Finished Chesapeake Legends and Lore from the War of 1812, by Ralph E. Eshelman and Scott S. Sheads. Not bad–some interesting and/or fun tales handed down in local families, most of which weren’t true.
Now I’m reading Operation Time Search by Andre Norton. I haven’t read anything by her since the 1980’s. I haven’t read this one at all.
It took me a year and a half to get through Bleak House, putting it down and picking it up a couple dozen times.
It’s the damnedest novel Dickens ever wrote, and that’s saying something. Loved it, and may reread it some day, in one shot!
Best 007 by far is Dr. No. Goldfinger would be #2. And I’m sorta fond of Live and Let Die.
I’m about halfway through Dorothy L. Sayers 1931 Lord Peter Wimsey novel Five Red Herrings.. It’s kind of a slog, what with all the railway timetables and Scots dialect.
A copy of Walter de la Mare’s complete spook stories arrived in the mail yesterday. I’m going to take a break from Sayers (and lose track of all those fucking timetables, dammit) and dig into those.
I finished Stephen King’s newest, The Institute. It was neither his best nor his worst; I enjoyed the familiar journey. However, I also noticed the familiar bloat. There were too many characters, and it seemed a lot of time was taken up with logistics and unnecessary detail when I just wanted to know what was going to happen next!
It’s not a horror novel, you will not be frightened; and though there are scenes of torture and violence, it wasn’t too much for my squeamish self to handle. One moment was so moving, it brought tears to my eyes. All in all, a very decent ride.
Finished Operation Time Search by Andre Norton. Not recommended.
Now I’m reading Story of a Soul, by St. Therese of Lisieux.
Thanks!
I finished Harris’s Red Dragon - as good as ever.
Now listening to an audiobook of Shirley Jackson’s sometimes-creepy, sometimes-tedious 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Next up: Patrick O’Brian’s eighth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Ionian Mission.
Is this for fiction only? because I don’t read that. Just got a fascinating book called Trigger. Its almost 900 pages and I am halfway through since Friday.
Nope, it’s for books you are reading, have read, plan to read…
Finished Story of a Soul, by St. Therese of Lisieux. Interesting.
Now I’m reading Pauline, by Margaret Storey.
That novel AIN’T TEDIOUS. Shoiley’s da BEST.
Finished Pauline, by Margaret Storey, which was okay.
Next up: Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, by Mary Norris.
Started today on The Ten Thousand Doors of January, portal fantasy by Alix Harrow.
Just finished The Warehouse by Rob Hart. I’ve enjoyed some of his books and then been frustrated by others. This one was both enjoyable and frustrating.
In this breakout attempt he imagines: What if Walmart merged with Amazon, and maybe Google, controlled the media, the raw materials, the means of production, and the means of delivery, and ran its business via work-life “cities” where workers lived, worked, got paid with scrip, essentially owing their soul to the company store, and this was pretty much the only game in town when it came to employment? A great premise.
The frustration was two-part. The book is constructed via the viewpoints of three characters: The man behind Cloud, who is dying of pancreatic cancer; Paxton, whose startup business Cloud killed, who’s now hoping for any kind of employment he can get; and Zinnia, who we quickly learn is an industrial spy. The founder is a bore, Paxton is a whiner, and the scenes where Paxton and Zinnia take part in a mass job interview, and then in a mass orientation, are almost as excruciating as actual mass job interviews and orientations. Which is a good thing? But hard to read.
Then, after a bit of first-half intrigue, we get a quick view of just how boring these jobs are, i.e., lists of which items Zinnia picked, as a picker, and Paxton’s boredom as he strolls around, being Security. Really, it’s only a couple of pages. Then things get intriguing again. It’s hard to say it’s not well written when it’s written so that it feels so real it’s actually boring, but I think a better writer could have spun this out more consistently.
End of frustration part one. Frustration part two had to do with what I considered some really big plot holes, which could have been explained but weren’t, and disappointment at the ending.
But Hart nailed it as a breakout book because Ron Howard has optioned it for a movie
Best review from Goodreads is not a review but a question.
Finished Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, by Mary Norris. Meh.
Now I’m reading The Case of the Demure Defendant, by Erle Stanley Gardner. I thought I’d read all of the Perry Mason novels when I was in high school, but I’ve discovered that I missed quite a few, including this one.
I took forever to read Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, a sexually frank, magical realist book translated from the Japanese about a sad sack brilliant painter whose wife has left him and who gets involved in some ambiguously mystical events in the home of an elderly master painter.
It was beautiful, but it took me about a month to read. Not light reading at all.
Followed up with Gathering Blue, the second in the Giver Quartet. Pretty decent YA fiction, but none of the twists were the tiniest bit surprising.
Finished An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, non-fiction about food and its relation to human development. It apparently matters a lot. Good stuff about food productivity and industrialization, especially about a sugar boycott back in the day because sugar was produced by slave labor. Lots of stuff about one of my heros, Norman Borlaug, a leading figure behind the Green Revolution and therefore one of mankind’s leading benefactors in the 20th century.
Right now working on The Dig, by Alan Dean Foster. Too soon to tell. I thought it was going to be hard sci-fi about diverting an asteroid so it doesn’t crash into the earth and ruin things, but that was just the first two chapters. Obligatory annoying female journalist who accompanies the mission to get in the way, but it has taken a turn into left field and the asteroid is an alien space craft. The aliens want the astronauts to do something or other, but it is not clear what. The usual string of improbable coincidences where they figure out how to use the alien machinery that just happens to be lying around. We will see where it goes.
Regards,
Shodan
“Tastes differ,” said the old woman as she kissed her cow. I found it tedious at times. Finished it yesterday, and although I’m glad I read it, I doubt I’ll ever go back to it. “The Lottery” is still the SJ standout for me.
Finished The Ionian Mission, too - Napoleonic naval goodness, as always.
I’ve now started an audiobook of Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. Lots of good behind-the-scenes stuff on the creation of the Broadway sensation. Best line so far: “George Washington was a man that bullets knew better than to mess with.”
I read this a couple of months ago and enjoyed it. The only problem was I had no idea whatsoever what the point of story was.
Finished The Case of the Demure Defendant, by Erle Stanley Gardner. Not bad. Once again, I wondered how Mason was going to get his client (and himself) out of trouble, and once again he did it.
Now I’m reading The Starship and the Canoe, by Kenneth Brower. It’s about Freeman Dyson and his son, George.