Re: What Have You Read Lately? (2024 Edition)

[RatGuy]

Just snagged a copy of The Girl with all the Gifts from our local library, thanks to movie thread. I also got Kingsolver's Flight Behavior.

[Morden]

Just finished Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. I have a hold on Flight Behavior.

[Parasaurolophus]

Just snagged a copy of The Girl with all the Gifts from our local library, thanks to movie thread.

Oh! That one's  great fun.

[apl68]

Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley.  These two early (1910s) books by the prolific Morley are what he's best remembered for.  Parnassus on Wheels is a kind of humorous romance about two bibliophiles and the horse-drawn mobile bookstore of the title.  Great fun to read, and it captures a lot of the appeal of bibliophilia.  Lots of allusions to classic authors--many of whom, like Kipling, were still contemporary or nearly so at the time.

The Haunted Bookshop is a sequel in which the protagonists of the first tale have traded up to a bricks-and-mortar location in New York.  Not as charming, due to an odd, melodramatic spy plot (set in the immediate aftermath of the Armistice of 1918), the bibliophile schtick getting laid on a little too heavy, and some drearily predictable efforts at philosophizing.  Still amusing in places, and boasts lots of loving descriptions of that bookstore.  Which has probably been serving as an aspirational goal for bookstore owners and would-be owners ever since. 

Both items are still in print, often in one volume.  Author Anne Patchett started an independent bookstore called Parnassus Books in Nashville some years ago.  They even tried running a mobile branch called Parnassus on Wheels that you can find pictures of online.

I read them as part of a big omnibus volume of Morley's work published long ago, when he was still a living author.  I found this last year on vacation, at a place in Galena, IL called Peace of the Past.  It's one of those antique stores that has enough books to qualify as a bookstore in its own right.  I loved browsing there and finding this and other things, and snagging a couple of their bookmarks.  Being able to order whatever you want online is great and all, but may we always have bricks-and-mortar bookstores to browse!

[Langue_doc]

Just finished Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. I have a hold on Flight Behavior.

Another recommendation for The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behavior which I've read more than once. Do read Prodigal Summer if you get a chance, and The Lacuna. I'm glad I read the latter, but might not be up for a rereading of the same. There's also Demon Copperhead which I keep putting holds on, but have usually had some excuse or other when I'm notified that the book's ready to borrow.

I just picked up Christopher Hitchens' A Hitch in Time from the library.

[FishProf]

We used to have an Audiobook thread, but it is a Zombie now.  Should we revive that?

In the meantime....

I found a three volume HP Lovecraft Omnibus collection and, having a passing familiarity with the author's works, decided to really go through the canon (also, I have a dozen or so of the books in print, haunting my shelves).  This is the same series that I mentioned earlier in the (now archived ) thread of the Conan and Elric of Melnibone omnibus collections, which have a contextual/historical introduction to each work.  The Omnibus Vol. 1 said I should start with Vol. 2 if it was my first time through the works, as that contained the best and most famous of the stories (and excluded the early poetry).  Despite my completionist tendencies, I obeyed.

The 2nd story was The Call of Cthulu, which I found underwhelming.  This is supposedly THE STORY and it fell flat to me.  But, I persevered.  Others I have finished are

Pikeman's Model  (meh)
The Strange High House (a cool short story)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (a good, but weird adventure story)
The Silver Key  (Continuation of dream quest, time travel involved)
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Creepy story, well written)
The Color Out of Space (Peak Lovecraft Horror here)
The Very Old Folk (Short story set in Roman Britain.  Cool, but unfinished)
The Dunwich Horror (Peak Lovecraft Horror here)
The Whisperer in Darkness (Peak Lovecraft Horror here)

I once had Lovecraft stories described as "gothic horror in late 19th-early 20th century New England.  Characters either die, or go insane."   That is, while not entirely accurate, close enough for the casual reader (which I am).  The stories also refer to places near me (and many that I have been to) albeit in an earlier time.

Alas, my loan has expired, and the book is currently unavailable.  I'm sure I'll return in time, but I have had enough for now.

[apl68]

I have a one-volume jumbo Lovecraft omnibus at home that I keep meaning to read.  Well some of it, anyway--some Lovecraft stories I recall being so nasty I don't care to revisit.  "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" I recall being a fascinating work of imagination.  "Dreams in the Witch House" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are also.

I've written a lot of "Lovecraft Lite" stories over the years that are set in a fictionalized version of the region where I grew up.  One of the towns in them sounds like it was inspired by one of Lovecraft's locations, but it's actually a variation of the place's real-life name.

[RatGuy]

Just finished Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. I have a hold on Flight Behavior.

Do read Prodigal Summer if you get a chance,

Of all the Kingsolver novels I've read so far, that's the one that affected me most deeply. I'm a huge fan of The Bean Trees, but Prodigal Summer just knocked my socks off. Maybe it's simultaneously going through a divorce and falling for someone from Appalachia, but that's the one I've been recommending to most folks.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Sisters of Fortune by Anna Lee Huber
In April 1912, a trio of Canadian sisters sail aboard the "Titanic" after a grand tour of Europe and Egypt.

[kaysixteen]

Getting back into my old fave Dr. Harry Turtledove, master of alternate history, and pretty darn good with straight historical novels, as well.   Just finished 'The Wages of Sin', about a 19th c England that had been dealing with the HIV virus since the early 1500s, and am about halfway through 'Salamis', the last of 4 historical novels set in the late 4th c. BCE.  Pity the doctor is aging-- his novel output is no more than 2 a year now, whereas 20 years or so ago it was more like 5 or 6, and there are many of his series he sadly will likely never revisit.

[Vkw10]

Second Hand Curses by Drew Hayes. I started reading his work when The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant. I was hoping for something with a similar mix of humor and mixed up tropes. Second Hand Curses delivered. The book begins with a tale of adventure featuring three characters traveling and working together. Each subsequent tale adds bits of backstory, until you realize that the book isn't quite a collection of fractured fairy tales. It's entertaining, with adventure, humor, and some dark overtones that reminded me of fairy tales before they were Disney-fied.

[fleabite]

Second Hand Curses by Drew Hayes. I started reading his work when The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant.

I read (and enjoyed) The Utterly Uninteresting and Adventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant, two or three years ago, and I think I heard about it here!

I haven't reported on my reading in a long time, so I'll just mention a few of my favorites from 2023, all of which I would recommend highly. Cloud Cuckoo Land is beautifully structured from some half a dozen stories, each with a gripping narrative arc. The stories are tied together by their protagonists' connection to a play by an ancient Greek dramatist that has survived only in fragments.

Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie, transmutes Don Quixote into an Indian-born pharmaceutical salesman in Donald Trump's America who sees the world through the lens of the television shows he watches. Reality becomes increasingly tenuous as the the main characters pursue their quest through a country in which alternative facts are gaining steam.

Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov, takes its name from an imaginary epigraph: "No one has yet invented a gas mask and a bomb shelter against time." The author weaves a story that has much to say about time, memory, and the past, and the epic battle that each person must fight against old age. There is a wonderful scene in which the aging protagonist wonders how soon he will lose his memory of letters. He imagines them crawling like insects from his notepad and books and leaving the room en masse.

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel, by Kati Marton, is an excellent biography of a very private woman. She became a physicist, she said, because she wanted to understand Einstein's theory of relativity but also because even the East Germans couldn't change basic arithmetic and the laws of nature.

Jane Against the World, by Karen Blumenthal, is a highly accessible history of the attempts to legalize contraception and abortion in the United States in the 1960s and early 70s. I was surprised to learn that many Republicans were pro-choice in that era; opposition to abortion was not a Republican tenet at that time.

[Hegemony]

I am always significantly out of date, so I am now reading Barchester Towers. I can see that there's a reason it's a classic.

[apl68]

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.  Satrapi's memoir of coming of age in revolutionary Iran has justly been regarded as a good example of how the comics medium ("graphic novels"--except Persepolis isn't, you know, fiction) can be used to tell serious, grown-up stories about real-life subjects.  She uses a basic, yet distinctive, art style to tell her story in a way that couldn't quite be done in any other medium.  The first section of the work--it was originally published in two parts--is the more successful of the two.  It gives more context of what was happening in Iranian society.  The second part focuses more narrowly on adolescent Satrapi and her narrow circle.  It is also much wordier, with many of the sort of wall-of-text panels that tend to get in the way of optimum comics storytelling.

Persepolis does a lot to humanize the Iranian people, who are all too often caricatured in the West.  I remember well what we all thought of them during the Iranian hostage crisis of my childhood.  Later, reading the work of journalist John Simpson helped me to understand more about how the Iranians were real people and not just all like the fanatics under whose rule they have had the misfortune to fall (It was from Simpson that I learned that revolutionary Iran's most popular TV show was the local version of Candid Camera.  Who knew?).  The portrayal of the Iranian people that we see in the background is the story's main source of interest.  Were it not for that, it would frankly just be a memoir of a selfish, spoiled adolescent from a privileged family acting like such people tend to act.  Living under a brutally repressive regime enabled Satrapi and her friends to think of their drunken partying as acts of "resistance."

There is another form of resistance to revolutionary Islam that Satrapi doesn't mention.  In recent decades several hundred thousand Iranians--estimates vary, as numbers are understandably hard to come by--have converted to Christianity.  The Islamist regime in Iran officially tolerates the existence of a tiny historically Christian minority.  The evangelism that is a fundamental part of New Testament Christian teaching is absolutely forbidden.  In Iran and other Islamist regimes it can get you killed.  That's how "privileged" Christianity is in some parts of today's world!  Yet people are finding Jesus valuable enough to turn to following him despite the risks.  He knew what he was talking about when he said that he would draw followers to himself from every nation.

[FishProf]

The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe.  THWoD is the story of John Moe's life as he learns (and fails) to deal with depression, addiction, suicide, and the vicissitudes of life, marriage, family, and the NPR world.

Moe was the host of the THWoD podcast (2016-21) where he interviews famous people (often stand-up comedians) about their struggles with depression and other mental illnesses.  He never talks about his own struggle on the podcast, so this book is his story.  I chose it as an opportunity to better understand some of MFP's struggles, but it was less about that than his journey.   Still a good, albeit disturbing at times, read.