"What, these? They all just fell off the back of a Bookmobile!"

[captainsblog]

I started tracking my Books-Read list on Goodreads this year. Until recently, I was also reviewing them as I went along, but I started getting backlogged and wasn't sure I was recording every read, so I've just been posting read-dates and starrings for now, and will catch them up when things are hopefully less crazy in a few weeks.

Last night, I finished reading my 30th of 2014 (31st, counting a beta-read I will add and review once it publishes), but surrounding it is quite a sudden backlog. The just-finished one was the second in a series by Lindsay Ribar (known as thunderemerald in these parts)-



It's well done and great fun, and works well as a standalone but even better as a sequel. I will get that Goodreads review up soon and will include my pageturn-pratfall tale that proved the book's chops for me.

That book was waiting for me when I got back from Shore Leave. This one was on an author's table at the con:



Peter David, who I met this year, this time takes an Artful turn out of Oliver Twist and focuses instead on the Dodger in the room.

Meanwhile, before either of those books arrived, I'd read a New Yorker "briefly noted" about this book, which I queued through the library's e-book service and which of course showed up on my tablet just as these other books were in hand:



I'm a few chapters in, and it's another Other World, that of emigrant Russian Jews in Brooklyn who turn to Our Hero of the third generation; he develops a cottage (dacha?) industry out of faking Holocaust claims for people in the neighborhood. It's slow but starting to show potential a few chapters in.

Then, Eleanor went to Barnes and Noble, and came back with a memoir I'd heard good things about:



It's told by a Chicago reporter who moved to Harper Lee's home town to get to know more of her elusive/reclusive story over a number of years. It's generated some controversy, since Lee has disowned the effort publicly, but the author stands by her quotes and her authorization to use them.

So those, likely, are 32 through 35, which I hope to have finished by Labor Day. That keeps me more or less on track for the book-a-week pace I've tried to maintain in recent years, and at least two of the 31 to date have been 800-ish magnum opies. Not bad for an old guy;)

Comments

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

I read an article of two about the Harper Lee book.

Let us know how it is.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

That I shall. Probably will try it after the e-book (which has a time limit on it).

Sorry I missed you in the travels, btw. Court got called off and I was only in Manhattan for a couple of hours late last Sunday.

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

No worries on this end. Honestly, I wasn't feeling all that well and would probably have not been much fun.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I sure hope Peter David's book "Artful" is different from Terry Pratchett's book "Dodger"

To be honest, I didn't like Pratchett's book. It was afflicted by the needless verbosity of a bad Dickens impersonation. (See also Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances, written in imitation of Alexandre Dumas, pere.)

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Peter David does homage the source with his chapter titles, but I scanned a few pages and, while more formal than his last work (about a vampire hunter who is secretly a vamp), it's not distracting.

[throbinson.livejournal.com]

I started to read A Replacement Life but abandoned it a couple of chapters in when I realized I really didn't give a damn what happened to any of the characters. Once I turned fifty, I've claimed the right to quit reading books; I used to feel obligated to plow through them no matter what.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I just got to the part where the plot really begins- where they convince Slava to fake the first claim. He's the only one so far I've been able to stand, and I have no hesitation about bailing if he joins the stable of annoying people for good. I had enough of that with the movie we watched last night.