I just finished The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. I went into it knowing very little other than it plays with the timeline like her previous book Station Eleven. I’m not quite sure yet how I feel about it. Her writing is beautiful and the characters are engaging, but it wasn’t what I expected. I think I’ll come to like it more as I turn it over it my mind.
I keep repeating basically the same to myself daily. I’m bored senseless but we’re all still ALIVE to be bored! 
Finished City by the Bay: Stories of Novaya Rossiya, by Walter H. Hunt. Meh. It was an interesting concept for an alternate history (most of West Coast of current U.S. was settled by the Russians and the American and French Revolutions never happened), but the plots (it’s a collection of short stories) weren’t interesting. Also, I don’t like it when many of the characters in an alternate history are real people, living lives very similar to those they had in reality. Lastly, something was wrong with the typography. Many pages were filled with incorrectly indented sentences.
Now I’m reading On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, by C. S. Lewis.
Finished Harry Turtledove’s Down in the Bottomlands. The volume not only includes his Hugo-winning novella (which has an entire Wikipedia page devoted to it, with maps – Down in the Bottomlands - Wikipedia )but also L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If (Which I read many years ago, but have forgotten most of) and Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacemaker, which is a sequel to The Wheels of If. I’d been wondering why those three stories were assembled into one volume. It’s undoubtedly because it gave an excuse for republishing the novella in book form (just by itself wouldn’t be economically feasible --it’s too short). The other two stories had been published together before – and you need both, because reading Turtledove’s sequel alone leaves you at a loss without the background from the de Camp story. Besides, they all fit together well as works of Alternative History, and Turtledove always said that it was de Camp’s alternative history fiction that got him started on that road.
Now I’m finally getting to Jack Williamson’s Hocus Pocus Universe, which I’ve been curious since I saw the cover of Science Stories #1 in the first edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. The story’s only been reprinted twice, both times within the past ten years, and not easily available. (Science Stories only ran four issues, all before I was born).
Here’s that cover, BTW. They used it on the most recent reprinting, too:
i just started 88 Names by Matt Ruff, and have Lawrence Wrights prescient pandemic novel The End of October next in the TBR pile.
Prepping for John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox, I’m skimming through the previous book in the trilogy, The Consuming Fire. Good stuff (a distant-future interstellar empire deals with the imminent loss of FTL travel), and now it’s fresher in my mind.
Started today on If It Bleeds, Stephen King’s newest. Yes! It finally came! I have peace in my soul once again.
Still mad at you, Amazon.
Finished Hocus Pocus Universe (Interesting, but not really worth the wait. But at least the cover is relevant to two scenes in the story).
Now on to Heaven, by Hotel Standards by Susan Wilson. It’s the history of Boston’s Parker House hotel, the self-proclaimed Longest Continuously Running Hotel in the US. I’d hoped to learn something for my next book, but it turns out that Wilson, the author and official Parker House Historian, doesn’t know what I need to know. I wrote to her to verify this, and now she asked me to send her material.
The title is great. It derives from a story about Mark Twain when he was staying there:
Elendil’s Heir, we watched the LOTR movies with our teenagers this week. It was the first time I’d seen them since I watched them in the theater–it was fun to revisit them.
I did read a fluffy hand-me-down from my teenage daughter. Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, is about a college freshmen who is an obsessive writer of fan-fiction. Various relationship issues ensue. It kept me pleasantly distracted for a couple of days. What I find fascinating about this book is that Rowell then went on to write a couple of books about the characters her Fangirl protagonist was writing fan-fiction about.
Martha Wells’ latest Murderbot book came out this week. I’ll be reading that soon.
A few nights ago, I finished reading Other Words for Home to my 11-year-old daughter.
This is a beautifully-written prose-poem novel about a girl who loves movies, loves the spotlight, who moves from Syria to the United States and navigates the strange cultural space she finds herself in. I kept bracing for the inevitable Newbery-bait trauma, the death that would teach a Very Important Lesson, and I love the book all the more for avoiding this cliche. Definitely worth reading!
We’ve talked about doing that, too. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen them, and despite some nits to pick, I really do love 'em.
Finished On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, by C. S. Lewis. , by C. S. Lewis, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading The City & the City, by China Mieville.
Ooh, I loved this one!
I finished the graphic novel Citizen of the Galaxy, based on the Robert A. Heinlein juvenile, adapted by Rob Lazaro and Eric Gignac. It’s pretty true to the original. The artwork is so-so.
I’ve also started The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, a comic novel about a fundraising drone for a mediocre university in New York City (the staff even call it Mediocre U.) who’s fired for being rude to a pushy, entitled undergrad, but then abruptly rehired when a wealthy alum insists he will deal only with the drone. It’s not as funny as it could be, but I’ll stick with it for now.
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, Our Fake History and Dark Histories being my favorite two. So the latest DH history was of The Balham Mystery or the poisoning of Charles Bravo, which I read a book about several years ago. So I pulled Death at the Priory by James Ruddick off the shelf, blew the dust off and started to reread it to see if his conclusion was different than DH’s.
Finished Voodoo River, by Robert Crais. His fifth novel. The star of a popular TV show, who was adopted as a baby and is now concerned about her fast-approaching middle age, hires detectives Elvis Cole and Joe Pike to travel to Louisiana, find her birth family and bring back information on their medical history. It seems like a clear-cut case, but it turns out other people are looking for her biological family too, and some of these other searchers are turning up dead. The author just happens to be from Louisiana himself. There is an interesting variation on Chekhov’s gun that could be called “Chekhov’s turtle.” Good, but not as good as the first four.
Next up is This Side of Paradise, by F Scott Fitzgerald.
Finished This Is How You Lose the Time War last night.
I really enjoyed this, definitely the strangest semi-epistolary novel I’ve ever read. The story, despite its short length, took me awhile to complete, because the plot appears to stall out about halfway through the book. But push through that, and in retrospect it’s moving forward, only subtly and in a direction that’s not immediately apparent.
This is, I think, a book that will stay with me. It’s got the cleverness you’d expect from a time-travel book but beyond that there’s a loveliness to the imagery and an emotional resonance that not many time-travel books achieve.
Finished The City & the City, by China Mieville. It’s brilliant–definitely the best mystery I’ve read this year, and one of the best novels.
Now I’m reading The Season: A Social History of the Debutante, by Kristen Richardson
Just this afternoon started The Last Emperox by John Scalzi, the last in his distant-future sf epic trilogy, and in the first 50 pages there are already two major shifts in the storyline. I’m digging it.