Wizard Popes of the 11th Century & Imperatrix Æterna (heard about Nixon's translations on Glitch Bottle) Turn of the Screw (via Project Gutenberg) Waiting on Djinn of Nightingale's Eye from the library.
Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche, the seventh book in Springer's series of YA novels about Sherlock Holmes' much younger sister, Enola. (Which inspired two movies on Netflix.) In the summer of 1889, a client comes to Sherlock Holmes while he's in a state of melancholia and his sister Enola is attempting to drag him out of it. The client, Tish Glover, just learned that her twin sister, Flossie, married to the Earl of Dunhench, took suddenly ill with a fever, died, and was cremated. She believes her sister is not dead and wants Sherlock Holmes to look into it. Sherlock, melancholic, displays no interest, but Enola does... and her enthusiasm -- and some "points of interest" rouse Sherlock from his stupor, and the Holmes siblings being an investigation in their own way--adopting disgusises, visiting the scene of the crime (Dunhench Hall in Surrey), and generally asking lots of questions and making observations. There's subterfuge, there's a dramatic confrontation, there's a carriage chase. The novel, like the other Enola Holmes books, is narrated by Enola (with a frame narrated by Sherlock, the first which summarizes the first six books of the series, so you can jump in, the second which explains the aftermath of the case), with Sherlock describing his part of the investigation to her. It's an Enola Holmes book, so she does most of the heavy lifting in the investigation, and some of the things that she discovers are things Sherlock probably wouldn't have considered because he's a man. (Let's just say, none of the cases published by the Literary Agent turn on how a woman deals with menstruation.) Sherlock and Enola have a warm and very funny relationship; he admits he didn't know her (she's twenty years younger than he is), but over the course of the first six books, and his efforts to find her therein, he'd become quite fond of her. Even if she is fifteen, is very headstrong, and has a big nose. (Enola's nose gets mentioned a lot.) I thought it was quite delightful. The characterization of Sherlock rings true to the Sacred Writings. You don't need to have read the first six books in the series to enjoy this. If you've only seen the Netflix movies, this works capably as a sequel to them. Wizard Popes? Okay. I'm in! And only a $1.99 on Amazon.
I listened to half an hour of "A Game of Thrones" which was the Prologue and some of Bran I. I liked the Prologue with Will climbing the tree and then getting killed. Not sure how I'll go with all this universe. I like the weird shit but not all the politicking and political intrigue. It's a universe I like reading about but maybe not actually reading.
Vulcan's Glory. Because it was the first TrekLit mention of "Number One" being a genetically engineered Illyrian. I will note that much of the first chapter seemed like a combination of "Author Tract" and "Writer on Board," on the merits of walking barefoot on sand. That's not to say that I'm not guilty of a bit of "Author Tract" myself, with my novel-in-progress and my "Organ Princess" short stories being rather obviously biased in favor of real pipes in general, and tracker action in particular, and against the primitive electronic substitutes of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s in general, and "Laurens Hammond's Noisome Little Noisemaker" in particular. But at least there, it's plot-relevant: the protagonist is, after all, a child prodigy organist who first fell in love with the instrument (and had her very first lessons at age 3) on something that's very nearly a copy of the Harvard Flentrop. I'll note that some things are in harmony with Spock's World, and The Vulcan Academy Murders, although other things (like vast amounts of non-native flora requiring, by Vulcan standards, massively wasteful irrigation). And I'll also note that T'Pring was already two-timing him with Stonn, years before "The Cage." Which is, in itself, rather inconsistent (albeit not fatally so) with SNW.
Sould Cage by Tetsuya Honda. I'd enjoyed the previous one (The Silent Dead - otherwise known as Strawberry Night) and this looks to be good too.
I enjoyed it. Finished it off in a couple of days. Confession: I've never read the The Maltese Falcon, just seen the movie. But our downtown library just reopened so I picked up a copy of the original novel this morning.
Somehow it seems it would be more appropriate to want to read The Maltese Falcon but never actually get your hands on it...
This is one of the extremely few cases where watching the movie is basically reading the book. They just turned the book into a script.
Sort of like Jack Warner very deliberately making the movie version of 1776 as exactly like the stage version as possible?
Hail, Hail, Euphoria! by Roy Blount, Jr. A book-length analysis of DUCK SOUP, the classic Marx Bros. movie.
Ah, OK. An unusual use of rolleyes, but I guess there's no actual problem here. Thank you for the explanation.
Just finished The Maid of Ballymacool by Jennifer Deibel. Next up, The Sound of Light by Sarah Sundin and The Nature of a Lady by Roseanna M. White.