Oddmonster lives in a cottage in the forests of Vermont, with her two magical back-talking rabbits, six dogs and a superhero. She's a lot like you, except that she can see light through the holes in her ears.Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
I have totally gotten behind again on my reading.
I’ve done and posted a couple reviews in other places, because I’ve added “disorganized” to my varied list of charms:
#21: Hot Lava by Rob Rosen
#22: Murder Most Frothy by Cleo Coyle
#23: Biggie and the Mangled Mortician by Nancy Bell
#24: Murder Can Wreck Your Reunion by Selma Eichler
#25: The Chocolate Cupid Killings by Joanne Carl
Remember when I used to do book reviews? Like, all the time? Me too. And while that kind of thing is fun, sometimes you get to a point where you’re unable to stop reading long enough to go online and write thinky thoughts about the things you’re reading and then the next time you look up it’s a whole new year, maybe three whole months into a whole new year and WHOA.
AAAAaaaangst and books. Mostly books. I'm about done with the aaaaaaaangst portion.
#97: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty:
My parents’ Ford wagon hit a concrete divider on U.S. 95 outside Biddeford, Maine, in August 1990. They’d driven that stretch of highway for maybe thirty years, on the way to Long Lake. Some guy who used to play baseball with Pop had these cabins by the lake and had named them for his children. Jenny. Al. Tyler. Craig. Bugs. Alice and Sam. We always got Alice for two weeks in August, because it had the best waterfront, with a shallow, sandy beach, and Mom and Pop could watch us while they sat in the green Adirondack chairs.
Synopsis: Dude’s parents die, dude’s sister dies, dude gets on bike, bikes across country assailed by dead things.
It’s more uplifting than you’d think.
# 93: How Right You Are, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse:
She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stern. I’ve never hunted, myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that Aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two plowed fields and a stretch of woodland.
Synopsis Aunt Dahlia recruits Bertie to help her wrangle a Shakespearean tangle of plots, including a Daschund named Poppet, rotten sausages, a fake butler and Uncle Tom’s beloved eighteenth-century cow creamer.
Nothing bad happens to Poppet, in case you’re worried.
Came away with Lenny Bartulin’s Death by the Book, The Dead Detective by William Heffernan and The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe. The first two seem kind of interesting, but the third one I’m dying to start reading like right now. At work. Le sigh.
Also did my proselytizing for the day: I went there with a friend who was having much worse luck than me finding things to read, so I pushed Confessions of a Prairie Bitch into her hands. She was wicked excited, despite not being an LHOP fan.
We shall see.
I am having a really hard time staying at work right now.
#87: Get Garrity by Allan Nixon:
Hurrying down the hall, I’d expected him to be alone–not just because everyone dies along, but because they’d told me he had no servants.
Synopsis: A drunk, homophobic disbarred lawyer just might be the worst P.I. in 1960s L.A.
My review’s up in the new issue of Crime Factory. Enjoy!