I keep meaning to read Gothic/19th c. mystery novelists Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu but I look at the size of their novels and think “not today.”
It’s not that I can’t handle long novels but more like I am in a losing battle against compulsion to borrow every book I’ve been meaning to read if I see it available on a library shelf.
I suppose if I did this with periodicals I’d be called a magpie.
Holy crap! I’ll have to show that to my kid. she’s been re-reading HP in anticipation of the Cursed Child (which we’re getting today, finally).
Catching up here…
Jonathan Norrell and Mr Strange is one of the rare books which I finished reading and immediately started reading it all over again. It was just that good, I had to go through it again and see how everything had unfolded the way it did.
Nearly finished with Paul Kriwaczek’s “Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization,” which I have found to be completely fascinating. May need to follow up with more like it soon, but next in line will be the second book in Greg Egan’s Orthogonal sci-fi series, The Eternal Flame. I’ve always loved Egan’s narrative voice, and his anthropomorphic treatment of an alien narrative riding on a harder speculative science backbone has been fun.
Last night I started Joy in the Morning, a Jeeves novel by P.G. Wodehouse.
How was the TV adaptation, btw? Love the book; haven’t seen the movie.
Is book 3 out yet?
It is! I picked up books two and three (The Arrows of Time) together at the same time after finishing the The Clockwork Rocket.
It’s really good. I want to find someone to discuss it with, because there is a ridiculously good parallel between how HPMOR’s Voldemort came to power and Trump’s candidacy, and I can’t talk about it without spoiling the big reveal at the end of the book. And it can’t be intentional, because it was finished in early 2015.
Do you mean that Nightmare Abbey is a spoof of Northanger Abbey? The spirit of Jane Austen compels me to set the record straight!
No. Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey is more like those “I wrote this as a gag. My friends are in this, hee hee!” stories. It’s a send-up of the Romantic movement in literature and transcendental philosophical systems, and misanthropy. English Lit readers who like the Smiths but sometimes think Morrissey is a parody of himself at times and who on occasion gives up on people in general would like Nightmare Abbey a lot.
Sounds perfect for me, then…thanks! 
Same here, so I can’t tell you; I’m not much of a TV watcher, and rarely even get to movies.
I liked it, but it lacked a lot of the book, inevitably. Footnotes are tricky on TV.
I’ll read them eventually but I’ve determined that Stephen Baxter is the kiss of death to dynamic tension as a co-author. I read the first two in this series and they had interesting ideas and an utterly limp plot. I thought this was weird as I’d read both Pratchett and Baxter on their own and that wasn’t an issue. Then I read the Medusa Chronicle by Alastair Reynolds and Baxter aaaaaand… same problem. It is like Baxter sucks all of the plot tension out of books in order to work with another author.
I keep meaning to read The Long Mars but haven’t felt like bothering.
Just finished Gladstone’s “Four Roads Cross,” which was terribly excellent, just like all the others in this series.
Also had “Waypoint Kangeroo” from the library, which was fun but pap:
Working on:
Supernova
and
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief
I like seeing how the ideas work out - but gosh, is it boring to get there.
I gave up on The Long Utopia after a few chapters. Just didn’t feel as interesting. Guess I’m done with the series!
That’s how I felt slogging through the second book.
Go read Max Gladstone.
It’s been covered multiple times on BB (I checked!) but Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is possibly one of the best short stories I’ve ever read:
They’re making it into that movie The Arrival that I think comes out this year?
I am also reading this
