The "I am currently reading" thread

[metalman 21]

A slightly more diverse selection for me last month.

 

Mary Craig - Were he a stranger. When Sydney's husband is killed in a hit and run, she uncovers his double life. Once you got over the idea that a woman can be called Sydney, it wasn't bad.

Fougasse & McCullough - You have been warned. Humorous book about motoring in the 1930s by cartoonist Fougasse and writer McCullough (later the first chairman of the Brains Trust radio programme). Dated but amusing.

Freeman Wills Crofts - Death on the way. Inspector French teases out a web of fraud and corruption when a railwayman is killed by a train. Excellent.

Max Murray - Royal bed for a corpse. Light-hearted detective/spy story by Australian author in which a man is killed in a bed in a stately home. Not bad.

Brian W. Aldiss - Non-stop. The classic novel of conceptual breakthrough on a generation starship. This one's now in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series and it's certainly a justified label in this case. Excellent.

Peter Robinson - A necessary end. Third in the Inspector Banks series, in which he has to deal with the murder of a policeman at a demo and the London cop sent to solve it. Excellent.

Peter Robinson - The hanging valley. Fourth in the series and still improving. Expat home from Canada killed in picturesque Dales spot is linked with the murder of a private eye a few years earlier.

Richard Littler - Discover Scarfolk. The first surreally funny Scarfolk book. Bizarrely I bought it from a shop who had put it in the Places of Interest section.

Sheila Stewart - Country Courtship. More rural reminiscences from Warwickshire villages in the early 1900s. Excellent.

Jenny Randles - Supernatural Pennines. Paranormal goings-on in the hills. Stocksbridge is singled out as a hotspot  for such things. The organisation of the book meant a bit too much repetition, but it was still interesting.

Elly Griffiths - The stone circle. Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is on the job when a girl's body is found in a stone circle (no shock there really). Includes a completely pointless excursion by the main characters to Stanton Drew stone circle in the West Country, but was otherwise not bad, though the need to shoehorn in the ever-increasing cast of recurring characters stretches credulity somewhat.

 

Looking at my posts every month, I've managed to read 124 books altogether over the year, so pretty much exactly one every three days, which isn't bad going.

[mikeG 16]

A Comic's Journey by John Martin.  Saw him on-stage recently.  Great show.  Also very interesting to talk to.

[Zinger549 234]

Just finished Little Me my life from A - Z by Matt Lucas. Now reading So Anyway by John Cleese

[feargal 21]

On 19/11/2023 at 10:19, Bargepole23 said:

Read all three, great trilogy, great choice 👍 

Just finished the last in this trilogy, Kill The King...  So good!  I was dragging out the last 20 pages as I didn't want it to end 😄

[metalman 21]

A slow start for the new year, only 8 read this month though the first one is quite long.

 

Hugh Howey - Wool. There are lots of stories where humanity survives in underground bunkers in a post-apocalyptic world, and this is another one. And it's a pretty good example of the genre, though to be honest  I was a bit unsure whether it was meant to be a YA novel. 

George Bellairs - Death in High Provence. Inspector Littlejohn travels to a French village after an Englishman and his wife are killed in a car accident and uncovers plenty of skeletons in the armoire. Very good as usual.

Peter Robinson - Past reason hated. Inspector Banks investigates the chequered past of a murdered lesbian. The fifth in this series, and still getting better.

Elly Griffiths - The lantern men. A convicted killer reveals the location of more bodies, and forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway unearths the evidence. All the usual strengths and all the usual faults, but a decent read.

John Dickson Carr - Castle Skull. This early Carr, one of five to feature detective Henri Bencolin,  has been reprinted by the British Library. Set in a castle on the Rhine, there's no locked room in this one, but it was still an entertaining read if rather luridly overwritten. If you've never tried anything by Carr (or his alias Carter Dickson), there are probably better places to start.

Greg Egan - Axiomatic. When these stories were written in the early 90s, Egan was a rising star of hard ideas-based SF. I'm not sure he's really fulfilled his potential since, but this is a really good collection.

Charles Kingston - The Rigdale puzzle. Another totally obscure 1930s detective story. Smooth-talking chap gets engaged to local squiress and is then promptly shot dead. OK, but the ending was a bit disappointing.

Ross Macdonald - The way some people die. Private eye Lew Archer is hired by a woman to find her daughter, but soon finds himself up to his neck in mobsters, narcotics, and murder. Excellent.

[Zinger549 234]

Just finished My Life in Red and White by Arsene Wenger. Really interesting book if your into football.  Now reading Surrender 40 Songs One Story  by Bono

[Guest]

I have a couple on the go: Becoming The Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar, a follow up to Chasing The Boogeyman, the meta 'true crime' novel I read a year or so ago; and I'm just about to start The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown.  This one sounds right up my street:

 

Quote

 

New York bookseller Cassie Andrews is not sure what she’s doing with her life. She lives quietly, sharing an apartment with her best friend, Izzy. Then a favourite customer gives her an old book. Full of strange writing and mysterious drawings, at the very front there is a handwritten message:

 

This is the Book of Doors. Hold it in your hand, and any door is every door.  Cassie is about to discover that the Book of Doors is a special book – a magic book. A book that bestows extraordinary abilities on whoever possesses it.  And she is about to learn that there are other magic books out there that can also do wondrous – or dreadful and terrifying – things.

 

Because where there is magic there is power and there are those who will stop at nothing to possess it.

 

Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is Drummond Fox who has a secret library of magical books hidden in the shadows for safekeeping, a man fleeing his own demons. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all . . .

 

Because this book is worth killing for.

 

But as this thread will attest, I've been disappointed before.

[feargal 21]

I spent all my Christmas money and vouchers on a big pike of books... haven't picked a single one up yet 🙄  I've really lost my reading mojo this month.

[metalman 21]

February's crop of crime, mainly.

 

Robert Thorogood - Death comes to Marlow. Pensioner Judith Potts and her colleagues in the Marlow Murder Club are back, investigating when the Mayor is crushed under a heavy shelf in his study during a garden party. Richard Osman fans will love it, and I thought it was better structured than the first. An enjoyable cosy read.

Harry Stephen Keeler - The murdered mathematician. In order to inherit his father's estate, 7ft 6in giant Quiribus Brown has to solve a mathematically-related murder before the end of the month. And what do you know, such a murder has just happened... As bonkers as ever, but this is another later Keeler so it's not so good as the earlier ones. OK though. Would have been better if he'd got the maths right for a start.

Elly Griffiths - The night hawks. A group of nocturnal metal detectorists find a body on a Norfolk beach. Dr Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson tie it in with another murder on a farm.

Elly Griffiths - The locked room. During the first Covid lockdown, DCI Nelson investigates a series of apparent suicides.

Elly Griffiths - The last remains. Body discovered walled up in a Kings Lynn cafe. This is the 15th and for now last book in the series so I thought I'd finish off the last three together. They all display the same strengths of incidental detail, humour, and relationships, but also in differing extents the same weaknesses (plotting, daft motives, Ruth usually ending up trapped by the murderer at the end). Overall though a series well worth reading, even though occasionally it seems to veer alarmingly towards chick lit rather than crime.

Freeman Wills Crofts - The end of Andrew Harrison. Now this is more of a proper classical detective story, with clues and actual detection. Harrison, a financier who gives everyone around him plenty of reason to hate him, is murdered on his houseboat at Henley. Inspector French investigates in his usual methodical and meticulous way. Absolutely brilliant.

Rebecca Rego Barry - Rare books uncovered. This month's odd one out. Examples of how bibliophiles who know what they're looking for (or at) have managed to find copies of rare books at yard sales, charity shops, in skips and so on. Inspiring and depressing in equal measure.

Bruno Fischer - Croaked the raven. Grocer Sam Tree has problems: his secretive wife, her two ex-husbands (one a crook, the other a gambler), and a man with a gun who wants twenty thousand dollars. A good pulpy hardboiled thriller.

C.H.B. Kitchin - Crime at Christmas. Malcolm Warren is spending Christmas with friends but on Christmas morning he finds the body of a fellow guest impaled on his balcony railings. Nicely written witty detective story.

 

[wearysmith 143]

Took me over two months to finish this. I just couldn't get into it. I have dozens of King books and generally come away satisfied. With this one, no.

Two thirds of the way in I still didn't care less who got eaten and whether the villains were caught or not.

 

Only thing that did get my attention was the "A millionaire walks into a bar...." coda running through the book. I might have packed it in as a bad job halfway through if it hadn't have been for that story tangent. 

 

[metalman 21]

Another month, another selection of mainly crime and science fiction...

 

David Mitchell - Black Swan Green. A year in the life of Jason Taylor, 13, growing up in a Worcestershire village at the time of the Falklands War. This was Mitchell's semi-autobiographical novel, as he did grow up in such a village (in a neat touch, the names of some real Worcestershire villages are used as the surnames of some of the characters). Excellent.

Peter Robinson - Wednesday's child. The sixth in the Inspector Banks series. A child is abducted by fake social workers, and a man is knifed to death at a mine; the seemingly separate cases turn out to be linked. Another really good one.

Ross Macdonald - The ivory grin. Hired to find a missing nurse, Lew Archer soon finds himself caught up in murder and the search for a kidnapped socialite. As good as the rest of the series.

Leo Bruce - Case with ropes and rings. Sergeant Beef, who got the better of some thinly-disguised more famous detectives in 'Case for Three detectives', and his snobbish chronicler Lionel Townsend, investigate when a boy is found hanged in the gym at a public school. Beef's methods involve drinking lots of beer and playing darts, but he gets there in the end. 

Leo Bruce - Cold Blood. Sergeant Beef is on the case again when a millionaire is bashed over the head with a croquet mallet. I really like this series; it's high time someone reprinted them. 

Poul Anderson - Tau zero. A starship develops a fault which means it has to keep accelerating. I remember reading this in the early 70s and being suitably mind-boggled by it, and I thought it was still pretty good now.

Edith-Jane Bahr - Help please. Stopped at a traffic light in a snowstorm, a woman sees a girl in the neighbouring car mouthing these words. When the girl is found murdered, she realises she could be in danger too. Good.

John Buxton Hilton - Dead-Nettle. Inspector Brunt investigates a woman's murder in a Derbyshire lead-mining village in 1905. Lots of local and period detail, but a decent mystery too.

'BB' - A child alone. Denys Watkins-Pitchford's autobiographical account of his early years growing up in a rectory in Northamptonshire. A naturalist of the old school (hunting, shooting, fishing, birds-egg collecting), he wrote all his books under that pseudonym, but illustrated them under his own name (leading one reviewer to say it was as though the artist could see into the author's head). 

Cordwainer Smith - Quest of the three worlds. For about ten years spanning the 1950s and 60s, Smith was one of the most original SF writers around. This short novel is actually a fix-up of four shorter works, and while not his best, it's still got the same magic. Sadly he died at the early age of 53 in 1966, thus depriving the field of a major talent.

Stephen Booth - Dead and buried. Finally got back to the Cooper and Fry series after a few months gap. Wildfire arson and murder at an isolated pub in the Peak District. Excellent.

[ukdobby 225]

Mandy,probably funniest thing on tv at the moment though not much to beat.