Then I highly recommend Edmund Morris’s bio trilogy on T.R., beginning with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Sweeping, richly detailed but very readable.
Finished The Marriage Bureau: The True Story of How Two Matchmakers Arranged Love in Wartime London, by Penrose Halson, which I enjoyed. It had a lot of information about that time and place that I’d never read before. Funny and tragic in spots, along with a number of unavoidable cliffhangers.
Now I’m reading The Flowers of Vashnoi, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Flowers of Vashnoi, which I thought was very good.
Now I’m reading Mother Wore Tights by Miriam Young. It’s about her parents who were in vaudeville.
Finished Catton’s The Civil War.
I now have Poul Anderson’s Operation Luna (his decades-later sequels to Operation Chaos, which I just read this year) and Ibi Zoboi’s My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, a book mixing black history, blues-funk-hiphop music history, and science fiction. I picked it up at the Boston Book Festival after listening to the author (but had to run, so I couldn’t get it signed).
Finished it. Good stuff, as always from O’Brian, although it ends on something of a cliffhanger. Best line of the book: an Admiralty official is described as “not overburdened with principles.”
Next up: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a post-global-pandemic novel of which I’ve heard good things.
I just finished reading Death’s Acre by Dr. Bill Bass, about the body farm at the University of Tennessee. It’s all about how he started it and how it grew to help forensic science. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it. Yes, it’s gruesome, but they learned SO much about how bodies decompose under different conditions and it helped law enforcement convict killers. He even worked on the Tri-State crematorium case and had a hand with the Homolka case.
Finished Mother Wore Tights by Miriam Young. It’s about her parents who were in vaudeville.
Meh.
Now I’m reading The Girl in the Green Silk Gown by Seanan McGuire.
I read his Theodore Rex. And Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.
Both very good
Morris’s entire TR trilogy is great, so I recommend you go back and read the first volume. You’ll be glad you did. David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback, about TR’s childhood and early adulthood, is also excellent.
Recently finished:
Forerunner: The Second Venture, SF by Andre Norton.
Owl Be Home by Christmas, the 26th Meg Langslow mystery, by Donna Andrews.
Now Reading:
*Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS *Arizona, by Walter R Borneman. There were 38 sets of brothers – 36 pairs and three trios – stationed aboard USS Arizona on 7 Dec 1941, along with one father-son set. Only 15 of these 80 men survived the ship’s sinking…
My mother in law’s eldest brother was on the Arizona that day, he was one of the unlucky ones…
Finished Falls the Shadow, by Sharon Kay Penman, the second novel in her Welsh Princes trilogy. Historical fiction covering the middle part of the 13th century. Very good. Wales actually takes a backseat in this installment, which focuses on the adversarial relationship between England’s incompetent King Henry and the French-born Simon de Montfort, the latter widely considered a visionary pioneer in representative government in England. My understanding is the spotlight will swing back to Wales in the final installment, with the consequences for that country of those tensions. The title of the book comes from TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
But before I take up the final book in the trilogy, I shall read The Wanted, by Robert Crais. I’ve never heard of him despite this being Crais’ 21st novel, but my neighbor, a fellow Michael Connelly fan, gave it to me. Said it is LA detective fiction in the same vein as Connelly and that there is some overlap in the two universes, what with occasional mentions such as “the detective who lives over the hill from me” in reference to Harry Bosch.
Finished The Girl in the Green Silk Gown by Seanan McGuire, which was excellent. I hope she keeps writing this series.
Now I’m reading The Sound of Silence: Growing Up Hearing with Deaf Parents, by Myron Uhlberg.
My current book is The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon). It’s about a girl cleaning out her grandmother’s old house and discovering some weirdness out in the boonies. It has a nice Lovecraft vibe and it’s also somewhat gentle and amusing, especially for dog owners. Sample sentence regarding the dog, “Bongo’s nose is far more intelligent than the rest of him, and I believe it uses his brain primarily as a counterweight.” 
Right now I’m in the middle of In the Woods by Tana French, and I’m enjoying it immensely. The scene where the detectives interview the victim’s family is mesmerizing, with everyone seeming perfectly normal while simultaneously being just a little…off.
My only nitpick: Ms. French’s protagonist is a male detective, with the story told in first person, and I don’t think she gets inside the male mind in a way that’s completely convincing.
On the other hand, if the ending of this one is as good as the beginning, I’ll be reading all her books regardless of gender issues.
Finished The Sound of Silence: Growing Up Hearing with Deaf Parents, by Myron Uhlberg. I thought it was very good.
Now I’m reading The Honour of the House, by E. M. Channon.
I need to move that one up the queue!
Apparently The Twisted Ones is a retelling of “The White People” by Arthur Machen, a short horror story I haven’t read.
I also picked up a children’s book, 26 Absurdities of Tragic Proportions by Matthew Woodruff, but I’m going to return it to the library unread. It’s a book of short stories based on the alphabet book Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey. However, I don’t have a copy of Gashlycrumb on hand to use as a reference, and Absurdities doesn’t give the stories their proper titles, e.g. “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.” I thought it would be cute, but without the charm of the Gorey illustrations, I can’t summon the motivation to get through any of this.
Well, that was a waste. Times two.
I picked up a free Kindle book, All He Ever Wanted. Set in the early 20th century (right before WWI) it’s about a professor who falls in love and marries a woman, despite her telling him she doesn’t love him. Lots of navel-gazing and he gets pissed because 1) She wasn’t a virgin on their wedding night and 2) She got herself a secret she-shed. I know, presentism and all, but after pages and pages of him expounding on some correspondence he found between his wife and her lover’s brother I gave it up.
Then I tried reading a Patricia Cornwell book, Book of the Dead, because of Death’s Acre. It was awful. There were two characters, one named Marino and the other name Maroni and I had them confused for about a third of the book. I gave it up when Marino, her assistant coroner or whatever, was giving a medic a hard time about where he lived and where he came from. It seemed like such superfluous nonsense that came out of left field. Are all her books like that? Should I try another one?
I dove back into the arms of the reliable Stephen King. Despite him saving the book was never going to be available other than as a paperback, Joyland is an e-book now.
I love me some T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon. Adding that one to my list!
I finished The Empress of Forever recently. It started off pretty uninspired: a rich technocrat decides she’s gonna create an AI that’s gonna change the world. Then things get a little weird. I almost set it down.
I’m glad I didn’t.
By the middle of the book, you’ve got:
Said technocrat, only her lack of a soul–i.e., an inability to connect to Future-Internet–makes her incredibly powerful;
-A psychopathic galactic space-pirate
-A shapeshifting nanomachine blob with the personality of a sulky teenage boy;
-A futuristic martial art religious zealot
-A pilot who’s never flown a spaceship before but who develops gears in her eyes when she first interfaces with a spaceship, due to genetic engineering
It’s delightfully silly and over the top and weird. I enjoyed myself a lot with this book, once I got past the first section.
Currently reading City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. I really didn’t care for her first book, but this one is better: on a tidally-locked planet, there are aliens and political revolutions and smugglers. It’s pretty good, but not blowing my socks off or anything.