cyphomandra | Entries tagged with stephen king

I have not updated here much recently as events took over - my city went back into lockdown on the 17th August, after one Delta strain COVID-19 community case, a fact which involved a lot of international & local commentary about over-reacting. Numbers obviously then increased, and eventually & slowly, decreased. We eventually hit single figures for daily cases - and then COVID-19 got into the homeless population, people with low levels of vaccination and little reason to trust any governmental organisations, and we lost control. Inevitable, but still hard.

On the date we went into lockdown less than 20% of the population were fully vaccinated, and about 1/3rd had had one dose. We’re now coming out of lockdown and moving towards a living with COVID-19 model, averaging about 160 cases per day. COVID-19 is moving downwards and throughout the country, popping up now in places that have never had cases, but now 82% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated (no vaccines yet for under 12s here) and 91% have had at least one dose. This is good but rates are much lower in certain areas and in certain typically disadvantages populations, especially Māori (running at about 62% double vax’d, and with younger average populations that mean more people aren’t yet eligible). Vaccine mandates are now in effect for a number of jobs, and as the numbers unvaccinated get smaller, the protests and dialogue get more bitter and more violent.

(on the bathos rather than pathos front, my local FB group had a massive schism as one of the admins is an essential oils marketer who deleted any and all mentions of COVID-19 and/or vaccination that weren’t about how terrible the vaccine was)

Anyway. I’ve been working and home-schooling, and reading - and even writing - but I haven’t been posting. Here is November (so far):

Just finished:
( King, Merriman, Durst, Francis, Harper, Mejia )

Still reading:

The Heart Principle, Helen Hoang. Her latest, this has Anna, a performance violinist stuck in a musical block, a loveless relationship with a guy who only wants her because she makes his life so much easier, and the expectations of her family, who never see her for herself. When the terrible boyfriend decides he wants an open relationship for a bit she rebels by joining a dating site for a one night stand, and meets Quan, best friend of Michael from The Kiss Quotient. He’s struggling to trust his body after cancer surgery, and also not looking for anything long-term - however, that’s what they both get. It’s a sincere, heart-felt book, about female autistics who mask until they’ve lost sight of their own selves, about the pressure on family caregivers and the pressure from family; Quan is a little too perfect and easy-going, but Anna’s fantastic.

Planetside, Michael Mammay. I can’t remember where or why I picked this up but I am on chapter 2 and it’s deeply irritating old-school military sf with a really annoying lead character. I might give it another couple of chapters but will probably dump it.

Up next:

At school each term there’s a book club from Scholastic, and I normally let the kids pick out books up to $20. The last one we got, my son stared wistfully at a boxed set of 8 volumes of the Amulet graphic novel series, which was definitely more than $20, and I said that given that I was a totally terrible example at resisting book temptation he could have it if he didn’t have anything else for the year. Naturally then we went into lockdown and he finally got it last week, several months later, and is now wallowing in it, and I want to read them too.

Standouts this month were Stephen King's Joyland and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, both of which were fantastic and very welcome after the previous month's dry spell.

The Bride Test, Helen Hoang
The Dry, Jane Harper
Joyland, Stephen King
The Heronsbrook Gymkhana, Catherine Harris
Moonlight Sonata, Eileen Merriman
Enquiry, Dick Francis
Brothers in Blood, David Stuart Davies
The Rum Day of the Vanishing Pony, Mary Treadgold
The Punishment She Deserves, Elizabeth George
A Duke by Default, A Princess in Theory, Alyssa Cole
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Cutie and the Beast, The Druid Next Door, Bad Boy Bard, EJ Russell
Their Finest, Lissa Evans
A Scandal in Battersea, Mercedes Lackey

( More under here. )

Is it Bedtime Yet?
Things I wish I’d Known
Tell the Wind and Fire
The Outsider
Mounting Danger (reviewed earlier)
Mounting Evidence (reviewed earlier)
This is Where it Ends

Is It Bedtime Yet? Collection of essays on parenting, most of which have appeared in The Spinoff, edited by Emily Writes. I have read most of these before (and also know some of the authors). Things I Wish I’d Known is also parenting essays, put out by the Mumsnet UK parenting website. Both cover similar territory - the shock of parenting, its highs and lows - but Bedtime is more focussed on covering diverse experiences (having a chronically ill child, same sex conception, a piece by a father etc) and Things is better written, as it aimed more to approach writers who were parents. I enjoyed both while not being particularly impressed. I think I prefer parenting in longform (either bloggers or books - Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages is probably my favourite parenting book).

Sarah Rees Brennan, Tell the Wind and Fire. Fantasy YA version of Tale of Two Cities, dedicated to all those who fell in love with Sydney Carton at the age of 14, which yes, me, pretty much. In a version of New York split into Light and Dark, Lucie, a young girl born in the Dark but brought into the Light, is dating Ethan, so T(in of a powerful light family, when the two of them encounter Ethan’s doppelganger, Carwyn, whose very existence means that Ethan’s family must have used forbidden Dark magic. Revolution ensues.

I like the bits dealing with Lucie navigating the shift from being an unproblematic angelic child emblem of salvation (the Bright Thread in the Dark) to an adult woman who has autonomy and relationships. I was unconvinced by much of the rest, sadly. The Light/Dark stuff feels far too generic YA dystopia and all too arbitrary, compared with the French Revolution, and her Sydney Carton is also generic snarky badboy, not anywhere near dissolute nor self-destructive enough.

Stephen King, The Outsider - police detective Ralph Anderson arrests Terry Maitland, popular baseball coach, for the horrific rape & murder of a boy. Anderson sets out to break Maitland’s alibi, armed with DNA evidence and eyewitness, but discovers to his discomfort that similar evidence exists for Maitland’s alibi. Eventually his investigation brings him into contact with Holly Gibney, from King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, as the two of them track down the titular Outsider.

There are a lot of good bits in here - the lead up to the final confrontation is a masterpiece of tension, and there’s an earlier plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all - and Holly is a great character who deserves more books. But the ultimate reveal is not that strong, and I agree with another reviewer that King’s pop culture references need some updating. Better than Doctor Sleep (which I really didn’t like), not as good as Finders Keepers.

This Is Where It Ends, Marieke Nijkamp. US school shooting, four viewpoints, covers just under an hour. Tries too hard and simplifies too much.

I am attempting to catch up on these by the end of the year...

A whole lot more graphic novels, as I bought some for my niece's birthday but (naturally) had to read them first.

Sharon Hale & Dean Hale (illustrator Nathan Hale), Rapunzel's Revenge. Rapunzel escapes Mother Gothel's tower and finds a steampunky-Western outside world that is failing due to Gothel's actions. She teams up with Jack (the Giant-Killer) in order to fight evil and restore balance. This didn't really grab me but I am a very hard sell on Western settings that are not actually Westerns. I also wasn't wild on the Rapunzel-Jack romance.

Victoria Jamieson, Roller Girl. Astrid and her best friend Nicole do everything together - until Astrid signs up for a roller derby summer camp (with minimal experience) and Nicole goes to ballet camp with Astrid's enemy. Excellent, good on friendship issues and acquiring practical skills, and great people.

Vera Brosgol, Be Prepared. Not the Jeremy Irons song from the Lion King that my daughter is currently fascinated by. Graphic novel memoir in which Vera goes to a summer camp for Russian speakers, which is not quite what she expected. Entertaining and well-observed, and I like the monochrome art.

Molly Ostertag, The Witch Boy. Girls in Aster's family grow up to be witches; men grow up to be shapeshifters. But Aster hasn't shifted yet, and he's fascinated by witch magic. This was fine and the characters are sweet, but it was lacking something as an actual story.

Eleanor Davis, The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook. Super-smart Julian Calendar discovers two secret science nerds, Ben and Greta, at his new school; they team up and fight crime. I liked this and it's fun, but I would have preferred one of the other two as a viewpoint character.

Mary Treadgold, The Weather Boy. Dutch boy goes to stay with his cousins in England; there's an obnoxious neighbourhood busybody accompanying him, his father is out at sea, and the main character (possibly Jan?) makes friends with a personification of the weather.

C.S. Pacat & Johanna the Mad, Fence (v1-4). Nicholas is the illegitimate son of a fencing coach and struggles to train without resources; at his first tournament he is easily beaten by the prodigious Seiji Katayama and vows to beat him. This means he somehow ends up on scholarship to an exclusive fencing school (with a surprisingly tiny fencing team) and, of course, rooming with Seiji. I like the idea of this and I like CS Pacat's writing, but there were one too many lurches in plot logic for me and also, remarkably little actually happening. Still. It's appealing, and I will read the next volume.

Alan Sisman, John Le Carré: the biography. Fascinating counterpoint to Le Carré's own memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, which I read earlier this year; fills in the gaps, looks at the facts behind the stories, and attempts to grapple with Le Carré's impressively monstrous father, who casts a long shadow over everything. Lengthy but a smooth read, and Le Carré is one of those people whose career does not seem to ossify as they age (I'm thinking of Doris Lessing's memoirs, which were similar in nature).

Mark Siegel & Alexis Siegel, Five Worlds book 1: The Sand Warrior. Easily my favourite of all the graphic novels this month. A sand dance who struggles to control her powers teams up with a professional athlete and a slum kid (who have their own secrets) to save a gorgeously detailed world. Fascinating and rich, and I really like the colouring. Book 2 is out and book 3 is out next May; I'm presuming there are five in total but am not sure.

Stephen King, Misery. This was

rachelmanija's fault, as she re-read it and then I picked up my copy just to check something (a process I know is always doomed) and re-read the whole thing. Fabulous. I always forget just how compelling the Misery book within the story is - it's the thing that I think the film glossed over.

Mary Stewart, Airs Above the Ground. Vanessa is having tea with a friend of her mother's who mentions seeing Vanessa's husband Lewis in newsreel footage of a circus fire in Austria; but Lewis told Vanessa he was on business in Stockholm. Vanessa seizes the opportunity to escort the woman's teenage son to Austria (where he was going) and investigate. It's fun, it's fast, the tense bits are genuinely tense (racing a rickety funicular railway train up to where someone is caught on the tracks) and there are amazing and heart-warming horse bits with Lipizzaners.

André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name. Read after I'd seen the film. Wonderful writing and very good, as the film is, on the emotions and distinction between late teenage and early adulthood; however, the book frames it as Elio looking back, and also goes on into the future, and that weakened it for me somewhat. Some of the supporting characters are also more well-developed, but then it doesn't leave me with the Psychedelic Furs soundtrack of the movie.

E.M. Channon, Expelled from St Madern's and Her Second Chance. EM Channon wrote schoolgirl books (The Honour of the House is one of my favourites, dealing with loyalty to family versus loyalty to school, and characters who have hidden depths beneath unappealing exteriors). In the first, a schoolgirl is (eventually) expelled for her understandable but regrettable attempts to ruin the school. The second, the sequel, has the expelled schoolgirl, now an adult, returning as a teacher and solving a mystery. Enjoyable. These are contemporary reprints and I need to track down some of her detective stories.

Rather than keep getting further behind I will post all this behind a cut: this is all of January except for four books by Robin Stevens that I loved and which will get their own entry. Someday.

Sarah Dressen, Dreamland
Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee, Raven Stratagem
Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun (x2)
Sherry Thomas, Not Quite a Husband
Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy
Stephen King, Riding the Bullet
KJ Charles, Wanted, a Gentleman
Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Naomi Alderman, The Power
Megan Abbot, You Will Know Me
Elin Gregory, The Eleventh Hour
Emma Newman, Between Two Thorns (the Split Worlds, book 1)

( Books read, January. )

Over a month's worth.

Finished:

Tana French, The Trespasser. I liked this, although still not as much as The Secret Place. It follows Antoinette Conway from that book, investigating what appears to be an open and shut case of murder of a young woman and dealing with the fact that the rest of the squad apparently dislike her to the point of sabotage. It does not have a moment when Antoinette says, "This was the moment when I had the chance to do something different, but instead I stuffed everything up," (or similar) and it has a happyish ending, and there are lots of bits I liked about it (the resolution of the storyline with her father), but the case itself didn't grab me on this one.

Dick Francis, Comeback. Solidly middle-tier Francis in which a diplomat between posts finds himself investigating sabotage at a veterinary practice. The main character spent time in the town as a child and has his own memories of people/places, but because his name is different and he is now an adult there is an element of working undercover, which I liked, and there’s a vivid and startling image when the sabotage turns to murder, but the rest of this is fairly forgettable (the love interest is appealing as a character but the romance works even less well than usual).

A Notable Woman: the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited Simon Garfield. Mentioned elsewhere. This was great. I put heaps of little bookmarks in when reading, but had no time to go back through it; basically, though, an excellent example of illustrating the general through the particularly, but also an excellent example of a particular experience - that of a single woman - that is all too often overlooked. You do get a sense of her crystallising in her 40s; the journals are shorter, her attitudes less flexible, and I do think about this as I'm in the same decade. I think it's common but not inevitable; Doris Lessing's memoirs don't do this for one, although I'm not keen to emulate her in many other respects.

Matthew Reilly, The Four Legendary Kingdoms. Latest in the series that started with Seven Ancient Wonders and is counting down, this one has Jack West Jr kidnapped to participate in the deadly games of a secret underworld kingdom that will serve the dual purposes of signalling to extraterrestrial intelligences that Earth's existence should continue and also granting power to one of the secret kingdoms that rule the world. Also, Scarecrow (from Reilly's other series) shows up as a rival competitor. I am not remotely in these for anything other than the ride, and on that level they work fine. I particularly like all the little diagrams of the ridiculously over-engineered challenges. If you are going to read any of Reilly's books I would pick this series or Hovercar Racer, although I really should read his first two as well.

Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call, or The Distinguished Thing. 1930s set murder mystery with East End (London) theatre backdrop; I really liked the worldbuilding and the characters, who are vivid and complex and interact with each other in interesting and unexpected ways, but then it fell apart at the end. This, I think, is largely because the murderer themselves is not so well characterised, and so the denouement falters.

[redacted for Yuletide] 2 books.

And then I discovered how to load ebooks from the library's extensive digital catalogue onto my Kobo *and* had to spend a lot of time sitting in a darkened room with it.

JL Merrow, Played! – actor hiding out in Shamwell before taking up the finance job his father favours entangles himself with local dyslexic repairman, who he gets to coach as Bottom in the local theatre group’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s hard to go wrong with this set up.

JL Merrow, Out! Closeted workaholic quits his job and offers to take in teenage daughter when ex-wife is having trouble coping, and gets entangled with a charity worker who is not going to pretend not to be gay for anyone. This is a lot slighter and after I finished it I kept wondering if I’d forgotten to read the end.

Courtney Milan, Trade Me. Tina Chen is a poor student who, after an argument, swaps lives with Blake Reynolds, the handsome billionaire who just happens to be in one of her classes. I read this for Tina, really, because she's a great character who actually has a family and friends and a context, but I didn't have much time for Blake and the denouement with his dad and the product launch felt horribly cringe-inducing.

Stephen King, Blockade Billy. Novella length piece about baseball, pretty much all voice and imagery, but it stuck with me.

Kate Wilhelm, Storyteller: writing lessons and more from 27 years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop. Part history/memoir, part teaching guide. Bits of this were more helpful than others (there's some repetition as well), and it's also very much an original Clarion book (I went to Clarion West) in talking about the Clarion experience itself. Worthwhile.

KA Mitchell, Ready or Knot books 1 (Put a Ring on It) and 2 (Risk Everything on It). Marriage-themed collection about 4 gay friends. Book 1 has the up-and-coming Broadway director Theo and his introverted Korean IT boyfriend dealing with the fallout after Theo’s massively public all-singing, all-dancing, Times Square proposal goes viral, book 2 is closeted former child star Jax starts a relationship with recently separated Oz, who parents two foster children with intermittent involvement from his scatty (male) ex, and does not want any more drama or lack of commitment. I do like that KA Mitchell has a lot of non-white protagonists (Oz is black and his ex Latino), and I do actually like the characters, but these are pretty slight. Everyone is super successful and rich, and there’s a lot of skimming over things – in book 1 both characters go off and have relationship epiphanies off-stage (at different times), then come back and narrate them to their partner, which successfully dulls the impact. Book 3 will deal with the last two friends, who have an on-again, off-again thing going, which is not my favourite trope but if the library has it I suspect I'll read it anyway.

In progress:

[Redacted for Yuletide]

Elin Gregory, Eleventh Hour. Historical m/m. I got about one chapter in and got distracted by something, will go back.

Lyn Gala, Mountain Prey. Contemporary small town m/m with a lead who is out on forest patrol when a handsome stranger seeking revenge on a criminal bad guy captures him and ties him up a lot, which is great because Stunt (the lead) really likes being tied up. I think this is just not working for me but I'm not sure why, given some of the stuff I've happily put up with previously.

Kate Sherwood, Dark Horse. M/M contemporary romance with the most glacial slow build ever - I think I was about 300 pages in before anyone had sex (and not within what I presume is the end-game relationship) *but* this is mostly because the lead, Dan, is grieving the loss of his long-term partner and also because he does have a job - training horses to compete in eventing - and there's a lot of horse in here, too. I do think it could have done with an edit, but it's doing quite a bit that I don't usually see in m/m (other details redacted for spoilers) and it's worth reading.

Up next:

I have been eyeing up my unread manga pile wistfully, but realistically All Yuletide All the Time.

Probably about a month's worth.

Just finished:

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests. Things did indeed go wrong - it turned into Lesbian Noir, with a side of court drama and class issues, but although it was still very well written it lost me quite a bit in the process - it's a tenuous thing, maintaining sympathy for characters in these circumstnces. Part of the problem is that the viewpoint character isn't at the very centre of the story - this does make for some interesting tensions but it shuts down options for action. I also had the same problem with this as I did with Waters'Affinity; moving into the novel's endgame, two options for resolution are presented, one of which opens up the story and the other shuts it down. As the pages tick by it becomes apparent that there is only space left for the latter option. Waters does pull a grace note out at the end that makes me like this better than Affinity, but it's still mostly shutting down. I haven't read The Little Friend yet but possibly the reason I've enjoyed The Night Watch most is because its structure means the ending isn't actually there at the end to bother me.

Mercedes Lackey, Wizard of London. Lackey seems a bit unclear whose story she's telling here. We start off with Sarah, the psychically gifted orphan with an African Gray parrot companion, being sent from her parents' incredibly tolerant mission in Africa to London for training, and then it's all about Nan, the Cockney girl she befriends who is also a psychic warrior and gets one of the Queen's Raven's from the Tower for her companion, and then it jumps between Nan and Isabelle, the teacher who runs the school the two girls are at, and juggles a psychic threat to the school with an Elemental magician Isabelle used to be in love. Most of the Elementals series have a fairy-tale basis, as well, but this didn't really - bits of A Little Princess and The Snow Queen, perhaps, but nothing more. Oh, and Puck has a significant guest role. It wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't particularly good. However. I have just picked up A Study in Sable, which has the same characters plus Sherlock Holmes, and I'm fascinated to see what she does with it - her not-quite Peter Wimsey is endearing.

Jane Duncan, My Friends from Cairnton, and My Friend My Father. Arrgh. I finished the latter in the work lunchroom and then had to avoid eye contact with everyone as I was crying. Cairnton is lighter - it goes back to her time in Cairnton, and then forward to St Jago, and basically ends up with one of those nightmarish dinner parties to which an impeccably decorous married couple, the longstanding mistress of the husband and the drunk platonic companion of the wife have all been accidentally invited. My Father goes back more, into early childhood, and has some great sections on the process of realisation children go through, that click in the mind as they work out how to count, or to tell the time, and then this carries on into other realisations. There's a particularly neat piece about realising for the first time that everyone else exists at the centre of their own universe (something quite a few adults have yet to realise), there's the relationship between Janet and her father changing and deepening over the years, there's the war again - and then the end. I think I need a small strategic pause, not least because I have half a shelf of pending reads, but she's such a great writer that I just want to keep going.

Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor and Park. The romance in this worked much better than that in either of the other two of hers I've read, possibly because I am a total sucker for a couple bonding over sharing issues of Alan Moore's Watchmen. I'm just a little bit younger than these characters (I read Watchmen in the collected trade) and the references really worked for me. As did the story. It's a very delicate book, neatly constructed, and I liked it a lot.

Stephen King, End of Watch. More sobbing at the end. It's good; not as good as Finders' Keepers, and I felt King ducked out a bit on really pushing the villain here, but it still ticks along and I still cared a lot. Nice use of social media and ereaders. I do wish King would do more historicals, because his research is always so solid.

Not entirely:

Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels. Turn of the century (20th) New York, an odd assortment of characters interact in the darker parts of the city. A nice hook where a night soil guy finds a baby and takes it home with him, which is why I picked it up, but then it becomes yet another book about People with Secrets, about which they will allude frequently without elaborating until the inevitable revelation at the end. I skimmed most of the middle. Nice writing, some good images, but I didn't really connect with it.

In progress:

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning. Arrgh again, but for different reasons. I want to love this book - it is doing so many interesting things! The prose style, which is 18th century with universal personal trackers generating the (apparently) omniscient point of view, the unreliable narrator, the post-Scarcity future semi-utopia setting, the toying with gender (the narrator assigns gendered pronouns according to what they think will make things easier for their imagined Reader, who is, um, definitely not us), the use of languages, the fact that I love the author's blog and want her to do well. Etc etc etc. And yet I'm 307 pages in and it's still a bit of a slog.

It's a weirdly static book. Reading it makes me feel as though I'm contemplating a series of paintings while a very educated guide with their own peculiar agenda describes them to me (everyone in this book apparently picks out every piece of clothing and accessory to convey a particular message, which is not "this was the nearest thing on my floor and it's comfortable"). It's an enjoyable experience, but not what I want from a novel. There's very little actual witnessed action and when it does happen, it's not convincing - Cherryh's Cyteen is equally full of people who sit around talking incessantly, but when she does action, I'm there. Arrgh. It is also two days overdue from the library and on hold, so I have to finish it tonight.

Louise Doughty, Apple Tree Yard. Woman has affair with the wrong man. Framing sequence has everyone in court, for what I am not yet sure. Not really my thing, but I am finding it compelling enough to keep going.

Up next:

The next Mercedes Lackey, plus a bunch of thrillers I have picked up, and Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit to which I am looking forward.

$cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)$

11.22.63. I re-read Firestarter when writing my Yuletide story (flimsy connection involving secret government research a la MK ULTRA, and just as well Banana Fish is still boxed or else I would have re-read that as well), and it reminded me of how good King's writing can be. So I picked this up from the library on Sunday and read it that night; by the end of it, I was pacing around, or as much as I could while reading a massive paperback (there are some definite advantages to ebooks, and one of them is the fact that when I get really into a story, I need to move), and I was not going to stop before finishing. It's not his best, but I liked it significantly more than Under the Dome, which was the last new novel of his I read since I stalled out on Lisey's Story, and it's set me off on a King reading kick.

Jake Epping is a divorced English teacher who is friends with the owner of a local deli with startlingly cheap hamburgers. The guy, Al, calls him over one night; when Jake arrives, Al looks far older than when Jake saw him the day before, is dying of lung cancer – and shows him a portal in the back room of the deli (now slated for imminent destruction and replacement by a chain store) that will take him back to 1958. Al has been able to make small changes in the past and return to the present, checking on the changed narrative, but every time he re-enters the portal it resets, and he's back in that first day in 1958 again. And he has just spent four years in the past, trying – and failing, ultimately, due to his health – to save JFK from being assassinated. Jake agrees to take on the job, with the caveat that he wants to prevent a murder first, to prove it can be done – and, conveniently, one of his students has given him the background he needs.

( 11.22.63. )
( Duma Key. )
( It. Re-read. )

Anyway. I have not read Rage, From a Buick 8, Cell, Blockade Billy, Everything's Eventual, or the last sixty pages of Lisey's story (stalled completely, not sure why), but apart from that I am now up-to-date with the King oeuvre. Until The Wind through the Keyhole comes out, at least.

Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars.

Four novellas. King is excellent at this length, and this is another solid collection of them; not as good as Different Seasons, possibly better than Four Past Midnight, and as I am still not back in my house and can’t check I am a bit unsure about how it would stack up next to Hearts in Atlantis (where I liked the title novella best, but don’t have a strong memory of the others). These four novellas are all about retribution, revenge; justified or not, and enacted by the characters or the narrative.

( Full Dark, No Stars. )

( Kenneth Lillington, Giving up the Ghost. )

$cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)$

These are all the rest of the books I've read for the first time this year, leaving me with five re-reads and however many books in progress. I'm still a bit ambivalent about where to put graphic novels that aren't manga, but I'm reading so few of them at the moment that they're ending up here.

( Edie Campbell, The fate of the artist. )

( Ellen Wittlinger, Sandpiper. )

( Hilary McKay, Indigo’s Star. )

( Diana Wynne Jones, Enchanted Glass. )

( Stephen King, Under the dome. )