Finished Upstream, a collection of essays by Mary Oliver. They are mostly about nature, with a few about authors such as Whitman and Emerson. They are very well written.
Now I’m reading The Counterfeit Man and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse.
Thanks for the suggestions from those that did!
I just found the 1984 movie, ‘The Bounty’ on IMDB so took the shortcut but did a lot of follow up online.
“Endurance: Shackleton’s incredible voyage” sounds like a good direction. I do thing I saw a documentary in PBS about it. Was quite fascinating.
After reading this thread I’ve noticed a lot of books with the word CITY in their titles.
I love Vonnegut so I bought a whole bunch at one time but never got around to reading them all. Started “Gala’pagos”. I love his style but not sure if I’ll be able to get through the story. I guess I’m staying for the writing rather than the subject. Matter.
Also gonna do “Mother night”, but i might start to read it only to remember that I’ve probably already have.
I read both of those back in the mid 80s. Mother Night was weird, I remember sitting in my Dr’s office reading it and thinking “What the ****?”
My library reopened! At least for curbside pickup. I am delighted to finally receive my loot. 
This morning I started on Circe.
Finally managed to finish Arthur Phillips’s novel The King at the Edge of the World. It’s set in Britain in the months and years leading up to the death of Elizabeth I, and the question that concerns many, many people in England is whether her apparent successor, James VI of Scotland, is a Catholic or a Protestant. In order to unravel the riddle superspy Geoffrey Belloc enlists the assistance of a kind and rather guileless man–a Turkish doctor named Mahmoud Ezzedine, who was part of a diplomatic mission from the Ottoman to England and was left behind thanks to intrigue.
I liked the book very much! Many of Phillips’s books trade heavily in questions such as “what’s the truth” and “who is telling the truth, if indeed anyone,” and “does such-and-such a character know that s/he doesn’t actually know the truth,” and so on…unreliable narrators abound, and no one should be taken as an unimpeachable source. Which makes for fun reading. The setting is interesting, the characters (especially Ezzedine) intriguing, and the writing is excellent. Took me a long time to get through it–time is limited for reading just now–but I’m glad I did.
Finished The Counterfeit Man and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse. Not recommended. He’s written some very good stories (I particularly recommend “Psi High”), but his good stuff’s not in this collection.
Now I’m reading The Ragged Edge of Science by L. Sprague de Camp, a collection of essays about science and pseudoscience.
I finished Reticence by Gail Carriger, the last book, I suspect, of her Custard Proocal series, which in in her Parasolverse. By far the best of the four CP books and very nearly on par with Soulless. the first Parasol book.
And seriously, is there anything MORE Japanese than a Temple train and a hot water conduit shaped like a dragon? No? I didn’t think so either.
Finished The Ragged Edge of Science by L. Sprague de Camp, a collection of essays about science and pseudoscience. The best was called “How to Speak Futurian”, about how languages change.
Now I’m reading Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi.
I started the lastest Rivers of London book, False Value got about 5 pages in and realized that I couldn’t remember what had happened in the previous book except that there was a bell…
Fear not, I had the book on my shelf for a quick refresh, but after thumbing through it a bit, I decided that I wasn’t recalling anything, so long story short ish, I started reading Lies Sleeping again. 
Just finished this. I almost put it down a few times, but stuck with it and am mostly glad I did. It’s bleakly funny, with a downbeat take on fatherhood, academia, family secrets and a curdled American Dream; the writing got better towards the end. Best line: “Around here she [a beautiful woman in a tony Manhattan neighborhood] was almost ordinary, but you could still picture small towns where men might bludgeon their friends, their fathers, just to run their sun-cracked lips along her calves.”
Next up: Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic sea adventure The Letter of Marque, next in the Aubrey-Maturin series.
You’ll appreciate this:
Oh, good! Hope you like it. I’m a big Scalzi fan.
Wow. I just checked to see how many books I’ve read since I last posted in one of these threads, and it’s a lot.
In the fiction category:
I read The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman, which is the third book in the Invisible Library series. It’s a fantasy series, where the main character has to go into dangerous parallel universes to retrieve rare books, save lives, etc. I usually enjoy stuff that’s a little more focused on thoughts and relationships, so while this book provided a change of pace, it wasn’t a favorite of mine.
I read The Night Garden by Lisa Van Allen. The main character has skin that’s poisonous to the touch, so she avoids everyone around her and doesn’t get close to people. I thought it might be an appropriate read for being in quarantine. And it started out good, and just got worse and worse and worse. By the end, it felt like the story was going nowhere and I was terribly disappointed.
Then I read The Family Next Door by Sally Hepworth. It’s about a few women who live in the same neighborhood, and it examines the whole concept of things not being as they appear: the secrets each woman is keeping, her jealousy, stuff like that. It also has a shocking twist that leaves you reading furiously as you get towards the end. It was a good book.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren was a book in a genre I didn’t even know existed: romantic comedy. I know romantic comedy is an extremely popular movie genre, but I haven’t encountered a whole lot of books in that style. I loved this book. The plot hinged upon some pretty improbable coincidences, but if you could suspend your disbelief, the chemistry between the two main characters was cute and fun, and I enjoyed rooting for the main character. I look forward to reading more books from this author duo.
The last book I finished was Every Single Secret by Emily Carpenter. It’s about a couple hiding secrets from one another, and then going on a couples retreat that seems sinister. This one’s kind of hard to describe how I felt about it. Overall, I enjoyed the book. But I had the same reaction to it as I did to the other book I read of hers (Burying the Honeysuckle Girls). Both books were good, but there was something missing that kept it from being great. A lack of emotional depth, maybe? I still recommend it, though – a book doesn’t have to be a five-star read to be worth reading.
I’m currently halfway through Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. IIRC, I discovered this book when Goodreads had famous authors put together lists of recommended reading during quarantine. This was on someone’s list, and it’s not at all the type of book I’d normally read. It’s classified as science fiction, and I read so little science fiction that I honestly couldn’t even tell you any other book I’ve read in that genre. But this book is GOOD. I just started reading it on Monday, and it’s been a pretty busy work week and has also included some long phone conversations and emails to friends. But even so, I’m halfway through it because I stay up past my bedtime reading it. I highly recommend it, unless the ending sucks. The basic plot is that the main character, Jason, is kidnapped and drugged by another Jason from a parallel universe, and is tossed into the other universe so that the two Jasons trade places. But the Jason of the parallel universe is in high demand, since he managed to figure out how to travel through universes, and his workplace will torture and murder and imprison whomever they need to in order to keep Jason around and discover his secrets.
I’m reading A. Merritt’s the Face in the Abyss, which I picked up months ago in a used book store (This quarantine is giving me a chance to work through my stack of bought-but-not-yet-read books). It’s typical Merritt fare – intrepid (and not) explorers in the wilderness, a Lost Civilization with weird superscience, a barely-dressed beautiful young woman who falls for the protagonist, and a fix-up book in which the first part doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with the second. Interesting, dated, diverting fare.
I finished Alan Steele’s Captain Future in Love, in which he shows the titular character in his formative years, and comes up with plausible reasons for that absurd title (and a better container for “The Brain”). Captain Future was created by Mort Weisinger (later editor at DC comics), but written mostly by Edmond Hamilton (who went on to write comics – mostly Superman – for Mort). A poster that’s a blowup of the cover of Captain Future #1 appears next to the door in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment in Big Bang Theory:
It is the epitome of 1940 pop Science Fiction. Appearance to the contrary, it shows the Captai with his two companionsm, Otho (an android) and Grag (a robot – Hamilton championed the distinction between artificial life/organic chemically based “androids” and metal “robots”, which has been eroding since the 1960s), each armed with a different type of ray gun. Steele works in an explanation of the Captaion’s weird expanding-circles gun in his story.
I hadn’t realized it, but Steele had written Captain Future stories before. He won a Best Novella Hugo for one story – “The Death of Captain Future” – that was kinda but not really about the character (along with a sequel). But he actually wrote at least two straight stories about Curt.
After this, eve though I’ve got unread stacks, I’d like to get Christopher Moore’s latest, Shakespeare for Squirrels. It’s the third book staring Pocket, King Lear’s Fool.
As for audiobooks, I haven’t been reading them. I can’t get to the library to return my now-finished copy of Oliver Twist, and I haven’t started any of the unread ones I have lying about. I’ve been listening to news or music during my commute.
Damned Duplicate Post
If you like it so far, I think you’ll like the rest of it. It’s a fun book, and gets into some interesting effects of the many-worlds theory. It’s just complicated enough to keep your interest, but not so much that it gets confusing.
Finished Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, translated and with an introduction by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson.
I read a few of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories recently and decided I’d try Captains Courageous, a Kipling novel that I’d read in middle school many many years ago. A sea story, with echoes of *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader *and Moby Dick. Eustace, I mean Harvey, is a spoiled kid (well, he’s 15) who falls off an ocean liner in the Grand Banks and is rescued by the crew of a fishing vessel. Though Harvey tries to get them to head for land immediately, using his father’s enormous wealth as a cudgel, the captain doesn’t believe him and makes him part of the crew. Harvey very quickly adapts to the situation. Most of the rest of the book is a loving description of Life Aboard a New England Fishing Vessel. Not a lot of drama after the first thirty pages, or characterization, but plenty of description, and much Kiplingesque stuff about What It Means to be a Man. No dragons. Meh.
I also reread The Pushcart War. A children’s classic, which I read back when I was in fourth grade or so. Guess I’m into nostalgia right about now. The account of the famous Pushcart War between New York City’s pushcarts and the trucks that are steadily taking over the city. It’s still quite wonderful and holds up surprisingly well. If you haven;t read it in the last fifty years, consider giving it a try.
Finished The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, translated and with an introduction by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson. Parts of it were very interesting. I especially enjoyed the names (which reminded me of the names in Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile), like Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter and Aud the Deep Minded.
Now I’m reading Altered States of the Union, edited by Glenn Hauman. It’s an anthology of alternate history stories about how the United States of America could have been different.
You’re right. I was mind-blown at how good this book was!
Well, you can consider that last post a testament to how busy the week was, because I meant to do a post after this one with the nonfiction books I’ve read lately, but it’s four days later and I still haven’t gotten around to that post.
It’s definitely the best of that quartet of books.
I’m pleased her novella came out this month and we finally found out who Dimity married.