aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
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The first international history of railroads and railroad infrastructure told through stunningly reproduced maps.
Since …
Making an effort to get a few pages read every week.
Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband; a palatial house in the heart …
Been sitting on my TBR long enough that the publisher has actually retitled the book as The Lagos Wife.
Ronald T. Turner is prepared for anything. And the zombies are prepared for him.
Content warning Spoils a punch-line that's not good enough to really worry about spoiling but nevertheless here we are
Small bite-sized that's barely a short story. Ronald Turner has thought through all the zombie scenarios and thinks he prepared for all of them, but they get him anyway. All to set up a a bit about zombies without teeth that's not really funny.
In a quiet residential area in London, a couple is discovered bound and imprisoned in …
Jack Caffery, brilliant detective whose past includes his brother disappearing and likely killed by a pedophile next door, is put on a case where a child is missing and increasingly likely to be dead after a pedophile ties a family up and does unspeakable things to the family. In fact, there may even be overlap between the current case and the long ago case of his brother.
The story is intense and fucked up. The families of the child victims are somewhat unlikable, and Hayder writes too many characters to make the reader think they may also be pedophiles. So while it's a well-written police procedural, I am not going to keep reading the series. Child abuse is just too infused into every aspect of the story and I'd rather read something not so depraved.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the …
Here's the premise: Humans explore space, establishing settlements across the galaxy. Something happens, and all the settlements are on their own for hundreds of years. Many devolve to pre-industrial states without connection to other settlements. A revived Earth sends out research missions to all the settlements with a Prime Directive like instruction to observe but not interfere. But then something happens again and all the research missions lose contact with Earth, stranding researchers, who have access to life-extending health technology as well as other machines not available to local settlements.
Nyr is the stranded anthropologist. Lynesse, aka Lyn, is local settlement royalty, but is the 4th, and least important daughter. A corruption starts defeating outlying kingdoms. Royalty doesn't care much because they are outlying. Lynesse sees a bigger danger, and sets off to find the wizard of legend (Nyr) to convince him to help. Isolated and lonely, he agrees.
The …
Here's the premise: Humans explore space, establishing settlements across the galaxy. Something happens, and all the settlements are on their own for hundreds of years. Many devolve to pre-industrial states without connection to other settlements. A revived Earth sends out research missions to all the settlements with a Prime Directive like instruction to observe but not interfere. But then something happens again and all the research missions lose contact with Earth, stranding researchers, who have access to life-extending health technology as well as other machines not available to local settlements.
Nyr is the stranded anthropologist. Lynesse, aka Lyn, is local settlement royalty, but is the 4th, and least important daughter. A corruption starts defeating outlying kingdoms. Royalty doesn't care much because they are outlying. Lynesse sees a bigger danger, and sets off to find the wizard of legend (Nyr) to convince him to help. Isolated and lonely, he agrees.
The story follows them in their journey, alternating points of view between Nyr and Lynesse. To him, it's just technology. To her, it's magic. They struggle to connect, and both struggle to understand if they have a chance to defeat a demon made of stuff that is unknown to both of them.
On the one hand, it's a lovely story of people trying to, and ultimately, coming together. And I mostly relate to it on that level. But also, there's a germ of ick at a dude who uses a vast power difference to be the impressive cool wizard. Tchaikovsky does a pretty good job of threading the needle so that Lynesse is both able to be impressed and also together enough not be be naive about the ancient wizard.
Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless …
Audiobook for my flights to and from DC.
In a quiet residential area in London, a couple is discovered bound and imprisoned in …
Pretty sure this will be the last Jack Caffery I read. Damn well written, but waaaay too graphically twisted for me.
After a near-fatal car accident, a young man asks Kinsey to protect him. When he …
Shortly before I hit the road with 14 hours in the air (each way) to Lisbon, it occurred to me I would need more than one audiobook to cover the flights. By shortly, I mean about 5 minutes before I left for the airport. I vaguely remembered the Alphabet series. I wasn't expecting anything super great, but the story barely met that bar. I should have pulled something that I'd already put on my TBR.
Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California, modeled after Santa Barbara. Bobby Callahan hires her to investigate who tried to kill him months before in what appeared to be a car accident. Hitch is, Callahan has lost most of his memory in the crash. The crime is overly complicated, which is a thing that irritates me when it happens in crime fiction. But what really made me meh about this is that …
Shortly before I hit the road with 14 hours in the air (each way) to Lisbon, it occurred to me I would need more than one audiobook to cover the flights. By shortly, I mean about 5 minutes before I left for the airport. I vaguely remembered the Alphabet series. I wasn't expecting anything super great, but the story barely met that bar. I should have pulled something that I'd already put on my TBR.
Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California, modeled after Santa Barbara. Bobby Callahan hires her to investigate who tried to kill him months before in what appeared to be a car accident. Hitch is, Callahan has lost most of his memory in the crash. The crime is overly complicated, which is a thing that irritates me when it happens in crime fiction. But what really made me meh about this is that the relationship between Kinsey and Bobby is portrayed as deep and meaningful, but there's only about 4 meetings between the two before Callahan is actually knocked off. The characters and their relationships just feel so incredibly forced.
After a near-fatal car accident, a young man asks Kinsey to protect him. When he …
Was pretty sure I would need another audiobook for the trip to Lisbon and back, so I queued up a couple of Sue Grafton Alphabet series books.
Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, DC—triggering an extinction-level global-warming event—Earth’s survivors have started …
The concluding book of the Lady Astronaut series starts off with Elma York finally getting to land on Mars. The 2nd Mars Expedition's mission is to establish a base on Mars for later Earth escapees. Only… of course stuff goes wrong, because space is hard. Prior to landing humans, Earth send a series of unstaffed rockets to Mars that dropped supplies. Only when Elma arrives at the drop site to pick up the supplies, which includes the atmosphere scrubber for the second dome, they find it has crash-landed and everything is a loss. The Martians can replace it by cannibalizing one of the engines of their ship, if everything works out all right. There's politics. Intrigue. Gee whiz exploration of Mars. Relationships & emotion. 60s & 70s style colonization tropes with 2020s sensibility & quality of writing. And if you get the audiobook, Kowal narrates the story herself and she …
The concluding book of the Lady Astronaut series starts off with Elma York finally getting to land on Mars. The 2nd Mars Expedition's mission is to establish a base on Mars for later Earth escapees. Only… of course stuff goes wrong, because space is hard. Prior to landing humans, Earth send a series of unstaffed rockets to Mars that dropped supplies. Only when Elma arrives at the drop site to pick up the supplies, which includes the atmosphere scrubber for the second dome, they find it has crash-landed and everything is a loss. The Martians can replace it by cannibalizing one of the engines of their ship, if everything works out all right. There's politics. Intrigue. Gee whiz exploration of Mars. Relationships & emotion. 60s & 70s style colonization tropes with 2020s sensibility & quality of writing. And if you get the audiobook, Kowal narrates the story herself and she is one of the best audiobook narrators ever. Easily 5 stars.
Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, DC—triggering an extinction-level global-warming event—Earth’s survivors have started …
first audiobook for this trip
In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the …
The Treatment is pretty intense, so I'm going to read Elder Race when the former gets a little too much.
Cop Hater (1956) is the first 87th Precinct police procedural novel by Ed McBain. The …
Three detectives are killed in quick succession in Isola, a fictionalized version of New York City. Fictionalized, according to the author, so he could take liberties with how the cops in New York City actually operate. Full of dames and men who appreciate the swell of a woman's chest and gangs that rumble, cops that harass suspects based on hunches, having a drink or two on the job and a general lack of respect for the Bill of Rights that predated the Warren court. The crime is solved through luck, accumulating evidence (I like this part) and a not very smart impatient criminal. There's a lot of copaganda in it, but the police are not portrayed as being particularly smart.
Discharged from the Barrayan Military Academy, Miles Vorkosigan chances on a jumpship with a rebellious …
Miles Vorkosigan washes out military school and heads to another planetary system to spend time with his grandmother and her family. There he decides to bail out some down & outers using his name and a bit of family money and do some smuggling/inter system trade to recover the money. Things go poorly and the only way through each obstacle is bluffing, and at every step he succeeds but has to face every larger obstacles afterward.
As a sci-fi adventure plot, it's adequate. But Miles "I'm a nice guy using my position to try to get in the pants of the woman who reports to me" vibe really brought me down. At least the character who raped women in the previous book wasn't given a "I was just following orders and feel bad about" pass from the narrative. Which it seemed like it would. There's still some amount of "we …
Miles Vorkosigan washes out military school and heads to another planetary system to spend time with his grandmother and her family. There he decides to bail out some down & outers using his name and a bit of family money and do some smuggling/inter system trade to recover the money. Things go poorly and the only way through each obstacle is bluffing, and at every step he succeeds but has to face every larger obstacles afterward.
As a sci-fi adventure plot, it's adequate. But Miles "I'm a nice guy using my position to try to get in the pants of the woman who reports to me" vibe really brought me down. At least the character who raped women in the previous book wasn't given a "I was just following orders and feel bad about" pass from the narrative. Which it seemed like it would. There's still some amount of "we still have to honor him for the good stuff he did" though.
In his first case as lead investigator with London’s crack murder squad, Detective Jack Caffery …
First in a series, where Jack Caffery is the new detective in the unit and gets a case where 4 bodies of prostitutes are found buried in a shallow grave. Suspicion falls on a few different folks. The author includes a few chapters from the perspective of the criminal in a fairly transparent try at misleading the reader. Once you get to the twist, you'll see it too. Enjoyable for me because the detective work is less movie plot magic wandism and more basic forensics. However, there's a fair amount of sensationalism. And as for the crime itself, many aspects of it seem unlikely and overly intricate to further the sensationalism and plot twists.