September is Read a New Book Month.
Or as Argh calls it, any month, any day, any year . . . .
Although the lure of comfort reads is great, the pleasure of finding a great new book is better. As for me, my plan is to start writing a new book soon. That’ll be a thrill, let me tell you.
What new book did you read that was wonderful?
Kindle says I’m 44% through Murder with Peacocks. That’s my newest book. I keep getting interrupted…
I just read my first Sherryl Woods, Hot Property, and quite enjoyed it! Easy, happy mystery. Got the second already!
Oh! What are you looking to write next??
I have many choices (g).
I’m really leaning toward finishing Paradise Park and Monday Street, but I think I’d be better off with the Alice book.
Liz Danger, please! (Though any of the others would be great too. 😊)
I would be happy with any (or all…vbg) of these!
I would LOVE to read an Alice book! I have read and re-read the WIP excerpt so many times. Rooting for more Alice.
P.S. I’m having disappearing and re-appearing columns. The number of comments listed under a column also changes.
I know, I know, I know, we’re trying to fix it. I’m so sorry. Something got into the blog somehow and is screwing things up.
Ooh, how appropriate. I’m starting work on a new book this month. Just finished the pre-writing, time to start writing the actual draft of LAID OUT IN LAVENDER (3rd book in the garlic farm mysteries).
As to reading new books this month, I’ve got the Donna Andrews audiobook to see if I enjoy the narrator, and then I’ll probably get the latest Toby Daye (Seanan McGuire) book. Although they almost count as re-reading, in terms of comfort, since they’re part of long-running series.
BTW, is anyone else having weird things happen here with comments and posts? I need to do a hard-refresh (control+refresh) to get new posts and new comments. May just be my computer, but the Good Book Thursday post has fewer comments than usual, and this morning, after I’d seen the Friday post on my phone, my laptop didn’t show either the Friday or Saturday posts until I hard-refreshed, so I’m wondering if other people aren’t getting posts and updated comments.
It all seems to be working as usual on my iPad. I always have to hit refresh a couple of times to be sure it’s updated the comments. Would something like emptying your browser’s cache help?
Nope because I did that and it’s still showing up as “no comments” on today’s post and only 3 on yesterday’s. Argh.
YES. I thought it was just my computer. I’ll get Mollie on it.
Thanks. Glad I wasn’t imagining it or having a computer meltdown. FWIW, if you want to pass more symptoms on to Mollie — I go to the main page, and it shows 8 comments (same as last visit here), and I hard-refresh on the main page, and it shows something like 14 comments. Then I hit the link to the 14 comments, and it shows 8 comments again, and I have to hard-refresh again. Very weird. I think I also noticed that the time stamps on the Good Book THurs. post were all over the place, not in chronological order. But I may be wrong about that. Oh, and this is on a desktop PC. It worked better on Android mobile last night, haven’t tried it today.
Good book Thursday did not show up at all on mine. And I was wondering about Cherry Saturday then I went to recent comments, saw that there were some, clicked on one, THEN Cherry Saturday appeared. I only went to recent comments to see if someone had said something about why they were not going to appear this week.
Crap. I was hoping it was just my computer having a glitch.
I’ve told Mollie, but I think she’s on vacation this week. Maybe.
I couldn’t even find the Cherry Saturday post this morning, and I posted it. ARGH.
I didn’t have trouble today, but I did have a whole post earlier in the week that never posted. I assumed that I had deleted it instead of posting, but maybe not.
Same here, I didn’t get Cherry Saturday until this morning on my iPad, even though I checked here last evening.
I’m also having problems and have had to find other creative ways to get into your blog, especially when I see all the contributors names listed on the right and only one comment shows on the screen. I thought it was just me. Just another glitch. I’m sure it will be straightened out.
OK, I’ll admit that I am technology challenged and I had to google what button on the keyboard is refresh. So I tried Control and F5, held them down and Voila, success.
Yes! I thought Argh was running way behind on usual posts, and then had to go through an old post and… I don’t know, but I finally found all the recent posts that I’d missed out on.
I read the second Murderbot, orphans of raspar by Bujold and October
Man by Aaronovitch. So an excellent week.
Orphans of Raspay (SP), a new Penric novel by Bujold.
LMB always reinvests me in her 5 gods world building. References to her work are outweighing, word for word, in my spectrum family chats,
Simpsons, Star wars, and Hamlet (any dubious WS maybe-quote safety word attribution to H to prevent ever imminent screen preference).
The Red Car, by Marcy Dermansky, baffles me. I read it b/c it has become some reviewers’ shorthand word for “elegant and densely meaningful”. See also, unedited solid first draft?
I reread the PTSD life sketched in Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters to check if it still seems hopeful. So far, so good.
Laura Kinsale still holds the benchmark for variety of treatments of PTSD. She clearly read Jane Eyre at a young age, and she seems to have graduated to Gaudy Night by Sayers soon after, before she developed her own various treatments of Rochestering the Modern Woman and Janing the Modern Man.
I won an ARC of Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore and by the time I finally picked up my copy, it was on the shelves at a bookstore. I liked the setting and the characters quite a bit, but I am so tired of the “I must choose between love and societal expectations” trope that it really pulled me out of the flow.
I enjoyed the the background about the suffrage movement in England and how the Industrial Revolution changed life for the landowning class, but the characters seemed pretty slow to notice the social results of those changes.
Word.
Along with my other reading, I’m reading “How to Greet the Queen and other questions of modern etiquette”. I bought it at The Tower of London gift shop 3 years ago and never did finish it. It’s time. I need a bit of polish.
I’m still enjoying ‘How to Belong with a Billionaire’; nearly finished, and need to find something equally absorbing to follow, to distract me from my upset at a formerly close friend who emailed me yesterday to say she’s decided I’m completely selfish and self-absorbed, and wholly inadequate as a friend, so she’s ending our friendship. She’s been pushing me away for several years, but I did hope our relationship would bounce back.
And then this afternoon I discovered my sister-in-law, niece and her partner are all now angry no-deal Brexiters, from being Remain voters. Altogether, I’m feeling a bit out on a limb.
Oh, hell.
I’ve had the inexplicable friend drop thing, and I always figure it’s more about them than about me. But then I would. Still, if you’ve asked why and they’re just slinging generalities, there’s something going on there that’s probably more about them than you.
The shift to No-Deal is even more upsetting. I figure if the referendum goes up again, Remain would win, but now . . .
At least your Parliament is fighting back. That’s more than I can say for our lousy Senate.
Oh, that sounds terrible — the friend, as well as the no-dealers. I had a friend kinda’ go off the deep end like that on me years ago, telling me I was suicidal (when I was the happiest I’d been in all the years she’d known me, confirmed by a number of my other friends!) and if I wouldn’t get help, she needed to dump me as a friend. It took me the longest time to really believe that it was all about her and things she was going through, so she was reflecting her issues on me, and it really wasn’t about anything I’d done.
Thanks, both of you. I’m still processing – I don’t want to ignore anything I ought to be doing differently; but it does feel more like her own drama, especially since she’s rebuffed me many times, but hasn’t let me know about any actual problem she had with me before this email arrived out of the blue.
As for my relatives and Brexit: they’re outraged that Parliament is ‘obstructing the will of the people’ – straight out of the Brexiteers’ propaganda handbook.
That’s horrible about your friend, Jane. But I agree with the others that it’s likely more about her. I had a friend write me a letter years ago, saying I had let her down when she really needed me – it was a real blow at the time because I took it to heart, and the truth was I WAS self-centred, so she wasn’t entirely wrong. But looking back on it now, she never told me she needed me – never even hinted at anything being wrong. I think she just expected me to know. People need to learn to use their words.
As for the Brexit thing, that’s awful too. I have the nicest neighbours who feed my cat and water my garden when I’m away, and we talk about gardening and pets. But they commented once that they’d vote for Trump. What????? So I wouldn’t trust them politically – but I would trust them to be completely honest and reliable in every other sphere.
Thanks, Lian. And I agree about politics – it depends where people get their stories from, and which of them chime with the people around them.
I had a friend torpedo what I thought was one of the closest friendships I had over absolutely nothing. It eventually became clear that a) she was projecting her issues onto me and b) she wasn’t as good a friend as I thought (apparently she’d been talking trash about me behind my back for months and trying to undermine other friendships)–but it was still devastating.
Years later, it can still cause a twinge, but I have come around to realizing it was her loss.
From what I’ve seen, it will definitely be your ex-friend’s loss too. xxx
The worst breakup I ever had wasn’t romantic, it was with someone that I’d once thought I’d be sharing a nursing home with. Things sort of changed slowly, and I didn’t realise how much I’d been walking on eggshells around her for years or how much her dramas were affecting my life until I started asking myself what advice I would be giving if someone else was describing this friendship to me. Then three weeks after the birth of my second son while I was still recovering from surgery and dealing with a newborn and a toddler, she emailed me to tell me how she’d been holding back on telling me exactly how I was failing her as a friend but she’d had enough (the trigger seemed to be that I’d refused to share gossip about close mutual friends). I emailed her back, and that was the first time I’d ever really told her that I was angry about something she’d done, and she told me that was the end of it. Ten years of hyper-overanalysis, including with professional help, trying to work out what I did wrong or should have done differently, and I wouldn’t go back to that friendship if you paid me.
Something similar happened to me.
I was long term friends (around 20 years) with someone, and I was always the one giving: I would go to his place significantly more than he would come to mine, I would help him with more than he would ever help me, I was far more supportive of him than he was of me.
I was then in a mutually supportive friendship with another male and I realised what I wasn’t getting from my first friendship – so I called him on it. He got angry, turned it back on me, and we’ve had no contact since.
I didn’t grieve too much as I think I was already walking away – but it didn’t ocur to me until much later that he was a narcissist and I had been enabling it. Not the best of realisations.
I now have a much better idea about friendship and how it needs to be an even exchange, sometimes it’s about them, sometimes it’s about me, but most of the time it’s about both. If I don’t get that, then I don’t invest.
Jane, I’ve found that when people let you down, books are your best friends. Except those dry textbooks and maybe manuals that lead you astray when looking for one thing and drift over to find the answer on another page.
This isn’t a new book, but to note that Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘The Calculating Stars’ has won both the 2019 Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Couldn’t happen to a nicer book. I’m so glad to see it being recognised. And it’s on Amazon Australia for 99 cents.
Just furnished Gaudy Night. It was wonderful. Loved it.
It’s my favourite of the Wimsey stories. The one with the most depth.
Also the most length. I remember preferring Busman’s Honeymoon because of the more manageable length, but maybe I just wanted the happily ever after.
I probably my favourite, too, but it is more a Harriet story than Wimsey, I’ve always felt. And I just read A Busman’s Holiday, which for some reason I have never read before (although I thought I’d read them all) and I really loved the characterization of their marriage in that one.
Okay, I just had another comment disappear. I replied to Lian’s comment about Gaudy Night and now it is nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t earth shattering, but I imagine it wasn’t dumped because I used to prefer Busman’s Honeymoon to Gaudy Night.
And now, an hour and a half later, it reappears. Yes, I AM confused.
Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton was one of the best books I have read this year. The story feels perfectly situated in its setting – I spent a lot of time in Brisbane in the 90s and reading this book felt like going home. I was given a copy last week and couldn’t put it down.
Cursed by Karol Ruth Silverstein. A biting coming of age booth with a disability no one care about. If Mrs. Maisel had written Wonder, this would be that book.
Finished Wicked Fox in the Gumiho series by Kat Cho, and I loved it. Great characters, tight writing and fascinating story.