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

Just finished How to Win a Grand Prix by Sky F1 commentator and former Force India/Racing Point/Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins, 2024.

This goes through all the myriad factors a strategist (and engineers, and teams in general) try to take into account in order to do well in a race.

While doing so, it also covers the phases of a year, testing, practice 1, 2, & 3, qualifying, the race itself, pre-and post race, and the off-season, plus Collins' background, her teams' only win, and her move to Sky.

I enjoyed it a lot, despite the relentless listing of elements that can effect the outcome of a race. It's almost as if strategists consider how you hold your mouth will affect the car.
:D


Collins was helped by Maurice Hamilton to structure the book.
 
I'm near to finishing Worlds of Exile and Illusion, A collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's first three novels - Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusion. They're independent stories, but take place in the same universe, separated by long periods of time. Yet there are threads of history connecting each story. Le Guin is said to have regretted the fusion of science and fantasy in these early novels, but I think she was ahead of her time. And even then, both the science and fantasy are handled with subtlety, with the focus being on characters.

Next I'll start Shroud, the latest by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who has quickly become one of my favorite authors. And like Terry Pratchett, he's delightfully prolific.
 
Maigret’s First Case, Georges Simenon

Though published in 1948, when the Inspector Maigret novels were already an international publishing phenomenon, this novel is set in April and May 1913. Jules Maigret, twenty-something and studying for a promotion, is currently the secretary for the chief of a smallish police station in Paris. He has been married for just over a year. Unlike in later years, he has a big moustache and is skinny. However, he is addicted to smoking his pipe.

The story begins on a night when, because of circumstances well outside the plot, Maigret and a single other officer are staffing the station house alone. A frantic young man rushes in and spins a story of hearing a shot, seeing a young woman slam up a window sash and scream for help, and then when he tries to intervene being thrown out of the obviously expensive house.

Maigret duly goes to check this out, discovering that the mansion belongs to a rich family (they own the biggest coffee company in the world). The testy scion of the clan, about Maigret’s age, sneers at him and insists that he look everywhere for any evidence of a shot and a scream in the dark. He finds none.

The witness, a musician, insists he knows what he saw and heard. Maigret’s boss, Inspector Le Bret, tells Maigret to take a week or two off and unofficially snoop. Le Bret is himself well to do, and he is on excellent terms with the head of the family where the alleged events took place.

Young Maigret tries hard to do everything by the book. We learn a little of his background: he comes from middle-class stock, and his earliest ambition was to become a cross between a physician and a priest so he could understand people and offer them help. He patiently makes his rounds, sizing up the characters involved, and eventually reaches his conclusion, despite a great many upper-echelon policemen telling him that sometimes justice doesn’t matter. It’s better sometimes to let things go.

This is a brisk novel, with Maigret having a knack for encouraging strangers to become friends, including both the distraught young musician who is the only witness and a jovial thug. Also, Simenon writes the best description I’ve ever seen in a detective novel of exactly how someone suffering from a concussion feels and reacts.

As for the solution, well, sometimes one must be satisfied only with the truth, not with justice.
 
The Fall of Colossus.
Complaint 1 -- Spoiler right in the title.
Complaint 2 -- A real deus ex machina appears, to help with the battle. After years of pondering the ending of the movie (identical to the first book), and finding out that there were continuations, I wondered how they'd get out of it, but never considered the direction it eventually took.

Otherwise, a very good and quick read, and some amazingly prescient predictions about how life in the "near future" would be.
 
Felony Juggler, by Penn Jillette

If it weren't an audiobook, I'd say I read this book so you don't have to. But the audiobook is read by Penn Jillette himself, which has its own attractions.

Penn writes like a horny preteen who just discovered he can put swears and sex in his stories. Penn reads like these are the two greatest discoveries in the history of the world. So if you want to listen to a YA bildungsroman, punctuated by some of the most enthusiastic and unnecessary celebrations of the f-word, and liberally seasoned with dick jokes, sodomy, and objectification of women, this might be your summer beach book.

The book includes descriptions of juggling, cold reading, and stage magic. If Penn adheres strictly to the principle of "write what you know", I can only assume he's also familiar with busking, bisexual experimentation, STDs, creating a false identity, and wanting women to photocopy their naked butts for his amusement.

That said, the book has its charms, and makes a pleasant change of pace from Moby Dick.
 
Intruder in the Dust, Wlliam Faulkner
A genuine detective story set in Jefferson, the seat of Yoknapatewpha County (both fictional), Mississippi (sort of real), this relates the murder of one of the poor white Gowrie boys by a person unknown but automatically presumed to be black.

The suspect is Lucas Beauchamp, farmer, whose independence, dignity, and refusal to play the role assigned to him by the community inspire anger among the whites. Arrested on mere suspicion and scheduled for a lynching, Beauchamp sends word via 16-year-old Chick Mallison to Chuck's uncle, lawyer Gavin Stevens: Beauchamp wants to hire him. And he also has a job for Chick involving grave robbing.

With the aid of his uncle and old Mrs Habersham and his black friend Aleck Sander, the teen strives to find evidence exonerating Lucas Beauchamp and identifying the real killer. The story spins out in Faulknerian prose, discursive digressive unelectable, at once projective and philosophical (attempting to clarify the irreducible because ineffable mankind, hydra headed yet present in each individual creature called Man, embracing too the greater mystery of Woman) in its trackless action while also having a little fun.

The book has humor and earthiness, but no heroes. Beauchamp is haughty and accepts no one's freely offered help ("I pays my way"). Stevens passionately believes in justice yet throws racial slurs around. Chick looks up to Beauchamp, who years before saved him from drowning but looks down on him because he is too uppity to let Chick thank him. Mrs Habersham is seventy and has grit enough to hold off a lynch mob armed only with a darning egg in the toe of a sock, but she's a snippy old biddy. I like the novel but had to be tolerant of its time and place. Also more than once I wanted to belt Gavin Stevens across the chops and yell, "Just shut up!"
 
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Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. A little slow as all the various personalities are introduced, but getting more into the meat of it now. Enjoying it so far, so we'll see if I will get the rest of the series (Malazan Book of the Fallen).

The Great Zaganza said:
Going to start The Devils by Joe Abercrombie soon.
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My next read is The Blade Itself, though I have seen ads for The Devils.
 
Just begun Ron Chernow's biography of Mark Twain.
Change of pace of Chernow, whose previous hugely sucessful biographies have been of political or finiancial figures, including "Alexander Hamilton" on which the hit play was based "George Washington" which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Natinal Book awardm and "Grant" which has become the standard biogrpahy of the guy in my avatar.
Will be interesting to see how Chernow writes about America's most famout author.
 
The Housemaid, by Frieda McFadden.

The good: Combining crime thriller and romance novel tropes is an intriguing and engaging idea, and the book gets off to a strong start.

The bad: The crime thriller part called for a dark and tragic ending, while the romance novel part called for a happily ever after ending.

The ugly: Watching the third act grind itself to pieces trying to reconcile those opposing forces in a satisfying way.
 
The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built, Jack Viertel

Published in 2016, this is a history of the golden age of the Broadway Musical, which according to Viertel began on March 31, 1943, and ended on June 25, 1975. The first date marked the opening night of Oklahoma! and the second the opening night of A Chorus Line.

Viertel, the owner of five New York theaters at the time the book appeared, dissects the process of creating a Broadway musical by analyzing, scene by scene, the songs as they appear: the Overture, identifying the setting of the show, the “I Want” song in the first act, identifying a character’s needs or desires, followed by the conditional love song (“If I Loved You”), then the Noise song (production number), and so on, through each act.

Viertel uses examples from the era to illustrate. The Music Man’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” is a Noise. The Bushwhacking number may introduce a secondary couple, like Ado Annie and Will Parker in Oklahoma! (“I’m Jest a Gal Who Cain’t Say No”) or it may be a villain song (Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd), or maybe we become aware that it’s a multiplot show, following the arcs of many characters, as in Avenue Q.

So it goes, act to act, with all the ritual songs in the ritual places, as elaborate as a Japanese tea ceremony. Viertel is not exactly resentful, but he is at least bemused, to consider the post-A Chorus Line musicals as somehow disorderly, not following the pattern, and not quite delivering the old thrills. I like musicals myself (our soprano daughter has been in several and in fact is directing one at this moment) and so spent a pleasant time with this slice of show-biz history.
 
I'm re-reading the Valérian and Laureline series, the latest John Sandford (Lethal Prey, retrieved from the pile) and stuck part way through Death Comes to Camvers.
 
Lennart Hyland said:
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.
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Knausgårds story has really captivated me. Currently reading his third novel in The Mornistar series, The Third Realm. In swedish/norwegian its translated into The Third Reich which is interesting considering Knausgårds six book self biography is called "My Struggle" (ahem ahem Mein Kampf).

Any how the story is really captivating and interesting, with alot of different characters (some in different life times), a story about life and death and the life after death.

So this is his third book and I'm about halfway through. There is a fourth one and the fifth comes out in October...
 
I've finally surfaced from my foray into Jules Verne. Some stories were better told than others (and some were familiar to me), but the essays were really interesting.

I've now exceeded my self-imposed target of French language literature for the year - I'm sure I'll read more - but I am listening to a French audiobook in the car (D'écho en échos, book two in the St Mary's series by Jodi Taylor, English title A Symphony of Echoes).

I also read the 19th Bobby Owen series; Night's Cloak. It's 1944 and Bobby finds himself investigating the murder of a local squire in his mansion with no shortage of suspects. On the surface, it's a classic Golden Age country house murder mystery, but it's more convoluted than that. There's a comic character who steals from everyone with a smile, and Olive plays a bigger role than she does in some other books. The author's politics leak a little into the book but that doesn't detract from it. Next up, book 20 Secrets Can't Be Kept.
 
Agatha said:
I've finally surfaced from my foray into Jules Verne. Some stories were better told than others (and some were familiar to me), but the essays were really interesting.

I've now exceeded my self-imposed target of French language literature for the year - I'm sure I'll read more - but I am listening to a French audiobook in the car (D'écho en échos, book two in the St Mary's series by Jodi Taylor, English title A Symphony of Echoes).
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A good series, at least in English.

Agatha said:
I also read the 19th Bobby Owen series; Night's Cloak. It's 1944 and Bobby finds himself investigating the murder of a local squire in his mansion with no shortage of suspects. On the surface, it's a classic Golden Age country house murder mystery, but it's more convoluted than that. There's a comic character who steals from everyone with a smile, and Olive plays a bigger role than she does in some other books. The author's politics leak a little into the book but that doesn't detract from it. Next up, book 20 Secrets Can't Be Kept.
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I don't think I'm going to make it that far.
 
I really enjoyed the St Mary's stories (and the Time Police ones, and the Smallhope & Pennyroyal spinoff). It seems like a long time until October and the release of Time Police book 6!
 
Agatha said:
I really enjoyed the St Mary's stories (and the Time Police ones, and the Smallhope & Pennyroyal spinoff). It seems like a long time until October and the release of Time Police book 6!
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I finished the fifth Time Police book recently, it's a good series.
 
I've started the third book of the Enola Holmes series The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets by Nancy Springer.

The first chapter caught my attention immediately. It starts out in an insane asylum with a man screaming his brains out that he's a doctor, author, and not the person they think he is, and considering where he's at, no one believes him of course.

It turns out this man is Dr. John Watson, and he's being held captive against his will.

That's all I'll tell you for now, but it certainly sounds good so far.


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