WWTBAM Bored

I enjoyed the previous thread, so I'll start a new one for the current season.





The sample quiz I've included should tell you all you need to know about the book. Of course the author may be enough as well.

I'm more than 30 books behind on my to-be-read list, but I've finally made it to Go Set a Watchman. I haven't yet reached the part that made it controversial. --Bob

Just started Eleanor vs. Ike, an alternative history in which Roosevelt is on Truman's 1952 ticket and he dies during the campaign and she takes over. Or something.

Gallows Thief by Bernard Cornwell. An murder mystery set in London shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars

I enjoyed it.

OK, this makes more sense than whatever I posted earlier, about Eleanor vs. Ike.

Stevenson dies at the convention and Eleanor Roosevelt is nominated: because they can't agree on anyone else, because she was an Adlai supporter, and because she can get the anti-McCarthy message out even if she loses.

Just started:



Lee Child makes it looks so easy.

"The Naturalist" by Darrin Lunde. About TR's collecting of specimens for museums and so forth.

In my world there are a lot of books and magazine articles about TR's hunting and conservation/outdoor interests and so forth.

"The Naturalist" seems to be a unique take and it is a hard book to put down. Author is a museum collector so looks at him from that angle.

This is the third book in my friend's series:

Book Club A is reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I love this book! I read it almost as soon as this year's reading list was out. I know Our Hero lives in the Pacific Northwest, but everything that happens could easily happen in Navajo country.

Book Club B is reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I got through the first 50 pages or so and turned it back into the Library. Call it what you want, I just couldn't read any more. If the point was to make me flinch about what people do to each other in this world, I got it.

Reading - All the Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Listening (via Audible) - 36 Books That Changed the World from The Great Courses. Just before that, completed The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi in two days, then got an autographed hardcopy at a local independent bookstore where he made a tour appearance and read the opening chapter from his next book (sequel to Lock In).

Just finished Pat Conroy's posthumously-published A Lowcountry Heart, which is mostly blog entries he wrote over the final few years of his life. There is also the eulogy and similar items.

I can't so much recommend Eleanor vs Ike unless you are a big Eleanor fan. The alternative history aspect of it is good, but it eventually ends up being just a little too fawning, even for me. The author is respectful of Stevenson and Eisenhower; that's not the problem. I just remember finishing it and putting it in the pile for my folks with a warning note.

it's also a quick read, so there's that.

audible: 4 3 2 1
kindle: Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things
email: Middlemarch