The "I am currently reading" thread

The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook. As per the title, the sorry tale of the financial disaster that was The Hacienda. This is ok but not great, 5/10. There are reasons why Peter Hook is better known for his music than his writing.

I rather enjoyed Mystery on Southampton Water by Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts gets a lot of stick these days and is often lumped in with the so-called 'humdrum' Golden Age detective story writers such as John Rhode. I've always considered him much better than that, and I've read pretty much all of his books and enjoyed them all. Maybe you just need the right sort of meticulous mind.

Now I've started The Man Whose Dreams Came True by Julian Symons (coincidentally the man who coined that humdrum term in his critical study Bloody Murder, which is also well worth reading).

East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I'm quite enjoying this but it's a bit plodding at times and over long in my opinion. Goes on a bit. This is my first go at Steinbeck, I've avoided him up until now because I expected him to be a bit dull and worthy and I think I was half right about that. 6.5/10

Just finished Finders Keepers by Belinda Bauer. Like her other ones I thought this was OK, but could probably have done with being a couple of hundred pages shorter - it's also one of those books that comes in at 500 pages because of a large print size, lots of small chapters with white space at the end of every one, and a fair bit of padding. Don't these people care about trees? Georges Simenon would have done the whole thing in about 150 pages.

Now I've started Anna by David Reed, which is a man's (non-fictional) account of his wife's descent into madness and eventual suicide. Bleak will probably sum it up.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dalquist.

A rip roaring erotic, steampunk, Victoriana adventure with much daring do, mysterious conspiracies, murder, mayhem, mucky books and glass Golems.

It's completely daft but I've been hooked since starting it.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dalquist.

 

A rip roaring erotic, steampunk, Victoriana adventure with much daring do, mysterious conspiracies, murder, mayhem, mucky books and glass Golems.

 

It's completely daft but I've been hooked since starting it.

I've got a copy of this somewhere (and its two follow-ups) but haven't got round to reading it yet. According to Wikipedia it was quite well thought of but still lost its publisher nearly a million dollars!

This week's offerings have been Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid (enjoyable, but nothing outstanding), and The Lake House by Kate Morton. I really enjoyed this until near the end. Chugs away nicely, then there's a clunky and predictable resolution, which is so obvious that I thought that only a fool would shoehorn it in. I hate when authors do that!

Also been dipping into a biography of Vivian Stanshall "Ginger Geezer", which is about my fourth re-reading of it.

Anna by David Reed turned out to be as depressing and harrowing as expected. Although the events in question only took place in 1973, which for some of us still seems fairly recent, mentally ill people were still being locked up in mental hospitals and treated with electric shock therapy; 'Reed' didn't want his wife to undergo this (and to be fair neither did she) so he consulted a psychiatrist who was one of the clique surrounding R.D. Laing, at about the time they were running their commune where schizophrenics and doctors lived together on equal terms. It didn't really work in this case as eventually she tried to commit suicide by pouring petrol over herself and setting it alight, then spent a month dying of 75% burns as a result. In hindsight the 60s and 70s were a weird time in all sorts of ways and since then Laing's ideas have been largely discredited but I suppose it must have seemed the right thing to do at the time.

Two minutes on Google shows that the real identity of 'David Reed' (and of the psychiatrist) are now known; in the book however 'Reed' himself comes across as a pretty unlikeable, pretentious character that I didn't really warm to, even if he went through something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. A rip snorter of a police/forensics procedural chase of a serial killer.

The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. A rip snorter of a police/forensics procedural chase of a serial killer.

I used like Deavers books around that time but couldn't get into the later ones, The Coffin Dancer is also very good.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest - Steigg Larsson - About halfway through the 3rd book in the Millenium trilogy - better than the last one.

Restless by William Boyd. I've got off to a slow start with this, I've read 3 or 4 others by Boyd and got into them very quickly but this one, not so much. Early days so reserving judgement.

This week I 'are mostly been reading... The wrong side of goodbye by Michael Connelly. Pretty good, nothing out of the ordinary. I seem to be lacking in oomph with book choice at the moment. I think I need to trawl back in this thread for ideas