I’m starting the year with Edward Rutherfurd’s New York and Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
I find PKD either spectacular or terrible, there seems to be no middle ground with him. Rutherfurd is an author I really like, despite some hack-ish tendencies, so I expect to enjoy this book.
Inspired by the lovely Kate Winslet starring in an HBO miniseries, I got Mildred Pierce from the library, and thoroughly enjoyed it even though the dialogue in the miniseries was taken almost verbatim from the book so it held no surprises. For a seventy year old novel, it holds up really, really well. I don’t know what it compares to - maybe Mildred’s daughter Veda Pierce as a non-homicidal Rhoda Penmark. Joan Crawford’s Mildred left out most of the book, so it doesn’t begin to compare and tells you nothing about the much more interesting novel. I really liked it. A synopsis.
Finished it. It is interesting, and it’s well written, but the story isn’t really all that dramatic. If you’re into art history, as I am, it’s worth reading, but if you’re looking for a real-life detective story, it’s pretty light.
Now reading:
The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age
It’s well-written, but it’s all in present tense, which some readers might find annoying. I don’t, but some might.
There’s a lot of background about the shenanigans of American “gilded age” financiers, which amply illustrate why the regulations that free-market-jihadis want to remove were created in the first place.
It also led me to Google Image search Josie Mansfield, which is worth the effort: an honest-to-og plus-sized “ingenue”. Standards really were different in the olden days.
Oh yeah, next up will be:
Hung Out to Dry: Gilbert Toyne’s classic Australian clothes hoist which is about the inventor of the rotary clothes hoist. Looks more interesting than you might expect.
Finished Ready Player One. Will probably reread it sometime in the future.
Looks like the next book on my pile is Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie. I have not read anything from him, but he gets good reviews. I can’t be entirely certain, but I believe this one is a revenge story.
Just finished the ‘new’ Sherlock Holmes novel, ‘The House of Silk’ by Anthony Horowitz. Would definitely recommend to anyone with an interest in the genre, an easy read page-turner.
Been jumping about a lot recently, the last three prior to this were:
Chris Bonington’s ‘Everest’
‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ by Anse Seierstad
‘Open’ - Andre Agassi’s autobiography
all of which were fantastic reads, in different ways.
Coming up next, a Xmas prezzie: ‘1000 years of annoying the French’ by Stephen Clarke; Anyone read it?
It is indeed! 
It is tangentally linked to his earlier trilogy, but can easily be read on its lonesome (though some things will make more sense if you have already read the earlier trilogy).
Be warned though - it seriously lacks likable characters. In this tale pretty well everyone is various shades of nasty. I did not fond that a problem, but I know some do.
Just finished Flying Finish, a Dick Francis mystery, and just started Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
Just finished Snuff - again and have started to re-read Piers Anthony Xanath books - read them when I was younger but stopped because of the names of the books - now I have a reader I can download them and finish all 30 odds of them. Roll on TP new books this year and Robert Jordan’s Final Book for the Wheel of Time (I know its not him writing it but it is his!)
Thanks for the feedback. The book description said it was a stand alone. Sounds like that’s pretty much the case. I guess if things get confusing I’ll just have to go out and get the First Law trilogy.
Well, I like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire so I think I can handle shades of gray.
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
I can’t put it down. It is gut-wrenchingly wonderful to someone entering middle-age. I’m not sure someone younger than 35 would see as much in it as I do. But that could be because I am watching the last months for my mother so I’m aware of her thoughts and outlook.
I seem to recall that Elizabeth George is well-liked by Dopers. As someone who will surely never read all the books in her Insp. Lynley series, I’m wondering where to start: with the first? Somewhere in the middle? Where do the best ones land in the progression? Do we have a fan of hers who can offer an opinion?
Just saw this. Thanks for the recommendation, I’m ordering it now. 
I’m finishing up George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings (a gift, from my wife who wants me to finish so she can read it before the HBO version starts). Then it’s on to two recent Jules Verne translations I just got – The Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson (the original version of The Mysterious Island, which was extensively revised – essentially completely rewritten ) and the restored version of The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, without son Michel Verne’s changes and additions. Even in its changed form, this has been a rare book. It’s Verne’s take on the idea of The Invisible Man, started shortly after Wells’ book appeared. It’s been called Verne’s last wholly completed novel, although he did write things afterwards.
At night I’ve been reading an 1850s chemistry textbook, which is utterly fascinating, for many reasons. One thing it shows me is that Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table wasn’t so completely out of the blue innovsation as we’ve been lead to think. And not just because of the “law of triads” stuff – people had grouped the elements into similar classes with similar properties and correlations with weights (and in groups larger than three) and called them by the same names we use now (like alkaline eartghs) well before Dmitri put them into columns and rows by atomic number.
In my car, I’ve been “reading” Clive Cussler and Douglas Preston/Lincoln Childs books on audio. They’re so over-the-top and shameless that they’re a guilty pleasure. Science fiction writers would be embarassed to propose stories as gee whiz-wow as these techno-thrillers are. I get these from the library, or buy them cheap at the used book stores.
Right now I’m finishing up Gideon’s Sword by Preston and Childs, and the hero does such ludicrous and frequently stupid things that I want to bop him on the nose. For a guy who’s supposed to be a master thief and clandestine agent, this guy does some idiotic and pointless things, and people in this book respond in unbelievable and unlikely ways to him. This is the kind of book Damon Knight came up with the term “Idiot Plot” to describe.
And the title, so far as I can tell, doesn’t make any sense!
Started today on Flashman and the Dragon.
I just read that Preston and Child plan to write twelve of these Gideon Crew novels. Gods help us.
I’m reading Breakdown, the latest V.I. Warshawski by Sara Paretski. I like these books, but I think the titles are dumb. What does “Breakdown” mean? It doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, and her other titles include Body Work, Hardball, Blacklist, Burn Marks, Blood Shot, and Deadlock. The covers aren’t distinctive either, so I always have to read the blurb before I can tell if I’ve read the book already.
Yup. I re-read Cussler’s Raise the Titanic! (1976) and Vixen 03 (1978) a couple of years ago, and they held up pretty well, despite some dated references to Women’s Lib. I loved both when I was a teenager.
I just finished A Game of Thrones after watching the HBO series first. I thought the writing was fine. I didn’t get the impression he was an enormous misogynist. Finding out who Jon’s mother is would be nice.
I haven’t read any non-fiction for awhile, so I’m going to read Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life next, while I’m waiting for A Clash of Kings from the local library.
Just added both of those to my list, thanks.
Finished Fellowship of the Ring, now on to The Two Towers. (And perhaps this belongs in the “Things About A Creative Work I Didn’t Realize” thread, but I just now realized what the two towers are. Despite having read the books before. Multiple times. I must have skipped right past that author’s note about it at the end of Fellowship, because I’ve always assumed they were Minis Tirith and Minas Morgul, not Orthanc and Minas Morgul.)