What have you read lately?

[ergative]

The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne Valente. It's a take on the Prester John legend, and really beautiful. Valente is a wonderful stylist with her writing, and the way she plays with the ideas of religion and conversion and memory and record-keeping is just wonderful. It's the first in a series, but because there is a recurring motif of incomplete records of tales and history, you don't feel the need to read the later books, because the broad outlines of the missing bits of the story to be addressed in sequels are still clear in this book, and the missing bits can remain missing in a way that is fully consistent with the motif. I was very impressed.

Predator's Gold, by Phillip Reeve. This is the second in the Mortal Engines quartet (start with Mortal Engines), which is a delightfully imaginative far-future science-fantasy series about a world where, after the Thirty-Minute War destroyed civilization as we know it, people rebuilt the world based on 'Traction Cities', creating vast, mobile cities that, according to the principles of Municipal Darwinism, hunt each other down and eat each other. There are also air ships and pirates and zombie monster robots, and overall it's a really wonderful series, full of wit and action.

Fingersmith and The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. Both books have the identical plot, if you abstract away enough from the specifics: Two women fall in love, and then one of them murders her husband. Very versatile, as far as plots go. Endlessly adaptable.

[Hegemony]

I'm reading Stephen King's new novel, Billy Summers. It's basically a crime novel, sort of Lee Child lite. I'm near the end and there was one disconcerting moment (really only about two lines) of something paranormal; so far no actual relation to the plot. And halfway through something very implausible starts, and just keeps on being implausible.

But I had been trying to force myself to read deep and intricate fiction without much narrative drive, and this novel is about the most my actual brainpower can cope with right now. I'm actually yearning for something that's both suspenseful and brilliantly written, but I have exhausted my supply of Graham Greene's thrillers and Elmore Leonard, and this is what the bookstore had. I do like Stephen King, but the last third is often a let-down, when the real answers behind the mystery start to emerge, and they're less interesting than the mystery was.

[ab_grp]

Thanks for the review, Hegemony.  It seems as though recent King novels are hit and miss.  I guess I think that's the case about much of his work, but I haven't found any really recent ones that seem as compelling as earlier novels.

Now we are on Hank Green's A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (follow up to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing).  We really enjoyed the first book, which was told from one point of view.  This sequel has several narrators.  We are barely into it, but it seems like a good set up so far, and I'm interested to see where it goes.

Finished this one last night.  It's very similar to the first book in its timely commentary on social media and societal interactions in the face of a global issue.  His writing reminds me a bit of the lighter Scalzi work.   Pretty funny, suspenseful, sad at times, and some interesting characters.  The first one was a "first contact" type of tale, and the second builds off of that on a bunch of philosophical paths (I use that term loosely, not being a philosopher!) including consciousness, "god" (or an infinite power), and free will.  Some parts and explanations feel a bit rushed or cute for the sake of cuteness, but overall it was very enjoyable, and I sort of wish that there were more books to come in the series.  Sometimes it's better to leave things as good and move on, though, rather than drag a story out and dilute the quality.  Green seems like a smart and creative guy, so I'm sure he has other things in the pipeline.

Now we're back to the Silo series (Howey) with the follow up to Wool, Shift.  I fell asleep within seconds of my husband starting to read, so I have no idea if it's good or not yet but will report back.  The first one was inconsistent but had some worthwhile parts, I thought.  I know we discussed it a bit earlier in the thread.

[ergative]

I fell asleep within seconds of my husband starting to read

I have nights like that too. But not last night. Last night we finished The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared, a delightful romp of delightfulness. This was nearly the perfect book. We have a doddery old man who, as we learn in backstory flashbacks, has been responsible in one way or another for nearly all the notable events in the 20th century, and his adventures continue in the present day as he sows chaos, collects allies, and, with the train of dead bodies that accumulate in his wake, sends gangsters and policemen spinning in circles as he just goes his merry way. There were a couple of places where the backstory dragged a little bit--some adventures in Communist China were rather slow--but they all feed into each other, culminating in a brilliant scene where the new Best Friends of Chaos need to explain to an extremely harassed official what's been going on.

[ab_grp]

Ergative, that sounds like a really fun read! Never heard of it, but I will look into it for our list.

After I caught up on the previous night's bit of reading, we made some more progress.  It definitely has a different feel from the first book.  And right now, I am still not quite sure I understand what's going on (which I guess makes sense).  This is a prequel to Wool and seems to be going back and forth between 2049, in which politicians are working on a proposal for some facilities and need to build a silo to get the proposal passed, and 2110, which takes place in the silo.  I omitted some of the details, because I think some could be considered spoilers of plot points in Wool.  We'll see what happens!

[apl68]

Ergative, that sounds like a really fun read! Never heard of it, but I will look into it for our list.

After I caught up on the previous night's bit of reading, we made some more progress.  It definitely has a different feel from the first book.  And right now, I am still not quite sure I understand what's going on (which I guess makes sense).  This is a prequel to Wool and seems to be going back and forth between 2049, in which politicians are working on a proposal for some facilities and need to build a silo to get the proposal passed, and 2110, which takes place in the silo.  I omitted some of the details, because I think some could be considered spoilers of plot points in Wool.  We'll see what happens!

Wool sounds like a Mark Kurlansky title.

[ab_grp]

That's true, apl68! Maybe we should nudge him with the idea...

[Hegemony]

I think we talked about Wool earlier on this thread. Anyway, I found it so unreadable that I gave the book away. I was not surprised to find out that it started out self-published. My experience of it was that it's a great plot idea made into a novel by someone who can't write his way out of a paper bag, or even a silo. But your mileage may vary.

[ab_grp]

Hegemony, yep, we did talk about that! It is interesting that this follow up feels a good bit different than Wool did, so I wonder if that's because it was not self-published or if I am biased because I know the first one was.  It's not great writing, certainly.  But it almost feels as though it had been written to be made into a movie or some such.  I think they are making a series out of it (or out of the first one, or maybe the series), so maybe that's accurate.  Anyway, I'll see where it goes and how it develops.

[FishProf]

I read Robin Hood and His Merry Men to Smolt. She was entertained, but quickly noted that "They didn't include THAT in the Disney version."

Sharp kid.

[hmaria1609]

Binge reading the "Lady Sherlock Series" by Sherry Thomas from the library.
Charlotte Holmes solves crimes as Sherlock Holmes in 1886 London.  The new and #6 entry, Miss Moriarty, I Presume?, releases in November.

[mamselle]

An old but useful survey, "Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I" by Mc Grath is making me glad I didn't put it into one of the "LittleNeighborhoodLibrary" boxes last week with others I've been turfing out after helping a friend move.

I'm dithering over a collection of Jonathan Swift's essays, too....figure they're mostly on line, but the commentaries  are often the most useful parts...

(Can you tell my friend was an English lit. major at one point? Now she's an artist....)

M.

[spork]

Finished these:

• Noise: A flaw in human judgment, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein. Very good if you like psychology and public policy, though I was more intrigued by Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
• The Premonition: A pandemic story, by Michael Lewis. Another excellent work by Lewis. I'm going to assign it in a course I teach in spring semesters.
• A World Without Email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload, by Cal Newport. He references plenty of studies to support his argument, but overall I think this could have been condensed into a long-form magazine essay.
• To Start a War: How the Bush Administration took America into Iraq, by Robert Draper. Written extremely well, an incredible work of journalism. The incompetence and hubris it documents are appalling.

Next I will probably start either The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, or The Afghanistan papers: A secret history of the war, by Craig Whitlock.

[ergative]

I've been really jonesing for some books on poison lately. Ever since I read Eleanor Harmon's magnificent text on The Royal Art of Poison I've been wanting more. Deborah Blum's books on the history of food safety and forensic investigation were great.

But then I tried to find fictional books that use poison as plot points, and I'm coming up dry. Sam Hawke's City of Lies was insufficiently poisonous, despite being about a professional poison-protector for a ruling family. There were all these interstitial entries about various poisons that could be used for various purposes and detected in various ways, but none of them actually appeared in the main plot, so that was a waste. Maria Snyder's book Poison Study was marginally better, but still didn't scratch my poison itch, because it was more about politics than the mechanics of being a poison tester.

Can anyone recommend either a good non-fiction tome about poisonous poisons, or else an SFF book in which poison really takes center stage?

[Hegemony]

Ergative, I'm something of an devotée of 19th-century murder trials in which women were alleged to have used poison; they make fascinating case studies. Here are three:

Florence Ricardo, a widow charged with poisoning her husband James Bravo. Covered in Death at the Priory: Love, Sex and Murder in Victorian England, by James Ruddick. Despite the rather sensationalist subtitle this is a really well-done book, and the author's detective work has turned up the persuasive answer to the case.

Florence Maybrick, a wealthy American woman accused of poisoning her husband James, a rich Liverpool merchant. Covered in A Poisoned Life: Florence Chandler Maybrick... by Richard Jay Hutto.

Madeleine Smith, a Scots socialite charged with poisoning her lower-class illicit lover, Emile L'Angelier. This was the sensationalist case to end all sensationalist cases, and her steamy letters certainly take the lid off Victorian repression. Covered in The Strange Affair of Madeleine Smith: Victorian Scotland's Trial of the Century, by Douglas MacGowan, and by Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Gwyneth (2009) Murder and morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith, neither of which I have read.

All the cases provide excellent, non-poisonous food for thought.