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.
 
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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