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 2013. Consequently when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
I just finished The Twisted Ones and have The Seventh Bride on hold at the library.
And now for something completely different: The Way I Heard It, by Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame. So, this is already a pretty decent book just by virtue of having two pictures of Mike Rowe on the dust jacket. Other than that, it’s all right. He’s doing the kind of “the rest of the story” things that Paul Harvey did.
The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story, Douglas Preston This is the true story of the search for what Hondurans refer to as Ciudad Blanca, or the White City, which, as legend has it, is a vast and advanced ancient city buried somewhere in the Mosquitia region of the country. This region is typically difficult to access, as is much of Central America: dense jungle, extremely rugged country, some of the more venomous and aggressive snakes in the world (fer de lance), and the usual nasty insects and diseases.
I recently finished two books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a post-global-pandemic novel, and Robert B. Parker’s The Widening Gyre, in which the Boston PI Spenser is hired by a conservative U.S. Senate candidate who’s being blackmailed. Both are good but not great, I’d say. Next up: a re-read of The Robots of Dawn, one of my favorite Isaac Asimov sf novels.
Finished The Wanted, by Robert Crais. Modern-day LA detective noir in the manner of Michael Connelly. As mentioned in last month’s thread, I had never heard of Crais before despite his having authored more than 20 novels. The book was given to me by my neighbor, a fellow Connelly fan, who told me there’s even some overlap. He said Elvis Cole, Crais’ detective protagonist, will sometimes mention things like “the cop who lives over the hill” in reference to Connelly’s Harry Bosch. I did not see that in this book but did note that Cole lives on “a narrow road off Woodrow Wilson Drive,” Woodrow Wilson being the street Bosch lives on. In this book, a teenage burglary gang steals from the wrong house and find themselves being hunted by hitmen. I liked the novel well enough that I went and bought his first two, published in the late 1980s.
But before I start on those, I did pick up Michael Connelly’s newest, The Night Fire, and will read that first.
The new Connelly came out last week, I think. I picked it up on Friday. As for Crais, The Monkey’s Raincoat is one of the ones I picked up, his first, published in 1987.
Just finished In the Woods by Tana French. It’s about a young boy who’s the only survivor of the abduction of three children in 1984 (a case that was never solved), and who becomes a murder unit detective himself 20 years later. His first big assignment is another child murder that has just taken place in the same woods he was abducted from. The book is mostly about the extreme mental and emotional duress the situation imposes on the detective, and his slow breakdown during the investigation.
I still don’t know exactly how I feel about the book. On the good side, French is an extremely skilled writer, and the conclusion to one of the book’s mysteries is very well done and has an excellent ironic twist. On the other hand, the book is very long-winded and slow-paced, and I found myself hating the protagonist about halfway in. Also, in a very strange turn of events, the other mystery is never solved at all. That kinda seems like a huge flaw to me.
Pretty much sums up my feelings as well. I had the “kller” pegged early on… And why on Earth waste the words and time on a mystery you never intended to solve?
Finished Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, by Andrew Blum, which was very interesting. It’s about the physical workings of the Internet. Published in 2012, it may be somewhat outdated.
Now I’m reading Valiant Dust, which is the first book in the Breaker of Empires series by Richard Baker.
I have the sense that a lot of folks on this board don’t much like Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve enjoyed most of the books of his I’ve read, some of them very much. But I recently finished his latest book, Talking to Strangers, and was underwhelmed to say the least.
The book deals, at least in theory, with what happens when strangers interact, and how and why things go haywire when they do. Examples: Sandra Bland’s traffic stop, Chamberlain misjudging Hitler’s intentions, double agents spying for Cuba in the US intelligence forces, how Bernie Madoff got away with it.
Gladwell remains an engaging and capable writer, and I always appreciate his interest in bringing disparate threads together to create a narrative. But this time it just doesn’t work very well. A lot of what he’s trying to argue (“we tend to assume the best in other people”) seems obvious to the point of triviality–and he spends a lot of time arguing it anyway. He seems to my mind at least to be curiously uninterested in issues of race and gender and class in talking about why interactions between strangers may go south. The stories are also too disconnected to make for a compelling and cohesive storyline. And these are not always interactions among strangers by any means…but that’s a story for another day.
Disappointing, I thought.
Now beginning Nevada Barr’s novel What Rose Forgot, about a woman with dementia. I love Barr’s work when she’s at her best, and she often is, but it’s also true that she wrote two utter stinkers of books a while back, so who knows. So far so okay.
I haven’t kept up with Nevada Barr’s latest work so tell me, Ulf, which ones I should think of skipping. And please review What Rose Forgot when you finish.
Finished The Night Fire, by Michael Connelly. “Retired” Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch once again teams up with current detective Renee Ballard to investigate a cold case left behind by Bosch’s mentor. At the same time, they each have their own other cases to work. Another great read from a true master. Connelly just gets better and better. The only bad thing is now I have to wait another full year for the next one.
Next up, it’s back to Robert Crais and more LA noir with private detectives Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in The Monkey’s Raincoat, Crais’ first novel, published in 1987. I felt a twinge of nostalgia reading the blurbs of praise on the back cover, as one was from my beloved Tony Hillerman, who was still alive at the time.
I finished City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. I started off liking it better than her debut, but by the end I felt the same frustration. The plot revolved around two women with different philosophical takes, and the love/hate relationship between them. The problem is that Anders puts her thumb on the scale, such that one of them is clearly better than the other, and the bad one isn’t written nearly as plausibly as she should have been. I doubt I’ll read a third book by her.
I also finished Endling: the Last as a read-aloud to my first-grader. It’s pretty good, a fantasy starring a critter that’s the last of her species, a cross between a dog, a human, and a flying squirrel. Solid entry in the kid’s fantasy genre, but nothing groundbreaking.
Now I’m reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf. A couple years ago I tried reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, but an early, brutal scene in 20th-century Jamaica was just too much for me, and I put it down. This book is every bit as brutal, but the fact that it’s fantasy makes it easier for me to stomach, and I’m really enjoying it. James is a gorgeous writer.
Re: What Rose Forgot: Will do! assuming I don’t, you know, forget
Of Barr’s books, I really disliked Burn, which is an Anna Pigeon novel taking place in an urban area (New Orleans). The backdrop is a child sex ring run by some very powerful people. My issue was not the grim subject matter, but that there were too many places where I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief about the whole situation–especially when Anna and her sidekick save the kids almost singlehandedly. Just rubbed me the wrong way.
I also disliked 13 1/2, which is a standalone novel following two brothers Then and Now. Then, when they were boys, one of them was convicted of murdering their parents and sister. Now, they are adults. There’s a romance and a mystery and a sense of foreboding…and the plot relies on two twists, the first of which I saw coming from very early on and the second of which seemed completely implausible and out of left field. Highly unsatisfying.
Of course, if you’ve read either of these and liked them, more power to you!
Barr’s more recent books have been better, though! And I have high hopes for this one. Thanks for asking.
I think the last one I read was Flashback so I haven’t read either of those. Thanks for the info. I see there are several more Anna Pigeon books since 2003 so maybe I will give some of them a try. (I’ll probably skip Burn though!)
