September 2022 Reading Thread.

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Just read "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn, which had more heft to it than I was expecting. It's an epistolary novel which uses progressively fewer and fewer letters of the alphabet as they are banned by a particularly deranged government.
 
Finished The Man Who Was Poe by Avi. Young Adult but needn't have been. Hard drinking Edgar Allan Poe solves a murder/kidnapping embezzlement scheme and reveals himself for an extremely ugly personality that caught me off guard. Recommended. Still undecided what to start next but have an idea.

In keeping with the fast approaching season of Poe I will be starting this next:
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It's a little different but, if you're into those, you might also enjoy Doyle After Death by John Shirley, in which a PI dies and finds himself in the plane of Garden Rest where he teams up with Arthur Conan Doyle to solve the "deformulation" of a resident (which is to say, a murder in the afterlife).
 
Had no idea Shirley wrote something like this. Sounds interesting, will probably read it but most likely on Kindle:
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Still reading IT by Stephen King but I've also, this morning, started a re-read of Hemingway "The old man and the sea"
 
Currently DOCTOR WHO audio drama starring David Tennant. And Joe Hill stories on audio.
 
Three and a half chapters into Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and it’s tough going. On almost every page we’re supposed to marvel at how the mc is just oh so clever. Snooze. If it doesn’t change soon it will be a dnf for me.
It only starts getting interesting at about page 100. I agree about the super-clever high-school teacher genius angle. It's a bit unbelievable (and annoying)
 
Beatrix Potter "The Tale of Little Pig Robinson"
The prequel to Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" in which we learn how there came to be a 'piggywig' with a ring at the end of its nose in the land where the Bong tree grows. The cat does play a significant role in this tale despite feeling gloomy and morose due to being apart from the owl (who happens to be en route to Greenland).
 
I finished reading On Basilisk Station by David Weber for the sixth? time. (It could be the seventh time.) And it still fills me with delight. Why can't more novels be written like this?

But, I hadn't remembered how much revenge plays a role in the progress of the story. I guess the Christian teaching on grace and turning the other cheek is still growing within me.
 
I've read all his laundry files books, the majority are ok and good reading fun but beware! there are a couple of dull tomes amongst them
Thank's for the warning. They look like "monster of the week" novels so I'm sure skimming the odd "dull tomb" won't make the whole series incomprehensible.
 
Aniela Jaffe "From the Life and Work of C.G. Jung"
Four essays on Jung by the woman who acted as his secretary in his last years. The interesting ones for me were (i) her memories of him in his old age and (ii) Her discussion of the accusations against him of involvement with the Nazis in the early 1930s.
There is also a good ghost story:
In his contribution to Fanny Moser's book, "Spuk: Wahrglaube oder Irrglaube?" (1950), Jung describes his own encounter with a ghost in England in 1920. He spent several weekends in a friend's recently rented country house. During the nights he experienced various increasingly violent ghostly phenomena like knockings, evil smells, sounds of rustling and dripping. They aroused in him a feeling of suffocation and a sensation of growing rigidity, and culminated in the apparition, or hallucination, of a solid-looking half of a woman's head lying on the pillow about sixteen inches away from his own. Its one eye was open and staring at him. The head vanished when Jung lit a candle. He spent the rest of the night sitting in an armchair. He and his friend later learned what was already known to the whole village: the house was haunted and all tenants were driven away in a very short time.
Jung interpreted some details of his experience as exteriorizations of psychic contents in the unconscious. But what remained an insoluble puzzle was the fact that the haunting took place solely in that house, indeed in one particular room of the house. During the week when he stayed in London, he slept peacefully in spite of a heavy working schedule. It was a typical case of localized haunting, for which to this day no adequate scientific explanation has been found. The house was pulled down shortly after Jung's visit.
 
I finished Eversion today. I've heard mixed things about Century Rain but I'm going to give it a try.
What did you think of Eversion? I've not got around to it yet.

I actually enjoyed Century Rain but it is a very different sort of Reynolds book, with it's blend of SF, alternate history and noir thriller, and I do understand why it should get such mixed reviews. Just don't expect a typical Reynolds space opera type of story!
 
What did you think of Eversion? I've not got around to it yet.

I actually enjoyed Century Rain but it is a very different sort of Reynolds book, with it's blend of SF, alternate history and noir thriller, and I do understand why it should get such mixed reviews. Just don't expect a typical Reynolds space opera type of story!
I actually really liked Eversion, even though I saw the plot twist coming a mile away. I feel as if you read him for any length of time you start to puzzle together his writing style.

It contains elements of his previous work but it's set in a whole new universe (or possibly the same? It's much earlier after all.)

It's also not at all his typical space opera, instead it follows a single narrator. It's honestly pretty hard to say anything more without spoilers.

Century Rain is interesting, so far I've only read the first few chapters but parts of it actually gives me Asimov vibes, it's hard to explain why though.
 
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