Finished: The Quick and the Dead - Louis L'Amour



I enjoyed this one about as much as I enjoyed the last (and first) L'Amour book that I read, Hondo--which is to say that I dug it pretty hard. I'm going to have to add a western every four or five books to my TBR pile.


Just starting: Mutants Amok - Mark Grant



Full disclosure: I don't do science fiction very well. However, a friend of mine read this series and posted about it on his blog. He and I were out book-hunting one day and we ran across this book and the second in the series. He convinced me to give it a shot, so I'm going to try it to see if I like it. If not, I can always resell it and get back at least double what I paid for it.

Just finished: Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon



This book is simply a masterpiece. I read Swan Song a year or two ago and loved it but this is even better. A great coming-of-age story that’s throws everything but the kitchen sink into the story. I also have to admit that this is the first book I’ve ever read that’s made me tear up at the end.

It's been a while since I've read it (I rarely reread books) but I think this is McCammon's masterpiece as well. And so unlike everything else that he's written. Though I do love great run of horror books leading up to this.

Maybe I need to give them another try, but the Matthew Corbett books haven't really done it for me (I think I've read the first couple). Maybe that's just me wanting him to write like he used to.

I really enjoyed reading The Ferguson Rifle by Louis L'Amour back in my teenage years.

Finished (listening to the audiobook of) Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa.

Excellent. I know the new book that came out recently is not an official follow up, rather just a collection of essays and articles, but I’m looking
forward to listening to that, too.

Wasn't sure which way I wanted to go, so I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. I can't recall when or why I picked this up, but it must've been from back when I glanced at book reviews in the paper and was influenced that way. In any case, it's a real short book (basically at this point, anything under 800 pages seems to be a short book) and not what I expected. But then, I really don't know what I expected. I think I thought it was going to be a semi-philosophical / religious opinion concept thing. Nope; it's a novel. It was good, and held my attention, and I'm glad that it wasn't real long because I think it might've worn me down emotionally if it were.

Finished Shadow Moon and will continue in with the next book in the series, Shadow Dawn.

I started into this yesterday, only reading the Prelude due to lack of time. But I noticed I was having a hard time holding it up (one-handed since my other hand is used for coffee). You were right, Kurt, in calling this thing a brick! Les Miserables has more pages, but it's physically smaller. In fact, the small type and closeness of lines might be part of why I had a hard time with it. Les Mis weighs 2 pounds, 6 ounces. Twain is 3 lbs 9 oz! I checked The Stand, which I also read recently, and it came in at 3 lbs 11 oz. This inconvenience of weight is partly my own fault since I insist on buying hardcover books. Oh well ... on to Chapter One!

I definitely have my share of books, mostly history, which are 'read on a table only' in size and weight! (My Les Mis was a mass market paperback, so easy to handle.) Not sure where I'll go next. Still plugging away at Superclass, which was published in 2008, so feels a little quaint now. I'm wondering when the idea of nation-states will become obsolete in favor of corporations and people like Musk.

Finished

Finished:

Mutants Amok by Mark Grant



Okay...first of all, this is the first in a series of five novels published by Avon Books in the early '90s, all of which were written under the pseudonym of "Mark Grant." In this book's case, the actual author was David Bischoff, and he went on to write most of the other novels in the series as well. In it, mutants who had been created by mankind to fight its wars have turned on the humans, putting them into forced labor camps. There's a resistance movement going, and the leader of the resistance movement ends up crashing a small-engine plane (that he'd stolen from his latest attack on the "muties," as they're called) near a farm camp complex. One of the humans sees his plane go down, finds him, and nurses him back to health...and the resistance continues. There's a lot of sex and violence in Mutants Amok, but it's absolutely impossible to take this book for anything other than the lark that it is. After slogging through the first couple of chapters, I was surprised to find myself giving in to the madcap spirit of the book, and, once I was on its wavelength, I enjoyed it for the junk that it is. Make no mistake--it's the literary equivalent of street vendor hot dogs, but if you're in the mood for disreputable fun, you just might enjoy it.

Up next:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh



Time to regain a bit of the sanity that I lost by reading Mutants Amok.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? and Other Questions about Dead Bodies - Caitlin Doughty.

I bought this book (and another) for Mrs Danger as a Christmas present. Doughty is a proponent of good death and has made a career of demystifying what happens to our bodies after we die. This book is answers to questions asked by children. A lot of them are really good questions. The illustrations at the start of each chapter are great.

Continental Op Stories - Dashiell Hammett.

Hammett was one of the founders of the hardboiled detective genre. The Continental Op(erative) is an unnamed detective employed by the Continental Agency, and he is old enough to have seen everything. He works for a paycheck. The murder victims are frequently lower class people in cheap boarding houses instead of aristocrats in drawing rooms. There are no deductions or parlor scenes. That was all excitingly new and different in the 1920s. The energy is still there a hundred years later. It's also fun to see Hammett work out ideas that show up later in his novels like The Maltese Falcon. The large set of stories is now available for free from Google Read.

Let us know what you think. I found the book disappointing when the author started making his point clear, but it may be merely that I disagree with him.

Finished

Just finished: Easy Go by John Lange (Michael Crichton)


Before he was a household name Michael Crichton wrote a handful of novels under the pen name John Lange. Once he was older Crichton went back and re-edited those novels and touched them up a bit and then release them under the Hard Case Crime label.

So being a Hard Case Crime novel, it’s got kind of a trashy pulp feel to it but it was a fun Egyptian tomb robber story. It wraps up a little too abruptly for my taste but it tied itself together decently and was enjoyable enough. I’ll probably add the other 5 or 6 books to my to-read pile for when I’m in the mood for a quick entertaining read between denser novels.

Finished Superclass. Great read regarding who really runs this dump (Earth). Read Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Going to take my time with Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1. (Finished A Study in Scarlet so far.)

Finished:

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. A great follow-up to The Tainted Cup, which mixes fantasy, kaiju, and Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries. I appreciate that while this is part of series, each book seems to be stand-alone.


Suffer the Children by Craig DiLouie. I read and enjoyed his Episode Thirteen, so got around to checking out one of his older books. This is much more grim, but not surprising given the subject matter (every child in the world dies and reanimates with a thirst for blood).

I started reading Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series, which I missed when it was new in the early 90s (despite always seeing the books in stores). For anyone who read it ... does it get better? I'm about 75 pages into the first book, and not liking it at all. I thought it would be a big world-building space opera. But so far all I've gotten is:

This isn't a long book, so I'm over 40% through. It's short enough I'll finish it, to see if it makes some big turnaround. But I'm bailing on the rest of the series if it doesn't.