I decided to participate in the Hugo awards again this year and have begun reading. Here is a list of nominees for anyone who is interested.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/2/18291920/2019-hugo-award-nominations-science-fiction-fantasy-books

Because the Hugo is a fan-based award there are lots of fan-oriented categories, fun for those involved in fandom but not of interest to me. (The other major award in SF&F is the Nebula, which is voted by professional writers only.) I plan to vote for novel, novella, novelette, short story, and the two "related" categories of New Author (the Campbell) and YA (the Lodestar). As there are six nominees in every category, and as a series generally has 3 or more novels, voting for the best series would mean reading 18 additional books, though perhaps fewer. If I absolutely despised a first book in a series, I would not feel honor bound to continue with the others to be able to judge fairly. I'm saving that for last, and will vote in that category only if I get enough time to reach it.

So far I've read three of the Best Novel nominees and am working on two of the YA novels. I have a favorite among the three I've finished so far, but don't feel so strongly about it as I did last year's Best Novel. The only decision I've made so far is the Best New Author.

I'm reading two books at once. I've just started "Educated" by Tara Westover. I must say, it is one of the most depressing true memoirs I've ever read, thus far. It reminds me somewhat of "The Glass Castle." I guess I will stick with it, though. Not to be a spoiler, but it is thus far the girlhood of a Western "Survivalist", who is cruel to his large family and stockpiling weapons and canned goods for the "End Times." How she escapes this bleak lifestyle is the meat of the story. Thus far, the children are encouraged to drop out of school and have to read on their own what scraps of booklets they can find.

I have just finished Even the Dead by Benjamin Black (John Banville) from his series about a pathologist, set in Ireland in the 50s and full of angst.

This afternoon, to rest after three days of pulling weeds and grass out of the flower garden, I started His Majesty's Hope, another Maggie Hope mystery by Susan Elia Macneal set in London during WWII. From being Winston Churchill's secretary, Maggie has become a spy catching rotten Nazis. Good stories, though.

The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear. I'm enjoying it very much. As with all the Maisie Dobbs books , it feels like I'm back with an old friend .

Possibly saw this book mentioned here. Very good, written for grades 5 to 9 but satisfying for adults. Not written down for kids. A Long Walk to Water by Park, only 133 pages. Refugees fleeing Sudan in the 80’s. Good one to pick up at the library.

Silent Scream by Karen Harper. Ugh, this book is so poorly written! Do I really care how these two story lines work out? I'll keep trying...

Donna

Finished reading At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier. The first part of the novel, which takes place in Black Swamp, Ohio, is depressing. Then things pick up a little as one of the characters moves west. Still the characters feel remote, like you never really connect with them, the story jumps from one of them to another, but ultimately, it is about trees. Both apple and sequioa trees. Learning about them, especially about sequioa trees, was what made the book worth reading.

In fact, halfway through the book, I did a little online research about sequioas, and then began finding them in our landscape, which I didn't even know we had. One of those instances in which the story was not memorable, but still the book has added beauty to my life.

Donna.....life's too short to slog through bad books !

As I mentioned, I scrapped Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children at the half way point. After a positive discussion at book club I decided to finish it after all and I just did. They were right - it was just plain fun. I enjoyed this very much. I guess I'll never listen to myself again, I don't know a thing. Also, how would this be categorized? Not sci-fi exactly. Magical realism? Fantasy? These sub-genres are unclear to me.

The Inn at Lake Divine by Elinor Lipman was a very enjoyable read. Set in Vermont where 'our heroine' spends Summers with her Jewish parents. The Inn of the title only welcomes customers of the Gentile persuasion and the daughter is determined to overturn their mindset. All told with humour and no religious/racist hatred . . . something of a novelty these days.

Bon, you are right about slogging through bad books! Though I did finish Silent Scream. It’s part of a series, but I don’t think I will read more. :)

Donna

I finished Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and I liked it very much. The story is told by a young man looking back at his early teenage years right after WWII when his parents went abroad and left him and his sister with a family friend. Spoiler-free synopsis from Amazon:

In 1945, just after World War II, Nathaniel and his sister Rachel stay behind in London when their
parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious
figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they
grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his
eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of
unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way,
determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel
and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And
what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of
silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A
dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know
and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts,
recollection, and imagination--that he narrates.

I thought it was well-written and certainly a bit of a page turner as I was eager to figure out what was going on. We'll be discussing it at my book group later this week and I'm eager to hear what everyone thought of it as it was my pick.

Today I started One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence, which was described as "Ready Player One meets Stranger Things" and I'm completely hooked by the story already. The main character is a teenage boy who has just been diagnosed with Leukemia. He's a math prodigy who plays Dungeons and Dragons and odd things start happening when he begins chemo. I'm not sure what is about to happen next, or where this is going, but I can't wait to read more.

Having finished my slog through "Silent Scream" I have now turned to Stephen King, an author who really knows his craft! :) Elevation is a collection of short stories. I'm still on the first one, in which a man is mysteriously losing weight, though his body looks the same. What will happen when/if he gets to zero? It's a good story and has nothing gory like some of his earlier novels.

Donna

I had to set aside "Educated" by Tara Westover. Now I am engrossed in "After Emily: Two Remarkable Women & the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet" by Julie Dobrow (2018). Reclusive New England poet, Emily Dickinson wrote her poems on scraps of paper which were hidden for many years. It was through a family friend that they got published and copied. This well-researched history tells how Mabel Todd and her daughter, Millicent Bingham, gathered all the fragments together against many odds and salvaged Dickinson's writings for all time. If anyone here read and enjoyed Polly Longworth's previous work on the Todd-Dickinson connection ("Austin & Mabel") you will like this one even more.

Well, it turns out that Elevation was the only story in the book, but it was good! I really enjoyed it.

Donna

What do you mean Donna? The short stories were all connected?

I'm reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I'm going as slow as I can because it is so good. (that trick never works)

Skibby, when I looked at the table of contents I thought it was several short stories, but it was just several chapters in one short story. :)

Donna

Thanks. I like his writing - I don't know why I don't read more of it. I have some in my TBR shelves.....

I'm reading Past Tense by Lee Child. Jack Reacher is in the town where his father was born, looking for family history. A young couple from Canada is on a mysterious trip to Florida (they say) when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and they find a motel where things seem a little strange. And the motel is near the town where Reacher is.

Donna

I hope Past Tense is good Donna - that's up next for me.

It is so far! I haven't read a Reacher novel in quite a while. This one is kind of spooky and (so far) not much violence, so it's different from the other Reachers I've read.

Donna

I finished Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. The perfect blend of nature, rhythms, art and mystery. What a wonderful book. I'll definitely look for her non-fiction works.

On to Past Tense (Lee Child) and am only on p. 105 but I was hooked (as always) on the first page. This is going to be a good one!

Everyone seems to love Where the Crawdads Sing, so I went to my library site to request it. I would have been No. 388 on the list. I think I'll just wait awhile and hope it turns up on the seven-day shelf.

I've finally finished His Majesty's Hope. I can't remember when it has taken me a week to read a regular-size book, but I have spent several days pulling grass and weeds out of the flower garden plus going home for Easter weekend. I am glad to say I'm finished with the weeding and now need to go to the nursery to replace some perennials that didn't survive. My plan is to get enough flowers that have long lives and multiply to fill up the ground and crowd out the weeds. I'm open to suggestions here (Zone 6).

Now I am ready to begin A Light over London by Julia Kelly tomorrow.

I picked up a reprint of Jessica Mann's The Sticking Place part of a 'Black Dagger Crime' titles.

A thoughtfully well-written book which would fit into Frieda's thread on literary fiction, but for a 'crime' novel it was more about the idea of violence rather than pools of blood, blades and bullets.

A quiet and self-effacing wife has difficulty accepting that her husband, an academic and popular TV 'presenter' might be mixed up in a Nationalistic 'movement' as he has always supported peaceful solutions to problems.

Quiet appropriate reading as this week we have seen the senseless murder of a young woman reporter in Derry N Ireland, by the so-called New IRA. No more than a bunch of thugs who claimed she was in the wrong place while they were shooting the 'enemy' ie the police.

I finally went back and picked up "Educated" by Tara Westover, with the goal of finishing it. I was glad I did although the beginning was so depressing that I was not sure I could get through this memoir. The way the author triumphed over great odds made for an inspiring true story. Westover is now separated from most of her birth family and has made a new life for herself, having achieved several honors and degrees from Universities both English and American. It was a wrenching break from the abuses in her Mormon family, and I wondered how many are unaware that some Americans in the far West actually live like that.

I finished Past Tense by Lee Child - the new Jack Reacher novel. I think this is his best one yet. Tense and twisty; ominous. At one point it was so tense I had to get up and sweep the kitchen floor! (an old family coping mechanism for when things reached a high anxiety point. I must be turning into my mother!) This will be a hard act to follow. I'm leaning toward The Martian by Andy Weir. I've been on a good roll lately.

I also looked into Delia Owens (Crawdads) non-fiction work and have ordered Cry of the Kalahari which she wrote with her husband Mark. Our neighboring town library has her Secrets of the Savanna that I can pick up. That leaves The Eye of the Elephant which I'll try to find if I like the others. Has anyone read these? They are not new.

Skibby,

I read Cry of the Kalahari decades ago, when it was a bestseller. The only thing I remember is that it was good and that they had a very isolated life. Nowadays, this sort of book by researchers are common, but I don't think they were when the book was published.

RIT - thanks for that. I'm looking forward to reading Kalahari more than ever now. This kind of book isn't my typical read, but as I've said I'm loving exploring new kinds of books. I should be getting it before the end of next month. Meanwhile, I skipped The Martian and opted for Plainsong by Kent Haruf. I find his books a delight to read.

Hats off to you for exploring new books .

OT....speaking of "April is the cruelest month..." we had snow this morning.

Egads.

I'm reading The Cartel by Don Winslow, which is the middle part of a trilogy. I read the first one, The Power of the Dog, in a weekend when I was in the back of a car driving to Melbourne and back (1450 km) and couldn't hear the people in the front because of road noise. Luckily it was a terrific read, as is the current one, about the drug industry and gangs in Mexico. I have been surprised to find mistakes I feel should have been found by editors though.

I am listening to The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk in the car with my husband, and this is also a very good 'read'.

However, my solo audiobook, The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley, is a problem. The story is quite interesting, but it is so overwritten and the characters seem like they have come straight from a soap opera. An example (as best I remember it) is ''it took several moments for my brain to compute the discordant sound of the phone jangling' would surely be better as 'it took a few moments for me to realise the noise was my phone ringing'. She never uses a simple word if there is a more complicated one, and many of the metaphors are terrible. That said, I want to know what happens and will finish, but I'm not going to read about the other five sisters!

I've just finished Love for Lydia by H E Bates I think one of his early books from the 1950's. As the title suggests it is all about Lydia, the young lady who comes to live in the only sizable house in a dull leather and shoe manufacturing town in the English Midlands. The young 'hero' only referred to as Mr Richardson, is smitten by her and every few pages I was tempted to say "Grow up young man, before she breaks your heart." The theme is not so much of 'young love' but of various tragedies that befall the young people who lives seemed to be taken up with attending dances at local village halls and looking for Lydia's attention. His descriptions of the countryside and the changing seasons are quite lyrical.

You, in the US, might be more familiar with H E Bates if you saw the popular TV series The Darling Buds of May back in the '90's about the happy-go-lucky Larkin family and in which Catherine Zeta Jones looked sexy in riding breeches . . . I wonder what happened to her?!

The Darling Buds of May

Vee, Catherine Z-J was in a film version of the musical Chicago several years ago, also looking sexy playing the bad girl. Renee Zellweger played the pretty blond good girl.

I finished Past Tense this morning. Skibby, I thought it was very different from the other Reacher stories I’ve read. I had a pretty good idea of what the “game” was going to be about halfway through.

Donna

https://www.listchallenges.com/catherine-zeta-jones-movies-full-list

Returned finished library books, picked up some requests that had come in, and found Where the Crawdads Sing on the seven-day shelf. I had gone online to request it, but since I was going to be No. 388 in line I didn't bother. This was a good break. I've heard a lot of good things about it.

I finished One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence which started out better than it finished, but was still quite a good story, IMO. (Warning: I'm a huge sucker for any story that includes teenagers playing Dungeons and Dragons as I did in my misspent youth, so bear that in mind if you try it.) If you liked Ready Player One, I would recommend this. There's a sequel, Limited Wish, coming out at the end of May and I'll definitely be reading it.

I followed that up with Wen Spencer's The Black Wolves of Boston, which was wonderful. Full of werewolves, witches, angel-spawn and vampires, it tells the story of the hunt for a missing werewolf prince and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Skibby, I loved The Martian and would definitely recommend it.

I read three books quickly this weekend. Two of P.D. James and tried a Maggie Hope series "His Majesty's Hope" which Carolyn mentioned. Macneal has certainly done her research and I was interested to see what privations were being experienced in Germany as we also struggled with similar ones in Britain.

Vee, I had to smile at your comment about Catherine Zeta Jones. The girl done well, didn't she! I loved that series. There was a movie done of the book too, which I saw but set in the USA.

I am enjoying Where the Crawdads Sing, with a certain dread gnawing in the back of my mind. I certainly hope I'm wrong.

Just finished up a good read of "A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries" by Thomas Mallon (1984). As the title mentions, it's a collection of various people's diaries, both famous and not. What makes this title slightly different than the typical anthology of diaries is that the author (English faculty at Vassar) has grouped the diaries into thematic categories for different chapters: Prisoners (for example, those are actually in prison (as incarcerated) or who may be imprisoned by their health); Confessors (those writers who are confessing to an unhappy life etc.)...

And Mallon also includes diaries from those who may less well known but still have interesting things to say... This was a perfect read for my end-of-the-semester monkey mind, despite its academic tone. A fairly random pick off the TBR. Go me. :-)

Also just finished a quick read of an autobiography of Sir John Russell, Duke of Bedford (of the family who owns/runs Woburn Abbey, a stately house much frequented by my family growing up since it had a really interesting collection of wild animals running around fairly free on its acreage). Russell has a great wry sense of humor, fully appreciating the lunacy and history of his family and the great house. His father and his grandfather sound like pieces of work though.

It was lovely to read about the Duke's hard efforts to keep and maintain the Abbey. Plus - not many people can take their family history straight back to the 15th century or so. :-}

I went on a coach tour to visit Woburn Abbey not long after it was opened to the public. The Duke was selling items in the souvenir stall and excited people were filming him.

I remember thinking that the place was crammed too much with paintings and so was hard to appreciate in the tour.

I am not comfortable being in a crowd so I didn't buy a souvenir. Just as well as I have too many jostling for space in my display cabinet now. I managed to off load some of my elephant collection on my eldest GD to add to her collection but no one wants dinner settings that have to be hand washed!

I read a short story last night that seemed familiar so I must have read it in another anthology. No matter, I didn't recall all the details. This is a problem with collections but I get ideas of a new author from them and sometimes find a favourite character being involved in a short mystery that wouldn't be enough for a book plot.

Ann, my DH had an aunt who collected elephants. She thought she had over 7,000! When she died everyone in the family took one or two as a remembrance; I'm not sure what happened to the rest of them.

I'm reading Stalker by Faye Kellerman, and enjoying it so far.

Donna

I wonder where she kept all those elephants?

My collection started by accident. A friend wanted to give me a gift and I said that I liked elephant ornaments as I had a couple then.

He started to send me elephants and related items from his travels until I mentioned that I had no more room for them! They varied in size and some were quite expensive so I was a bit embarrassed by his generosity!

I finished Plainsong (Haruf) yesterday. It was just as I had hoped. I loved it. I thought that I had a copy of Evensong, which is a continuation of some of the same characters but a cursory look around hasn't produced it. Available at the Library though, which I'll get soon because it's an older book and the new Library Director is a mad culler. Grab it now before it disappears - just like a flea market. (many classics have met this fate too, much to my chagrin)

Speaking of elephants, I'm trying to track down The Eye of the Elephant by Mark and Delia Owens. An older book that I'll try to get via interlibrary loan.

Ann, I imagine that's how Aunt Vera's collection started, too! Except everybody she knew gave her elephants. : ) Fortunately many of them were figurines that didn't take up too much room. She did have some larger ones, like a coffee table with an elephant pedestal.

Donna

Years ago, I read "Plainsong" and one other by that author and liked both. I agree that it is sad to see older books that are well-written being rapidly culled from modern libraries. Classic films, as well.

I started Where the Crawdads Sing on Sunday afternoon and finished it late last night. Yes, I liked it! I don't see the comparison to Barbara Kingsolver except that there was a good deal of description of marsh nature. It is a good book, and the ending was one of the three endings I anticipated.

I picked up Cry of the Kalahari this afternoon and while I was there snagged Eventide (Haruf). Sorry, I got the title wrong in my comment above. Barely started this but I'm already settled right in. Those McPheron brothers are just the best. This too is not a book to be rushed through. I won't get much reading time in tomorrow with a couple of routine appointments and then the Primo Maggio dinner and lecture. The featured author is Katherine Paterson talking about her book Bread and Roses, Too. I'm hoping that I can get her to sign my book if it's an appropriate thing and providing I dare to ask. (!)

Having read Plainsong, Benediction, and Our Souls at Night, and enjoyed all of them, I guess I'd have to say I'm a Kent Haruf fan. I also see a copy of Eventide across the room in my TBR stack. Better get back to reading!

When I read Our Souls at Night and saw that there were no quotation marks around the dialog I thought I was in for a confusing read. Not so. I had no trouble discerning what was being said. In Eventide I was in a chapter or two before I even noticed - oh yeah, no quotes. Interesting how quickly you can adapt. I just checked the Library catalog and see that they have Benediction so I'm not done with this series yet. Excellent!

Just finished The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri. Started out well - four friends agree to meet in the same bar on the same day every year...and one of them does not show. Where is he? But I didn't like the book and don't recommend it, although I know that many would enjoy it. Heads up - cruelty to animals and a child, silly teenage-level gratuitous sex...no thanks.

So I'm onto Lynne Truss's The Lunar Cats, which is silly and ridiculous and thoroughly enjoyable. (Truss wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves, however this book is fiction). You won't look at cats the same way...