s a fun ride too.
Happy to!
So, I finished The Invited. I think it would be a stretch to call this a haunted house story, since there is only a house-in-progress throughout the book. It’s more of a haunted objects story, and although there are supernatural happenings, it had much more the feel of a murder mystery to me. A couple of problems: the characters moved much too quickly from skepticism to belief, and I figured out the mystery before the characters did. (That may have been the author’s intent). Also, I think this book cried out for an epilogue. Most ends were tied up, but in my opinion, there could have been a little more to say about the restless spirits and the phenomena in the house. Overall, I enjoyed the book but I didn’t find it chilling as I had hoped.
Next up, a thriller featuring a woman with locked-in syndrome, If She Wakes, by the awesome Michael Koryta.
If you don’t mind some m/m sex, Restless Spirits by Jordan L Hawk is a good haunted house mystery. It has elements of Hell House and The Haunting of Hill House and moves along quite nicely.
Currently plowing my way thru The Outlet by Andy Adams. It’s a Western about a cattle drive. The problem is “It’s a Western about a cattle drive” pretty much sums up the whole book so far. There isn’t much of a central conflict. There is a bunch of stuff about some evil corrupt Easterners who are trying to rip off one of the cattle bosses, and they rip them off in return, but it’s not much of a conflict and there is not much reason to care about it. Lots and lots of detail about the day-to-day of a cattle drive, which isn’t bad, but it’s hard to get emotionally involved in the difficulties of crossing rivers.
Also read Killing Jesus by Bill O’Reilly, which didn’t present anything I didn’t already know.
Also listened to some of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, newly written ones called The Rediscovered Railway Mysteries which were frankly pretty bad. It is not a good sign when, three paragraphs into the story, you say it’s radiation poisoning and, sure enough…
Gotta get to the library - I need some audiobooks for a long drive this weekend.
Regards,
Shodan
John Scalzi’s Lock In is a pretty good near-future sf novel about a pandemic that leaves one percent of the world’s population “locked in,” and how that changes society.
There have been too many nights in the past month when I was too tired to read before falling asleep!
On Monday night I finished David Baldacci’s Redemption, book #5 in the Amos Decker (“Memory Man”) series. I’m a Baldacci fan, and I really enjoy this series. In this one, Decker starts showing some growth; it’s nice to see that character slowly evolving.
That night I started to read Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul. Even when I disagree with Sullivan, I find him to be intelligent and thoughtful and worth a listen/read. I’m more conservative than most people would guess, so I was interested in his take on “modern” conservatism. However, last night I realized that I’m not really up for nonfiction at the moment. Plus, this book was published in 2009 and so much has changed since then; I think I’m more interested in Sullivan’s current thoughts. I’ll go back to this someday, though.
After perusing the books and samples available on my Kindle, I decided to start reading Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good – which I’m 90% sure I learned about here, after someone recommended/posted a review of it. I’m just a few pages in, but I have a good feeling about it. 
Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science John McKay
People have been digging up mammoth bones, and wondering about them, for centuries. In the Middle Ages, Europeans, with little experience of elephants, believed that they were the bones of giant humans. There were also thought to be unicorns, or walruses. When it was realized that they were elephants, it was naturally assumed that they had been carried by the Great Flood.
The story of how we figured out the truth (presumably) is the subject of this short, fairly interesting book.
Finished The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds, which I enjoyed, more for the future tech than for the characters. I just found out that this book has been retitled Aurora Rising, and “The Prefect” will be a trilogy. It had a second book released last year.
Now I’m reading Tranquility and Other Myths: Seventeen Stories of Light, Night, and the Writhing Shadows, edited by Donna Royston.
Finished Tranquility and Other Myths: Seventeen Stories of Light, Night, and the Writhing Shadows, edited by Donna Royston. Not recommended.
Next up: The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, by Neil Gaiman.
Just finished There There, by Tommy Orange, a Native American author. It’s a novel about the “Urban Native” experience and is pretty bleak.
Friday I finally finished The Haunting of Tram Car 015, a short, light fun story set in a djinn-filled early-20th-century Egypt. Not something that’s going to stick with me, but it’s pretty enjoyable.
Saturday I read in one day An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. My devouring of it isn’t a testament so much to its genius as to my having a lot of time on Saturday, and also the book is pretty fun. The author has clearly been thinking a lot about what fame means in the age of social media, and there are a lot of mini-essays on the subject scattered throughout, and I’m not sure the author is as wise on the subject as he thinks he is–indeed, sometimes he came across like some dude at a part waxing philosophical on his pet subject.
But there’s a plot that hurtles along, and if you’re looking for the kind of book to read in a single day, thumbs up for that.
I enjoyed An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, but warning! It’s part one of two. I hate that. When I don’t know it going in.
Started today on The House Children by Heidi Daniele. It’s about an illegitimate girl being raised in a school run by nuns. The one bright spot in her life is that she spends holidays with a kind family, and then she finds out that the lady of the kind family is her real mother. It’s just okay so far; I’m finding it rather bland.
Finished The Outlet by Andy Adams. As mentioned, it was a Western about a cattle drive. The central conflict sort of petered out without much resolution. i kept waiting for something to happen. It never did.
We were listening to Moriarty by Antony Horowitz on audiobook in the car. Not quite halfway in, but I am considering picking it up on paper and finishing. Better than most non-Doyle Sherlocks, or at least more engaging. I am wondering if my suspicions as to the Athelney Jones character are correct. Plus Horowitz has the flavor, more or less.
And for dog-walking audio, The Sun Smasher by Edmund Hamilton. Bubble gum for the brain, but Hamilton has the innocent gee-whiz spirit of early sci-fi and not so much heavy philosophical stuff. Sort of a palate cleanser after I finish rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Regards,
Shodan
I finished Northwest of Earth by Catherine L. Moore – the later version that incorporates ALL the Northwest Smith stories. I knew that I’d read Shambleau many times before, but evidently I’d read several other NW Smith stories in other anthologies before, but didn’t remember. Even worse, I didn’t recognize them when I re-read them just now. Moore’s brand of science fantasy is interesting – NorthWest Smith (who, I’m convinced, inspired the name of Indiana Jones and the character of Han Solo)encounters mysterious and incredibly sexy (and often nude) alien females who appear at first to be in desperate trouble, but are ultimately revealed to have weird features , and often downright cosmic powers. Awesome as it is, it gets repetitive after a while. Most of these appeared in Weird Tales in the later 1930s. The song “The Green Hills of Earth” cited in the stories, and recited in one of them, surely inspired the Heinlein story of the same name.
On Sunday I picked up two books by satirists that I had never heard of before – The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders by Jonathan Swift is a biography of his own ass. It’s accompanied by similar often scatological writings. actually, it’s not absolutely certain that he wrote it, but it was published during his heyday, it’s definitely in his style, his contemporaries thought he was the author, and as far as I know he never disputed this. an interested bit of weird writing. I finished it off pretty quickly.
At the same time I picked up Is Shakespeare Dead? by Mark Twain. It’s supposedly abstracted from his autobiography, but I’ve read both the short version of his autobiography and, more recently, the massive three-volume complete version, and I can’t recall this at all.
After I finished that detour I’ll get back to the fictionalized version of the story of the submarine Hunley.
On audio, I’m still working through Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams.