What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

Finished Surviving to Drive by Guenther Steiner, 2023 edition.

It covers the Haas F1 Formula 1 team's creation but mainly focuses on the 2022 season, with this edition having a postscript about 2023.

Steiner is sweary, and hilarious, and I laughed out loud multiple times. I did a longer review in the Formula 1 thread.

Now reading his other book, Unfiltered, 2024.
 
The Madman of Bergerac, Georges Simenon
An early Inspector Maigret, this one came out in 1932.. An armchair mystery is one in which the sleuth gets reports from assistants or the media and solves the case without stirring from the comfort of an armchair.

This one is a hospital bed mystery.

On a train trip from Paris to a provincial town, Maigret is cut out of his first class compartment and takes the lower berth in a second class one. The man in the upper tosses and turns, and when the train slows, the restless man leaps out of bed and off the train. Maigret follows him into the woods and gets shot in the shoulder.

He comes to in the small town of Bergerac and under suspicion of being the mad killer who has already murdered two local women and assaulted a third, who could not describe the attacker. Maigret clears his name but faces weeks of recuperation in bed. He moves into a hotel, insisting on a room with a view of the town square, and then sends for Madame Maigret to make his tea, light his pipes, and bustle around seeking clues. By some reasoning that I cannot follow, he decides that the murderer must be a professional man. The local chief of police, prosecutor, and doctor, along with a few others, are his suspects. He cherchezes a few femmes as well ...

Not a fair-play puzzle because the villain cannot possibly be detected by the reader, this one is a little annoying because of a plethora of characters with no depth or development. Madman might have worked better with a smaller cast and at novella length. OK, but not compelling.
 
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Finished If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe last night. Loved the ending, loved how everything came together at the end --even what I thought was just random throwaway characters and events suddenly mattered towards the end. In fact it might be my new favourite Pargin book, yes, maybe even better than I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, even though I still find that a way more important book, with its social commentary. It did have a few "why didn't you just--" parts where you just find yourself irritated by how dumb the protagonists could be, but I think that might have been deliberate, and the book lampshades several times how inept the protagonists can be. Loved all plot twists, too, you'll think you have someone all figured out and then it turns out 300 pager later that you were dead wrong (yes, it's a long book, clocking in at over 500 pages, but it's a real page-turner).

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe has a completely different horror scenario than This Book is Full of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It, and it also pulled off an...

(sort of spoilers, goes into detail about what kind of story it is, feel free to skip if you want to go into the book knowing as little about it as possible)
...alternative universe/time loop story surprisingly well. It's not just the Butterfly Effect-style plot that's been done to death, where the heroes go back in time to fix something and inadvertedly breaks something else over and over, it's a genuinely exciting story where just figuring out how it all works and how the various actors fit in the story is a big part of the plot and genuinely interesting.


Oh, and the ending was really unexpected and poignant.
 
I’m reading one in a favorite series- Aaron Elkins’ Gideon Oliver, the “bone detective” mysteries. Dr. Oliver can tell amazing things from a few old bones, preferably nice, clean ones. Elkins makes fairly unpleasant situations lightly entertaining. The Dark Place is the novel I’m in the midst of. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest, and had me thinking, oh, this is near where Trebuchet and Varwoche are! Then, Dr. Oliver and his FBI friend visit a Bigfoot enthusiast in Port Townsend (hi, Treb). The enthusiast is the only one taking Bigfoot seriously, of course. There may be a mysterious Native American tribe involved, haven’t gotten that far. These mysteries are a bit hard to find now. This one is from the mid-eighties, but all I’ve read so far are worth reading. They have many different settings.
I also have to comment on the mention, above, of the stewardship of nature of Native Americans. The early settlement of Virginia was influenced by the fact that deer were badly over-harvested in this region, creating considerable strife among tribes and adding to the food shortage for the settlers.
 
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Pietr the Latvian, Georges Simenon, tr. David Bellos
The chronology of the Inspector Maigret novels is something of a tangle. Simenon wrote this one and four others before starting publication. This is the first one written, but it wound up as the fifth one published – all in the same year, 1931. Much later in his career, Simenon wrote Maigret’s First Case, the action of which antedates this one….

Anyway, Pietr the Latvian begins when Maigret gets a bulletin recommending that he meet a train on which the infamous Pietr is coming into France. He is the head of a vast criminal network covering all of Europe and reaching even as far as America. Having only a very exact description of the criminal, Maigret arrives at the station just as an uproar breaks out: someone in carriage 5 has been murdered. The corpse matches the description of Pietr to a T. However, as Maigret rushed through the crowd on the platform, he had passed another man who also looked exactly like the description.

As he seeks the living man, Maigret meets a wealthy American businessman and his wife who treat him with disdain, then in a seaside town finds a woman who is married to a merchant seaman. The sailor, away on a voyage, looks astonishingly like Pietr, and then a member of Maigret’s squad is mysteriously murdered while surveilling the millionaire in a swanky hotel.

From there the plot gets complicated and Maigret’s life is imperiled. The presumed murderer of his subordinate shoots the inspector in the shoulder, starting something of a trope with Maigret, who ignores the wound as he painstakingly connects all the dots.

Simenon is more interested in the psychology of murderers than in a Sherlockian accumulation of clues and deductions, but he keeps the pace fast and the solution has a kind of logic. This novel has been translated into English at least three times. This version has some odd phrasings. Maigret is the leader of the “Flying Squad,” a distinctly British term. An educated character tells Maigret to “buzz off.” These and others don’t ruin the book, but they make one go “hmm.” For what it’s worth, I listened to the audiobook version, so that may have made the strange wording stand out for me.
 
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The Looking Glass War: A George Smiley Novel, John Le Carré

First published in 1965, this is a follow-up novel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, though not a true sequel. Reportedly Le Carré felt seriously irked by the earlier book’s reception. He’d set out to write a realistic anti-James Bond tale, drawing on his past experience working for British Intelligence, but the reading public regarded it as a romantic thriller.

Thus, he wrote The Looking Glass War, a bitterly sardonic satire that makes the intelligence community look as if they would come in second in a contest with the Keystone Kops. The setting is the 1960s, the Cold War era. In London a dwindled and neglected outfit, the Department, gets wind of Soviet missiles being deployed in East Germany, and the leadership, eager to rebuild their operation to the level of its glory days in World War II, decides to send a spy to confirm or disprove the existence of the missiles.

From the beginning things go wrong. One man is sent to Finland to retrieve a roll of film that might show . . . something, they don’t know what. He dies violently. A second, dispatched to retrieve his body and the film, is issued a passport in one name, but he carries a driver’s license in his own. Oops. A Polish veteran of the Department, now a naturalized British citizen and twenty years out of the game, is tapped to infiltrate enemy territory with outdated info and equipment. And so it goes.

Even more than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this one views the whole espionage community as less than competent and certainly less than admirable. The characters are not relatable or easy to sympathize with, though the final section does a nice turn of suspense. Problem is the characters decide it all has been an exercise in futility and the reader may feel the same way. The book does make it plain that the author does not regard espionage as "the great Game," to reference Kipling.

This is billed as a George Smiley novel, but really the Circus, Control, and Smiley are barely present. Have to say I thought the novels in the Quest for Karla sequence were much more engaging.
 
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Spektator said:
The Looking Glass War: A George Smiley Novel, John Le Carré

First published in 1965, this is a follow-up novel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, though not a true sequel. Reportedly Le Carré felt seriously irked by the earlier book’s reception. He’d set out to write a realistic anti-James Bond tale, drawing on his past experience working for British Intelligence, but the reading public regarded it as a romantic thriller.

Thus, he wrote The Looking Glass War, a bitterly sardonic satire that makes the intelligence community look as if they would come in second in a contest with the Keystone Kops. The setting is the 1960s, the Cold War era. In London a dwindled and neglected outfit, the Department, gets wind of Soviet missiles being deployed in East Germany, and the leadership, eager to rebuild their operation to the level of its glory days in World War II, decides to send a spy to confirm or disprove the existence of the missiles.

From the beginning things go wrong. One man is sent to Finland to retrieve a roll of film that might show . . . something, they don’t know what. He dies violently. A second, dispatched to retrieve his body and the film, is issued a passport in one name, but he carries a driver’s license in his own. Oops. A Polish veteran of the Department, now a naturalized British citizen and twenty years out of the game, is tapped to infiltrate enemy territory with outdated info and equipment. And so it goes.

Even more than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, this one views the whole espionage community as less than competent and certainly less than admirable. The characters are not relatable or easy to sympathize with, though the final section does a nice turn of suspense. Problem is the characters decide it all has been an exercise in futility and the reader may feel the same way. The book does make it plain that the author does not regard espionage as "the great Game," to reference Kipling.

This is billed as a George Smiley novel, but really the Circus, Control, and Smiley are barely present. Have to say I thought the novels in the Quest for Karla sequence were much more engaging.
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It should be noted that the bumblers in this story - the Department - are military intelligence. They were a big deal during the war, and were well-versed and well-equipped to carry out intelligence operations in support of an army at war.

They are envious of their civilian intelligence counterparts at the Circus. With the war over, the civilian agency grows in importance, and funding, while the military intelligence department languishes. Thus, they try to mount an operation on their own, with outdated information, equipment, and plans. They ask the Circus for help, which is politely declined. Smiley reaches the conclusion that the best result for the intelligence community is to let the Department crash and burn, so that it never again meddles in the touchy field of Cold War Espionage.

Ultimately, the "war" in Looking Glass War is that conflict between the Department and the Circus. While the Department focuses on their ill-advised and ill-fated operation, they themselves fall victim to a much more subtle, and much more effective operation mounted against them by Smiley. Less than admirable though he may be (and he acknowledges such) Smiley is certainly competent.

I like this novel because of its oblique approach to the story, which I think suits the subject matter well. I think it is also Le Carre at his best, when he writes like this.
 
I have heard that Karla's Choice by "Nick Harkaway" (a pen name for Le Carre's son) is quite good. It takes up where Spy ends and deals with Smiley's cleaning up problems across Europe in1963.
 
Moby Dick

Audiobook. Part of my program of revisiting old reads and hearing them in a new voice.

The reader of this edition has a lowkey sarcasm to his delivery, that makes much of what Ishmael has to say kind of hilarious. Definitely a refreshing take on the story, for me.
 
I had started listening to an audio book, something I rarely do. As it went on I felt that there was something decidedly "off" about the presentation. Odd pauses and pronunciation of words, etc. I looked it up the next day and found that it was being read by AI. Instantly trashed it.
 
I've finished Butchers Crossing by John Williams and it was great but not as excellent as Stoner.
I was so amazed by The Morningstar by Karl Ove Knausgård that I had to continue reading the "sequel", The Wolves of Eternity.
 
Halsey’s Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.

As an imperious Army general prepared for a battle he passionately desired, a stubborn Navy admiral, smarting from a serious miscalculation that had tarnished his reputation among his naval superiors and inferiors, determined to atone by aggressive action. General Douglas Macarthur poised his troops for an invasion of Luzon, determined to fulfill his promise “I shall return” to the Philippines. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey had unwisely taken his task force on a wild-goose chase in October 1944 at the moment when it was direly needed to defend American troops in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

While Macarthur prepared for the Luzon invasion, Halsey got ready to bring his sea and air forces to support the effort. Halsey ordered his fleet to refuel at sea, a tricky business. The storm that became the first informally named typhoon in the Pacific, Cobra, spoiled Halsey’s plans and nearly destroyed his fleet. An insanely powerful storm with winds howling at 125 knots and lashing the Pacific with blinding rain, Cobra spun right toward the refueling site. Though Navy meteorologists (“aerologists” then) warned that a tropical storm would hit, Halsey scoffed that it would be gales at worst.

Worst was worse than he thought. Even as refueling lines snapped and spilled their contents into the Pacific, Halsey changed his orders to “refuel at first opportunity” and “keep the force together.” Not being allowed to sail away from the typhoon meant that the big ships, critically the carriers, would receive damage. The smaller carriers would be tilted to 30+ degree lists, and t50 planes on the hangar decks would be wrecked, the Monterey set afire. The Farragut class destroyer escorts suffered even more in mountainous seas, three capsizing and sinking, the others severely damaged.

For too long the task force steamed into harm’s way before Halsey first changed course and later allowed the ships to break formation, but still he ordered them to reassemble and refuel at the first opportunity. The toll was fearsome – more American deaths than resulted from Midway, plus three ships sunk, nine others needing extensive refitting. One destroyer escort that escaped Cobra, the Tabberer, was commanded by a young, not very experienced officer, Henry Lee Plage. With his own ship battered, radar out, lists exceeding 60 degrees, and fighting high seas and punishing winds, Plage started picking up survivors. When Halsey ordered the ships to form up again, Plage disobeyed and continued to seek out survivors, figuring he would either be court-martialed or get a medal. In the end, Plage and other captains rescued 155 men, though 800 died.

In the end, Halsey received a slap on the wrist for making a poor decision, the invasion had to be put off until January 1945 – and Plage received his medal. A riveting read, history with the suspense of a thriller.
 
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

This one took me a long time to read. The novel itself is not Dickensian in length, but the plot is highly complex and at times after reading a scene, one realizes there was more to an earlier passage than the first reading revealed, so there’s much ping-ponging to do in order to keep everything straight.

Many of Le Carré’s spy books are labeled “A George Smiley Novel,” though in some the character appears only incidentally. This one is Smiley’s story from the get-go, and a fine one it is. As the story begins in 1973, Smiley has been forced out of the British spy organization, the Circus, along with the head man, Control (who dies not long afterward). Smiley is going through a bout of depression because of that and his suffering from the indulgences of his chronically unfaithful wife, Lady Ann.

Gradually the outlines of a plot form. A British agent in Czechoslovakia is taken prisoner by the Russians. Control’s successor as chief of the Circus is a shirty fellow lacking in social skills or intelligence, in two senses of the word. And Smile is requested by people high in the British government to see if Control’s suspicions were correct all along: there’s a Soviet mole* high in the Circus, right at the very top, and the organization is hemorrhaging secrets.

The characters are complex and engaging, and Smiley is a wonderful protagonist, cool, reserved, brilliant, and methodical. Two dramatic adaptations of the novel have appeared, one a BBC series starring Alec Guinness as Smiley, the other a theatrical movie with Gary Oldman in the role. I watched them after reading the novel. Both actors are splendid, though their characterizations differ. Guinness, with his hooded eyes, poker face, and patient observation, makes a hell of an interrogator. He impressed Le Carré as the definitive Smiley, and he even changed the description of his spy in later novels to more closely resemble Guinness. Oldman gives us an observational, brilliant man whose rare outbursts of temper come so unexpectedly they jolt the audience. The serial is more faithful to the novel (Le Carré wrote the script), down to one agent’s singing “Old Man River” to test a recording device, while in the film the agent recites “Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck”). Trivial, but both work.

Anyway, this is a fine book, written in clear prose that lays subtle traps for the reader, the kind that makes one smile at how easily the author can take in the unwary. Excellent plotting, great control, and a fascinating cat-and-mouse game between the Soviet master spy Karla and the academic George Smiley.
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*I learned that Le Carré invented the term “mole” to mean an espionage agent who has infiltrated an opposing spy ring.
 
Nearly finished Punshon's fourth Bobby Owen book, Mystery Villa.
Not bad, probably the best so far.
 
alfaniner said:
I had started listening to an audio book, something I rarely do. As it went on I felt that there was something decidedly "off" about the presentation. Odd pauses and pronunciation of words, etc. I looked it up the next day and found that it was being read by AI. Instantly trashed it.
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Yeah, I get that. Especially with USAian readers.
 
So I've Mystery Villa. Not bad but the denouement feels rushed. I'm travellering atm so I'm giving Death of a Beauty Queen a try.
 
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