It's the lucky July reading thread!

Lily Fairbairn

Lily Fairbairn

Half-elven
Tomorrow is the eleventh day of the seventh month, and some people regard seven and eleven as being lucky, therefore.... Good luck to us all!

Speaking of good luck, I'm past the two-thirds point of The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane, an odd couple novel where two very different women (and an elderly aunt) end up living together. There's not a lot of plot, per se---it's about each woman finding herself after a difficult period in her life. Just to show you how much I enjoy reading a strong witty voice (or, in this case, two strong witty voices), I was well into the book before I noticed that it's written in present tense, something I usually find very artificial and annoying.

On paper (well, in pixels) I started two different novels but gave up on each of them very quickly. So I'm still catching up with a spate of magazines. Eventually I'll choose something from my TBR stack---stay tuned!

What have you been reading?
 
We were on a mini vacation in Michigan taking some shopping, eating, beach time in Holland and Saugatuk (highly recommended) and in a book store I saw this book.

It takes place on a South Carolina barrier island and concerns an orphaned boy sent to live with his great aunt. He is swept into a world haunted by the Hurricane Hazel 50 years before and a nameless family that disappeared. His encounters with the ghost boy and his own demons makes for a good story. A bit slow developing but it is easy to read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31450969-grief-cottage
 
a collection of short stories in the Harry Dresden 'verse, every one a gem. My favorites so far: the one about the Billy Goat Curse (of course Harry, as a Chicago wizard, would figure that one out!) and the story where Molly shows her chops as the new Winter Lady.
 
A fascinating, heartbreaking story of the girls and young women who painted dials with glow-in-the-dark radium. Hard to believe that radium tonic was peddled and heralded as a cure-all while these girls were being poisoned at work.
 
I had read them before, but it was good to re-read.
The Billy Goat story was great and he got the details right. Now that the Cubs have won the World Series, the Curse isn't quite as relevant, but it was fun to read how Dresden solved the person.
 
I'm dipping back into Terry Pratchett. He's grand to have along on my commute - unless there's an especially funny simile that cracks me up and I almost hit the car in front of me...

Phrases like "the backside of the moon" and "the sunrise looked like a 3 minute poached egg..." He actually makes traffic enjoyable!
 
I read it with my book club friends. Some of them just could not read it because of the terrible side effects of the radium poisoning on the girls. I did finish it and it is a book I shall never forget.
 
When we have a heat wave here in Texas, you notice it! We came out of a restaurant about 1 pm yesterday afternoon to find the car registering 120F [shocked] It went all the way down to 100F by the time we got home, though.

Right....

I'm now listening to Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, a novel written in the style of P.G. Wodehouse by Sebastian Faulks. Faulks gets Wodehouse's language delightfully right---I keep chuckling at the way the narrative is presented. The plot is a typical Jeeves-and-Bertie mess of plots gone awry and is entertaining. The narrator is Julian Rhind-Tutt, who I've seen on various TV shows and who does a wonderful job. It's hardly his fault that I can't help but hear Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as Jeeves and Bertie!

Like Ioreth, I'm reading a Terry Pratchett Guards novel, Thud. This is one of the ones I listened to a couple of years ago but I'm enjoying reading it on paper, too. While narrator Stephen Briggs does a brilliant job with all the voices, he can hardly stop in the middle to explain how names are spelled, or to let me appreciate a particularly good play on words. So I'm discovering the book all over again.

What have you beein reading?
 
by Ijeoma Oluo.

Uncomfortable and important. Several of my friends are reading it so we're doing a kind of online book club about it.
 
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