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**Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.**
Finished. The story is bizarre, as expected from Vonnegut, and it feels satisfying to me … as a well constructed philosophical thought experiment. Alas, I haven’t had a stronger reaction yet.
**Beasts of the Sea, by Iida Turpeinen**
Finished in just two days. This is a well-researched novelized story of an extinction, specifically the extinction of Steller’s sea cow as a function of Russian colonial expansion. The first, very engaging half follows Georg Wilhelm Steller on Bering’s Second Kamchatka Expedition that got stuck on Bering Island—with the sea cows and sea otters. In the second half, after a poetic intermezzo about evolution of life, Alaskan governor and various researchers seek to recover the skeleton of the Steller’s sea cow already long driven to extinction. 9/10, devastating though.
And now for something completely different … I spent one night flipping through an unintentionally hilarious book *Family Doctor* published in the 1970s, a compendium for lay people written by esteemed medical professionals. As expected, some of the information was outdated, for example treating head lice infestation with DDT. 😀
Finished
**A Mouthful of Dust, by Nghi Vo**
**Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, by Annie Jacobsen**
**Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion, by Barry Lam**
Continuing
**Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, by Isaac Asimov**
**The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson**
**The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones**
**The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, by Evan Osnos**
Started
**Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations, by Alton Brown**
Finished
**Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë**
Started and Finished
**Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë**
Started
**Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson**
Finished:
– **Japanese Ghost Stories, by Lafcadio Hearn** (a Penguin edition collecting his spookier stuff from *Kwaidan*, *In Ghostly Japan*, etc etc). Some of the story concepts—particularly “guy falls in love with a beautiful woman who turns out to be a ghost WOOOOOOOO”—got repetitive by the end, but the little details of life in pre-Meiji Japan were always interesting, and there was something comforting about Hearn’s old-fashioned writing style.
– **Paper, by Mark Kurlansky**, one of his lesser-known “commodity history” books. *Cod* is still my favorite in that category. This one was good enough to keep me reading, but kept banging on about the relationship between technological and social change, in ways that I didn’t always think were well-supported. In addition, I lost count of the times that “east” and “west” got mixed around when discussing the spread of different technologies; it’s hard for me to see Kurlansky making that error at this stage of his career, so I’ll blame his editor.
– **Spirit of Steamboat, by Craig Johnson**, the tenth(?) Longmire novel set in the Bighorn region of Wyoming. This one is a little out of the norm for the series, with much more action than mystery; it was decent, but I’d file it under “non-essential” for a reread, or for anyone else who’s working their way through the series. (Johnson happily admits in the author’s note that he banged it out in a few days for Christmas. It’s definitely better than I could have done under those conditions, but the premise is a little ridiculous, and the writing gets overly dramatic in places.)
**Finished:**
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
**Started:**
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Finished reading:
**The Vampyre, by John William Polidori**. 1/5.
Not only is it predictable (well, all Vampire lit seems to be, even Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, just because you already know going in “hey, this creepy guy is going to be a vampire”), but it reads more like a premise that is not fully detailed out than it does an actual story. I know the backstory, Byron challenging his peers to write a horror story, Mary Shelley made Frankenstein, Polidori made just this short story, Byron and Percey Shelley backed out. So I’m aware that he didn’t spend as much time on it as Mary Shelley had hers and that’s why. But still, to read it, there is very little dialogue, and so many things are just told to us, with little development of those ideas.
Some sequences defy logic (>!after being held captive by robbers one night, Aubrey, shocked by the death of Ianthe and Ruthven just decides to leave? And the robbers even help him locate Ruthven’s body?!<), seem contradictory (>!Aubrey reprimands Ruthven for going after a young, unmarried Italian girl, only for himself to pursue a young, unmarried Greek girl!<), or inexplicable (>!Ruthven choosing not to kill Aubrey as he stumbles into him killing Ianthe, not to mention other Greek villagers stumbling into Aubrey, now alone and with a knife in hand standing over Ianthe’s blood drained corpse and doing nothing!<, or >!Aubrey keeps seeing “images of Ianthe” after her death, unaware that it’s really her as she’s been turned into a vampire. Multiple times he sees her, but she never interacts with him in a way where he’d actually figure this out. She just doesn’t factor into the story ever again!<, or >!why Ruthven asked Aubrey to stay silent for one year and one day. Such a specific frame of time, but he couldn’t have known then he’d be marrying Aubrey’s sister on that final day, as she wasn’t even taking suitors at that point in time. In fact, why even marry his sister when he’d just kill any other girl, other than to heap more trauma onto Aubrey!<)
My version came with interesting notes on how vampire mythology reached the Western world, and some letters urging the reader to remember “Lord Byron really was a good guy. Despite what parallels this sorry would otherwise suggest”, but not so interesting as a story.
Continued reading: **The Aeneid, by Virgil**. This week I read Book 7 and 8. Only half way through, and this is like Aeneas’ third wife, lol. The highlight of Book 7 was Allecto causing her chaos. The long list of Italian tribes gets a little tiring though. On the other hand, I did like when in Book 8, Aeneas made it to the Arcadian settlement, and got to witness the festival of Hercules. Only 4 more books to go!
Finished
**Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon**
Started
**Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña**
The girl next door by Jack Ketchum