Happy almost-Halloween!  I think I’ll kick-off this month’s recap of reading with my one spooky book – Goosebumps: Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes by R. L. Stine.  My book club opted to go fun and nostalgic this month, and each of us picked a Goosebumps book to read.  I was actually never a fan back when I was the target age (although I later read Phantom of the Auditorium…of course) but this was a fun, silly read now.  It’s a basic enough premise of lawn gnomes who come to life, create mischief, and get the twelve-year-old boy protagonist in trouble until he figures out their secret weakness (spoiler: it’s the dog whistle).  I will say, though, I deeply, personally related to the boy’s older sister, who alphabetizes her books by author, and the main character and his best friend really were as obnoxious and annoying as the sister thought they were!  Fine to read, would drive me nuts in life I’m sure.

I finished out a trilogy with The Master Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg, trying to finish the sloooow burn romance of the previous two books.  They did ultimately get together, but there was surprisingly little pay-off for the long build-up.  The couple went from maybe to inevitable with very little fireworks about it.  The magic was good though, and the adventure was enjoyable too. Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (October, 2023)” →

Squeaking in at the end of the month with an update on September’s reading!  Let’s jump right in…

Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister was a very good time-twisty mystery.  Jen watches her teenage son commit murder – and then starts living her life backward, each morning waking up on an earlier day.  I really liked seeing her try to put the pieces together to unravel what had happened, and how to prevent the murder.  A couple twists I saw coming, but others surprised me.

My book club selected How to Take Over the World by Ryan North as our non-fiction read of the month.  It’s basically a pop-science book about the current edges of technology, loosely centered around the idea of pursuing a career as a super villain.  It’s a career strong on secret bases and low-to-nonexistent on actual villainy.  The final section on how to preserve a message for the future (on the order of thousands or millions of years) was probably the most intriguing. Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (September, 2023)” →

My recent reading seems to have been mostly fantasy and biographies – only one of which is typical!

My television watching has influenced my reading a bit lately.  I watched The Crown, which made me want to read a biography of Churchill, so I picked up Gretchen Rubin’s book, 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.  I love her Happiness Project, but I’m sorry to report this concept didn’t work for me.  It’s more or less 40 brief essays on different aspects of Churchill, and since the whole idea is to present conflicting views, she doesn’t contextualize or give relative weight to different ideas enough.  There ended up being a lot of seemingly contradictory things and I didn’t know how to interpret them.  It is vaguely satisfying to have read this, though, after first seeing her mention it in The Happiness Project ten years or so ago.

I also read a biography of Mister Rogers, The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King.  My toddler is very into Mister Rogers at the moment, and I’ve been enjoying watching the show with him.  There were no huge revelations in here (Mister Rogers really was as he seems) but some interesting backstory, especially in how he developed the concept of his TV show and the principles behind it.

Over in the fantasy realm, I read a good duology, Spellbreaker and Spellmaker by Charlie N. Holmberg.  A late Victorian fantasy, it has the very distinctive feel of historical fiction set in that time, with a cool magic system and a good romance. Continue reading “What I’ve Been Reading Lately (June, 2023)” →