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Lily Fairbairn
Gondolin
Thu, 3:28pm
Post #1 of 2
(1996 views)
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It's the occasional reading thread!
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Can't Post
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June is busting out all over! My husband and I have our back-to-back birthdays this weekend. Yes, it's always fun when filling out forms or presenting passports to reveal that we were born only twelve hours apart. Obviously our fate was in the stars.
I'm still listening every day to a bit of Andy Serkis's superb reading of LotR. The end is in sight, as the hobbits return to Rivendell and relate their adventures to an aging Bilbo. But hints have been dropped that they have at least one adventure still ahead of them.
I listened to The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong, a very cozy novel set in a fantasy world inspired by ancient China. A young woman moves around from village to village telling fortunes, counseling the worried, and collecting friends. Very sweet and pleasant.
I concluded my Ben Aaronovitch binge by listening again to Tales from the Folly, a collection of stories set in the Peter Grant universe and told from the points of view of various characters, not always Peter himself. The introductions by Ben himself are as enjoyable as the stories, or "moments", as he himself says.
I then listened to Ask a Historian: 50 Surprising Answers to Things You Always Wanted to Know, written and read by British historian Greg Jenner, one of the writers of the children's series Horrible Histories. Ask a Historian reminded me a bit of David Mitchell's Unruly, in that Jenner expresses his own opinions in an occasionally sarcastic way.
I was particularly tickled by his essay on historical movies, since he agrees with three things I've been saying for many years now: You can tell when a historical movie was made by the hairdos, makeup, and costuming. The most accurate historical movie is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The least is Braveheart.
I read the ebook of Anne Hillerman's latest, Shadow of the Solstice. While she'll never be the writer her father was, neither in prose nor plotting, I keep reading the books because I enjoy being in the company of the characters. In this installment, they must overcome two different groups of ugly, manipulative people.
I started a new e-bundle, the Arnold Landon Mysteries, by Roy Lewis. I've been disappointed by two or three of the mystery e-bundles I've purchased, but not this one. Arnold isn't your typical hero---he's a mild-mannered amateur historian working for the Northumbria planning department who finds himself involved in murders. Small books, yes, with predictable plots, but beautifully done.
The first book has been retitled from A Gathering of Ghosts to A Murder in the Barn, as has every other of the titles in the bundle so they're all Murder in the Something. Marketing, you know!
I'm finishing up my bundle(s) of the Sister Joan series by Veronica Black. The penultimate book, A Vow of Compassion, was better plotted than some of the previous books, although still predictable. I'm just now starting the last book, A Vow of Evil. As always, I like Sister Joan, her fellow nuns, and the other ongoing characters, but the author seems to have grown tired. For one thing, she's no longer bothering to correct various contradictions, such as Evil taking place two years after Compassion but the convent's dog still being "half-grown", as she has been throughout the entire series.
I enjoyed reading a paper book titled simply Reykjavik, which is where the story is set. Of the authors, Ragnar Jonasson is a mystery novelist and Katrin Jakobsdottir, is the prime minister of Iceland. I'm guessing they outlined the story and the actual writer wrote it. The prose is a bit flat, but then, it's translated from the Icelandic.
It's dedicated to Agatha Christie but isn't entirely evocative of her work. There's more characterization, for one thing. An author's note says the authors set (most of) the story in 1986 because they grew up in that era and were feeling nostalgic, but I suspect they also wanted to do a story set before the internet and cellphones—-the presence of either would have changed the plot and taken it even further from a Christie-style mystery.
So what have you been reading?
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow....
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Annael
Elvenhome
Thu, 11:54pm
Post #2 of 2
(1585 views)
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Got through both Lies Sleeping and False Value while on vacation; enjoyed them both very much. Aaronovitch does very scary villains and delightful hero/heroines.
We listened to several podcasts about Maine history on the trip, and now I need to read The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor, who contends that the War of 1812 was, in fact, our first civil war. And that each side thought that the solution was to beat/destroy the other, which in fact did not happen, and we keep on thinking that and not actually managing to do it and just muddling on together anyway.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words.
-- Gaston Bachelard
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NARF and member of Deplorable Cultus since 1967
(This post was edited by Annael on Thu, 11:56pm)
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