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38) "Doomsday Book" Connie Willis: I'm super confused, because I could swear I remember writing this book up already, but I can't find a post that includes it. I read this way back in the first few days of May, on a long weekend when I had a bad cold. This book is set in the same universe as "To Say Nothing Of The Dog", the Cambridge Time Travel series, but they are very different. Basic premise - time travel is used by historians to study history close up. A young woman is going back to a period when everyone was dying of black plague, and she gets vaccinated against that, but she gets a fever immediately upon arriving and then doesn't know how to get back to her drop site for retrieval. Meanwhile, back in the future, the tech who sent her falls ill with flu, so isn't available to do the retrieval, and he turns out to be Patient Zero of an epidemic. She wrote this long before COVID, and so many of her predictions are completely accurate as to how people react: Patient Zero is of Pakistani descent, so there's immediately a backlash against foreigners, particularly Indian, because of basic British racist confusion. Everyone is quarentined where they are standing. The governmental organization is MUCH better than it was in real life, unfortunately. I feel like governmental emergency planners should read books like this in order to get ideas. And everyone is running around being confusing (Connie Willis is really good at that) and talking about how confusion is one of the hallmarks of getting a fever, so me, as I was coming down sick, I was like, "am I confused because this book is confusing or because I'm getting a fever?" Oh, and I loved how she had the whole bell-ringing team from the U.S. who are comical characters through most of the book and then become inspirational at the end.
39) "Bard" Keith Taylor: The first of a series, but mostly this book (and if I recall correctly, as this is a re-read, the whole series) has an episodic feel to it. Felimid the Bard is bouncing around the island which will become England later on, having adventures that involve some outright magic of different sorts. One of the ways he figures out how to defeat one enemy is to take note of the spells the guy can work and figure out the rules that guy's magic works by, which I think is a great detail - every culture and even every person can be using a magic that works by different rules.
40) "Guards! Guards!" Terry Pratchett: This is our first introduction to Sam Vimes, and I think the point at which I love him most. He gets increasingly more powerful and by "Snuff" I'm bored because he's practically a demi-god, but at first he feels really like an every man, who drinks because he is smart enough to see how unjust the world is. And he doesn't really have a past that we ever get to hear about, oddly. Nobby says Vimes drinks because he was "brung low by a woman," and it is implied that the woman is actually Ankh-Morpork, as he's going on at one point about how the city is a woman (and later about how Sybil is a city, with room enough for everyone in her heart, and I love that bracket so much.) Anyway, Sybil really kicks ass in this one.
41) "Eric" Terry Pratchett: I feel like he had to find a way to get Rincewind back from the dungeon dimention after the events of "Sourcery." You can't just leave him stranded after saving the world. And he gets to mentor a youngster. In how to run away.
42) "Moving Pictures" Terry Pratchett: I think I liked this one better on the re-read than initially, not sure why. This is Gaspode The Wonder Dog's first entrance, another favorite character.
43) "The Nine Tailors" Dorothy L. Sayer: Another Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. Interestingly, a ton of stuff about bell-ringing and influenza which was pertinent to the end of "Doomsday Book" was also of influence in this one. Lord Peter is passing through a small town at Christmas and has car trouble, stays with the local vicar and helps with their effort to break a bell-ringing record, because one of their team has the flu. And by the end he has somehow gained a sort of ward - a rich woman decides to leave her money to her niece and have Wimsey be the adminstrator of the inheritance. I can't wait to see if this girl ends up showing up in any later stories. Nine Tailors is the ring for when a man dies, as it happens I learned at the end of "Doomsday Book."
44) "Pattern Recognition" (Blue Ant 1) William Gibson: Hubertus Bigend is a mysterious Belgian billionaire who runs this hype agency called Blue Ant, and during the series he grabs people and demands they do mysterious things for him. I decided to read them all at once. In this one the main character has an aversion to certain advertising logos, including the old Micheline Man, which her enemy uses as a way to freak her out. Somehow her reaction reminded me so much of Ray and the Marshmallow Man from Ghost Busters. She's seeking the maker of some movie clips which have been dropped online and have a cult following.
45) "Spook Country" (Blue Ant 2) William Gibson: This time Bigend's grabbed specialist is a former rock star who makes art photographs, and he's working at cross-purposes to some agents, some of whom may be working for governments. She's seeking the purpose of some geo-location tracking a certain person is doing.
46) "The Long List Anthology" A collection of short stories that were contenders for the Hugo award. Varied in likeability, but most were good.
47) "Zero History" (Blue Ant 3) William Gibson: The junky who was one of the POV characters in "Spook Country" has been sent to an expensive rehab by Bigend, and is said to have 'zero history' so the opponents have trouble locating anything about him, and his weird way of thinking is useful to Bigend. The former rock star also makes her return, being asked to locate the maker of some very expensive clothes that are being anti-marketed - IE, if you are one of the select few who are allowed to buy them you will pay whatever is asked. The end is... so surreal that I wondered if it really meant the junky had died.
48) "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" P.D. James: Cordelia Gray inherites a detective agency.
49) "The Fourth Bear" (Nursery Crimes 2) Jasper Fforde: Another re-read that I think I found even better than the first time. Jack Spratt takes on The Gingerbread Man.
50) "Reaper Man" Terry Pratchett: Eor describes this as two short stories told in parallel which really have nothing to do with each other. Death has to leave his post due to the Auditors deciding he's unsuited to his job, and as one of the consequences of this Windle Poons doesn't die when he was supposed to, but has a rather excellent after-life as a zombie, for a while, and gets to do a lot he'd never considered doing as a wizard, including listen to other people's knowledge and opinions. And saving the city. Meanwhile Death hires on as a farm hand with an elderly woman. It's a lovely book.
51) "The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo" Zen Cho: Another re-read. Jade is smart and straightforward and quite delightful.
52) "For Us, The Living" Robert Heinlein: This is supposedly his first book, unpublished until long after his death, and it's kind of rough, but I found it interesting to read his ideas about how to create a better society. I want to go into this a little, and might do a seperate post on it.
53) "We Could Be Heroes" Mike Chen, audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller: Was there a sentence in this book which could not have been written better? Yet somehow I finished it. I guess I'm a sucker for memory loss stories and the whole "what makes a personality?" question. But yeah. This guy needed a beta who would have held him to task about some of this. At the point where the protagonists steal a food truck in order to lead the police to the real villain, and they get to eat deep fried food, but the hot oil in the deep fryer is NOT spilling all over the place... Hm.
I just finally finished the Asimov's with "Gravesend" on the cover, and am now just starting the "Slightly Spooky" edition.
Currently listening to "Lincoln In The Bardo", George Saunders: They got a cast of I think 165 to read it, which puts it more on a different level than an audiobook in my mind. People think a lot of this book. So far to me it's... okay, but it feels like a New York Times Best Seller; scattered, pointless and gruesome. We'll see.
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I liked it on the whole, but I felt like the ending went on forever. Although also I was trying to finish the book so I could get on a plane.
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It was an overdue library book!
From: (Anonymous)
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But I love it when you write-
I miss you more than I know
Your writing reminds me.
Kinda bittersweet
Lta
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From: (Anonymous)
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Not General Delivery
Lta
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From: (Anonymous)
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About updating your cell\s
Did you keep your number?
If so -I leave voice mail
lta
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Grammer
Lta:)
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