Seconded (or was it third?). Although my favorite by far is A Dirty Job. I wish he would write more, right now!
Just finished rereading all of Laurie R King’s Holmes/Russell novels - fun! I reread books a lot, and these are favs. What’s next…? Maybe a Connie Willis novelette, or maybe I just pick up Dune again (halfway through).
Thanks for the rec! Horse-stealing Norwegians, huh? I feel like there’s a joke about Minnesota in there somewhere.
Ugh. Tell me about it. I have a weakness for light, fluffy romance novels, and it only takes me a couple hours to read a 300 page book. That’s not eight bucks worth of entertainment for me, so I buy all those at thrift stores for a quarter. But that still means someone paid a lot more than that for it originally, and that’s nuts.
Confession: Somewhere I got the impression that the book was set in 1840s England, and was a story about sex changes in a sort of Dickensian way. Like if Pip had started out as a girl and then discovered he was, in fact, a man. (And, honestly, wouldn’t Great Expectations be better if Miss Havisham cast off her mantle of femininity and acted as a mentor to Pip?) When I picked it up and discovered it was set in mid-20th century Greece and Detroit, I was . . . surprised.
There must be a book around somewhere with that plot, because that’s what I thought Middlesex was about too.
Off to google Victorian sex change novels!
Either that or you confused the title with “Middlemarch.”
That might well be. Twickster, I’ll need your address so I can send you the second Garnethill book. PM or e-mail me, okay? I think I liked it even better than the first one.
When I was in high school paperbacks were 25 or 35 cents, 50 cents for a larger one. In my last year in school William Schirer’s **Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ** came out in paperback. It was two inches thick and cost an astonishing 95 cents!
Ninety-five cents? For a paperback??? Everyone was astonished at the idea of paying nearly a dollar for a…paperback.
My book club read Middlesex a few years ago, and most of us - myself included - liked it. It’s offbeat and odd, in a good way. It’s as much about the immigrant experience in the U.S., Midwestern life and the decline of Detroit as it about hermaphroditism. I’d give it a solid B+.
I’ve read bits and pieces of Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich over the years, but have never read the whole thing through. True story: my sister once lent her copy to a friend, helpfully inserting a bookmark as she did so. She didn’t look closely at the bookmark at the time, and her friend, astonished, soon called to read to her what she’d written on it when she’d earlier put it in another book: “This has a pretty wacky cast of characters, and the plot’s a bit contrived, but I liked it and hope you will too!”
Still working on The Fountainhead. Spending 12 hours on a plane (well, four different planes, technically) last week helped quite a bit. I swear I’m going to finish it this time!
PM sent – thanks! No urgency on getting it to me, though – I had a good trip to the library yesterday:
[ul][li]Water for Elephants, Sarah Gruen[/li][li]An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke[/li][li]An Absolute Gentleman, R.M. Kinder (novel) Memoirs of an English professor/serial murderer[/li][li]The Empress of Weehawken, by Irene Dische[/ul][/li]
They all look good! I’m glad it’s raining, so I can finish Garnethill today and start one of them
Oh, I hope so. I’m always the one in these threads reading fluff while everyone else is reading deep and thick and hard. 
For example, I just finished Helping Me Help Myself: one skeptic, ten self-help gurus, and a year on the brink of the comfort zone, by Beth Lisick. I can honestly say I learned nothing from it, but I had a good time, so I’ll probably look around for her other book. One quote from it reminded me how I felt about the Scottish accent after reading Garnethill: “A Scottish person could cut your tongue out and stuff it into a bottle of Laphroaig and still you would hope they were free for dinner the next evening.” This was after hearing a psychic talking about the “speddit woold”. Anyway, like I said, an entertaining book.
AuntiePam, I think I’m going to give up Berserk, but the next book in the queue is The Dollmaker, by Harriette Arnow. I figured you wouldn’t mind. 
You guys think your book prices are high - you should try buying them in Canada where they list the US price and the Canadian price on the book, and even though the currencies are at par and have been for awhile, our prices are still 25-30% higher than the US prices. If it wasn’t for shipping costs from the US, I’d never buy a book in a Canadian store again.
Books are somewhat higher in Thailand than in the US, too. They’re considered a luxury item, because few Thais bother to read, even university graduates. Thank goodness for the private Neilson Hays Library, which the wife and I both belong to. Saves us quite a bit of money.
I met my mom in Birmingham yesterday and we swapped out books. She brought me a whole box of Georgette Heyer - about 25 books. I think I’ll start with The Unknown Ajax.
I also have the new Kim Harrison, The Outlaw Demon Wails, which is a terrible title. I’m with her on the Clint Eastwood homages but this one is a stretch. And I got a copy of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which I think will be my next non-fiction read.
I have chills! I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s read it. You won’t let the dialect stop you, will you? It’s kinda odd, the way Arnow does it, dropping the “e” on “the”, for instance.
I’m reading The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Rennie Airth, and I’m wishing I’d waited for the paperback. it’s okay, but not as good as River of Darkness.
Finished *The Somnambulist *by Jonathan Barnes. All in all a mediocre read, although not altogether unenjoyable. It was not a strong as the promise it had.
The detective character Edward Moon, we are led to believe has the mental faculties of Sherlock Holmes. But we are only told that he does, it is never shown.
There was a hint of magic here and there, but little enough that if you don’t enjoy fantasies, you may ignore it.
I found the writing style to alternate between amusing and annoying. At times it intruded too much into the story, jarring out of it and reminding me it was a story.
I can’t say that I hated it, but I can’t recommend it.
I’m going to give up on 1876. It spends too much time hanging around in drawing rooms gossiping over dull political scandals. Meh. Fortunately I went to the library yesterday and got both L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy and Pharaoh by Karen Essex. I pulled the Heptameron out of the “recently bought” pile as well, so I’m pretty well set up for history and historical fiction right now.
But it’s not rendered th’, like Zippy th’ Pinhead?
Nah, she just drops the ‘e’.
What’s Zippy th’ Pinhead? Off to google.
An extremely dumb cartoon… but by now you know that. Sorry not to have warned you earlier.
I’m beginning H.L. Mencken’s semantic tome The American Language (the 1948 edition, as that’s what my library has) today.