'books' Category
the second stage
I have been reading Victor Kloss’s Royal Institute of Magic series – a somewhat depressing endeavor, since I just finished book 5 and he died (tragically, of lymphoma at age 35) while writing book 6. They are fun, though there are klunky bits the size of speed bumps throughout. One question I’m left with is, […]
Aaronovitch and Anglophilia
After reading the latest of Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant books, The Hanging, Tree, I started over from the beginning of the series to refresh my memory of the details, and also because it got me thinking. In this series, which is written in the first person, Aaronovitch does a thing that’s rare in US and […]
book: Fallen into the Pit (Inspector Felse)
One of the books I’m recently read is Fallen Into the Pit, by Ellis Peters. She’s best known for Brother Cadfael, but this one is an Inspector Felse mystery (contemporary, published 1951). Lately I’ve been reading a lot of BritLit from WWI to just after WWII (DE Stevenson, Angela Thirkell, Elizabeth Cadell), and in the […]
Conflicting bookery
Perhaps not the best combination: reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth while my workout audiobook is Connie Willis’s Blackput. Death and destruction in all directions 🙁 And I keep hearing the refrain, “For, Willie McBride, it all happened again, and again and again and again and again.”
a few more things about St. Mary’s
(See previous post for context.) These books are absolute time travel crack, but they move along so damned fast, apparently, even the author can’t keep up. Just a few of the continuity errors, behind a cut because spoilers are unavoidable though I’ll try not to be too specific.
a concise St. Mary’s reference
I really like The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series by Jodi Taylor; the first book was a bit awkward, as first books so often are, but they’ve smoothed out. There are faults, of course – a ton of minor characters not adequately fleshed out (one reason for this post), way too much plot crammed into […]
windfall
Good heavens. I’ve just gotten a credit on Amazon from the Apple price-fixing settlement … for a hair under $250. The time span the settlement covers falls within my expat years; I bought a *lot* of books in those years. What I’d liek to do with it is to keep it until September in hopes […]
on immersion in October Daye
I’ve been rereading the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. Their plots are very twisty, an I’d realized I was missing a lot of the connections when I read the books as they came out, a year or so apart (Seanan is amazingly prolific and the first few came out at a faster pace, but […]
happy things: weddings and new books
Weddings! We haven’t been to a wedding for a few years, but now all of a sudden we’re invited to two within a week of each other, both requiring travel. There’s one for a young cousin of Ted’s; I’d like to go, because it would be nice seeing all that side of the family, but […]
book series rec: The Chronicles of St. Mary’s
I’ve been enjoying rereading The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series, by Jodi Taylor; these are time travel stories, excuse me, descriptions of investigating history in contemporary time. They are “kitchen sink” books; there’s humor of both the slapstick and more subtle variety, suspense, romance, fantasy, you name it, in a quasi-academic setting that allows for […]