I’ve been on a bit of a crime/thriller trip these last weeks, with mixed results. Just now I finished Tana French’s In the Woods, something of a psychological thriller set in Dublin. I’m very ambivalent about it: I was initially a bit annoyed by its first-person narration, which seemed a bit hamfisted in places and then suddenly started to give foreshadowing of things to come; then I was hooked by the story, and finally
I just wanted to find out how it ended, but had lost all interest in the narrator, whose descent into unlikeability and quasi-insanity seemed thoroughly over the top for me.
I also read Mo Hayder’s first three Jack Cafferty novels, which I liked more thoroughly, though Ritual, the third, seemed a trifling too much to go for effect, at the expense of believability; and a couple of cheaply got paperbacks of Colin Dexter’s inimitable Inspector Morse, which is about as far on the other side of Hayder and French as it’s possible to be before smacking right into Agatha Christie…
Otherwise, I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which is utterly brillant both as historical novel as well as just as a novel, and Gore Vidal’s Empire, which has great bit and pieces but, as far as I’m in right now, hasn’t really picked up the pace.
It took me a long time to finish Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, not least because my son keeps stealing my Kindle Fire to play*** Plants versus Zombies.***
But I did finally finish it, and it was well worth the effort.
Now, I’m immersed in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. My only other exposure to Wilkie Collins was the Classics Comics version of TheMoonstone, when I was 7 or 8. So far, I’m enjoying it immensely.
I’m about 80% of the way through the first Sandman Slim books & loving it.
I’ve also got The Gone Away World on the go, good, well written but for some reason I seem to dip into it for a few days, go off to another book & then come back.
Yeah, Gone Away World is that kind of book. It’s like a lot of brilliant riffs strung together, but it’s easy to lose interest.
I’m just finishing Soft Apocalypse, by Will McIntosh. It’s about educated suburbanites trying to preserve their humanity despite a very gradual decline of society, similar to live frogs in a pot of cold water, brought slowly to a boil. The author is a social psychologist, so the focus is on the narrator and the relationships he has with other people. Although the language is unextraordinary, the story is surprisingly compelling, and very well thought out. It’s been given much praise, and I do recommend it.
Next up for me is Gone Girl, a new novel that I keep seeing recommended everywhere I turn.
eta: I just noticed 3 books on this page with the word “Gone” in the title.
I am reading The Yard, debut novel by Alex Grecian, who writes a series of graphic novels called Proof. It’s a police mystery set in London in 1889. I’m on page 56 and totally hooked. Right now we’re in a flashback about the past of one of the detectives, who was a child coal miner. He is talking to one of his fellow miners:
“Alice was six and would soon be moving to a bigger tunnel.”
I finished The Book Thief, and cried buckets. Loved that book. Loved loved loved that book.
I’ve just started Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I started it last night, so I’m only a chapter into it, but it’s fascinating. The author has a knack for making these very real stories come alive, so it’s not just rote reporting. It probably helps that her subject is so bizarre - it’s easy to make The Hermit Kingdom a compelling setting. I’ve snatched a glimpse at some of the upcoming pages, and I think this one’s going to be good.
Slogging through the last quarter of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, which I picked up after enjoying Wolf Hall so much. She does a good job of making her protagonists sympathetic, especially Desmoulins and Robespierre, but for the last half of the book their arcs just seem to have stalled along with my enthusiasm to finish. Oh well, the number of pages remaining match up well with the historical dates of The Terror, so it won’t be long now. Promised myself I would finish this one before downloading Bring Up the Bodies.
That may have been me - if so, my apologies. I liked the first in the Quantum Gravity series well enough for what it was; urban fantasy with a scifi twist & softcore romance thrown in. I dumped the second one about halfway thru - it got more complicated, plot and character-wise than I was willing to invest in.
However, I quite enjoyed http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11936279-the-technologists by Matthew Pearl, which I checked out from the local library. Described as a “historical thriller” - we follow 4 members of the first (and possibly last) graduating class of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they investigate bizarre happenings in the town of Boston just after the Civil War. These disasters appear technology-based, and many believe the Institute is to blame. How can these students use their training and intellect to find the real culprits?
There’s more than a touch of steampunk in this novel; but the straight historical aspects of the fiction are just as important. I found myself wondering which elements of the story were true, or at least possible. The main characters are generally well-developed, especially Marcus Mansfield, the protagonist. The plot moves along well, and despite its 496 pages, kept me quite entertained all the way through, with a couple of surprising-to-me twists along the way.
Recommended to alt-history fans who appreciate a suspenseful story - I’ll probably be picking this up at some point for myself.
I finished Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson the other day. I thought it took a while to get the story moving, but the payoff was pretty good. I just started the 2nd book of the Mistborn trilogy, The Well of Ascension. So far so good, but I’m only a couple chapters into it.
I’m also seeing this book everywhere but haven’t actually read what it’s about. I’m eager to read your feedback. I enjoyed her Dark Places.
I finished Redshirts, which was my first John Scalzi novel, but will not be my last. The book’s a total geek-fest, but has lots of heart.
Also read We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver and hated it. It suffers from Important Book Syndrome, common of books that are about touchy and controversial subjects (in this case, school shootings… From the shooter’s side) and so beyond criticism or reproach. The writing style was forced and pretentious, every single one of the characters were awful people and the book ended with a gimmicky twist I saw coming from page 4.
Right now, I’m on the** Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter** bandwagon. It’s crowded here!
Finished The Reversal, by Michael Connelly. Very good. I’ve become a Connelly fan.
Next up is another one by him, The Brass Verdict. Slightly earlier in time and the first instance of his two normally separate protagonists, Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch, working together.
