Finished The Hob’s Bargain another light quick read by Patricia Briggs. Like most of her work it is a mixture of fantasy, adventure and a little romance all thrown together. It was an easy read and helped pass the time while I was snowed in.
I read Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing last month and started this month with the sequel, Six Bad Things. A good set of gritty detective novels, although the violence may be a bit much for the faint of heart. I recommend both books. I’m going to start the third in a few days.
I also read Magic Bites, by Ilona Andrews. It’s the first in a supernatural series with a ass kicking heroine with a dark past, sexy-but-antagonistic male shape-shifter, blah blah blah. Very “been there, done that." The world is interesting – set in a future Atlanta, where magic and technology are at constant odds – but Andrews doesn’t do enough with it.
Yeah, I liked it well enough. It wasn’t great, but was an easy read. I also read the others. As you say, it didn’t bring anything new to the genre. I don’t mind though, I usually am just looking for a diversion.
My book about Heloise and Abelard turned out to be really good.
I’m almost finished with the new Connie Willis book (it’s good, so far). A lot of Willis’s humor is based on chaos and confusion, and the proliferation of cell phones has probably greatly annoyed her. In this book there’s a weak throwaway line to possibly explain why the people in the year 2060 are still running around campus looking for each other and passing around illegible, hand-written phone messages.
Blackout by Connie Willis. It’s a sequel to a couple of other books I’ve not read, but that doesn’t seem too important.
Fairly lightweight so far; my main grype is that, if I don’t get some sort of hint of an explanation as to why the department is being run so ineptly, I may give up in annoyance!
There are also a couple of kids in it who are surely named after Henry Kuttner’s Hogben (sp?) family…
Ah, got distracted and took ages to finish my post, so Eleanor got in before me…
There’s a CS thread on Blackout already underway: New Connie Willis novel: Blackout - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Finished Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Damn but that was good! I had never read any O’Hara before and am awfully glad to have discovered him. The book covers three days in the lives of the leading couple of the smart set in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, in December 1930. Gibbsville is a fictionalized version of O’Hara’s native Pottsville.
I liked it so much I checked out another small novel of his, a “novella” if you will, called The Farmers Hotel and will start that today.
Finished it and loved it. Got An Unpardonable Crime from the library, starting now, and bought two more on Sunday. Plus e-mailed the author apologizing for not having read all his books before.
Yes, she is great. Her early stuff isn’t as good, but that just shows that she got better. I’ve met her and she’s great.
I liked that one too. Plan to read A Beautiful Blue Death.
Also on my list.
I put this one down because I just couldn’t invest the time, but I was enjoying it. I will pick it back up.
I finished The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. It wasn’t great. It mixed stories of modern and old-time polygamy. I found the modern parts too few and far between, yet when I got to them they felt … I don’t know, I can’t quite place a finger on it. Not necessarily badly written, just poorly executed. The old-time stuff was so dull at times I ended up skimming. Overall I loved the concept but felt it missed the mark.
Today I’ll be starting The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It’s YA, which I don’t usually read, but it came highly recommended from a friend so I figure I can give it a few days of my time. I also started reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It started out slow but now I’m getting into it.
I have apparently decided to read every Robert Sawyer novel in 2010, having knocked off about 6 since my trip to Toronto/Montreal in early January. Planning to follow that up by re-reading all of Vonnegut’s stuff.
My book club read Alexie’s interconnected short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven a few years back, and most of us (incl. me) really liked it.
Finished Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams. Except for a couple pages of :rolleyes: romantic dialogue toward the end, I liked it a lot. Williams must have been quite the outdoorsman. Almost all of the action is outdoors – hiking, horseback riding, camping, fishing – and there are scenes of a flash flood and a forest fire that are quite realistic and exciting. They were left out of the movie, probably because they blew the budget on Gene Tierney’s wardrobe.
Reading some short stories from The Wastelands, post-apocalypse stuff, and just started the fourth Aubrey-Maturin, The Mauritius Command. God, but Mrs. Williams is funny!
I’m trying to resist going to Amazon to look for Andrew Taylor’s books. Thanks, Sigmagirl!
I read *The Wastelands *a few months ago and I liked it quite a bit. Though I found “The People of Sand and Slag” so disturbing I wish I could un-read it.
Disturbing, but brilliant. And maybe a bit hopeful, in a perverse sort of way. I mean, look at how adaptable humans are! 
And they didn’t eat the dog until after it was badly injured.
Finished John O’Hara’s novella The Farmers Hotel. Short but very, very good. One night in November 1950, at the reopening of an old rural hotel. I like O’Hara and will have to read some more. Our library carries some collections of his short stories, of which he wrote more than 400 in his life. (He reportedly took great pride in having published more fiction in The New Yorker than any other author. Dunno if that record still stands.)
But next up for now: Enigma, by Robert Harris. Have read his Pompeii and Imperium and liked them. Would love to read Fatherland, but I’m having trouble finding it in the bookstores here.
Read:
The Child Thief by Brom ~ I got this for my husband who is a Brom fan but thought it was an art book. It turns out to be Peter Pan meets Lord of the Flies meets Tales of King Arthur story with a few illustrations. It was ok.
Empress (Godspeaker Trilogy) by Karen Miller ~ Enjoyed! I would be reading the next in the series if I could find it locally.
Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy) by KJ Parker ~ This was an ok read but interesting enough for me to get the next in the series. An engineer is sentenced to death for not following the strict rules applied to his trade. He manages to escape and starts giving the closely guarded secrets of his country to their enemies although I’m still not too sure what his motives are.
Wise Children by Angela Carter ~ I’ve had this kicking around for ages and regret not reading it sooner. Follow the lives of twins who grew up in vaudeville and have the most twisted family tree.
The Family by Ed Sanders ~ Reread. Hate the writing style although it matures as you read along. I also find it a bit too gossipy.
Reading:
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen ~ Decent read so far but not as exciting as I had hoped.
I started Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I like so far. It reminds me of a better-written, better-edited, more-interesting version of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, except it’s not about Dracula (I don’t think…although I’m only on page 84).
Fatherland* is, IMHO, one of the best alt-histories ever written; it’s a very well-crafted thriller and a chilling and all too plausible “what-if.” I haven’t read his other books (with the exception of the nonfiction Selling Hitler, about the tawdry Fuhrer-diary hoax of the early 1980s), but a friend of mine loves his Roman history stuff.
I can recommend the two of his Roman works I read. And Imperium looks to be the first of a “Cicero trilogy”; I think the second installment came out last year. Will keep looking for Fatherland; a copy should surface sooner or later, and I could probably order one too.
I’ve had very good luck using interlibrary loan for relatively obscure books. As a matter of fact, I just got a childhood favorite (published in the early Sixties) through ILL, and am now reading it to my son.