I finished The Sound and the Furry by Spencer Quinn. I don’t know how this got on my list. (paused here to check it out) Oh, I see. meep mentioned Hoka books and one of the Hoka compilations is named The Sound and the Furry. But that’s not this book.
This is a “Chet and Bernie mystery”, where Chet is a dog and the narrator. The running jokes are 1) Chet knows a lot about the cases because of scents, but can’t convey any of this to Bernie. And despite the knowledge from the scents, Chet still doesn’t get the significance of anything 2) Chet forgets stuff, is easily distracted (squirrel!), can’t count above two, and misunderstands Bernie all the time because of his literal interpretation of figures of speech. Interesting concept but it doesn’t hold up that well for a whole book, let alone a series (this is #6 in the series).
Goodreads show 3 other books with the same name, one of which is another mystery series.
I finished another quick mystery, Death of a Maid by M. C. Beaton, a Hamish Macbeth mystery. I’m not sure how this got on my list, either. It was ok - a series set in a small town in the Scottish Highlands. It’s one of those where they wrap up the main mystery at the 80% point, though, which is annoying. The rest just feels like filler.
Just finished The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. I didn’t love Me Before You and refused to read anything else by this author for a while. But this is a book club read and I tend to make exceptions for those.
I’m really glad I did. This was a good book with multidimensional characters and a satisfying plot and resolution.
Started Tana French’s The Secret Place and don’t love it. Trying to decide if it’s worth slogging thru or if I’m just going to skip it. That was last week and I didn’t touch it over the weekend so my apathy may be my answer.
Meanwhile I started Octavia Butler’s Dawn. 40 minutes in and I’m captivated. Why did I wait so long to start this one?
Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
McWhorter is a linguist, so he often goes through some linguistic concepts that are new to non-linguists (or I forget, because I tend to buy all his stuff, especially his lectures).
And while he does go through etymology/history of terms, often he does dig into how we parse the distinction between, say, being a dick and being an asshole.
It’s a dirty book in that he has loads of dirty words in there, but also gets into how some were just the run-of-the-mill term for the verb/noun in question. And how some things that are just normal pieces of speech now were incredibly offensive in centuries past. Also, he pulls in distinction of British, American, and other Anglophone uses (and what got morphed into Tok Pisin, a creole that came out of pidgin English in Papua New Guinea), and then gets into how certain foul concepts are used in other languages, like Russian.
Finished Octavia Butler’s Dawn and I will definitely have to read the others in this trilogy. What else should I read by this author? I read Kindred ages ago.
I don’t always love science fiction and then I read something like this and wonder why not.
I finished Us Against You by Fredrik Backman, the followup to Beartown. It takes up the story right where the original ended. If you liked Beartown, you’ll probably like this. If you didn’t, you definitely won’t like this one, as the subject and style are pretty much identical (down to the continued use of “bang bang bang”, etc). One thing that only became annoying for me with the followup was his continued use of misleading foreshadowing of major plot points (“she will come to regret leaving her gun at home” and stuff like that). When he does it enough times, you come to mistrust the narration and that pulls you out of the book. But I liked it overall. I’m not sure if I’ll read the 3rd book when it becomes available, though. He seems to have wrapped up most conflict with this one.
I’m already most of the way through Stormbreaker, a YA book by Anthony Horowitz, then I’ve got another of his YA books next.
I finished Stormbreaker, a YA kid-spy story by Anthony Horowitz. It’s about exactly what you’d expect and follows the format of all spy movies (right, movies, not books).
I’m a good part of the way through another one of his YA books, The Falcon’s Malteser, but this one is trying to be humorous, with obvious references to The Maltese Falcon, and not particularly succeeding.
TIL, though: Malteser is apparently the British version of Whoppers Malted Milk Balls.