What I have been reading
May. 22nd, 2019 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scripsiYay, I’m actually doing a reading post on a Wednesday. Of course it isn't only for a week, but on the other hand, I’m busy sewing, so I don’t read much at the moment.
Richard Vanderbeets: George Sanders, An Exhausted Life. Feeling Memoirs of a Professional Cad was, most of all, an attempt to not actually showing the reader who George Sanders really was, I dug out an actual biography. I enjoyed it; he certainly had an interesting life, if not, a very happy one, but the sense of someone being fiercely private about his inner life, remained. And, of course, MiPC ends on a positive note with Sander happily married. Sadly his marriage ended only a few years later when his wife died of cancer, the same year as his mother and brother died as well. Paired with some unsuccessful economic decisions as well as his own physical and psychological decline, his choice to commit suicide in 1972 wasn’t so strange. Still very sad.
Jonathan Kellerman: The Wedding Guest. I always say I’m not going to read any more Kellerman, and then I always do. Truth is that I find his writing style enjoyable, and even if the conclusions rarely satisfy me, he is quite good at setting up stories. This one was pretty average.
L. M. Montgomery: The Story Girl. Montgomery is pretty much always charming, but this book wasn’t particularly engaging. Two brother goes to live with relatives while their father works abroad, and not much happens. The Story Girl is one of their cousins who has the gift to tell a story, so the narrative is interspersed with her stories. The problem is that they aren’t very engaging. It is noted that she has the ability to make a dull written text exciting when she retells it- the problem is that we only have the written text. I understand why this book is never listed as anyone’s favourite.
Elizabeth Peters i>Crocodile on the Sandbank. I’ve been recommended the Amelia Peabody-books for about 20 years, so I guess it was time to finally pick one up. Amelia is a Victorian well-to-do spinster who goes to Egypt, picking up a companion with a complicated past, and gets embroiled in a mummy-mystery. I found it a fun read and I may read more, but I don’t feel any urge to jump to the next book. Amelia as a type feels very familiar, and the plot wasn’t that complicated- I figured out the twist before Amelia even came to Egypt.
Dot Hutchison: The Vanishing Season. I’ve read the previous three books in this series about a group of FBI-agents, and enjoyed them, even if the plots are on the more outrageous side of believable. In particular, I have enjoyed the descriptions of friendship, and how we get to follow the victims and see how they deal and survive their trauma. This book, however, feels more like the author wanted one more ebook because she has fallen in love with her characters and don’t want to let go. An 8-year-old girl disappears, and what first seems like a coincidence- she is the spitting image of the sister of one of the agents, who was kidnapped years ago, it soon turns out to not be a mystery at all.
The problem with this book isn’t so much the mystery or the characters, but the pacing. The search for the girl is engaging, but it's interspersed with long sequences about the main character's inner life. Which isn’t uninteresting per se, it's just that I don’t you sit down and deal with your own traumas (unrelated to the mystery) when you are busy finding an abducted child. Especially as it’s stressed repeatedly that this character is hyper-focused and forgets to sleep and eat when she does that. But she has time to deal with a several-year-old breakup… It made the narrative choppy, and as less than half the book was actually about the abduction, the conclusion gets very rushed and happens much too easily.
Richard Vanderbeets: George Sanders, An Exhausted Life. Feeling Memoirs of a Professional Cad was, most of all, an attempt to not actually showing the reader who George Sanders really was, I dug out an actual biography. I enjoyed it; he certainly had an interesting life, if not, a very happy one, but the sense of someone being fiercely private about his inner life, remained. And, of course, MiPC ends on a positive note with Sander happily married. Sadly his marriage ended only a few years later when his wife died of cancer, the same year as his mother and brother died as well. Paired with some unsuccessful economic decisions as well as his own physical and psychological decline, his choice to commit suicide in 1972 wasn’t so strange. Still very sad.
Jonathan Kellerman: The Wedding Guest. I always say I’m not going to read any more Kellerman, and then I always do. Truth is that I find his writing style enjoyable, and even if the conclusions rarely satisfy me, he is quite good at setting up stories. This one was pretty average.
L. M. Montgomery: The Story Girl. Montgomery is pretty much always charming, but this book wasn’t particularly engaging. Two brother goes to live with relatives while their father works abroad, and not much happens. The Story Girl is one of their cousins who has the gift to tell a story, so the narrative is interspersed with her stories. The problem is that they aren’t very engaging. It is noted that she has the ability to make a dull written text exciting when she retells it- the problem is that we only have the written text. I understand why this book is never listed as anyone’s favourite.
Elizabeth Peters i>Crocodile on the Sandbank. I’ve been recommended the Amelia Peabody-books for about 20 years, so I guess it was time to finally pick one up. Amelia is a Victorian well-to-do spinster who goes to Egypt, picking up a companion with a complicated past, and gets embroiled in a mummy-mystery. I found it a fun read and I may read more, but I don’t feel any urge to jump to the next book. Amelia as a type feels very familiar, and the plot wasn’t that complicated- I figured out the twist before Amelia even came to Egypt.
Dot Hutchison: The Vanishing Season. I’ve read the previous three books in this series about a group of FBI-agents, and enjoyed them, even if the plots are on the more outrageous side of believable. In particular, I have enjoyed the descriptions of friendship, and how we get to follow the victims and see how they deal and survive their trauma. This book, however, feels more like the author wanted one more ebook because she has fallen in love with her characters and don’t want to let go. An 8-year-old girl disappears, and what first seems like a coincidence- she is the spitting image of the sister of one of the agents, who was kidnapped years ago, it soon turns out to not be a mystery at all.
The problem with this book isn’t so much the mystery or the characters, but the pacing. The search for the girl is engaging, but it's interspersed with long sequences about the main character's inner life. Which isn’t uninteresting per se, it's just that I don’t you sit down and deal with your own traumas (unrelated to the mystery) when you are busy finding an abducted child. Especially as it’s stressed repeatedly that this character is hyper-focused and forgets to sleep and eat when she does that. But she has time to deal with a several-year-old breakup… It made the narrative choppy, and as less than half the book was actually about the abduction, the conclusion gets very rushed and happens much too easily.
