I finished Maltese Falcon… and while the movie is different, it’s actually not that different, and huge portions of the dialogue is copied straight from the book. I have no clue what the point of the Flitcraft parable was supposed to be.
In the middle of “A Murder is Announced” by Christie. Not really a fave, and the main plot point is something she used in a couple other stories.
Started the Disappearing Spoon about the Periodic Table and elements.
Finished The Only Good Indians (hoo boy it’s dark). Started NPCs (LitRPG book) and The Owl Service.
I finished Beartown and thought it was really good.
I already grabbed the followup, Us Against You, although I have a few others around I might get through first - two short Anthony Horowitz YA books and a Rachel Held Evans.
I’ve liked his other books, but not a fan of Beartown so I didn’t read the sequel.
This one is a bit all over the place, but I like that he went into the politics of science, especially in the naming of elements.
I learned a rule I hadn’t known before: if an element name is proposed to IUPAC and it gets voted down, it cannot be proposed for a new element later.
Finished Ben Hur (action adventure, really wasn’t, I won’t reassess genres after reading). Pretty interesting
Finished Go Set A Watchman (literary fiction, maybe). Bothered me on so many levels
Starting Loon Lake, Doctorow as my historical fiction
Listening to Mayhem in Christmas River by Meg Muldoon, a short cozy mystery, more novella than novel.
My son bought me a book about the Dallas Cowboys for my birthday, so I started that last night.
Was it the subject matter, how it turned out, or what? It’s pretty clearly about 1/3 of the way through that there will be no happy ending for anyone and it certainly wasn’t going to end how I’d have liked. Almost everyone behaves in a way you hope they won’t and it’s one of the few books I’ve read where most characters have both pretty significant positives and negatives. And those that aren’t presented with both pretty much have only negatives.
I kind of liked some of the style he used, where he would repeat statements and the second time it is said it carries more weight or clarity than the first time. It pretty well did that throughout the book.
I’m kind of skeptical that he can follow it up with something that isn’t just an hockey underdog book with tension from the previous book. But I’ve been surprised in a couple other sequels recently.
My copy just came in the mail. So, to answer the thread title’s question: “America’s Original Sin” by Jim Wallis.
Currently reading Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars for book club and Tana French’s The Secret Place so I don’t finish the book club read too quickly.
Halfway through Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 and 2 stories into Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection.
Finished! Good break from Wheel of Time. On to book 8, whatever that one is called. Will come back to the Dune series eventually. Enjoyed it.
So, if that is completely new to you, just a warning: later books take a turn a lot of people didn’t like.
I didn’t mind it, and read through to Chapterhouse: Dune. I still re-read the series from time to time (just finished Children of Dune).
I don’t like what Frank’s son and that other guy did with the series, though. I considered it an insult to the intellect.
That’s what I hear. I like the genre in general though. I’ll likely get through the series at some point, like it or no.
If remember correctly the first Dune book was awesome, the 2nd Dune book was pretty good, the rest of them are kind of useful as toilet paper.
I believe I read all the ones that were originally written by Frank Herbert, noticing the same kind of shift. I never read any of the substandard knock-offs that completed the series, and I don’t intend to.
My daughter just posted on Facebook that her favorite book is Day of the Triffids. That’s a complete shock, as I’d not known her to read any science fiction at all. Now I’ll need to read it.
I read it as a school assignment
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.