Oh, I loved Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather. It’s a really cool use of the format.
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Her very abrupt endings miss much more often than they hit for me, but “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” did really speak to me as someone who has gone down a lot of rabbitholes involving traditional folk ballad lyrics.
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I just finished Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night.
A detective/thriller about two detectives researching a series of ritual (and particularly gruesome) murders, an anthropologist specialised in ancient African magic (of the kind that inspired santería) who lives in hiding because her ex killed her sister, and said ex who was taught tribal Olo magic on a field expedition to Mali and is now seeking revenge and power.
It starts as a straightforward detective story and gradually morphs into a supernatural thriller.
I liked it.
Next up is Vidamía by Edgardo Vega Yunque, about a half Irish, half Puerto Rican woman who seeks to reconnect with her estranged father, a once succesfull Jazz pianist.
EDIT: nope, Vidamía is going to have to wait. While looking for it on my bookshelves I came across Fairy Tale by Stephen King, which I picked up in my local 2nd hand bookstore a month or two ago. Just read the first few tens of pages and I’m hooked.
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I’ve been reading the lord of the rings (yes I never read it), because I was playing Lord of the Rings online recently.
I’ve had struggle reading regular old books in recent years. Lower attention span, too many devices to distract me. It’s hard to do, but it’s nice when I do.
I love how it turns out that LOTR is mostly about hiking. Maybe it’s because I’m not yet at the more serious parts of later in the stories, but for now a lot of the pages are spent describing hills and landscapes, and weeks long treks through the country.
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I’m re-reading Defending the Devil: My Story As Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer by Polly Nelson.
Nelson joined a big law firm in the 1980s and took, as her very first case, pro-bono work on trying to hold off death warrants on Ted Bundy.
This book is eye-wateringly detailed in its description of filing cert. pertitions, habeas corpuses and running up and down the chain of USA courts. I don’t think anything else I’ve read has given me such a strong feeling of what this kind of work must be like – except there was no internet for sending documents around at the time.
The other major spectacle of the book is Nelson’s godly powers of mental compartmentalisation. She is someone born with a sense that she must take charge of others’ wellbeing, to lift up the ashamed and make them feel better, and she will do whatever she has to to make it happen. Here, she’s going all out to make it happen with the knowledge her client kept women’s heads.
Something about it reminds me of the comedy Liar Liar with Jim Carrey. Not that Nelson couldn’t lie, but in the film, Carrey plays a lawyer cursed with the inability to lie, and in one scene physically beats himself senseless in a toilet to avoid going to court. This is the kind of inner-punching-bag-life I think Nelson was subjecting herself to.
-Wade
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Most months I compile an infographic showing the covers of the books I am mainly reading that month. Here is my new visual for July, with the titles in the alt text in the collapsed text section after.
Alt text
The image shows 6 book covers, a row of 3 above another row of 3. All are vibrant and colourful. The books are Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang, Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics edition) by Charles Dickens, There’s a Hole in My Bucket A Journey of Two Brothers by Royd Tolkien, iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Scottish Poetry 1730-1830 edited by Daniel Cook (Oxford World’s Classics), and the manga version of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.
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I really appreciate the consistent alt-texting. It’s a strong reminder to do better myself.
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The Count of Monte Cristo is the only book I ever called in sick to work for. I simply could not put it down.
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I read it for the first time a few years ago and was blown away. I am now trying the manga version for a reread!
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I’ve got better at it since going to Mastodon where it’s strongly encouraged. I wanted to post the image here, but there was no way I wasn’t also going to give alt text with the important info too.
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My wife tried listening to an audiobook version of that. After about 3 hours (whatever that converts to in audiobook content) she gave up on it. I was the one to recommend it to her, lol.
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Huh. No accounting for taste. I’ve never listened to an audiobook, though, so maybe the experience just doesn’t translate sometimes. Maybe it wasn’t read well?
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In the last couple months, I listened to all of Shakespeare’s plays on audiobook in reverse order of how much I like them while playing Civilization VI. I started the Feynmann Lectures on Physics, which I’m still reading (it really helps, since I learned physics on my own and never took a class that connects all the different subjects). I also started reading Maxwell’s Treatise on Electrodynamics, and I’m in the middle of the Hobbit audiobook, which I play when my son’s around instead of the horror podcasts I usually listen to.
Count of Monte Cristo is pretty gripping! But people’s tastes are all different, I guess. I remember it getting really slow around the point that he gives a pages-long speech about the virtues of marijuana while bribing the pope with a carved emerald or something but it picks up a lot more later; maybe that’s where she stopped?
(okay, I just looked up that scene and it was shorter than I remember, but still I remember thinking ‘yeah your recipe for combining opium and hashish is great and I’m glad you like macaroni but what about revenge?’)
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For me it was the “Italian tourism with Albert” section that was tough to get through. You’ve just had this daring prison break where Edmond pretends to be a corpse and gets thrown into the sea, you’re dying to know where he goes from there and how he gets rolling on his revenge quest, and then… hey, let’s hear all about this random young rich guy’s trip to Venice and various other parts of the country! For many, many, many pages before it links back up with the main plot! (Although maybe it felt like more than it was because I don’t care about Albert?)
Which is to say, I adore the book but I absolutely don’t blame anyone for dropping it. The pacing requires a certain amount of patience, to put it mildly.
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Honestly, I’m not sure on the specifics. She just left it at “it wasn’t for me” and my rudimentary social skills suggested digging further at that time wouldn’t have been a rewarding activity.
Now that some time has passed, I’ll ask her and find out for you guys. I’m kinda curious myself.
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The tricky part in Monte Cristo for me was about halfway through, when a mass of new characters were being introduced in Paris. So much to take in! I felt like I had to work at sticking with that. But it picked up again, and I loved the machinations going on constantly behind the scenes. I don’t think the manga version copes so well with the growing large cast. It’s compressed things down a lot, and I don’t think the reader is given enough time to learn who these new people are, and so not muddle them up! Having said that there is a marvellous character linkages diagram at the very end of the manga book which I could probably have found handy when reading the original novel on my Kindle!
If you like Monte Cristo I’d recommend having a look at Dumas’s much shorter and vastly less well known The Black Tulip. It’s set in 1670s Holland, and though there’s a bit of contemporary politics and historical events to get to grips with I think it’s a delightful small package.
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I just finished Tom Holland’s Dynasty. The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. This book stands out between the other works on Roman history I’ve read by zooming in on the lives of the five Augustean emperors thatcame after Julius Caesar. From Octavius who wove a web of deception about his own standing in Roman society, pretending to be merely the First Citizen in the Republic to Nero who dropped all pretenses of respect for the old Republican Mores and openly claimed the role of autocrat.
Very interesting,especially after reading Mary Beard’s SPQR, which glosses over the individual differences between emperors rather quickly and focuses on the observation that they all more or less followed the mold Augustus left for what it meant to be an Emperor of Rome.
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I treated myself to a digital weekend pass for the Cymera writing festival in Edinburgh in early June. Over the last few weeks I have been watching as many events as I could get through on catchup via streaming. I got through 22! Here’s my writeup. The focus of the festival is scifi, fantasy and horror writing. So very much up my street. A huge number of authors and books covered, and my to be read list is now groaning!
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I just read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and I had to take breaks. It gets good at the end where it turns to gripping psychological thriller. I suspect that references to murder early on is the author’s attempt to keep reader’s interest.
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I don’t know if there’s any Avatar (The Last Airbender, not the other one) fans on here, but I read The Dawn of Yangchen recently. I liked it well enough, though, funnily, my favorite chapter was probably the first one. I would’ve loved to see more of Jetsun and Yangchen — as an older sister myself, the older sister trope is one of my favorites.
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