All the tourists have cross-infected themselves with covid and hunkered down in their caravans to watch Netflix, because they’ve caused most of the hospitality venues and restaurants to shut.
So they’ve put immense strain on local internet, and I can’t watch any streaming service for more than a minute without it resembling the EFC website on Crichton night, so i finished Unforgiven.
Replete with bad guys and smart girls, it’s a quickish read and I’m not sure it’s a great work of fiction, but somewhat satisfying, so I now have to cheer myself up with something lighter, like a WW2 novel.
I just finished reading a fantastic book The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. Story about an incident involving 4 Native American teens 10 years prior. It has everything, mystery, murder, horror, revenge.
Don’t know if its been mentioned on here before…
William McIlvanney (died 2015) was a Scottish crime writer who is credited with being the progenitor of the Tartan Noir genre. His most famous work was the trilogy of novels featuring police detective Jack Laidlaw, very much of the Harry Bosch mould…not good with his superior officers but an excellent detective. By “not good with his superiors”, it appears that he doesn’t know any of those funny handshakes.
When he died, he left behind a half-finished prequel to the Laidlaw trilogy entitled The Dark Remains.
It’s been finished by a noted successor in Tartan Noir, Ian Rankin, of Rebus fame, and very readable it is too.
So I’ve bought the Kindle edition of the first of the trilogy, simply titled Laidlaw, and will commence it this evening.
I read the three Laidlaw books fairly recently. I can’t remember whether I wrote about them above. They’re good, but they’re yet another in the “Morose Detective with Chip on Shoulder” genre, and I had had more than enough of Laidlaw in the end.
I recently finished The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Australian Pip Williams. It’s a nice premise: little girl living with her widowed father, a lexicologist who works with Dr James Murray compiling the Oxford English Dictionary at the turn of the 20th century; she plays under the table where the compilers of the Dictionary work and collects slips of paper with words on them that occasionally fall under the table. These are the “lost words”. It’s won a whole heap of words, but quite honestly I thought it was pretty ordinary. From the interesting premise, the story really just meanders through from one thing to another, just happening to tick every politically correct box along the way: disability, feminism, female suffrage; she even manages to get indigenous languages in there. I really couldn’t get very interested in any of the characters and from about halfway through the book I was continually on the verge of giving up and only kept going because I kept hoping that something interesting would happen. It didn’t.
A friend who I mentioned it to said she had read it and would give it 6 out of 10. So would I.
I’ve just finished listening to The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. It’s a bit twee and at times verges on the maudlin sentimental, but never quite goes to far and those things are more than compensated for by a lovely understated humour and a continually inventive and surprising plot. I enjoyed it greatly and I’ve just started no. 2 in the series and pre-ordered no. 3. Very nicely read too.
The novella “The Empress of Salt and Fortune”, by Nghi Vo, had me from beginning to end. It’s listed as fantasy but it’s not, at least not the sort of text I associate with fantasy. Vo is fantasy in the same manner as Marquez, the field of magical realism in other words. It is a carefully crafted tale steeped in knowledge of Asian history, elegant and suspenseful and tart. I look forward to reading her other work.
And once more it’s from TOR publishing, long may it reign.
At this stage much shorter than Murakami, and she makes a point of linking her heritage to Vietnam and not sure how steeped she is in Japanese Lit. The book is set in a fictional world that could well be pre modern era China. TOR have released more of her work since the success of the aforementioned, including a full scale novel that has been likened to a modern Asian tinged Gatsby. Prior to that she produced short fiction that I intend to investigate. A comer for sure, seriously talented.
PS I suspect she might have read a bit of Ali Smith.
Murakami writes all sizes. For some years now he’s tended to produce a volume of short stories followed by a short-to-medium-length novel, then a huge blockbuster, then back to the short stories, for a rinse and repeat.
I’ll have to look out for Nghi Vo. She sounds interesting.
Last year for my birthday i got 6 books. Its a little over 3 weeks to my birthday and i was thinking the same again would be good when i realised i have only read 2 of the 6 i got last year.
Is it just me, or are books you don’t have always more attractive than the ones you do have?
Just wondering if @Alan_Noonan_10 or any of the other fans of Australian crime would recommend Michael Robotham? He was recommended to Mrs S by someone whose judgment is sometimes good and sometimes not.