Finished:

Up to book 5 of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, Double or Quits.



Earl Stanley Gardner having fun violating the genre conventions. Not only is Donald Lam having casual sex in 1941, but in book #4 the girl runs off with another guy to resume her life of crime. The detective is supposed to get the girl at the end.

Finished: Fat, Drunk and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House (Matty Simmons). A quick read, nothing too revelatory but it makes me want to see the movie again.

Started: Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation (Adam Resnick). I'm about 1/3 through the book. This guy is warped and hilarious!

Most of the way through

Just started. My go to in between Dresden Files
releases.

Book 6 of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, Owls Don't Blink.



I was less impressed with book 5. Everybody in the house was having a secret affair: husband, wife, houseguest, secretary, and chauffeur. Was that shocking in 1941? A mere twenty years later, the movie A Shot In the Dark treated it as a joke.

Finished:



It was ok, and at under 200 pages certainly fast to get through. The writing just felt really underdeveloped ... almost like I was reading a comic book script (names, dialog, with very brief descriptions of what things look like and outlines of the action) and not a novel.

Just finished this


I think next up is this:

The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, by, Barbara W. Tuchman.

Very interesting read so far. Writing's not dry, and parched, like a lot of
historical tomes I've tried to read.

A re-read.

I set Meat Market aside for the time being and read Looking for Alaska by John Green over the past couple days.




I thought it was a beautifully written book and I highly recommend it.

Sinatra The Chairman by James Kaplan.

I'm really liking this, I believe it's my first "horror" book. It's super short, but I'm taking my time reading it.

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam book 7: Bats Fly at Dusk





Book 6 was an improvement over book 5. The overall plot made sense again, and there was some inspired legal chicanery. At the end, Donald Lam enlists and is sent to fight the Japanese. I understand that he remains off-stage in the books published during the rest of WWII, leaving the up until now secondary character Bertha Cool in charge.

Finished:



Wrestling stories are always a fun read. Daniel Bryan has a great one, though you get the sense that he's not so comfortable writing about himself (as opposed to guys like Chris Jericho and Mick Foley). The parts by Craig Tello are absolutely awful - jam-packed with industry "buzzwords", annoying nicknames (Daniel Bryan and Brie Bella are constantly referred to as "Braniel" ), and astonishingly written as if professional wrestling was real (which would be immediately contradicted by Bryan's writing). Fortunately those bits are only about 10-15% of the book and were easily skimmed.

Just finished:

To hell with skimming, I think those bits are mandatory to skip. They're so terrible.

I had to order from Amazon UK, as there's no US release.