What Fiction are you reading this week, June 9, 2024?

[hermetic]

The library aboard the MS Queen Victoria spans two decks and is linked by a spiral staircase. It is home to around 6,000 books and periodicals.

Still reading Demon Copperhead. Still listening to Last Bus to Wisdom. Turns out, these are pretty much the same story. Kingsolver supposedly based her book on Dickens' famous work but I get the feeling she may have read and been influenced by Doig's as well. Boys growing up in foster or relatives' homes and all the similar problems. Both excellent but Doig's is a lot funnier.

Wishing everyone smooth sailing this week. What do you have on board for your reading enjoyment?

[Diamond_Dog]

1. Three Inch Teeth, another in the Joe Pickett series.

I have read them all.

[hermetic]

8. Mmmm

#24 in C. J. Box's series. "A riveting new novel about a rogue grizzly bear that has gone on a rampage -- killing, among others, the potential fiancé of Joe's daughter." Sounds great.

[Easterncedar]

2. Unfortunately reading "The Falls"

Last edited Sun Jun 9, 2024, 01:13 PM - Edit history (1)

By Joyce Carol Oates. I picked it up when visiting my hometown, Niagara Falls, last week. I have a hard time just dropping a book unfinished, but this is such an amazingly ugly, tiresome and unpleasant work that I may. She admits right away that it’s not situated in the real city, just resembles it a bit, so it jars that way, too. I may race to the end, or may give it up.

I will need a good brain/palate cleanser afterwards. Maybe Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Just bought it, never read it before.

[hermetic]

5. The Falls

A haunting exploration of the American family in crisis, in the 1950s. Look like this is one of the few books she has written that didn't win any prizes.

The Cather novel was a lot more popular and it's only half as long so I hope you find it more enjoyable.

[Easterncedar]

18. Funny description

“The American family” she has created is so weird I kept thinking at first it was set in a gothic 1880 instead of 1950, and the ‘crisis’ all the characters seem to face involves repeated surprising “sexual pangs” in their “groins.” I just talked myself out of finishing it. Thanks for helping me decide!

[hermetic]

20. And thank you

for helping me decide to NEVER read it. Def not my cuppa tea.

[Srkdqltr]

26. I read 1or2 of Oates books a very long time ago. I remember they were strange. I did not like them.

[GarColga]

3. I am re-reading "Paths of Glory"

by Humphrey Cobb, it has been about 30 years since I read it! Published in 1935, it was Cobb's only published novel and was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's first film, starring Kirk Douglas. It is a brilliant anti-war novel. Apparently during WWI the French army had a bad habit of executing troops for the failures of their leaders, and after a failed assault some men are selected at random to be tried for cowardice. Their execution is a foregone conclusion and the lack of empathy from the French military leaders is shocking. Their attorney (Douglas) puts up a surprisingly vigorous defense to no avail. The film is just the bare bones of the story, but the book is full of the grim realities of trench warfare. Highly recommended!

[hermetic]

6. Geez

Grim, indeed. Thanks for telling us about it.

[KPN]

4. Just started "Burma Sahib" by Paul Theroux last night. A fictional account of George Orwell's

time in colonial Burma as a young British policeman. Theroux writes and "paints' the place and the British and Burmese cultures of that era really well, but I'm not sure this is going to be a can't put down or put me to sleep quickly each night book at this point. But I do enjoy his mastery of the English language and prose. A downside though is the number of new words I can't always resist taking time out to look up. Kind of distracting.

[hermetic]

7. Interesting

"..a valid and entirely credible attempt to add flesh to the skeletal facts we have of this time. [this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre.]” -- New York Times Book Review

[Native]

32. I love it when I come across a new word! The older you get, the more rare the occurrence. The last 2 I encountered were

invigilate and etiolated. I knew etiolated because I read about plants quite often, but this was the first time I'd come across it in a work of fiction, and it was used to describe a person's looks. I loved that. Miscegenation was another one.

[cbabe]

9. The Appeal/Grisham

How to buy a Supreme Court Justice. Written in 2008. Wonder what he knew when.

Collateral Damage/Jance
Cyber hunt for killers. Touches very lightly on legal/moral aspects of stalking by the ‘good guys’. One of her better written books.

Phantom Prey/Stanford
Second read. Even better, picking up details and fun and not so scary.

[hermetic]

11. Happy reading!

They all sound great.

[Srkdqltr]

10. Reading the last Mazie Dobbs " the comfort of ghosts"

Set just after WW2 in England. So far seems like an interesting story. This is Jacqueline Windspar's last Mazie so it should be good.

[hermetic]

12. Oh yes, indeed

"The Comfort of Ghosts completes Jacqueline Winspear's ground-breaking and internationally bestselling series. A milestone in historical mystery fiction as Maisie Dobbs takes her final bow!"

[japple]

13. Just finished reading Lief Erickson's, I Cheerfully Refuse last night

and was blown away. I don't want to give away the plot in case others plan to read it, but it got mighty bleak at one point. Much to my relief, fortunes turned and justice was
served and my faith was restored!

I have just started a rather cozy book, Sipsworth, Simon Van Booy.

Following the loss of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns to the village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. She retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit: “Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle—as though even for death there is a queue.”
Then, one cold winter night, a chance encounter with a mouse sets Helen on a surprising journey.
Sipsworth is a reminder that there can be second chances. No matter what we have planned for ourselves, sometimes life has plans of its own. With profound compassion, Simon Van Booy illuminates not only a deep friendship forged between two lonely creatures, but the reverberations of goodness that ripple out from that unique bond.

Thank you for the weekly thread, hermetic. Love the Queen Victoria library. It is beautiful.

[hermetic]

16. That is one heckova book, for sure

And your new one sounds great, too. Just came out. They're calling it Visionary & Metaphysical. Got my attention.

I saw that about your sister and I do hope you will be able to help her keep hanging on. It's a lot to deal with. I'm here for ya.

[Midnight Writer]

14. Re-reading the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

I first read the plays when I was in grade school and was totally enthralled.

Read them all again in my forties, and still impressed.

Lately been thinking about them and all the quotable lines of wisdom, so I started in again, now in my seventies.

I guess this is why they call them classics.

[hermetic]

17. Well, now

you should drop a few of those quotable lines here and there.

[txwhitedove]

15. Beautiful library photo. Wouldn't it be a wonderful cruise, a Library Cruise for us bookworms?

Now thru 1st 100 pages of Extinction/Douglas Preston. At a resort "deep in the Colorado Rockies" guests can experience wolly mammoths and other herbivores "in their native habitat, brought back from extinction through the magic of genetic manipulation. When a billionaire's son and his new wife are kidnapped and murdered in the back country by what is assumed to be a gang of eco-terrorists, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frances Cash partners with county sheriff James Colcord to track down the perpetrators." Great summer reading.

Read last week #8 Scents and Sensibility. "Chet and his human PI companion, Bernie Little, find themselves in a prickly situation when a mysterious case of illegal cactus smuggling comes to their attention." Great episode in Spencer Quinn's series. Did you know they microchip rare saguaro cacti?

Tried to read Riley Sager, The House Across the Lake. Wow this ebook started strong, witty, moody. Almost halfway thru got into hand wringing and worry to the point of boredom, so I jumped ahead. I'm a fast reader so got whole idea and ending through a totally bizarre plot twist that would be hardly believable in the best movie horror thriller, and didn't buy the ending. Do not rec.

[hermetic]

19. Ah, Extinction

You might want to have a Chet and Bernie story close at hand when you reach the end of that one. Scariest book I ever read. Couldn't get it out of my head.

[txwhitedove]

21. I do, #9 Chet...

[Native]

31. Oh, man, I love books about illegal cactus smuggling!

Seriously though, re Sager's novel, it should be illegal for books to start out that well and then crash & burn.

[rsdsharp]

22. I slogged through Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us the Living: A Comedy of Manners.

I originally read it shortly after it first came out in 2004, but I had forgotten just how bad it is. It’s largely 300+ pages (with appendix!) of a (socialist) economic lecture masquerading as a novel.

There’s very little plot or character development, and what little there is, is just a frame on which to hang the lecture: If the government pays everyone a monthly living wage ($150 — this was written in 1938/1939), and injects fiat money into the economy to make up the difference between over production and consumption, we would have utopia.

I hadn’t remembered the Libertatian gloss to the book — everything is allowable, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, but that’s really the “Comedy of Manners.”

There were hints of things to come. The moving roads of The Roads Must Roll are present, as is Coventry, and the novel is set in 2086, after the theocracy headed by Nehemahia Scudder found in If This Goes On—. Themes which will be more fully developed in Starship Troops, Methuselah’s Children, and Time Enough For Love are also present.

This was published after his death, and the death of his third wife, and widow, Virginia,, and to my way of thinking, is a prime example of the “Let’s publishing anything he wrote; the rubes will buy it” (guilty!) mentality that ruled in the years following his death. That’s why we got a fifty year old travelogue—Tramp Royale — and excerpts of his correspondence — Grumbles From the Grave. If they had old grocery lists, they would have published those, too.

Unless you are as big a Heinlein freak as I am, I don’t recommend this.

[hermetic]

23. Thanks for the honest review

Taking one for the team, as it were.

[NanaCat]

24. This week...

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Patricia Engel – Infinite Country
Talia escapes from a juvenile correction facility in Colombia, after committing a crime that may not have been a crime at all. Her parents once overstayed their visas in the US to live away from the drug violence back home, but her father was deported. Meanwhile, her mother remains in America with their other children. Mom has sent her daughter a plane ticket to get to the US, supposedly to safety and being with her family again—but how did she get to Colombia while her siblings stayed in America? I’m sure we’ll get the answers, and that they won’t be easy. Thank goodness it’s a relatively short read. As a companion, I’ll be reading The Undocumented Americans, a non-fiction work by Karla Villavicencio, also a short read.

Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
Hammett was instrumental in creating the noir genre with this gritty tale of a hard-boiled detective, a stolen treasure, the expected corpse, a v. creepy criminal, and a double-dealing (in more ways than one) dame. An assembly of so many unlikable people in one book is usually a slog to read, but I have a feeling this one won’t be.

As for the MS Victoria. 6000 books? Is that all? Pfft.

[Bayard]

25. I read 3 books week before last, but missed the thread

This week, I'm just trying to get through, "Sacrament," by Clive Barker. Haven't read him in years, but have several of his books that were very good--especially the ones of short stories. This is one of those I feel like I have to finish, half way through.

Great library pic!

[Skittles]

27. still on Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman

[BlueKota]

28. The Medici Manuscript by C.J. Archer

Set in England just after World War I it involves a woman whose late mother kept her father's name a secret. The mother kept moving her two children from town to town never telling them why. The mother eventually dies of influenza and the brother dies in the war, but in his journal her brother writes he suspected they were descendants of silver magicians, ones who could craft the finest silver objects but was killed before he could prove it.

The woman decides to take up her brother's quest and meets a wealthy man whose mother inherited a magical ability with time pieces. He hires her as an assistant to the librarian who runs a library filled with a collection of books on magic. The wealthy man's family partially funds it. He also maybe hiding Magic secrets of his own.

There are mysteries to solve and a hint of romance. I am listening to the second audio book in the series now on Hoopla!

[LoisB]

29. Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe books

[Native]

30. Just finished reading The Others, by Jeremy Robinson, today, and...

yesterday I finished listening to Moye's Someone Elses Shoes. Now I've started reading King's newest novel, Holly, and listening to Not Alone by Falconer and The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. Keeping it light after having read Hannah's The Women.

[Native]

33. I think you will really love this 5 minute interview with Kingsolver about that book....did you know that she actually

started writing it on Dicken's desk?

[txwhitedove]

34. Fascinating! Thanks.

[hermetic]

36. Thank you so much!

That was quite interesting. I did know about the desk but she also answered a few questions that the book raised for me.

Welcome to the group. Always happy to have new participants.

[yellowdogintexas]

35. "Christmas Crime" another Kat Makris Greek Mafia novel (by Alex King)

Kat Makris’ time in Greece is up.

She’s been kidnapped, shot, and used as a corpse’s mattress … and that’s on the good days when her grandmother isn’t drugging the cookies. Why stay in Greece when there is no safer place for Kat and her menagerie of unusual pets than her childhood home in Portland, Oregon?

Yes, Kat is quitting Greece and the Greek mob mostly fine-ish. So what if Hipster Burger’s fake mustache is giving her a rash? At least she’s working, right? And there’s a tiny issue with her other new job, but nothing the fire department and Homeland Security can’t fix.

Kat’s biggest problem is that the Greek mob can’t quit Kat—and they’re coming for her just in time for Christmas.

I was having a horrible night last night so I dived into this book. It was just what I needed. I read up until about 4 am and finally fell asleep. These books are chock full of quirky characters and hilarity. Kat herself is somewhat of a smartalec. If Alex ever finishes with Kat she has at least 2 other good sized series going.

I finally finished 'Neverwhere' by Neil Gaiman
It is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he discovers a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her—an act of kindness that plunges him into a world he never dreamed existed. Slipping through the cracks of reality, Richard lands in Neverwhere—a London of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth. Neverwhere is home to Door, the mysterious girl Richard helped in the London Above. Here in Neverwhere, Door is a powerful noblewoman who has vowed to find the evil agent of her family’s slaughter and thwart the destruction of this strange underworld kingdom. If Richard is ever to return to his former life and home, he must join Lady Door’s quest to save her world—and may well die trying.
I really enjoy Gaiman's work
"
I also finally finished 'The One Hundred Years of Lennie and Margot' by Marianne Cronin. An extraordinary friendship. A lifetime of stories.

Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Though the teenager has been told she’s dying, she still has plenty of living to do. Joining the hospital’s arts and crafts class, she meets the magnificent Margot, an 83-year-old, purple-pajama-wearing, fruitcake-eating rebel, who transforms Lenni in ways she never imagined.

As their friendship blooms, a world of stories opens for these unlikely companions who, between them, have been alive for one hundred years. Though their days are dwindling, both are determined to leave their mark on the world. With the help of Lenni’s doting palliative care nurse and Father Arthur, the hospital’s patient chaplain, Lenni and Margot devise a plan to create one hundred paintings showcasing the stories of the century they have lived—stories of love and loss, of courage and kindness, of unexpected tenderness and pure joy.

Though the end is near, life isn’t quite done with these unforgettable women just yet.

This was such a sweet and sad yet uplifting story. highly recommend

[hermetic]

37. Neverwhere

so many years ago, caused me to fall in love with Gaiman and I have read and loved everything he's written since.

I will have to find myself some Kat Markis books as they sound so enjoyable. Thanks.

[yellowdogintexas]

38. the first book in the series is Disorganized Crime. nt