Body Double - Tess Gerritsen She writes a fast moving who done it, very good.
The Appeal - John Grisham Also very good novel about a crooked court system in Mississippi.
Someone in my on-line book group raved about the book even though she absolutely hated one of the plot points. She said she’d never felt that way about a book before, and she recommended it highly, despite whatever plot point she had trouble with. (She didn’t elaborate.)
Lately I’ve read Misfortune by Wesley Stace, Mélusine by Sarah Monette, Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare, and Labyrinths by Borges, I’ve reread Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and I’ve started The Earth Path by Starhawk.
I finished Doors Open by Ian Rankin. Absolutely worthwhile, and it reassures me that he can still write stories that aren’t about Rebus.
I’m still reading The Service, but I have to say I’m very disappointed. It is very much a ‘first novel’, and while it has lots of the elements that made Paul Quarrington a great writer, they aren’t yet sorted out, and it suffers from a deliberate attempt to be written in a sort of pulp stroke book fashion. I switched to the Ian Rankin halfway on the plane ride out here because I was getting extremely self-conscious about my reading material… There’s a quantum leap in writing ability from this to The Life of Hope, his second novel. I’ll tough it out, but barely…
Last night I read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, which is actually more of a booklet. It took me about fifteen minutes. It’s just a list of short, snappy rules about how to eat, which is much likelier to help you in the grocery store than if you had read a scientific tome about nutrition.
Started on By Blood We Live, a vampire story collection edited by John Joseph Adams. I didn’t really have time to get into a new book last night, so I just re-read the Stephen King story One for The Road. It’s been a long time since I’d read any old King, and I was struck by what a wonderful job he did on this story (okay, the last line was a little hokey). I’m still a fan, but truthfully his early stuff was the real gold.
God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer by Bart Ehrman and Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson by David S. Reynolds.
I just finished The September Society by Charles Finch which the second in a series of Victorian mysteries and very enjoyable. I’m now reading Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin which is a Swedish mystery.
Finished When Demons Walks by Paricia Briggs.
A combination of Fantasy, Love Story and Murder Mystery. Briggs’ work is a good quick read and I enjoyed this one as much I enjoy most of her others.
I tried reading Lemony Snicket’s whatever of unfortunate events. The writing style bugged the crap (and by crap, I mean the excrement from a billy goat) out of me.
I’m now reading The Doomesday Book by Connie Willis. I’m having a hard time getting into it.
I’m working my way through My Big Stolen List of Dystopian Fictionand hope I have better luck with the next ones.
I just finished a perfect gem of a book, A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick. Gorgeous writing, deeply felt, it will stay with me for a long time.
That sounds really good, from the description on Amazon. Wow.
Tonight I finished The Sagan Diary, a novella by John Scalzi that’s part of his very good Old Man’s War military sf series. It’s the musings of one of his main characters, and gave me some insights into who she really is. Wouldn’t mean much to anyone who hadn’t already read the other three books, though.
After 60 pages, I confess I gave up on Suzanne Clothier’s Bones Would Rain From the Sky, about appreciating and better understanding dogs. It’s my book club’s February selection, but just didn’t hook me. She really, really, really loves dogs, and I don’t (not that much).
Thanks for the nudge; I still need to read The Last Colony.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
I had started Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency last month, but couldn’t get into it – a bit too cutesy for my taste. Be that as it may, it’s not like I didn’t have or don’t have a lot to read anyhow. Within the last week, I finished:
Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter, by A.E. Moorat. That was quite good fun. Though only marginally comparable, it beat both Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, and V for Vendettaby Alan Moore et al. These are really outstanding books, and I’m sorry it took me so long to get to them. From Hell, especially, was terrific.
and in a different register, Frederick C. Leiner’s Millions for Defense about the subscription warships of the Quasi-War with France. I really enjoyed that as well, although as far as narrative continuity was concerned, it really had none, and didn’t tie the subscription warships all that well in with the rest of the Quasi-War. Still good.
I’m currently reading (as in, they lie around cracked open and get read in randomly):
David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas on the construction of the Panama Canal. A 1976 book I’ve been meaning to buy for some time now and finally got in a used book store. Quite interesting – I’d known about most of the difficulties in general terms (Malaria, the difficulty of cutting through at Culebra, and the financing problems in the French operation), but this really brings home the amazing magnitude of the Canal.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It’s certainly as good as the reviewers made it out to be. Not yet quite as tragic as I imagined it, though…might yet come to that.
Dan Simmons’s Drood. Got it for five bucks and remembered the recommendations here (weren’t they a bit mixed?). The book has its lengths, that’s for sure, but Simmons also certainly knows how to keep a mystery alive and well, at least into the 280 or so pages I’m in.
I wanted some good, comfort-food fiction. So I’m re-reading the Song of Ice and Fire series.
Seriously, though. I’m getting angry. Is Martin ever going to finish this series? There’s so much left unresolved, and A Feast for Crows kind of pissed me off because he deliberately ignored a lot of the previously developed characters.
Other than that, I breezed through Soccernomics (decent read. I’m not interested in either soccer or sports in general but this was an interesting look at why certain teams prosper and others fail. Think of it as Freakonomics as told through a sports, or more precisely a soccer lens)
Yes, I think many liked it, although I found it long and tedious and in the end didn’t really care what happened.
Freudian slip, or purposeful?
For strengths, I suppose? A Germanism, I guess – I’m only now discovering that one doesn’t actually say that in English. Live and learn…I actually really meant that there are some tediously long stretches of nothing actually happening.
I liked it a lot, not so much as a story with a plot (it was thin and more than a bit contrived), but as a leisurely, detailed look at the daily lives of Dickens and Collins, and Victorian life in general.
I’m almost finished with Leave Her to Heaven. The book explains a lot of stuff that was left out of the movie. Next up will be the fourth Aubrey-Maturin.
Thanks, Enterprise.
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