Ha, well, I grew up IN 80s pop culture so that’s all good. I just started it last night, and it’s pretty fluffy but pleasantly engaging so far. I started it because my ebook copy of Reamde had the nerve to expire when I was on about page 775 (it’s 850+ pages). This is a serious downside to getting ebooks from the library – in real life, I would have kept it for another day and cheerfully paid the overdue fine.
I am walking away from *Reamde *- maybe a bit over half-way. Just not holding me - it is not superficial and fast-paced enough to be a page-flipping thriller (he loves his details a bit too much) and not speculatively thought-provoking enough to challenge how I look at the world around me (which he did to great affect in Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Crypto, and others…). Sorry, Neal - just not for me this time.
Looking at **Ready Player One **for a goof and The Swerve, as mentioned above, for something a bit chewier…
I was more than half-way through when I had the same thought … I kept waiting for him to get to the ideas part of the book, and it’s just not there. I was far enough along that I got back on the library waiting list for it and will finish it eventually.
I think as long as you’re looking at Ready Player One as a bit of goof, you’ll be just fine. That seems like exactly what it is, in a very well-intentioned, sincere way.
Just finished David C. Distelhorst’s Primitive Paradise, about Boy Scouting in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area, set in the context of Scouting nationally since WWII. It’s a slim, self-published amateur history, very badly edited, but still somewhat interesting.
I’ve begun Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, about a Nigerian refugee who ends up with a struggling British family. It’s so-so. Dunno that it will pass my 50-page rule.
Flashman and the Dragon was really good, although it’s not my favorite Flashman book. *Redskins *is still my favorite so far, although I have a few more to go.
Over the weekend I read Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin. I had been hearing good things about this, and I enjoyed it very much, more than I was expecting to. It’s a medieval murder mystery set in Cambridge during the reign of Henry II. The book has flaws - the heroine is too modern, and it’s not hard to guess the identity of the murderer - but I thought it was very well written. Henry’s cameos at the beginning and end were nice.
I’m halfway through Richard K. Morgan’s new fantasy novel, The Cold Commands, which is the middle book of a trilogy. Morgan’s fantasy is just as dark and gritty as his science fiction, and just as well-written.
I started reading The Lost City of Z by David Grann last week - although, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into when I picked it up. I thought at first it was a historical fiction dealio, but I see that it is actual straight ahead, no shit, non-fiction.
I’m not sure which I’m more impressed with.
I have to admit … when I thought it was a fiction book, I was afraid the lost city of Z was going to turn out to be some zombie shit. I’m a little relieved at that, at least.
I decided not to finish The Making of the Prefident 1789 by Marvin Kitman, a “humorous” take on George Washington’s first presidential election. Unfortunately, the author wanted to be much cleverer and funnier than he really is.
Still reading Little Bee.
The Stone Carvers turned out to be partly about the construction of the Vimy Memorial in France. I’d recommend it, especially if that’s something that interests you. It’s also good for the character studies of a brother and sister who led very different lives. The brother, Tilman, began running away from home at the age of six. He wasn’t abused or anything – he just had an aversion to staying in one place, and being confined.
Just started The Cottagers by Marshall Klimasewiski. Ordinarily I don’t bother with novels about husband-wife relationships, but this one features a rather intriguing sociopathic teenager who spies on people who rent cottages in his resort town.
Just read Jazz by Toni Morrison, which everyone else ready >15 years ago. I think I missed something, or its hype oversold it. It was good, but I expected to be blown away.
Now reading***False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent***, by the state of Ohio’s former attorney general Jim Petro. I hope it’s good - whatever it is, it’s an important book. He had to fight to get his own prosecutors to consider new exonerating evidence in at least one murder case. He also looks at how bad eyewitness testimony is. Our justice system has convicted many innocent people, and people remain in denial about it.
If you like it, I can recommend John Grisham’s nonfiction The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, which I reported reading earlier.
Scott Turow’s Ultimate Punishment is also an excellent look at the death penalty from all sides, acknowledging and addressing the best arguments from each. Short but quite good.
Finished Cell and I must say I enjoyed it. Maybe because I like zombies in my fiction or maybe I’m relatively new to King that I can’t tell he has jumped the shark.
I know I should read Misery next but I picked up Desperation instead. Because I’m kooky like that.
Finished a quick read: River of Darkness, by Rennie Airth. A mystery, set in that classic English mystery period between the wars, but written with more of today’s crime writing style (or at any rate, 1999’s crime writing style) - so you get more graphic violence and not everything is so cozy. I enjoyed it, and it’s the first in a trilogy.
delphica, I liked River of Darkness too, but the second book was a disappointment. Maybe I read it too soon after reading the first one, as it felt like I was reading the same book, but without that “this is fresh” feeling.
I dumped Cottagers at the halfway point. Two couples take a vacation cottage together on Vancouver Island. A local teenager insinuates himself into their lives. I knew from the dust jacket blurb that someone was going to disappear, and as soon as that happened, I quit reading. The only character who was even slightly interesting was the teenager, and he was repulsive. The best part of the book was the author’s descriptions of the setting.
Now I just finished The Snowman by Jo Nesbo. It’s a Norwegian mystery about a detective trying to catch a serial killer who builds snowmen as his signature. It was really good.
I’m currently reading*** The Litigators by John Grisham ***but so far (38% through) it’s really not very interesting, even though I usually like Grisham. It’s about a small, loserish law firm going after a big pharmaceutical company.
I’m also reading The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist. It’s a dystopian novel where older, childless people are housed/locked in “The Unit”, which is actually a nice place with lots to do, and used for medical experimentation and organ donation.
Finished The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff, which I mostly liked.
This was a follow-up to The Enchantment Emporium featuring Alysha Gale and the Gale clan of witches. It is urban fantasy and a light easy read.
Ms. Huff enjoys poking at our sexual mores which I find both odd and often confusing. The Gale family, being witches, interbreed within the clan. More Gale girls are born than Gale boys and so they tend to have a gaggle of girls after them. Thankfully, she isn’t explicit about the sex, but the fact that Auntie Catherine may also be a character’s mother or grandmother, and the fact that Ms. Huff switches often between calling an Auntie and Auntie and calling her grandmother sometimes makes the narrative hard to follow. Since this particular oddity seems to server little purpose in furthering her plots, I have trouble imagining why she insists on it.
But I will likely read the next.
If you want to read another Pat Conroy (author of The Water is Wide) I would recommend The Lords of Discipline or Beach Music.
Fortunately, I have a lot of time to read. I recently finished Maine (only ok) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (excellent). I am now on to Echo in the Bone, book 7 in the Outlander Series, a historical, science fiction, romance, adventure, thriller. Not bad when you are not sure which genre to choose.
Well, I have wound up with my nose in both the Nero Wolfe mystery Too Many Cooks and the Flashman adventure Flashman and the Dragon.
Focus, at the moment, is really on Flashy–it’s a library book, so I’ve got a deadline with it. While I’ve been enjoying it, I feel it’s not quite as action-packed (in any of the several ways Flashy’s adventures tend to be) as the earlier books in the series. It’s also so far been lacking the “Disastrous Blunders of the Victorian-Era British Empire” theme that’s run through many of the other novels–you know, the First Anglo-Afghan War and retreat from Kabul, the Indian Mutiny, and so on. (Of course, you do get a bit of “Disastrous Blunders of the Victorian-Era American Republic” here and there as well.) Still, I’m only around halfway through and I don’t know the first thing about the setting/time period, so there’s still room.
Train by Pete Dexter. After Paris Trout, I swore I’d never read anything else by him, but it was a quarter at the library sale and it won a big award. I think it’s quite good, but I’m getting the same misanthropic vibe that I got with Paris Trout.
Anyone else read Pete Dexter and come away thinking he hates people?