Dancing Around the Four Sides

Books read in 2012
Books read in 2013
Books read in 2014
Books read in 2015
Books read in 2016
Books read in 2017
Books read in 2018


2019

An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories, Andy Duncan
Auntie's War: The BBC during the Second World War, Edward Stourton
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino
Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, Edward L. Ayers
The Terror, Dan Simmons
The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, Finn Murphy
Tabloid Dreams: Stories, Robert Olen Butler
Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849, Kenneth L. Holmes
Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, Rob Dunn
The Hanging Tree, Ben Aaronovitch
The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1929-1961, Jeff Kisseloff
The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly
Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age, Geoffrey C. Ward
Where Shall We Run To?: A Memoir, Alan Garner
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins
The Day That Went Missing: A Family Tragedy, Richard Beard
Milkman, Anna Burns
The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Furthest Station, Ben Aaronovitch
The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod, Henry Beston
Cherokee America, Margaret Verble
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert Caro
Shrill, Lindy West
Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, Nathan Ballingrud
Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan
The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi
Quantum Night, Robert J. Sawyer
Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, Antony Beevor
Lies Sleeping, Ben Aaronovitch
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal
Runaway: Stories, Alice Munro
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, Casey Cep
Dear Life: Stories, Alice Munro
The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops, James Robert Parish
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov, translated by Tom Stoppard
Wanderers, Chuck Wendig
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Daniel Mendelsohn

And the first day of April is warm and humid, although there's a cold front moving through that should cool things off later.

I finished The Lazarus Project last night (it's not a very long book), and I liked it a lot. Something I do when I finish a book is go to Goodreads to see what other people thought -- in this case it was not a lot of help because (a) it's not a new book, and (b), it's kind of an ... arty? ... book, I guess? So not a lot of readership to go by. All of which means the Goodreads reviews were mostly a bust, with three or four people saying they didn't like it as much as his previous books, which really was not a help to someone reading this book first. Also there was at least one person who seemed to hate dislike the author because he'd received a MacArthur Fellowship.

ANYWAY. As I said, I liked it. It's not a nice book -- people (including the narrator) behave badly, and there's an incident of animal cruelty in the story that made me sad, but it's thoughtful and interesting, with a lot of layers to unpack. In its theme of "going to Eastern/Central Europe looking for ancestors," it reminded me a lot of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (but without Foer's broader humor). I did think there were a couple of places in the book where the action was confusing, and also a couple of places where I felt like I was missing something, but I still considered it a page-turner and looked forward to reading each night. Two thumbs up, qualified recommendation.

Books read in 2012
Books read in 2013
Books read in 2014
Books read in 2015
Books read in 2016
Books read in 2017


2018

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff
Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, Marie Brenner
The Body in the Clouds, Ashley Hay
The Nix, Nathan Hill
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone, Richard Lloyd Parry
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann
The Girls, Emma Cline
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Close Encounters of the Furred Kind, Tom Cox
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Colin Dickey
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett
Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum, Gavin Francis
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caroline Fraser
Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, Laura Spinney
The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
The Overstory, Richard Powers
What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home, Mark Mazower
The Hummingbird's Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea
Eternal Life, Dara Horn
The Child in Time, Ian McEwan
The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats, Daniel Stone
Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
Queen of America, Luis Alberto Urrea
Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett
The Spirit Photographer, Jon Michael Varese
The Missing of the Somme, Geoff Dyer
The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
Sea of Rust, C. Robert Cargill
Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama
The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, Peter Brannen
Less, Andrew Sean Greer
Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes
Nine Island, Jane Alison
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Broken Homes, Ben Aaronovitch
The Afterlives, Thomas Pierce
The Wanderers, Meg Howrey
Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, Andrew Sean Greer
Grant, Ron Chernow
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky: Stories, Lesley Nneka Arimah
City of Miracles, Robert Jackson Bennett
Not My Father's Son: A Memoir, Alan Cumming
Jackalope Wives and Other Stories, T. Kingfisher
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, Martha Batalha
Flora, Gail Godwin
War Horse, Michael Morpurgo
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, Kay Redfield Jamison
The Elementals, Michael McDowell
Transcription, Kate Atkinson
Red Dirt, E.M. Reapy
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Melmoth, Sarah Perry
Foxglove Summer, Ben Aaronovitch
The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner
Elisabeth's Lists: A Family Story, Lulah Ellender
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
Dubliners, James Joyce
Becoming, Michelle Obama
America Is Not the Heart, Elaine Castillo
The Bus on Thursday, Shirley Barrett
Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka, John Gimlette
The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin
Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite: My Story, by Roger Daltrey
Seventeen, Hideo Yokoyama
The House on Vesper Sands, Paraic O'Donnell
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik

Watched Kong: Skull Island last night, and for a big CGI monster movie, it was not bad. There was at least one cringe-inducing scene (Brie Larson taking pictures of the natives like it's for a Coke commercial), but overall it was worth a watch. I thought Tom Hiddleston had surprisingly little to do other than stand around and flex his muscles (but they're very nice muscles), and John C. Reilly ended up basically stealing the show. Anyway, then we watched the Bruno Mars 'live at the Apollo' special and it was great, because Bruno Mars is always fun. :D

The Guardian has an interesting column today on what they're calling the best SF/fantasy of 2017. I ended up ordering one of the books (Djinn City), plus a different book by one of the authors mentioned (the book I got was Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space). I also put a few of the other books on my To Be Considered List. I'm still reading Sam Wasson's biography of Bob Fosse, which is, by turns, sad, funny, and enraging. Jesus god, but Fosse was a hot mess.

Still not very cold here, and very, very dry.

1) I finished Stephen King's It a couple of days ago. I had two main complaints about it -- one, that it is too long and thus lends itself to repetition, and two, I hated one of the protagonist kids. Just could not stand him. I think my favorite parts of the book were what I called the interludes, where some of the individual kids were being kids, like Ben's after-school piece with his teacher, Mrs. Douglas, where they're counting/cataloging books. That was so well done by King, so evocative and so melancholy. So, way too long and one very unlikeable kid for me. By the end of the book my eyes were pretty much glazing over. And yeah, the "bonding scene" near the end didn't resonate with me at all. Oh, and I skipped part of the "Patrick Hockstetter" chapter because that was the one thing I DID remember from my first reading years ago, and I didn't want to relive that little shit's episode of animal cruelty (what I didn't remember was the OTHER episode of animal cruelty in the book by a different character, ugh). So, one thumb up? One and a half thumbs, with appropriate warnings?

2) Currently reading Warren Zanes' biography of Tom Petty, which is way better than I thought it would be.

3) Watched a Bollywood movie called Bajirao Mastani and liked it a lot. Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone, both of whom are absolutely gorgeous! An interfaith love story! Stirring battles! Men in armor! Elephants! A tiger! Smoldering glances! Ranveer Singh's body! Oh my god, Ranveer Singh's body. Oh, and I also really liked Tanvi Azmi as the mother. I thought she was terrific.

4) Will probably read Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach next. I loved her earlier novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

5) Renewed our membership in the ACLU yesterday.

Five things; post.

PLEASE NOTE: SPOILERS FOR IT IN COMMENTS. SPOILERS IN COMMENTS.

Oh my god I am still so tired. I am getting better, but this is going to take a while. Anyway, I read some books ...

1) Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977 - 2002, by David Sedaris. I loved this, but then I am a David Sedaris fan. There are times I can take or leave his essays and I know he can be an acquired taste, as it were, but if you like him then you should like this. What a cast of (real) characters! What an ear for dialogue! This is funny and sad and weird, and I hope his next volume of diaries comes out soon.

2) News of the World, by Paulette Jiles. I enjoyed this a whole lot more than I thought I would. It's 1870, and grizzled old Captain Kidd has been hired to take ten-year-old former Kiowa Indian captive Johanna from the Oklahoma border to her aunt and uncle outside San Antonio, Texas. Along the way there are bandits, unfriendly townspeople, and a near-constant threat of continued Indian raids. I thought Johanna's voice was a mite too precious at times, but this is a terrific story. If you liked True Grit and/or Lonesome Dove, you'll probably like this. Two thumbs up.

3) Alligator Candy: A Memoir, by David Kushner. This is a true crime story, and it's a heartbreaker. The author's older brother was abducted and murdered in 1973. The author was four years old, his brother was eleven, and this book is Kushner's attempt to come to terms with it all. It's a tough read at times, but I recommend it.

And now I'm reading an anthology -- Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. So far I've read the first five stories, and I've liked Neil Gaiman's "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" and Sam Weller's "The Girl in the Funeral Parlor" best, although the others were pretty good too.

Otherwise ... it is still warm here, but you can tell the weather has changed. Layla is also much happier. And I'm terribly behind on comments. Sigh.

1) I finished Paul Tremblay's Disappearance at Devil's Rock last night, and ... well, I'm glad I didn't buy it in hardback when it came out. It was not anywhere near as good as his previous A Head Full of Ghosts. I think Devil's Rock would actually make an excellent scary movie, but as a novel ... it just left me really cold. There were (to me) some strange writing choices, among them writing some dialogue as if it were from a script (so you get dialogue like Luis: No), which I think was supposed to convey immediacy but came off to me as simply lazy. And ( cut for spoiler ...  )

Anyway, the book just didn't work for me. No thumbs up. If you're in the mood for something REALLY scary, read Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts.

2) Spent a little time last night opening an Imgur account (because of this). I haven't seen any of my Photobucket-hosted pics vanish (yet), but there are at least two fic-related images I need to not go away, so I replaced the Photobucket links inside the fics with Imgur links. Then I discovered that the links on my Dreamwidth Annals page all pointed back to Livejournal, so I worked on fixing that.

3) Fireworks last night. Layla did not like.

Otherwise known as jury duty, which I was summoned to this week.

( Cut for a lot of blather about what it was like ...  )

OTHERWISE. It is hot and humid. In recent weeks, I have read:

The Sunlight Pilgrims, by Jenni Fagan. Apocafic, ahoy! Really liked it, two thumbs up.
Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, by Penelope Lively. Memoir of the English novelist's Egyptian childhood. Very interesting, would recommend.
The Astaires: Fred & Adele, by Kathleen Riley. Short dual biography of Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. Maybe a bit too heavy on the details of the behind-the-scenes construction of a Broadway musical, but still good.

Not sure what is up next -- maybe Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, maybe Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean, maybe something else. :-)

1) Ugh, a very blah day today. Mostly sunny and humid, but looking forward to tomorrow because our local Calloway's will have marigolds for 99 cents. Our two big flowerpots out front are empty and some bright, happy marigolds will look nice up there.

2) Still reading the Walter Winchell bio, and was amused to learn that his first job as a "real" newspaper columnist (as opposed to working for an industry organ) was for a publication (the New York Graphic) widely regarded as the worst newspaper in America, if not the world. In covering one crime story involving a killer named Carillo, the editors found that they didn't have a photo of the man, so they used a picture of the actor Leo Carrillo (note spelling) instead. :D

3) Layla may be two and a half years old, but she proved last night she still has some puppy in her when she stole one of Mister Nightdog's running shoes and neatly bisected one of the laces.

4) Still watching Doctor Who and Class, but right now I think I am getting the most enjoyment out of American Gods. Crispin Glover as Mr. World in the last episode was just a walking Ball of Sheer Crazy and was absolutely terrifying. That smile omg.

5) Working on a fic but it is going very slowly.

So I read Kij Johnson's The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and really liked it. It's basically sort of a fanfic remix of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, with the protagonist changed to a middle-aged lady professor of mathematics. Reader, I loved her. Vellitt Boe was smart and sensible, and I could've easily read another hundred pages of her adventures (my paperback copy was only 165 pages, so it's a very short book). I know she could easily have slipped into Mary Sue-dom, but she really didn't ping my Sue-dar at all. Okay, I did think the Quest went on a little too long, but that was my only complaint. Two thumbs up, 9/10.

Also I have been watching Class on BBC America and enjoying it, especially Katherine Kelly as Miss Quill. I also watched the first episode of American Gods and thought it was pretty good (I read Gaiman's book years and years ago but don't recall a great deal about it). I am amused to see that Ricky Whittle (playing Shadow Moon, the main character) is a Brit -- I thought he was an American. :D

Weather has turned cool and windy again. This is an up and down spring.