What are you reading the week of June 22, 2024?

I've got four major projects going on at work at the moment. I didn't have time to read this week. I'm gonna try to take some me time this weekend.

I've just gotten more or less to the halfway point of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust. I took a break from it to read Erasure by Percival Everett for a book club meeting. I finished the Everett novel, which I thought was just OK. In a very rare development for me, I thought the movie, American Fiction, was better. Anyway, now it's back to the Proust, which is slow going but which I find myself quite often enjoying.

Still plowing through The Forgotten Battle of the Kursk Salient ("glossed over" might be a better description) and will probably wind up Battle in the Baltic in the course of the day. Tidal Creatures is the next book in line.

Having finished all of the above, I knocked off The Light Years and am starting The Wizard and the Prophet.

I just started Cress by Marissa Meyer. I'm excited to continue the series.

>2 rocketjk: I think many movies are better than the books on which they are based. Of course a great work of literature has many features which cannot be readily transmitted into film and a movie version generally fails to do it justice. But many second-rate books make first-rate films.

>3 Shrike58: Battle in the Baltic looks extremely interesting to me. That's a slice of history I know absolutely nothing about. To be more precise, this is the first I'm learning of it at all.

>5 booksaplenty1949: Interesting. My experience has been the opposite, but I could have my mind changed. What are some of the second-rate books that have made better movies that you're thinking of?

>6 rocketjk: Strangers on a Train comes immediately to mind as I have just read a book on the making of the movie. Also, coincidentally, just read the very feeble short story (It Had to be Murder) by Cornell Woolrich on which Hitchcock based Rear Window. Will think more.

Red Alert. Source of Dr Strangelove.

Jaws the book would be long forgotten without Jaws the film. We could multiply examples of books with catchy plots but weak characterisation and banal dialogue which a gifted director/cast punched up into a memorable movie.

The Underground Railroad– Colson Whitehead
Book on CD performed by Bahni Turpin
4****

Cora is a slave on a Georgia plantation in the early to mid 1800s. Her mother disappeared some time back and now she casts her lot with Caesar to run away. Caesar knows where there is a “station master” for the Underground Railroad, if they can only get there.

Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel is an extraordinary work of fiction. Unlike many novels set in the antebellum south, Whitehead’s imagination gives us a real railroad, traveling underground, through various states. As abolitionists and slave holders battle for supremacy, stations are closed or opened, sections of track are expanded or abandoned. Some tunnels have been purposely caved in and abandoned. Some are so unfinished as to simply dead end.

Cora is a marvelous character - strong, resilient, smart, observant. She is always on guard but is sometimes lulled by the occasional feeling of safety, when she misses signs of approaching disaster. There are times when she is out of the frying pan and into the fire. But her desire for freedom never wanes; she will get there or die trying.

Bahni Turpin is a marvelous narrator and I loved the way she performed this work.

This week I finished the audiobook To Kill and Kill Again by John Coston. It was excellent and amongst the best true crime books I've ever read. It's about a killer I've never heard of before, Wayne Nance, and the damage to the town of Missoula, where he committed most of his crimes. I'm now listening to Sociopath by Patric Gagne - who is female, despite the male name, and who is a sociopath turned therapist and author. I'm riveted.

I read Fahrenheit 451 this week!! The exclamation marks are because this time I finished it and awarded it all five stars. I think Bradbury takes some getting used to. I read two of his other books before trying this one again, and am so glad I did. I am reading nothing at the moment - I've tried four books and none of them stuck. I think he may be one of my favourite novelists, which is a huge surprise.

Just browsing through Where There Is No Doctor this week as a reference for future writing- it's pretty interesting!

Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
3/5 stars
This is a much darker fictional version of what we went through with Covid. Fortunately, we recovered. I enjoyed this book. Science Fiction

A Deceptive Composition by Anna Lee Huber
New and #12 in the "Lady Darby Mystery" series
In October 1832, the Gages are investigating a murder of an extended family member in Cornwall.

I’m reading Percival Everett’s James. It’s very good!

Leave the World Behind – Rumaan Alam
Digital audiobook read by Marin Ireland
4****

From the book jacket: Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door the spell is broken. Ruth and G.H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden blackout has swept New York, and they’ve come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no cell phone service, the facts are unknowable.

My reactions
This grabbed me from page one and held on through the wonderfully ambiguous ending. Alam writes these characters so well. And gives the reader the same “unbalanced” sense that the characters feel – not knowing what is happening nor whom to trust.

It’s hard to say this is post-apocalyptic, though it’s certainly headed in that direction. The reader, like the characters, knows little of what has actually happened. Alam gives a few clues that this is bigger than originally thought – loud boom, large migration of animals, unexpected physical symptoms.

The couples take a few precautions that one might expect, but other things aren’t done (no effort to ration food, for example). Yet we can’t know anything for certain. We have only Ruth & GH’s statement that there was a blackout, but no way to corroborate this information. But why would they lie? They seem like reasonable, intelligent people. They don’t seem threatening. When a significant event occurs, they do all work together to form a plan of action. But how long can this cooperation continue?

I’m left feeling unsettled and confused and curious and excited and desperate to know what is next.

Marin Ireland does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. She sets a good pace and sufficiently differentiates the characters so that the listener can tell who is speaking.

>6 rocketjk: One nice thing about Dunn's work is that he is good at sorting out the very involved context in which the RN's intervention took place.

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman. The 4th in the series The Thursday Murder Club. Cute series about aging sleuths with a bent toward solving murders.

Unfortunately Yours – Tessa Bailey
1*

A rom-com set in the Napa Valley. Natalie Vos has returned to her family vineyard after a failed financial gamble in New York City, and a broken engagement. August Cates is also in Napa, having promised his late friend (and fellow Navy SEAL) that he’d fulfill his dream of opening a vineyard. They hate each other but agree to a sham marriage so that she can get her trust fund (to return to NYC), and he can get a business loan to continue his efforts in Napa.

So, there’s a kernel of a cute idea here. But these two are so NOT interesting. Natalie is a whiny, spoiled brat who mistakes lust for love. August is clearly suffering some PTSD, and also prone to “thinking with his dick.” The fact that his actions make this obvious isn’t enough for Bailey, though. She has to tell us this at least twenty times.

Of course, they have hot sex and achieve multiple orgasms. But these scenarios are so ridiculously unbelievable that I found them tedious to read. With two exceptions … Loved these descriptions:
”August’s climax was like reaching land after parachuting at night into the ocean.”

And perhaps the best (or at least most entertaining) metaphor I’ve ever encountered:
”She rode on a rainbow unicorn over the Milky Way and waved at an astronaut.”

The book gets 1 star for those two descriptions.

The new thread is up over here.