It's the occasional reading thread!

Lily Fairbairn

Lily Fairbairn

Half-elven
January's always been one of my favorite months. It's so quiet, even dull, after the excesses of the holiday season---a season that seems to start earlier every year. It's finally grown cold here in North Texas, but we're in dire need of rain. (Hopefully as water, not snow or ice!)

I finished Moriarty, a Sherlockian novel by Anthony Horowitz. This is what I said last time about its beginning: It has a great first-person voice, that of an American Pinkerton agent sent to investigate Moriarty and Holmes's supposed deaths at the Reichenbach Falls All the time I was reading, I kept thinking that this beginning had almost nothing to do with the ensuing story of (violent verging upon sadistic) crime in Victorian London. Sure enough, Horowitz throws in quite a twist at the end. I'm not sure whether I find it brilliant or annoying, but then, that's what I feel about the himself-as-character novels beginning with The Word is Murder. While he writes well and tells quite a tale, I keep getting an awkward, "Look how clever I am!" vibe that I find off-putting.

After this I wanted a cozy mystery, and found one in Pride, Prejudice, and Poison: A Jane Austen Society Mystery, by Elizabeth Blake. The president of the Austen book club in an English village is murdered, and the bookstore owner wants to exonerate her best friend by finding the killer, but by doing so puts herself in danger even as she and the police detective are attracted to each other.... Yes, in other words, the author evokes every cozy trope, right up to the main character going it alone when she really shouldn't. But there are some nice touches and it suited my mood. I won't look for any more books in the series, though.

I'm now listening leisurely to a book I read on paper several years ago, The Forgotten Affairs of Youth, an installment in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series. In this story, Isabel helps a visiting Australian academic search for the identity of her Scottish father. I'm enjoying the soothing Scottish voice of the narrator and Isabel's soothing but thought-provoking introspections.

I'm also listening to a much harder-edged mystery, Uniform Justice, book 12 in Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti series. This installment starts with a young military cadet discovering the body of a colleague, who has apparently committed suicide. Note the "apparently". Of course Brunetti's conscience leads him deeper into the lives of the cadet and his family, even as he negotiates the politics of the Questura. I like the characters and the setting (Venice) enough to keep reading the series, even though some of the stories can be dark and gruesome.

I also read the very short---novella-length, I bet---story I found hiding on my Kindle, A Study in Stone by Michael Campling. A guy loses his job in London and moves to a village, where he becomes friends with his teacher/writer neighbor. Together they find out the truth about a local man's service in WWI. There’s no crime committed at all, and I like the interplay between the two men, but the truth is no surprise at all when it's revealed.

An entire quarter of the Kindle file is taken up with the beginning of the next book in the series. I’m pretty sure this book and the next ones are self-pubbed. It’s not bad, but I'm not going to pursue the series any further.

I've gone back to my paper copy of The History of the British Isles in 100 Places, by Neil Oliver. I put it down a couple of months ago not because I disliked it---I like it very much---but because each short essay is so packed with information and handsome prose that I needed to stop for a while and let them digest. This is a superb overview of British history. Highly recommended.

So what have you been reading?
 
written almost exlusively by Jane Austen or stuff written about Jane Austen by others. Troubling times need nice remedies :)
Am on the Xth read of Claire Tomalin's biography and have read her own letters several times over too.
A lot of recipes before Christmas and New Year - some handwritten into my recipe collection binder.
 
Miss Seeton's Finest Hour by "Hamilton Crane" (Sarah J. Mason), who took over writing the series that has had two other authors. Miss Seeton is an English spinster who teaches art and somehow intuits stuff from what she's observed that gets put into her paintings. In this book she comes to the attention of TPTB in Britain during WWII after some of her sketches appear to foretell British military operations. Far too much time taken up by dialogue that doesn't move the story forward, and so far not much action.

So I put it aside for a couple of "proper romances" (romances that don't have page after page of explicit and clinical descriptions of sex acts, which bore me). I read Edenbrooke by Julianna Donaldson which was a bit too long on descriptions of the heroine's emotions--what I call the "fan fic error" in writing where the author TELLS us what a character is feeling instead of showing it (Read Mary Stewart, peeps!)--and again, short on action. It also bothered me that it purports to be set in Regency England but no one behaves or talks like people did in the time (read Georgette Heyer, peeps!). But her writing in general is good, and the story was satisfying. Once again I find myself thinking "I could do this so much better" and yes, one of these days I will attempt it!

Now I'm reading The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. It took a while to draw me in, as the story keeps jumping around in time and to different characters, but I'm finally to a place where the mystery at the heart of the story is being revealed, and I'm sure all the intricate plotting will start to come together. Picky moi cannot fault her writing in any way, so it appears I have found a new author to follow- yay!

I've finished Sword Stone Table, a collection of stories based on the Arthurian legends but set in different times, cultures, and "bending" the story in many ways. Some are better than others, but I enjoyed almost all of them. Anthony Rapp, the actor in "Star Trek: Discovery," wrote one of the stories. Highly recommended, especially as you can dip into it and then put it aside as time allows.
 
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I'm still making my slow way through this - not because it's a hard or boring read: quite the opposite actually. I don't want to finish it!

Brannen is writing about the five Great Extinctions in Earth's history and what we can learn from them during this current climate crisis. He's a science journalist and his writing is engaging and easy to grasp. Have a look at this section about the asteroid that probably killed off the dinosaurs:


"The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn't notice any atmosphere whatsoever," said Rebolledo. "It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometres per second, 10 kilometres - probably 14 kilometres - wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away."

These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast this it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.


He then goes on to say that not all scientists back the asteroid theory, but instead look at massive volcanism in India as the kill-switch.

Despite the debate over the cause of this fifth extinction, it's known that the previous four were caused by excessive carbon in the atmosphere. It's also clear that the speed of carbon release can be more important than the volume (although the volume will eventually kill off life if enough of it is released) ... and that since the industrial revolution, humans have released carbon into the atmosphere at a faster rate than during some of the Great Extinctions.

So, yeah, there's that.

As well as being a new angle on the current crisis, this book will be valuable for when I finally get to the SciFi novel I plan to write (after finishing my current fantasy trilogy - one and a half manuscripts to go!).
 
for sustainable aging in place. I have to pay for upgrades beyond the standard insurance replacement value, but I figure why not go for it. No hobbit holes on the market here.
 
I also like the 'Cadfael' books of Ellis Peters, but with all these authors I've had the books in the house so long and read them so many times over the years that I'm familiar with them. There are no surprises left.
 
depending on the budget available. Good insulation to reduce fuel costs and some sort of positive ventilation where fresh air is drawn in (filtering out allergens etc) to replace stale air which is pushed out is a good start, for comfort and health. I love reading those sort of books, watching tv programmes on building/revamping homes, especially if it's done sustainably - and I dream of what I would do with mine if I had the time and money!
 
Reading his description of the Siberian Traps eruption (massive volcanism reaches a massive store of petrochemicals) and the amount of carbon that was calculated to have been ejected into the atmosphere is a proper eye-opener and no mistake.

(The eruptions lasted for about two million years and are considered the primary cause of the Permian Extinction, the one that almost wiped out all living things.)
 
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