Cool. I liked the one Hambly I’ve read (forgot the title).
I’m almost finished with All This and Heaven Too by Rachel Field. It’s based on the real life case of Henriette Desportes, a French governess in the mid 1800’s. Her mistress was murdered by her husband, a duke, and public opinion was that Henriette and the duke were lovers. She leaves France for America, marries, and she and her husband become friends with several famous people – writers and politicians and such.
The book is written by Henriette’s great-niece (by marriage). It’s hard to know how much is fictionalized – probably a lot. Henriette is one of those characters that I can admire without liking very much. I like the book though – lots of nice detail about France (and America) in the 1800’s. I’d recommend it if you’re interested in that time period – it covers the 1840’s to 1875.
Next up is the new one from Barry Udall, The Lonely Polygamist.
Finished Exiles by Ron Hansen, one of my favorite writers. He wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Desperadoes.
It’s sort of a biography of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, focusing on Hopkins’ poem The Wreck of the Deutschland. Five exiled German nuns died in the shipwreck, and it affected Hopkins deeply. The book is fascinating, with a lot of detail about seminary life (and Jesuit politics), and Hansen brings the five nuns to life. The shipwreck is fascinating too. The Deutschland ran aground in a storm at the mouth of the Thames, and survivors had to cling to the masts for two days awaiting rescue.
This month I’ve read Stephen King’s Under the Dome, which was good for the first 900 pages, plus the YA classic The Outsiders. One of my students insisted that I read it, as it is her favorite book. I had somehow never read it or seen the movie, and now I wish I had when I was in high school.
Yesterday I started another YA book, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. I’m three chapters in, and it’s going slowly. The book gets rave reviews, but I’m having a hard time seeing how my teens will keep reading this after 10 pages. The pacing is just… off. I don’t really care about the protagonist or anyone else in the book yet; the protagonist keeps mentioning how sweet her sister is, but I’m not being shown that.
Wait, does anything actually happen in this book? I listened to one CD and I’m about to hurl it, along with the new Elizabeth George book, This Body of Death, which is a white hot, overpopulated, under-plotted mess, with a (so far) unrelated subplot I could happily do without. Only about 75 pages to go, so I’m guessing it probably won’t redeem itself, which is disappointing since Careless in Red almost made me forgive the author for past transgressions.
Next up, The Double Comfort Safari Club, by Alexander McCall Smith, …and it better be good. :mad:
I’m finishing Inda by Sherwood Smith. Bare bones version: Young prince excels in military training, is betrayed and exiled, adapts to new life with integrity (so far). Has the potential to be deadly dull, but Sherwood’s characterization makes it work. And the library has the sequels.
Next on my list is The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass (great name!), sequel to The Edge of Reason.
I thought the magic beer was awesome, and I don’t even drink.
I do drink, but rarely, and only dark beer, which is the only reason I figured out the literal “dark” of the title before even starting the book. I never pick up on double meanings, metaphors, etc., so was very proud of myself.
I loved the Vikings, and pictured them as the Capital One crew. Fun!
Finished this and also got through Between a Rock and a Hard Place, by Aron Ralston. He is the hiker you may have heard about some years ago who got trapped under falling rock in a canyon while hiking alone. He was out there six days with hardly any food or water and had to amputate his own hand to get free.
I didn’t enjoy either of these books as much as I had expected to. The Ralston book had some very interesting parts and occasionally moved me to tears, but the other 70% was pretty tedious. I think a major problem for me with both books was that I didn’t like the authors themselves very much.
I’m now on to The Darker Sex: tales of the supernatural and macabre by Victorian women writers, edited by Mike Ashley. Digging it.
Yes! Swamp shootouts, a hidden laboratory, a long-lost painting, and some backstory about Agent Pendergast’s mysterious late wife Helen and even more mysterious ward Constance. If you haven’t read any of the Agent Pendergast books, you might not be as agog as some of the rest of us for these little tidbits. But A.X.L. Pendergast is the man.
Now reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a book about a Harvard graduate student learning about her witch ancestors, by Katherine Howe. Good so far. I had some Borders credits about to expire, and this looked likely.
Just finished the holiday-themed sf short story collection Christmas on Ganymede (Avon 1990), edited by Martin H. Greenberg. I looked it up at my library because it had a short story I remembered really enjoying when I was a kid, Gordon R. Dickson’s 1957 “The Christmas Present,” about a jellyfish-like alien who bonds with a human colonist child and helps his family. Just as good as I remembered! The other especially fine story in this collection was “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus” by Frederik Pohl, a 1956 story about the insanity of rampant seasonal consumerism. Despite the title, it’s not a heavy-handed religious screed.
Finished Devil’s Cub a couple of days ago. Amazing that Heyer could turn a spoilt bad tempered alcoholic boy racer in to a hero! Still just love this book!
I was sick over the weekend, and I didn’t want to try to concentrate on a new book, so I did a lot of comfort re-reading. I love being able to skim through a book and read just my favorite bits.
I’ve just finished the first Maisie Dobbs book, and I was disappointed in it. The writing left me cold. The series sounded like something I would like - a female private detective in post-WWI London - and the books get good reviews, but this one did nothing for me. I even put it down for couple of days and came back to it, to make sure it wasn’t just my bad mood.
Finished The Night Watch (which I believe was recommended here) and mostly enjoyed it. IMO it was pretty much three novelettes tied together. I alternately enjoyed and got bored with the constant moralizing - what is the line between doing good and evil? The first tale’s surprise ending was fun, even though I guessed most of it. By the third tale’s surprise I had grown tired of surprise endings - much like M. Night Shyamalan, once you know that there will be a twist, it fails to be fun. None-the-less, overall I enjoyed the book and will probably read the next two.
Getting around to A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. It’s off to a slow start – taking a long time to tell me that Ralph has been a widower for 20 years and is really, really horny. I get it. Fifty pages of I get it.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, I’m sorry you didn’t like Maisie Dobbs. I really did. I hope it grows on you.
Finished The Darker Sex: tales of the supernatural and macabre by Victorian women writers, edited by Mike Ashley. It was just as described, so if that’s your cup of tea, have at it!
I also just got done with Knowing Darkness: Artists inspired by Stephen King. That is not the edition I have, and I hope not the price the library paid for it! I didn’t actually read the text, just looked at the purty (and not so purty) pictures. The book is huge…it weighs ten pounds!
Next up: Wisenheimer, a childhood subject to debate, by Mark Oppenheimer. Autobiography of a nerd who found fulfillment when he joined the debate team.
I finally finished Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson. I was sad that I finished it last night when I was all alone in the house, so I couldn’t show off the triumph of finally landing that 900+ page monster. I made my cats look at it and they seemed very impressed.
On a lighter note, I finished the newest in the Dresden Files series, Changes. Liked it, mainly because it closed some plot threads that I was getting sick of and started up some interesting new ones.
YUCK. It just went on and on like that. At least a third longer than it needed to be, and all the same thing – Ralph wants to have sex. Likes sex. Misses having sex. There’s an actual plot in there somewhere, but it’s buried under the author’s belief that I want to read about Ralph’s libido.
Now reading The Black Cat, Martha Grimes’ newest Richard Jury mystery.
