I also liked And Then There Were None, but I may have forgotten some racism stuff from it.
If people want their narrators to be reliable, they need to be sure narrators have affordable child care, safe housing, and good transportation options.
2: I think the text of the book was fine, but the original title was pretty special.
Probably better than Sherlock Holmes. You're reading an ordinary mystery and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, he just starts spouting off like he's commenting on a blog post about football players kneeling.
May every book contain a strong woman protagonist, every mystery a dark secret that turns out to be drugs, alcohol or sexual abuse, every thriller an ex-Navy SEAL turned entrepreneur slash White House adviser.
May every book contain a strong woman protagonist, every mystery a dark secret that turns out to be drugs, alcohol or sexual abuse, every thriller an ex-Navy SEAL turned entrepreneur slash White House adviser.
May every comment you post double
May that be your greatest trouble
May you all always be sarcastic, witty and wise
May you always be able to see through all the lies
May all your thoughts be uncensored, recorded and blogged
May you stay forever unfogged.
I liked The Silent Patient and comment 8, both.
I loved Anxious People, which I read over the summer.
I'm on the Libby list for The Silent Patient and liked 8.
Just read Louise Penny and HRC's thriller and it wasn't bad. The Trump-like character is kind of on-the-nose, he's not a huge part of the book.
I disliked The Silent Patient. The writing was so bad, and the characters were so thin and implausible, and nothing made any sense. But I didn't finish it, so maybe the end redeemed the experience. My loss, if so.
Agree that Woman in the Window was only okay, although maybe I'm thinking of Girl on the Train, another thriller about an emotionally-unstable woman who maybe witnesses a murder but drinks too much so we don't know whether she's crazy or she's telling the truth (spoiler, both can be true). One of the two books was markedly worse than the other, but I don't remember which.
Other mystery novels I read recently and didn't like:
- I tried to read the Viveca Sten Sandhamn series, and wow, those books are so boring. I thought Scandinavian mysteries were supposed to be dark and cynical and morally bleak, not bogged down in endless pointless descriptions of dumb quotidian details and populated by characters who propel the plot with their inexplicably stupid decisions.
- Ruth Ware's Turn of the Key, One By One: I want to support Ruth Ware's project of writing Golden Age manor house mysteries set in the present day, but I wish they were better executed.
I did like Sara Davis' The Scapegoat, a lot. That was kind of a mystery/thriller. And I love everything by Michael Connelly and recommend him to everyone, although I'm less interested in the mystery aspect of the books than what Harry is going to eat at Musso and Frank's.
I've quite enjoyed:
Andrew Cartmel's "Vinyl Detective" series. These are somewhat "cosy" and consistently mildly amusing, with a fair amount of music nerdery. The lead character is clearly a bit of a "Marty Sue" but they are fun, nonetheless.
Caimh McDonnell's Dublin Trilogy, which starts with "The Man With One of Those Faces". Also a fair amount of black humour.
Various novels by MC Scott aka Manda Scott. There's a Roman era set series of historical thrillers that she wrote as MC Scott: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manda_Scott#Rome which I liked. The modern era standalone novels as Manda Scott are also quite good. I liked "A Treachery of Spies" and the related novella. I was less keen on "Into the Fire". Scott writes a lot of strong female characters, and same-sex relationships into her books, and does quite a lot of fun* stuff with historical "fact" and/or religious history.
https://uklesfic.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/q-and-a-with-manda-scott/
* or could be irritating, depending on your perspective.
15: A fellow poll worker was reading Stacy Abram's While Justice Sleeps which is characterized as a thriller*. I did not realize she has also published a number of "romantic suspense" novels under the name Selena Montgomery**. Everyone else probably already knew this.
I sometimes suspect that there are people with better discipline and time management skills than mine. But it don't worry me.
*I don't even see "genre."
**Which at first glance I read as Selma Montgomery because why not.
Don't remember the last murder mystery I read. I'm currently almost halfway through the Night Watch series. Not the Terry Pratchett books; they're Russian urban fantasy. The plot of the first book was sort of standard "good wizard vs. evil wizard" stuff but with an unusual structure to the book. The second also played with the structure and also with the plot. Too early to say about the third, but I'm liking it in general.
20: Cyrus, how's the language in those? I might try them in Russian for language practice, but it's been a few years and simple would be best. Not that you probably know how the Russian is, but assuming a faithful translator, I guess...
I speak zero Russian, so I can't comment on the quality of the translation. It definitely feels Russian to me, for whatever its' worth - some scenes of characters at a country home getting depressed, drunk, and talking about love reminded me of an adaptation of The Seagull. There are only a few words that look made up by the author or translator, e.g. "remoralization". A lot of stuff about it feels weird. I'm not sure what feels weird because it's Russian and what because of the author's world-building.
I don't want to make this sound too difficult, though. The plots are linear. The narrators are reliable (as far as I can tell so far)(except to the extent that half of them are Objectivists). It doesn't rely on subtext too much. It's interesting but not all that challenging.
20, 21: I've read at least the first three, maybe the first four, and remember them as solid and fun. The language was straightforward, didn't call attention to itself, so I think it would be good for practice. Probably some interesting slang in the dialogue.
Have either of you read much Boris Akunin? All the World's a Stage is probably the last murder mystery that I have read. Two more to go among the Fandorins that have been translated into English. Kinda saving them in case that's the end.
Thanks, both! The Lukyanenko sounds ideal, and even though I had no intentions of starting a Russian project when I woke up this morning, now I guess I do. I haven't read any Akunin, Doug. I was living in Kyrgyzstan and operating mainly in Kyrgyz when I read the occasional Russian-language book, so I've got no breadth at all.
There's a genre of books that I don't quite know how to categorize. They're very very easy reading, but the characterizations of people are quite adept, and it's mostly plot driven and doesn't necessarily seem super deep. Liane Moriarty is one, (and I'm reading Apples Never Fall right now and it's exactly what I mean), and the 2nd Celeste Ng book, Little Fires Everywhere, is also one, and I forget who else. (Ng's other book was much more somber and dark, IIRC.) I really enjoy how zippy they are without being bad writing.
Like "Mainstream but enjoyable". I think of them as being book club books.
I did not realize she has also published a number of "romantic suspense" novels under the name Selena Montgomery**. Everyone else probably already knew this.
I did, but I love it so much as an oddball fact about her that you can mention it as much as you want.
24: Akunin's terrific, though I think the first book is mostly him figuring out what he wants to do.
We kinda sorta almost went to Bishkek with the OSCE back in 2011/12! I forget why that one fell through. Would have been very interesting after Tbilisi.
I was there in 2011/12, doing fieldwork in the south with occasional trips to Bishkek. It's a lovely city as post-Soviet provincial capitals go, and would absolutely have been a good Tbilisi followup. I haven't been back in years and I miss it.
I tried to read a Selena Montgomery book once, but the hunky love interest turned out to be a law enforcement officer, and that was too kinky for me.
I've been reading a lot of Nicola Griffith; she's amazingly versatile, writing in different eras and locations with a strong sense of place. Of the mystery(ish) end are her Aud books, beginning with The Blue Place and (currently) ending with Always. I skipped over Stay, because I couldn't find it, but will be keeping an eye out.
Hild and So Lucky were great, in very different ways.
Hild is set in 7th century England, and involves lots of great small empire struggles observed by a child growing into young womanhood. There's fascinating politics on several layers, including relationship webs, trade with the continent, the contest between different Christian churches striving for supremacy (and to displace old-gods worship)... plus a bunch of alien (to a modern eye) social arrangements.
So Lucky is set in Atlanta, today; a woman with an enviable life managing a non-profit gets terrible news; the story is mostly about how Mara and everyone around her navigates the disruption that results. Carefully observed, strong willed characters make the novella/short novel fly by.
29: That sounds grand! Berlin is entirely too flat, I'd love to see Central Asian mountains. And I kinda like post-communist capitals -- I've lived in five of them.
I am slogging my way through KSR's Ministry For The Future, and there is much to admire; but it leaves me far more completely despairing about the future than I was when I started. So many of his solutions rely on people being nicer less short sighted, and less interested in power than the evidence suggests; then there is a central role played by a global currency on the blockchain, pegged to carbon sequestration. Of all possible forms of unobtanium, that seems to me the least likely to appear, or to work.
I really should like KSR, but everything I read by him leaves me with the impression that while his heart is in the right ñ, he's fundamentally not that bright. That's not exactly what I mean -- obviously, he can competently write prose and all that, and his books are about interesting things -- but there's always something like the blockchain currency where I'm tilting my head on one side thinking "you can't possibly think that makes sense."
I am also completely disgusted with him after reading one of his early utopias, Pacific Edge, which is about a bunch of fucking NIMBYs cynically misusing environmental review laws to block useful development. He does not see the problem with this.
How autocorrect turned "place" to "ñ" in that, I'll never know.
I really don't get "blockchain". It's like a bunch of programmers decided programing was what would have the world and blockchain is programming therefore blockchain will save the world.
Blockchain is the result of programming knowledge becoming so diffuse that some hopeless gold bugs could make something precisely to their deranged specifications and pretend it was innovation.
I'm guessing my NFT aren't going to payoff.
The people who get in early make all the profit, subsidized by the people who get in late. What's not to like?
HIs talk at the cathedral here (to 13 people; I counted) was interesting, though. He was on his way to COP26 in Glasgow, staying with mutual friends, and this was a sort of impromptu whistlestop. He discussed allthe novels that HG WElls wrote to promote world government between the wars, and how everyone ignored them until the world was more or less remade at Bretton Woods and with the UN after the catastrophe. So he thought that it was the duty of a science fiction writer to write large visions of how the world might bet better. He was also interesting on the nature of money, and the degree to which it is sustained by the general agreement that it is in fact worth something. But I can't remember how these tied together.
I have filed him with Amanda Palmer as someone who talks wonderfully but whose books are a real struggle. Hers more of a struggle, to me at least.
"Not that bright" is correct. In Red Mars our heroes are flying an electrically powered airship when strong winds push them off course. But! They have a bright idea! Their cargo includes several wind turbines, so they just dangle them out of the cabin, and they start generating more electricity, which they feed to the engines, allowing them to fly upwind and get back on course.
He wrote this, and his editor didn't see a problem with it.
The Brennan Torpedo, on the other hand, really worked, even though it really seems like it breaks the laws of physics in a fairly fundamental way.
If only they had realised that the solution was to form little circles of twenty to forty wind turbines in each other's zeppelins.
I think you have invented an entirely novel sexual perversion. I can't unsee it but I can't really visualise it either.
40.2: Amanda Palmer, the rock star? It seems like you must be talking about some one else
46:. Ada Palmer, of course. Sorry about that.
46-47 thanks for that. I was also hung up on the Eight Foot Woman performer, who is, after all, married to Neil Gaiman so it seemed plausible she also wrote scifi.
I am also completely disgusted with him after reading one of his early utopias, Pacific Edge, which is about a bunch of fucking NIMBYs cynically misusing environmental review laws to block useful development. He does not see the problem with this.
I'm not actually invested in defending KSR, whom I haven't read in a decade or two, but Pacific Edge was written in 1995. California had ten million fewer people then. Being a NIMBY could more realistically mean 'killing sprawl-y development (and keeping out Brown people)'; it has only meant 'shutting your children and all service workers out of housing' since the mid-2000s.
Are Gaiman and Palmer still married? Didn't she announce their divorce over Twitter right before taking a long airplane trip, thus informing Gaiman as well?
Huh. It appears they are. Pandemic reunion.
Being a NIMBY could more realistically mean 'killing sprawl-y development (and keeping out Brown people)'; it has only meant 'shutting your children and all service workers out of housing' since the mid-2000s.
I think it was exclusionary in practice much longer ago than that - far-sighted people were saying so from the 70's! - but I agree the data hadn't made it so painfully obvious by the 90's.
What an abominable thing to do if rushing mothers love their children too.
In the book it wasn't housing, it was a hospital? I think? The "heroes" are sentimentally attached to the proposed building site, and are combing over it looking for anything they can characterize as possibly an endangered species that they can use to block the project, despite being aware that there is nothing special about the site making it worthy of protection. That's trying to fraudulently coopt the power of the state for your own personal agenda, and it's an abuse of environmental review laws. That KSR presented it as admirable makes me think he's an idiot.
Didn't George Lucas try to get a studio in Napa and keep getting rejected because the prequels sucked?
They were conditioned to respond to all the threats in the rhetorical speeches of the Boba Fetts.
When you're tired you take a Napa, you don't move to Napa!
When you're tired you take a Napa, you don't move to Napa!
lucas wanted to expand his studio in marin, and threatened to build affordable housing if he didn't get his way. his studio is completely isolated from any retail, jobs, schools, libraries, etc., and not exactly well-served by transit. lucas had and has no history of having any interest in housing, let alone affordable housing, and did not propose to do a single thing in order to make his ludicrous threat into any kind of viable good-faith proposal to provide housing. just pure spiteful weaponization of the poor in an intra-rich people fight. lovely all around!
coppola tried for years, maybe still is trying, to vastly expand and further commercialize his property in napa and the inside details and politics of how that has not yet come to fruition at least licitly are mildly interesting but i'm not going to write them even presidentially on this obscure website bc only know many of them from a prior professional situation.