It's the occasional reading thread!

Lily Fairbairn

Lily Fairbairn

Half-elven
Once again, real life has impinged on my reading time. There's nothing bad going on, but we are in a period of transition.

I thoroughly enjoyed the library ebook of The Bullet That Missed, by Richard Osman, third in the Thursday Murder Club series. In this installment, the group of friends living in a retirement center in Kent take on a cold case that has its very warm moments. Osman's cast of characters keeps expanding in a very good way. His pacing is excellent, his dialog sparkling, and his sympathy for us older folk is subtle but telling. I like these books so much I can almost overlook his veering back and forth between past and present tense, the latter being an affectation that will often destroy my patience with less entertaining books.

Next up on my ebook list is the latest in Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe series, A Song of Comfortable Chairs. I'm not fond of all of his multitide of titles, but I do like this series, not least because I know to expect an easy, positive read.

I'm still listening to The Garden of Unearthly Delights, written and read by Robert Rankin. His main character, Maxwell Carrion, is whisked out of the present day into a future world, where magic rather than science rules. It's Douglas Adams meets Terry Pratchett meets Monty Python. Even though Rankin is right up there with Neil Gaiman in his ability to read his own fiction---something I don't say lightly---and the satire is dead on (if heavy-handed), I'm only able to listen to this in short segments. I'm also listening to a collection of Gaiman's pieces in short segments because they're so dark. Despite the comedy, there's a darkness to Rankin's, too, and I think I'm just not in the mood.

I took a break and listened to the very short 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, read by a variety of voices. This is the transcription of New Yorker Hanff's correspondence with a rare books dealer in London over many years between the late 40s and the early 60s. She mentions Queen Elizabeth IIs coronation, which added a moment of poignancy to a light but entertaining narrative.

On paper, I started reading yet another of Titan Publishing's Sherlock Holmes novels, this one by Nick Kyme and titled A Legacy of Deeds (not a good title, IMHO). Also IMHO, I don't feel as though Kyme has captured Watson/Conan Doyle's voice as well as some of the other authors in the series. The plot---multiple people found dead at an art gallery---is plodding along.

The recent Smithsonian has a very nice cover article on Samuel Adams, but I found another one, on the science of smells and smelling, to be more interesting. The newest Archaeology just arrived, with a cover story on England's medieval abbeys.

I'm still listening to Andy Serkis's brilliant, compelling reading of LotR. I'm now well into The Return of the King, where iconic scene follows iconic scene. Our heroes are counting their losses after their victory in the battle of the Pelennor Fields and debating what to do next to challenge the Dark Lord on his dark throne. Never mind that I've read this book many, many times, and even listened to the earlier recording, I'm hanging on and relishing every word.

So what have you been reading?
 
A long-time favorite, always worth a re-read. They made a movie with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, but for my money it didn't capture the charm of the book.

I've just finished Deathless Gods, which P.C. Hodgell promises is the penultimate book of her Kencyrath series. I was first led to read Godstalk, the first of the series, many years ago on this very forum by someone who said "it's probably out of print but if you can find it READ THIS BOOK." I found a hardbound first edition on alibris and loved it. Then Hodgell, who had been busy pursuing a PhD, started writing sequels. The world and the characters are inventive and unique and compelling and I have re-read the entire series every time a new book comes out, always finding something new (it's a very complicated plot!). I can't say this latest book was as compelling, however. It feels like a detour, picking up some plot threads that got a bit dropped along the way - filling in a hole in the sweater of the story, perhaps? Things happen very rapidly without a lot of tension being built, and considering that the entire series is heading toward a very large confrontation, I would have expected more urgency, more fraught-ness. We shall see.

I also got The Golden Enclaves, the last of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, and I'm very excited about that. BUT FIRST I need to read The Godbreaker by our very own Ufthak, Mike Brooks, which I just got on Kindle. So I'm awash in long-anticipated books!

I also read FireGrrl by Sharon Ryals Tamm. Sharon & I were 2 of the 4 first women ever hired by the Hoodsport Ranger District on the Olympic Peninsula to be forest fire fighters, back in 1974. I lost contact with her years ago and only just found out that 1. she has recently died and 2. she wrote this book. It is a very thinly fictionalized account of our first year on the crew. She hops from memory to memory with no explanation, so it's a little hard to follow, and her impressions of the other people on the crew - including me - do not always square with my memories of them, but she's got the major incidents down pretty much as I recall them. Including the time the four of us came very close to being gang raped while out on a fire. The story is told against the backdrop of Sharon's own earlier experience of being raped and the threat that was hanging over our college town of an "unknown rapist" who was kidnapping and killing women. Turned out to be Ted Bundy, but we didn't know that then. So that stirred up a lot of memories.
 
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I remember reading my parents' hardbound copy, but never knew there was a film. One detail that impressed me was how long shortages and rationing persisted after the war ended.
 
The Hunt for Red October was enjoyable although I like the movie's ending better (it's tidier by removing repetition).

Red Storm Rising is a re-read, although all I remembered was that it involves submarines and Reykjavik. The book was published in 1987 so there's still the Soviet Socialist Empire and the Berlin Wall, and the technology is waaaay out of date - but the push and pull of politics and war remain the same.

Reading Red Storm Rising - with its plot developments of the influence of oil supplies, destroyed bridges and the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons - has has been a disconcerting hall of echoes given that we have the Ukraine war going on.
 
It is a very thinly fictionalized account of our first year on the crew.
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...to read about yourself and your experiences through another person's eyes. Are you in touch with anyone else in your crew?
 
It's a 100-year-old romance novel with a silly premise: a dying mother hires a poor librarian to marry her invalid son, who is also expected to die soon. (Spoiler: he doesn't.)

My daughter recommended it to me, saying that it reminded her of The Secret Garden. I listened to it on Librivox and devoured it in one day. Despite the silly premise the writing was very good. There are some unfortunate racial and ethnic slurs, none mean-spirited, and typical of the time. The author won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (shared with Carl Sandburg that year.)

I'm also re-reading the Silmarillion as I enjoy RoP.
 
Reading Red Storm Rising - with its plot developments of the influence of oil supplies, destroyed bridges and the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons - has been a disconcerting hall of echoes given that we have the Ukraine war going on.
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This is the sixth book in the Cormoran Strike series (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) I like not only trying to figure out who did it but also the story of the personal lives of Strike and Robin (though I do find her a bit whiny at times). I found it interesting that amongst the murder suspects are the moderators of a website. The book is almost 1000 pages, but some of the pages are columns of moderators speaking on separate channels at the same time.
I liked the story, even though I didn’t figure out the mystery.

And next to read is my hardcover copy of The Godbreaker.
 
I remember watching A Town like Alice and being surprised at how long rationing lasted in the UK. I didn't realize it became worse after the war. Helene's food packages must have been like manna from heaven.
 
I had read the Bernard Cornwell Saxon stories sort of as they came out years ago. The TV series Last Kingdom was very good overall, so I've gone back to the books to re-read from the start.
 
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