And for our many Stephen King fans: - YouTube
Thanks for that, EH!
Right now I’m midway through Tom McGowen’s Sir MacHinery, a children’s book which had its own thread here recently.
I finished “Gone With the Wind” over the weekend and “Little House on the Prairie.” On to “Farmer Boy.” I might pick up something else this week, too.
Turns out The Last Policeman is the first in a planned trilogy. I probably won’t read the other two. The story was sufficient – young detective continues to do his job while the rest of society falls apart, waiting for the comet. But the author ends the first book with a government (?) plot to save a limited number of valuable people.
Currently reading The Absolutist by John Boyne. It’s set during and after WWI and is a story of friendship and courage and forbidden (in 1916) love. It’s really good, but if anyone’s thinking of reading it, don’t read the description at Amazon, because it gives away the major plot points. Why do publishers do that?
Right now, I’m reading Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale.
I just finished Caliban’s War, by James S. A. Corey, which is a sequel to last year’s Leviathan’s Wake (a 2012 Hugo nominee). This new book is just as fun as the last one: a rollicking space opera set within our solar system a few hundred years in the future. No warp drive and no artificial gravity; plenty of space suits and airlocks and radiation danger. Lots of interplanetary politicking and the occasional firing of torpedoes.
I know the authors are writing the third book now, and I read somewhere that they are planning more, but they’re promising one a year.
While on vacation I had a re-read of Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy, Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen. Nifty little YA fantasy series about an interwar-era England in which magic works north of Hadrian’s wall, more or less. They focus on the Abhorsen, a person whose job it is to make sure the dead stay so–also the titular Sabriel and Lirael. The second book has a bit of a weak spot in the form of a rather unsympathetic secondary viewpoint character, but in general they’re good entertainment. Also led to tears on the plane when a certain character “died.”
Moved from there to Stout’s Black Orchids, continuing my slow march through the Nero Wolfe canon. Finished that either on the plane or shortly afterwards and ahad a few days off from reading.
Last night I realized I was having an itch for some true crime of my favorite sort–thieves and/or con men. So I poked around on Amazon and found Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber. Barely cracked it this morning waiting for my coffee, but I’m thinking this should get me my fix. Might have to look into the rest of the “Library of Larceny”, in fact…
I finished The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson, the third in his *Mistborn *trilogy. Overall, the whole trilogy was very entertaining. I look forward to reading more Sanderson, unfortunately all he’s got going is the final Wheel of Time stuff (I’m not starting that just to get to the millionth book in the series to read Sanderson) and one book in a ten book series. There is apparently a 4th Mistborn book, maybe I’ll pick that up eventually.
Next up is a re-read of The Hobbit in anticipation of that upcoming trilogy. At least I think I read *The Hobbit *before…I honestly don’t even remember.
I just finished Sir MacHinery, a children’s book. It was…nice… If I’d read it when I was a kid, of course I’d have liked it more.
I’m now reading a humor book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson. It’s amusing, although sometimes I feel that the author is trying too hard.
Finished Midnights with the Mystic. Even though I am agnostic (or as one friend puts it, an atheist who wants to believe) I enjoyed it.
In my Laura Ingalls Wilder quest I have finished “Farmer Boy” and have moved on to “On the Banks of Plum Creek.” I live about seven miles from where this one takes place and did a story about it recently. I also started “The Terror” by Dan Simmons because I need a little something more grown-uppy once in a while.
Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing by Peter Silverton.
The best writing I’ve read on the subject. Very interesting and highly entertaining. Note: author is a Brit, so while US English is covered, it’s not the sole focus as it would be if the author was a yank. There are also lengthy digressions into non-English swearing, too.
I finished a mystery called City of the Dead by an English author named Daniel Blake. I like books set in New Orleans, but this had a lot of cliches, and it had some translation misses that should have been caught by the editor: When a policeman is doing an investigation in England and gets no results, he might report “We knocked on every door in the neighborhood, but no joy.” That’s just not something we’d say in America. “No results,” maybe, or “no luck.” And we don’t say “minibreak,” for a short vacation or long weekend. That really took me out of the sense of place the author went to such pains to achieve.
Now just starting Broken Harbor by Tana French, the Edgar-winning Irish author. Her previous books have been excellent and Faithful Place was really terrific.
I had to return the North Korea book before I finished it - someone else at the library had requested it, so I couldn’t renew it for another three weeks. Bummer, that. It wasn’t a quick read, but I was making headway, and it was really interesting. I think the second half had more snapshots of what life was like in N. Korea, and I wanted to get to that. (The first half is a long study about the Kim family and how Il-Sung created and shaped the North Korean state.) Maybe I’ll see if I can grab it again.
I’m now 3/4 of the way through Orange is the New Black, one woman’s study of life in a minimum security prison “camp.” She made some bad choices as a young adult, got got up with a drug trafficker, and was sentenced to 15 months when that trafficker was later caught by the feds. (The author didn’t run drugs herself; she had a more minor role and only transported money. She got out and away because she saw herself going down that path and didn’t like where it was headed.) Kerman paints a portrait of a world I never knew and could only imagine, and it’s much different than I anticipated. (It’s also really interesting to me - my brother-in-law is currently headed to a low security prison where he’ll be spending the next 8 or so years for bank robbery. So this book gives me some sort of idea, sort of, about what he’ll be facing.)
It’s well-written, pretty light in tone (considering the subject matter; it may get darker later. She does describe some sad things, but doesn’t dwell on them), and goes really fast.