I’m about two thirds way through A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith, and I am totally caught up in it. Great writing!
The Mapping of Love and Death, sixth in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.
A Booth Tarkington collection that includes short stories and three novels. It’s a big fat book! I’ve seen the movie versions of Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons but have never read him.
I just finished reading Jules Verne’s The Lottery Ticket (AKA Lottery Ticket 9672). I’m a big Verne fan, and am trying to read all his works, but this is easily the worst thing from him I’ve read – worse than Dick Sands, the Boy Captain. Verne produced some incredibly clever and eerily prescient works, and knew how to extrapolate the science and sociology of his times in a series of engaging works. This isn’t one of them – a sappy tearjerker with no redeeming value.
i also read Captain Future and the Space Emperor, the first of Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future stories from 1940. It’s got some interesting ideas (including the first Living-Brain-in-a-transparent-glass-box I’m aware of), but it’s hopelessly puerile and downright racist (something that no one writing about these stories ever mentioned.)
I have a stack of other things to read. I’m plunging on with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos (I’ve never read any of her works before) and The Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches of Mark Twain, which is more to my liking.
Oh, good, I’m glad you like it! One thing I thought about that book was that if it was a Choose Your Own Adventure game, the protagonist did just what I’d have wanted him to. Interesting to see how that would have worked out!
Since reading Stranger in a Strange Land, I’ve never been able to understand why anyone liked Robert Heinlein. Chronos recommended that I give him another try with one of the juveniles, and so I’ve been reading Space Cadet. I admit that I approached it with reluctance, but I got to page 93, and now I’m giving up.
It was written in 1948, so it reads a lot like the Hardy Boys, which is okay, but IMO too much detail is slowing down the story. If you’ve read it, you’ll probably laugh at me for saying that, but sci-fi is always kind of hit and miss for me, and this just wasn’t working out.
I’m running back to some girly, modern YA now with Breakfast at Sadie’s by Lee Weatherly.
Well, if you’re willing to try Heinlein just one more time, these are my favorites: Glory Road (an American soldier is lured into interdimensional adventure by a beautiful but mysterious woman), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (a revolution breaks out in a lunar colony), Time for the Stars (telepaths keep near-lightspeed starships in touch with Earth) and Starship Troopers (futuristic infantry in powered armor fight aliens).
All very different, all very good, IMHO.
Agreed - and if you want to try the juveniles, my own view is that “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” is the best of the lot.
Rule of thumb for Heinlein: The more sex he puts into his novels, the weirder they are as a whole. This isn’t prudery speaking - it’s just that Heinlein was an, ah, interesting fellow.
Ugh, give me a couple of years to rest and I’ll think about it.
If you enjoyed that book, I’d recommend Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois. It’s another alternate history novel that I felt had a similar feel to Fatherland. (The alternate history in this book was the Cuban Missile Crisis became a minor nuclear war.)
In keeping with the alternate history theme, I’m currently reading Hitler’s War by Harry Turtledove. It’s a typical Turtledove book, if you like his stuff, you’ll like this.
I’m reading A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift, by Kate Griffin. I’m taking my time with it because it’s so good, I just don’t want it to end. Plus there’s a sequel!
This book is everything that Neverwhere (Gaiman) tried to be and could have been, and far more. It’s urban fantasy set in London, skillfully, beautifully, and lovingly written, with imagination that never quits and just blows my mind. Every page is a pleasure. Sorcerers fueled by the rhythms of the city, archetypal entities of great power such as The Bag Lady, The Beggar King, and blue angels in the wires of the city.
And I just learned that the author was 19 when she wrote it! Catherine Webb is her given name, and she published her first book at 14. It was a hit and she wrote two successful YA series. Madness of Angels is her first adult book, followed by the sequel. Now she’s going to college, zomg.
If you like this stuff, I beg you to give this book a try.
Is there any particular reason you chose Ethan of Athos to start with? I like it well enough, but I don’t think it’s one of Bujold’s best.
I recently read Georgette Heyer’s *Regency Buck *- still working my way towards An Infamous Army. I liked this one much better than the first two in the sequence (These Old Shades and Devil’s Cub).
I just finished Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color, the first in a series of historical mysteries set in New Orleans in the 1830’s. I like Hambly’s writing very much. This was a vivid portrait of the French-flavored culture of New Orleans, an island of relative (and diminishing) security for free persons of African ancestry. The protagonist has returned home after living for several years in Paris, and he waxes nostalgic despite the many dangers and indignities he faces. In the end I wasn’t at all convinced that he shouldn’t get right back on the boat and return to Europe.
I don’t recall conscious choosing it at all. It appeared on my reading stack. For all I know, the Bookmobile Fairies brought it in. I have no idea how I got it. But it’s here now, so I started reading it.
I’m finally getting to the end of Turgenev’s short story collection, A Hunter’s Sketches.
(Whcih I already used in the “Pick the 11th sentence from page 111 of the nearest book” thread.’)
There’s no bigger fan of Fatherland than me, but I was very, very disappointed by Resurrection Day. Not nearly as well written as Harris’s book, IMHO, and the author just couldn’t pull off the concept.
You didn’t ask me, but I’m a little bit ambivalent about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer. I liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I think that was just about the right book for Grahame-Smith to have “written,” because he got in a bit over his head in the Lincoln book. I don’t want to spoil it; it was fairly well-written and engaging, but it’s not like it has a plot, or a story arch. It’s somewhat episodic, the cameo appearances are unsurprising both in who appears and what their roles are. The Civil War is the last seventh or so of the book, with nary anything happening that would tell us what vampires did and how they interacted with the rest of the troops. I much prefered Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, which was more ludicrous, but much greater fun, and actually had a plot.
As for myself, I just finished the sixth volumen of Bill Willingham’s Fables. Next to Kirkman’s Walking Dead, this is the most readably impressive comic series I’ve found – much less esoteric than Sandman and considerably less weird than The Invisibles. I’ve ordered the remaining for a short holiday that’s coming up…
Finished Michael Dobbs One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. At once a sobering and encouraging book: sobering because of the remarkable room for silly error and astounding ineptitude of so many participants and plans (like the emergency bomber bases that couldn’t cope with the weight of the B-52s, or the emergency fighter fields which had absolutely no nuclear security), and encouraging for what gimples it gives of the decision process in Moscow and Washington and the determination on both sides to avoid nuclear war at almost any cost.
Still on Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (bedtime reading, mostly) and have just started Jim Buthcer’s Academ’s Fury; Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts; and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, which I may relegate to a later date, however.
Thanks for the feedback on ALVS. Not sure I’ll read it, but it sounds like an intriguing concept.
If the Dobbs book interested you, and if you haven’t already ready these, I’d recommend The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison (the classic study of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Kennedy’s Wars by Lawrence Freedman (a British historian’s more recent take on JFK’s diplomacy and military policies). I’ve long been interested in Kennedy, and these are both quite good.
Finished the Civil War novel – A Distant Flame by Philip Lee Williams. It wasn’t quite as gut-wrenching as Flanders by Patricia Anthony (WWI) but it had the same kind of feel.
We see Charlie Merrill in three distinct times of his life – a young teenager in 1862 before he joined the Confederate Army, camping in the woods with his friend Jack – in 1864 when he’s 17 and a sharpshooter for General Cleberne, on the way to defend Atlanta – and in 1914 on the 50th anniversary of the battle for Atlanta when Charlie’s getting ready to give a speech. I’m not usually a fan of moving back and forth in time, but it worked well here and it shows Charlie’s growth. I liked the book a lot.
Now reading a Booth Tarkington collection that includes three novels and several short stories. I’m reading Alice Adams.
I finished A Simple Plan and must say it is one of the better reads I have come across in a long time.
After this and *The Ruins *by the same author, Scott Smith, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
Finished The Juggler a Faustian tale of a Medieval juggler who sells his soul to Satan to become the world’s greatest juggler. I found it slow in parts and maybe the ending was a little rushed, but overall enjoyable.
Finished Monster a quirky little book about a cryptobiological containment specialist - a monster catcher. Why he is *named *Monster was never answered or I missed it. It was an OK read, but I not good enough for me to seek out the author’s other books.
Next up: Butcher’s new Dresden book - hooray!