The "I am currently reading" thread

[mikeG 16]

'The Way You Look Tonight' by Richard Madeley.  Great story.

[feargal 21]

Absolute Proof by Peter James.  Very much in the style of The da Vinci Code, it romps merrily along getting sillier and sillier, building up to.... Nothing much.  Its another one of those books where the author seems to have no idea how to end it, and it just fizzles out. 

[feargal 21]

Recently got through Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo.  Booker prize winner, I think.  I didn't really enjoy it, it follows 12 characters and how they are girl/woman/other.  Their paths cross, but as none of the characters seemed to have any redeeming features, you don't feel any warmth towards them. 

 

I'm reading The Beekeeper of Aleppo now, it's very good. 

[metalman 21]

Recently read:

Raymond Chandler - Farewell my lovely. Philip Marlowe tracks down killer Moose Malloy, encountering a selection of other homicides along the way. Those offended by various terms in use in the 1940s for people of colour will probably want to avoid this one, because it's got most of them in.

P. G. Wodehouse - Uneasy money. Penniless Lord Dawlish inherits a million, but not without complications in this early Wodehouse. He never fails to amuse, and this one's no exception.

Roger Zelazny - To die in Italbar. Various people chase a man who is a walking pandemic across the galaxy for varying reasons. 70s SF that seems a bit dated now, but OK.

 

Now reading:  The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton. Murderous goings on in an East Anglian village. Burton was a pseudonym of John Rhode and the Burton books are even more difficult to get hold of than the Rhode ones, but this one and one other (Death in the Tunnel) were reprinted a couple of years ago. Good so far.

[taxman 12]

Finished The Mirror and the Light, the last part of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy.

 

I found it quite hard to finish because we all know what the ending is. The descent into the inevitable. I think it suffers in comparison to the first two books because, although we know the story of Henry and his queens, it was told from Cromwell's perspective, but now it's his time to die it felt somehow sad. Someone I'd been with for about 2000 pages, and suddenly gone.

[mikeG 16]

Sheffield Wednesday Miscellany by Jason Dickinson.  Owls Trivia, History, Facts and Stats.

Think I bought it in a shop near Winter Gardens or in Winter Gardens itself.

[wearysmith 140]

Hugo Wilcken's overview of Bowie's 'Low' album.

Quite insightful. Never my favourite Bowie release (that would be 'Aladdin Sane') but after this I'll dig the LP out for a reappraisal. 

 

Edited August 7, 2020 by wearysmith

[metalman 21]

Recently read:

 

Miles Burton - Death in the tunnel. Retired industrialist is shot in a locked compartment of a train going through the tunnel. An ingenious working out but as with so many detective stories of the time, you do wonder whether it would actually have worked in practice.

Miles Burton - Death in shallow water. Several deaths by drowning in a few inches of water in one village attract the interest of Scotland Yard. Unusually for Burton/Rhode, this one doesn't involve an ingenious murder method or an elaborate attempt to frame someone else for the crime.

P. G. Wodehouse - The small bachelor. A relatively early effort (1927) and you might say it's basically the same as all the others, but it never seems to matter because, well, it's Wodehouse, and he was incapable of writing anything  dull.

Jack Vance - Night lamp. Another SF novel set in the Gaean Reach, Vance's version of far-future colonised space. Typical independent social-convention-defying Vance hero Jaro Fath tries to find out the truth about his early childhood after his memory was wiped. Pretty good, especially when you consider that Vance was about 80 when he wrote it.

Seishi Yokomizo - The Honjin murders. Japanese locked room mystery. Ingeniously worked out, though again you wonder if it would be worth all that effort. 

Ron Goulart - Cowboy heaven. Despite its title, this is a humorous SF novel. Goulart's usual themes are robots and other technology going wrong, and so it is here. Probably this is as out of fashion as possible at present, but I quite enjoyed it.

 

Now reading: John Rhode - The two graphs. 50 pages in and one of two brothers (who happen to look remarkably similar) has been "accidentally" drowned in a Norfolk Broad. I'm guessing that the identity of the victim will play a part, but the relevance of the two graphs has not appeared yet...

Edited August 28, 2020 by metalman

[feargal 21]

I've read a couple of enjoyable shorter books this week - taking just enough (but not too much) brain power in these weird times.  I seem to be struggling to get into a heavy book at the mo.  This seems to be fairly common among friends and family too.

 

Ann Cleeves - Dead Water (a novel from her Shetland series); The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (psychoterapist tries to get a woman who murdered her husband to speak); and Paper Girls by Alex Smith (big city detective relocates to Norfolk and gets embroiled in a missing girls case). 

 

All good reads, rolling merrily along  in an entertaining fashion.  The Ann Cleeves one was by far the best, she writes her characters really well, just enough detail to be interesting, but no so much that you can't fill in your own details.    

 

Happily, my mum has just dropped me a large carrier bag of books off, so I have plenty to be going on with!

[RiffRaff 10]

One of the Roland VS1680 user manuals, from 1998.

I say "one of", as there are three to plough through.

 

It's going to take some time....

[metalman 21]

Here's my latest round-up of the things I've recently read:

 

John Meaney - To hold infinity. Well it was OK, a competent enough hard SF novel but I never felt I really cared much about any of the characters.

Robert B. Parker - Death in Paradise. This is one of his series involving police chief Jesse Stone as opposed to most of his output about private eye Spenser, but it's still set near Boston and written in much the same way. Good as usual.

James Lovegrove - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. A Holmes/Lovecraft mash-up that was good fun.

Agatha Christie - The mysterious affair at Styles. A classic, the first Poirot novel.

Charles Powell - The poets in the nursery. A little book of parodies: nursery rhymes cleverly rewritten in the style of poets of the day (which was 1920). My copy belonged then to noted Bristol lawyer R. N. Green-Armytage and according to the inscription in the front was lent to his close friend Walter de la Mare in 1933.

John Rhode - Blackthorn House. Stolen cars and a body turning up in a trunk. Another enjoyable Dr. Priestley mystery, though he doesn't feature all that much in this one.

P. G. Wodehouse - Uncle dynamite. One of the best Wodehouses I've read for a while.

 

 

[metalman 21]

This month's round-up (can't believe nobody else has read anything all the way through October):

 

P. G. Wodehouse - The world of Jeeves. A700+ page doorstop of Jeeves & Wooster stories. They say you can have too much of a good thing but not in this case.

Belinda Bauer - Dark Side. I like her stuff, even though it's modern.

Sarah Pinborough - Behind her eyes. The most shocking ending you'll read all year, says the front. Well it was certainly the daftest.

Agatha Christie - Partners in Crime. Crime-fighting couple Tommy & Tuppence Beresford solve their cases by taking inspiration from other great detectives of the time. Not quite parody, but cleverly done and very good.

E. C. R. Lorac - Case in the clinic. Inspector Macdonald investigates pensioners being seemingly bumped off by a homicidal nurse. OK.

James Lovegrove - Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities. The second of his Holmes/Lovecraft fusions. Quite enjoyable again.

 

Now it's probably going to incorporate this post into the last one so that no-one will know I've posted it anyway - so annoying... Edit: oh, no it hasn't.

Edited October 31, 2020 by metalman