What are you reading?

Sophia said:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, ... there was a BBC adaptation of it

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^Oh - that's very good news

I'm reading "The Rifter" series by Ginn Hale - this is a fantastic writer, somehow in a niche with a small press. I'm also reading "The Magician's Land" (book three of the series by Lev Grossman.) It's been so long since I read the other two that I forgot all kinds of stuff...

I didn't read it but I listened to the audiobook of The Martian. A few reviews I read gave low marks but I was still curious after the overwhelming positive comments about.

The narrator did a fantastic job I thought, and really personified the characters well. While I wouldn't dock the novel for the tech talk it did get a bit much at times. It seemed unnecessary to an extent, but it also worked because it was sort of a diary for his colleagues. Why wouldn't he talk in more technical terms for them?

It was tense and engaging and, I must admit, am even more excited to see the film now that I've read/listened to it.

Jazz by Toni Morrison -- This is great work. Not set in that world, but the style is reminiscent of the form. I am really digging this.

Another month, another update...

Last Finished:
The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt, on Kindle) - Eli and Charlie Sisters, hired guns under the nefarious Commodore, ride down the west coast of frontier America for a hit on an eccentric prospector, a journey in which Eli decides he's had enough of this violent life. It's not so much a Western as a surreal examination of a life gone wrong, often with black humor - something like Fargo in spurs and six-shooters. I found myself intrigued enough to keep reading despite the frequent gore and often-unlikable characters.

The Once and Future King (T. H. White, in paperback) - The classic retelling of the King Arthur myth, from his youth as the bastard child "Wart" under Merlyn's eccentric tutelage to the final days of Camelot. Some interesting imagery and nice moments, but overall I didn't care for the modern (well, modern for 1939) omni narrator and the way it felt more like a commentary/companion piece to Thomas Malory's King Arthur saga than its own tale, clearly assuming I was familiar with that version. Still, overall it's worth reading if you like fantasy, and I could see the roots of some of my favorite tales in its pages.

Currently, I'm in a heat-induced reading slump. I've stalled out on that Damon Knight collection; I really need to take another run at the thing. On my Nook, I just started Michael Scott's The Alchemyst (MG/YA fantasy, Book 1 of a series I'm too lazy to look up the title of at the moment), which looks promising.

I bought The Rising Tide by Jeff Shaara for my Kindle, but haven't gotten too far into it. I can tell it's a good read, but maybe I'm just not in the mood for it. Instead I started reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons and can't get it out of my head even though I'm not too far into it.

Finished Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day today. Started a biography about Noor Inayat Khan today. I'm also in the middle of a volume of Oscar Wilde's plays and I'm still at 4% in Les Miserables.

Just finished The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, a Swedish police procedural mystery, but the best of those kinds of things i've ever read. Highly recommend it.

Now started a Victorian mystery, Guy Deverell, by J.S. LeFanu. One of the most readable of Victorian writers and very solid stuff.

caw

A Most Wanted Man - John LeCarre

Ruin and Rule by Pepper Winters

Geronimo: Complimentary Sources in Historical Investigation

I just finished reading Geronimo: The Life of the Last Apache War Chief, by Geronimo as told S. M. Barrett. There were military personnel at Fort Sill, Oklahoma—when Barrett proposed the book, who still thought in Geronimo should have been hanged. Hence, Barrett had jump through hoops, including an appeal to President Theodore Roosevelt, to get the book approved.

I am now about one third of the way through Angie Debo’s highly regarded biography, Geronimo.

Debo quotes extensively from Geronimo’s account, but she also draws on military records, newspaper accounts, and oral history provided by other Apaches. Her main criticism of Geronimo’s account is that he occasionally got the chronology wrong. Yet when the book was published in 1906, Geronimo was in his late 70s. He died in 1909.

Together the two books provide a good melding of Apache oral history and more traditional scholarly methods.

I just finished Tuesdays with Morrie, which was a wonderful, uplifting book. Now, I am reading Nova. It's not as good as I anticipated.

FINALLY finished the third Fifty Shades of Grey book and I've started Go Set A Watchman.

RavennaTate said:

FINALLY finished the third Fifty Shades of Grey book and I've started Go Set A Watchman.

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Interesting turnabout.

I've been slogging through Deaver's The Vanished Man. Getting better, now that a female magician is on the case.

Following a long and tempestuous relationship Stephen King and I broke up. We had a good long run, but he had changed on me and I found I no longer loved Big Steve's ways.

We called it quits and agreed to see other people.

A few weeks ago while browsing the shelves of a second-hand bookstore, I saw one of Steve's latest efforts that wasn't part of my collection (and most of his books for the last ten years aren't), Full Dark, No Stars, a collection of four short stories. I shrugged and decided to give it a shot.

Holy God, I had forgotten what a sick and twisted bastard Steve can be when he's off the Bolivian Marching Powder. He reminded me pretty dang fast, lemme tells ya.

Good (creepy) stuff. That's the Big Steve I fell in love with!

I just finished reading The Empire of the Summer Moon, a history of the rise and fall of the Comanches and specifically about the last war chief, Quanah Parker, by S. C. Gwynne. Gwynne pulled from first hand accounts and unpublished letters etc. as well as other histories and biographies. It's a stunning and excruciating read which follows the destiny of the Comanches from before horses arrived, through their amazing ascendancy in the Southwest, and details their downfall and the reasons it occurred. Particularly after reading BoF's post upstream there, I wanted to recommend this for anyone who wants a closer look at the Indian Wars and the destruction of the Wild West as it was before Texas statehood. If you read it prepare to have your tender sensibilities brutalized. Neither Indians nor whites spared their enemies (though there were moments of exception here and there.)

One thing that was amazing was how much serendipity, plain stupidity (usually on the part of the whites) and seemingly random events continued to change the fates of all involved. None of that 40 year trajectory could really have been predicted and while it was happening much of it was unknown to the rest of the world including much of the existing U.S.

Reading about the slaughter of the buffalo herds was the hardest part to get through. Right there was doom for the Horse Tribes.

And then, who could have predicted Quanah Parker? who adopted white ways (to an extent), started the Peyote church, was apparently liked by nearly everyone once he gave up warring, learned how white men bargained and bested them sometimes, amassed a small fortune and spent almost all of it helping people so that at his death "he came out even."

A worthy read.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Armada by Ernest Cline. Not nearly as good as Ready Player One, but it's still enjoyable.

Read Annihilation and Authority last week, hoping to finish reading Acceptance this week. It's fun reading Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, but there's been a steady and slow enjoyment erosion since Annihilation.

Max Beerbohm's collection of essays, And Even Now--a sly, elegant, delightful writer.

Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobsen.

He's funny, but he owes too big a debt to Philip Roth here to make the book overly notable.

A People's History of the American Revolution by Ray Raphael. I got interested in the topic on vacation in Colonial Williamsburg and this book is an interestin perspective on the topic.

Trying to decide on some old John LeCarre (The Little Drummer Girl) or some more recent LeCarre (Our Kind of Traitor). Not sure...

Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation.​ My kind of story. Enjoying it greatly.

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.

Before that: Duma Key by Stephen King. That was all right. Gotta read it again later on to catch everything. Before that it was We Are Water by Wally Lamb. If you haven't read this book yet, go and get yourself a copy now. We Are Water is one of the best books I've read, I think. Purely character-driven, wonderful dialogue, and had me turning the pages until daylight.

Another month, another update...

Last Finished:
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, on Nook): An early-19th-century young lady's only prospects for a future involve making a suitable marriage... but Mrs. Bennet's five daughters have thus far had no luck in rustic Meryton, so far from the high society of London and other hot spots. Then a fortuitously available gentleman, Mr. Bingley, buys a neighboring estate, bringing along an even wealthier bachelor, Mr. Darcy. While Bingley charms the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, outspoken Elizabeth clashes with Darcy's aristocratic pride... the start of one of literature's most famed relationships. Not a bad book, overall, but the writing was very trying, every sentence twisting and weaving and turning back on itself like a labyrinth of words. The customs were utterly alien, at times in a fascinating way but also often frustrating. (One almost wonders how the English aristocracy bred, they were so restrained about affections, courtships, and physical interaction with the opposite gender.) Characters tended toward exaggeration, especially those at the periphery of the story, but this isn't uncommon in older works, in my reading experience. Overall, I'm glad I finally read it, though I don't know if I have the stamina to read more by Austen.

Currently Reading:
An American Werewolf in Hoboken (Book 1 of the Wolf Mates series) (Dakota Cassidy, on Nook): Compelled by a prophecy delivered via a bowl of chicken noodle soup to a relative, werewolf Max heads to Hoboken to find his life mate and face a deadly curse... only he doesn't know what form either will take. He winds up stuck in wolf form when he hits the city - and taken by animal control. Meanwhile, hairdresser JC, recently out of a bad relationship, decides to fill the void in her life and apartment with a pet. She meant to adopt a cat, but somehow found herself standing in front of the biggest, filthiest, smelliest dog she's ever seen. But who could say no to those adorable eyes? Little does she know that her new companion, Fluffy, hides a supernatural secret... So far, it's a hilarious twist on werewolf romances; the sequence where he's wrestling with the urge to eat JC's undefended T-bone steak versus the premium doggie kibble in his bowl nearly had me laughing out loud.

The Lives of Tao (Wesley Chu, on Kindle): Torn by internal schisms, a species of near-immortal gaseous aliens fight a secret civil war on Earth through their human hosts and allies. Tao, formerly the power behind generals and emperors, loses his latest host in a clash with his enemies, and is forced to latch onto the first human he comes across: overweight, underconfident Roen, a lowly cubicle jockey. A fun, reasonably-paced read so far, with action and humor and some deeper themes now and again.

I'm also trying to start Simon R. Green's Deathstalker in paperback, but every time I pick it up I get distracted by annoying family members or other crises, so I'm still on Page 1. Literally.