Lily Fairbairn
Half-elven
Apr 16, 3:25pm
Views: 1788
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It's the occasional reading thread!
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Good morning from a dark and slightly damp Texas. It must be April! Fortunately the clouds parted just enough last week we were able to see the solar eclipse. I listened to The Victoria Vanishes, book six in Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May series. In this outing, the Peculiar Crimes Unit is once again under threat of closure, even though they're chasing a killer who stalks older women in pubs. Narrator Tim Goodman does a great job with the different voices, especially that of the elderly Bryant. I also listened to another contemporary mystery, The Chalk Pit, by Elly Griffiths. I'd read the first two books in the series and was put off by several aspects of the story and the writing, but thought I'd give this one a try. Since this is (I think) eleventh, I was prepared for there to have been a leap in time, but I was disappointed that the issues that annoyed me to begin with are still present. (In fact, Griffiths' use of the present tense is one of them.) Even though I like the historical/archaeological aspects of the series---and enjoyed the references to The Hobbit in this installment---I'm done. I'm now listening to a non-fiction book, The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to JonBenet Ramsey, the FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Sheds Light on the Mysteries That Won't Go Away, by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. Douglas is an FBI veteran who brings his experience to these "classic" cases. So far he's considered the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, and the Lindbergh kidnapping as he moves chronologically to the present day. Since I recently read Anatomy of Evil, a Barker and Llewellyn mystery that deals fictionally with the Ripper case, I was gratified to see that author Will Thomas really did his research. On paper I read another non-fiction book, The Museum Makers, by Rachel Morris. Morris runs a company that designs and builds museums, so I was expecting to hear about her work and the history of museums. However, she spends more time with her own intriguing family history, which she uses as an example of how we view the past, than with museums per se. A couple of ghastly copy-editing errors cast a shadow over an otherwise interesting book. I'm now catching up with a couple of magazines, Archaeology and Trends and Traditions, the new incarnation of what used to be the Journal of Colonial Williamsburg. Both of these magazines, and Smithsonian as well (I'm expecting a new issue any day now) are now mostly short articles and photos rather than long, scholarly pieces such as those I remember from years ago. At least they still have decent copy-editors! So what have you been reading?
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow....
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