What are you reading?

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape From North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

 

I bought Antique Roadshow: 40 Years of Great Finds at my local shopping centre and when I got home I Dow loaded the Audible version of it so I can aalternate between reading and listening to it. It is BBC Roadshow not the American one.

 

Some hardboiled mysteries from "Hard Case Crime."

Kor

 

If anyone is interested I have worked out my reading challenge for 2018 over at LibraryThing.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/276157

I am not that happy with some of my selections. The one I dislike the most is in my ColorCat. I have put down John D MacDonald's Nightmare in Pink but I am nor really all that fond of the Travis McGee books, so if anyone can suggest another book with 'pink' in its title and I will give it a consideration. So books with 'orange' in the title.

I would also like suggestions of any South American murder mysteries.

For my BingoDOG I need the following for a complete card

A book with a LGBT main character (I hate romances by the way)
A book with some sort of money in its title
A book set on a holiday

 

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake (aka Snake)
Fascinating read

 

I'm reading Factory Girls, about teenage girls in China who leave their villages to work in the big factory cities on China's coast.

 

I'm back to reading Ethel Lina White 'Midnight House'. It did not receive as good a response as her other books but I am very much enjoying it so far. Perfect for being on your own and enjoying the language of a story as much as the story. I just hope it doesn't have a crappy ending and I have to come back here and delete this post.

 

Reading World's Greatest Sleuth by Steve Hockensmith, part of the Holmes on the Range series. I haven't read any of the others in the series, but liking it quite a bit, and I'm likely to visit the others. Basically, what happens when two cowboys who are big fans of Sherlock Holmes and want to follow in his footsteps. What results is a comical western take on the concept of author and deducer on adventures, this one taking place at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where they are invited to participate in a sleuthing contest.

 

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. I know I'm late to the party (it was published in 2012), but I found it on my shelves and couldn't remember reading it. It's thought-provoking, as much of her writing is.

 

I have read two of the Holmes of the Range books and loved both of them. Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer are wonderful characters. I haven"t got to 'World's Greatest Sleuth' yet.

 

Good to know. Yeah, they are fun characters. I just wondered how long he'd be able to keep up writing them, because they feel like something that'd be hard to keep going with the wit that he has. Apparently the one I'm reading now is the last, but I'll definitely be reading more of them. It's one of those where I'm wondering why I hadn't heard of before. I ended up picking this one up as a bargain book several years ago. Hardcover no less!


Bargain hunting can be fun. I actually picked up a book that'd been on my to-read list that I saw appearing in giveaways on Goodreads several times. Then I'm shopping at a bookstore and I happen to see it in the bargain section for $8. No way I wasn't going to pass that up. That was The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons, also hardcover.

 

I came across them because I am a keen Sherlockian collector and I am always on the lookout for books with a Sherlock theme.

 

Great minds think alike! I picked it up because I thought the concept sounded really interesting and I'm a big Sherlock Holmes fan. This one's set in a big city, so part of me is really curious about how the western setting works with a similar duo. I've always had a thought that it would be fun to see Sherlock Holmes gallivanting around the Old West solving crimes and I've had the thought of writing a Nanowrimo story several times. Maybe someday.

 

Just finished listening to Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, narrated by Rupert Degas. It has been more than 30 years since I read the paperback version.

Now I am listening to A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, narrated by Hope Davis.

My Kindle read is The Birds by Frank Baker. Written 16 years before Daphne du Maurier’s story and 17 years before Hitchcock’s movie, Baker threatened to sue as he believed that his book inspired the story/movie.

My paper read is Twelves Collections and the Teashop by Zoran Zivkovic. I started reading this collection of short stories last year but misplaced the book but found it recently.

 

At the moment I'm 2/3rds through Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City, and after that will be two new releases: Fools and Mortals by Bernard Cornwell, and Munich by Robert Harris.

 

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 5-in-1 volume - Douglas Adams

Shield of the Gods by Chris Bennett

 

Currently reading:
"Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World," by Dr. Paul Stamets

Up next:
"Wholeness and the Implicate Order," by Dr. David Bohm

 

Finished that history of Amsterdam last night, and...it's a fine book if the object is to read about Amsterdam's culture, but it emphasizes that more than its physical form's history. There's nothing about the city almost being lost to cars in the 1960s, then reclaimed as a city for people (and bikes, lots of bikes).

On to Fools and Mortals, a novel about William Shakespeare's younger brother who may or may not have stolen his play to sell for money.

 

The Golden Age of Piracy: The Truth Behind the Pirate Myths by Benerson Little. His works on the history of piracy have nicely rounded out my research library.