What is the most recent book you finished and how was it?

I just finished The Girlfriend by KL Slater. If you’ve seen Single White Female, Fatal Attraction, and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, you’ve “read” this book. Ugh! It was incredibly disappointing, and the “kitchen sink” ending was too much. I really wish authors would spend some time on character development, a *good* plot, and interesting dialogue instead of this nonsense.

Since you enjoyed Rose Madder, try Bag of Bones by Stephen King.

Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey. It was a re-read, but I love it. The whole Expanse series is probably my favorite sci-fi series so well worth it. Doors and corners, kid.

I finished reading “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Luigi Pirandello last night. Hadn’t read it in 25 years. Still a mind-blowing read and one of my favorite plays. The book has a couple of other Pirandello plays that I don’t know.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson.

It was a much smaller scope multiverse tale than I had expected from reading the book’s description, but it worked to the book’s benefit. I enjoyed it.

*A Long Weekend With Marcel Proust*. 7 stories, 1 novella by a Scottish writer I’d not heard of, Ronald Frame. Stories good, novella scrumptious–it was like a thinking person’s Twilight Zone episode. In it Frame used 3 fonts (bold, italic, standard) which I realised at some point was a way of telling reader which account was of the past, and in a sense the present and future and of offering a clue.

*The Devil’s Flute Murders*, by Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Jim Rion. Yokomizo can basically be considered a Japanese Agatha Christie- an insanely prolific mid-c20th murder mystery writer whose work has been widely adapted- and in the past couple of years Pushkin Press has been publishing some translations of his best known books.

I’ve read all of the translated ones (bar one, *Gokumon Island*) and I think *Devil’s Flute* is probably the best? It’s got a lot of social commentary on the very peculiar world of immediate post-war Japan and the social transformations it was undergoing- particularly the collapse of the aristocratic class, which is a major thing in this one.

Basically, an aristocrat has recently been found dead in an apparent suicide, but his family have reported several sightings of him since, playing a haunting melody he composed on his flute. Yokomizo’s signature character, the scruffy detective Kosuke Kindaichi, is called in to investigate only for further murders to take place. It becomes clear that the late viscount was desperate to hide a secret that could apparently ruin the family name forever, so Kindaichi has to dig into the family history and the social world of their class alongside trying to solve a locked-room mystery. 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

First read, Amazingly written.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow. I listened to it – it was superb. It is set in the fictional Eden, Kentucky (loosely inspired by the very real Paradise, Kentucky). Harrow was born and raised in KY and captured it perfectly.

She is a master at mixing and matching seemingly disparate themes and genres together really well. Starling House is haunted house southern gothic meets portal fantasy meets a surprisingly grounded portayal of the downtrodden folk in this economically depressed and ecologically ravaged area.

The medieval underworld by Andrew McCall. It was a bit bumpy, was slow in some parts, became name soup in others but it helped me learn alot about the time period that consistently gets glossed over in more traditional history books. I also learned about a rebellion where nuns hired bandits to take revenge on their Abess.

Lord of Dark Places by Hal Bennett and I hated it which is fitting.

Legacy Of Lies, Robert Bailey. Excellent, under rated author, legal thrillers similar to John Grisham. Currently reading the next book in the series.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. Haven’t been reading much lately so have mostly been reading heavy serious books. This book was amazing and really moving. One of the best I’ve ever read. 

Lords and ladies. Discworld witches book. Spectacular as they basics all are.

My most recent finish was All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. It was fantastic I highly recommend it. Very unlike his usual work but still very much Cormac McCarthy.

I most recently finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and was somewhat disappointed with it.

The first third of the book is particularly offputting – some of the prose is very clunky and it annoyed me so much that I very nearly gave up. Take this passage on page 11 of my copy. For context, the narrator is meeting up with his old war buddy to reminicse so that he might finish the book about the war he’s been working on. His friend’s wife is unhappy about this.

> You were just babies then!”, she said.
> “What?” I said.
>”You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs!”
>I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
>”But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
>”I-I don’t know”, I said.
>”Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

>So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

Yes, we know what made her angry, Kurt, because she just explained it. Why did Vonnegut write that last paragraph? Why on Earth did his editor not have it removed? This is the most egregious example of Vonnegut explaining through the narration what’s already been explained through dialogue, but it’s far from the only one.

The famous “so it goes” also wore out its welcome very quickly. I didn’t realise it featured quite so often, but it follows more or less every mention of death, tragedy, and brutality to the point that it just ends up sounding like Vonnegut saying “Hey, look! I just wrote about something brutal happening! Did you notice?” I realise that PTSD is a major theme of the book and detachment is the narrator’s way of coping with the horrors he’s witnessed but the repetition is too cloying to allow it to serve that purpose.

To its credit, the book does pick up as it goes on and is enhanced by the fact that the protagonist’s experiences are in large part the experiences of Vonnegut himself and, “so it goes aside”, the novel’s strongest sections are those depicting the barbarity of war at the ground level.

There is also, however, the problem that the novel propogates Nazi propaganda. It gives the number of deaths in the bombing of Dreseden as 135,000, while the real number is estimated to be 20,000 – 25,000. Vonnegut’s research comes from the book The Destruction of Dresden by David Irving, the notorious Nazi sympathiser, holocaust denier, and charlatan; the book and its author are both mentioned by name is Slaughterhouse Five.

Overall, while I can understand the popularity of the book with the generation that protested the Vietnam war, I expected a lot more given its reputation.

Solaris it was pretty good once you surrender to the age of it. A great look at what it is to be human while being forced to reflect through “alien” eyes. Now on to Annihilation, even though I am done with the first book of the levithian wakes