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Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. It's certainly ambitious with a different setting (1960 to 1997 Argentina with London stop-over during the Swinging Sixties) than any other book I've read. Personally it didn't quite live up to the "all-time classic" hype that I heard. Maybe it was a bit too meandering, and I struggled with the author's (translator's?) style of embedding dialog without quotation marks in huge walls-of-text paragraphs. There were certainly numerous striking scenes, both with supernatural horror and the real-world horror of Argentina during that period.

I'm making my way through the Witcher books. Feels as if there's lots of background detail in terms of kingdoms/rulers/wars, but very little in the way of actual story. But I'm committed.

Finished:


Pretty mediocre if Im being honest.

The complaints about it being too political are a little unfair. I would say it's more COVID focused than anti-MAGA, although there is a decent amount of that as well, but its no more political than some of his other books, definitely no where near something like Dead Zone. I get that setting a story in the last few years makes it hard to not acknowledge the COVID experience, but I just dont have much appetite to read about at this point. This is probably the first major piece of fiction, written or on screen, that incorporates/acknowledges the pandemic that I have consumed, so maybe that is why it seemed to take me out of the story when it came up. It just feels weird reading about it at this point.

If you take out the political and COVID stuff, there is a decent little mystery here. The villans and what they are doing were always compelling, but I found the other side with Holly doing her investigation to not be the most riveting content. Holly herself is pretty meh to me. I dont love or hate her, but she just isnt that interesting to me.

I haven’t ready this yet, but I know what you mean about COVID. Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society made COVID a big part of the setting in the first part of the book, and I had a similar reaction: just lived through it … don’t want to hear about it in my “entertainment” reading. Thankfully recent tv and movies I’ve seen have all ignored COVID, though it makes more sense in visual mediums. Masks, social distancing, and staying at home aren’t really conducive to entertaining stories,

Just finished this book this morning. I don’t usually read these kinds of books but I enjoyed the stories and analogies that supported his hypothesis.

Just finished:



It was a lot slower than I anticipated for such a short, quick read. The last act started picking up quite a bit though and I enjoyed the last 1/3 or so.

Just finished 'Gwendy's Magic Feather' and starting 'Gwendy's Final Task' - the former by Richard Chizmar and the latter once again a collaboration between Stephen King and Chizmar. Nothing too terribly significant to me about the Gwendy books as far as the first two I've read go, although the first, 'Gwendy's Button Box' got praise for the portrayal of the title character. The books go down quick and easy though, and are pleasurable enough.

Decision at Delphi by Helen MacInnes, 1960. An American on assignment from a magazine gets drawn into uncovering a assassination conspiracy in Greece. The historic background is that after the Nazis were driven out of Greece, there was a brutal civil war until 1948. The communist faction lost, and it took 25,000 children with them as hostages when they retreated across the border. In 1960, there is still a lot of anger and sorrow, and terrorists are still around. The villains in the book are communist extremists who think Khrushchev is too soft.

This could by my favorite MacInnes book so far. The protagonist is pretty smart, but makes bad decisions when he gets tired or emotional. That was more interesting to read than a Jason Bourne clone. It was tense throughout.

My copy has another inappropriate cover. It looks like a gothic romance. In the book, the woman in the foreground is a photographer taking pictures of the ruins for a book. The man in the background is a police officer who's protecting her.

Finished:


All these have been really fun reads and I highly recommend to anyone looking for a fun whodunit with some really enjoyable characters. It seems the author is taking a break from the series for a bit to do something new after cranking four of these in four years.

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Wraiths of the Broken Land by S. Craig Zahler. The movie Bone Tomahawk was such an intriguing mix of classic Western and extreme horror, so I was certainly interested when I learned the director previously wrote a couple of novels in the same vein.


What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. Maybe I need to be checking out more novellas, since they're a great length ... long enough to have a fleshed out story and characters, but not so long they drag or wear out their welcome. The idea of fleshing out Poe's Fall of the House of Usher is an interesting one. I sympathize with the author when she felt disheartened by being "scooped" by Mexican Gothic ... although I think this book has enough things different to make it stand apart.

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North from Rome by Helen MacInnes, 1958. My least favorite MacInnes book so far. It has all of her virtues: taut writing, vivid descriptions of foreign places as they were sixty years ago, and a pragmatic view of international power. But the basis of the plot is Bill trying to win back his girlfriend who is engaged to a Italian count, a scoundrel who secretly imports bulk heroin and associates with the KGB. The book didn't really gel for me until the ending when the girl self-rescues. I liked her!

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Finished

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Prelude to Terror by Helen MacInnes, 1978. The first half is great, with an art historian hired to bid on a painting that a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain is selling to fund his escape. Then he learns that the refugee was shot weeks ago and the money from the painting is going to fund a KGB operation. But Intelligence wants him to go through with the auction as if he knows nothing, so they can pick up all the bad guys. It's well-plotted with believably smart people going against each other.

The second half is a common action-adventure story which I found less engaging.

By the late 1970s, everyone in Europe has a car. The roads are jammed, and once-quiet villages are full of tourists. In books written twenty years earlier, characters could just drive to a distant town at high speed and lie low there. No more.




At least by the 1970s, the book covers stopped looking like gothic romance novels.

Finished

I’ve finally slayed my white whale!! No, I didn’t read Moby Dick. I FINALLY finished House of Leaves, a book I’ve started and gave up on at least a half a dozen times over the years. I finally buckled down and completed it!


This is such an interesting premise yet was such a challenging and trying read. Footnotes upon footnotes (I kid you not, some footnotes had footnotes). I can’t imagine I’ll ever tackle this book again but I’m glad I finally finished it.

It's on my list. Do Gravity's Rainbow next!

I'm just starting Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. Super excited ..

I eventually stopped with the footnotes and just plowed through the "main" story. Certainly not creators intent, but by that point it was that or DNF.