AuntiePam

I liked that book too -- especially the man who created the golem. Unusual to have a "bad guy" who's sympathetic and multi-dimensional. Have you read anything by Midori Snyder? The Innamorati is literary with fantasy. She also adds a fantasy element to a western, The Flight of Michael McBride.

King's son Joe Hill is doing excellent work, short stories, a graphic series (Locke & Key), and novels that are just as long as they need to be. We still have King's early work and his short stories. The Reach is my favorite.

Well then I'm really surprised he got out of jail -- and so quickly. Was this due to Cerisola being extra careful -- no more bodies?

He's off my reading list too, after too many disappointments, including 11/22/63 . I remember in the late 70's (?), seeing The Gunslinger as a King title on the flyleaf of Pet Sematary. What is this? Nobody had ever heard of it. I called every bookstore in Seattle until I found one who had the book. It was $50. I had to ask for an advance on my paycheck to buy it. Same with the hardcover of Creepshow -- $35, when $35 would buy a week's groceries. When The Stand came out, I was late for my first day on a new job because I was reading the book on the bus, was almost at the end, could not think of anything else until I knew what happened. Went right past my stop. And It -- I called my favorite bookstore every few days: "Is It in yet?" "Is what in yet?" "It -- the new Stephen King book." :) And then the Bachmans! After it was revealed that Bachman was King (after Thinner), everyone was looking for the four paperbacks. I ended up getting them in a mystery grab bag for $2 from a mail order bookstore (Weinberg books, pre-internet, that was where horror fans got their fix). Giving up on him kinda hurt, after so many years. He was like a member of the family. Now he's the drunk uncle.

I was surprised that Frye made it out of that jail alive. Was it a Mexican jail? He confronted Cerisola at his son's school, and I thought Cerisola lived in the states. Guess not.

I don't like the Dumb Asterisk ads. I get the joke -- Dumb Ass-terisk, but does he have to beat on people? All the fast food burger/taco ads that show people eating the stuff at home or at the office. Because a McDonald's burger & fries is only palatable when it's hot. One of my kids worked at McD's years ago and said the food is tossed if it isn't sold within 15 minutes. So even McDonald's knows it's crappy unless it's right off the grill/out of the fryer. Most other ads bug me only when they're overly-rotated. If you've got the money to pay for ad time, use some of it to make a different ad.

I adore The Oldest Trick in the Book. "Thus endeth the trick!" The newer one with the Great Wall of China is good too. I've liked all the "Did you know?" Geico ads. I had to explain Words Can Hurt to my husband. He thought the guy just fell off his horse.

I'm a bailer -- books, TV, movies. If something ticks me off, it doesn't matter how much time I've invested, I'll bail. But I might cheat and read a review to see how things turned out, so I guess there's a little bit of a completist in me. Dancing With the Stars -- first season, when the competition was so obviously fixed. Jericho - first episode, when a couple of bad guys killed cops and stole their uniforms, which fit them like they were tailored. Under the Dome, third episode, I think, when that stupid guy started the house on fire by burning papers in a trash can which he could just as easily have taken the papers with him. Desperate Housewives, second or third season, when everyone's personalities changed. Any network "drama", when it should really be a daytime soap. I would like to watch all of Supernatural some day. I think I stopped at the fifth season. I don't like it when characters keep returning from the dead, even on a supernatural show. But Sleepy Hollow? I'm so in. The show doesn't take itself seriously yet it doesn't quite wink at the audience either. I love it. It's the only major network show I watch.

Some good time travel (with and without romance): Replay by Ken Grimwood -- I've seen this one on more people's #1 time travel lists than any other. Time and Again and Time After Time by Jack Finney A Shortcut in Time and a Family in Time by Charles Dickinson -- Shortcut is better than Family but both are interesting Green Darkness by Anya Seton -- is it time travel or reincarnation? I can't remember, but I remember loving it about 40 years ago. Not sure how it holds up. Elleander Morning by Jerry Yulsman -- an assassinate Hitler plot, interesting and different Doomsday Book by Connie Willis -- the "now" part of the story isn't that great but the rest is wonderful

sharpie66, you mention pirates. Are you old enough to have read the Angelique series by the husband-wife team Sergeanne Golon? Glorious, romantic bodice-rippers, and at least one of them has Angelique in love with a pirate. I've thought of finding them again, but they probably don't hold up. I don't know if it's a romance sub-genre or not (it should be) -- white women and "savage" Indians on the American frontier. I've only read one -- Hermana Sam -- and a scene where the woman teaches her savage how to kiss -- well, as my Aunt Lola would say, I almost had a runaway.

Since you couldn't get into it (so presumably didn't finish it), let me spoil it for you: (Hope I did that right.) I kid you not.

I thought Hank turned himself in, or whatever it's called when you admit you liked about a shooting. He would do that for Sonja.

The guy driving McKenzie's van seemed way too interested in the conversation with Sonja. Sonja rejecting Marco broke my heart, and his too. He's disappointed in himself and needs someone (besides Galvan) who understands the difficulties of living in his world. I think Sonja's not just upset with Marco and Hank -- she's also upset with herself, because now she knows she can't trust her own judgment. It's a little late in the series for us to see a "good" side of Robles, when he defended that homeless woman.

Hoping it's okay to talk about books we didn't like, and why. Sometimes my reasons are quite silly -- like an author using the word "suddenly". Sometimes I'll dump a book, go back to it a few years later and love it. I, Zombie by Hugh Howey -- I adored Wool, but this one is just an exercise in gross-out. The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Edith Beer. I mention it only because the "Nazi Officer's Wife" part of the title is extremely misleading. You might pick it up thinking "Oh cool, I've always wanted to know what Himmler served at dinner parties." Edith's husband wasn't a ranking officer, he was never anywhere close to the inner circle, he knew she was Jewish and didn't care, and she was never in any danger because of their relationship -- he would have been in just as much trouble as she was if they'd been found out. Plus, their marriage was short and unhappy. Other than that, this is an interesting memoir, with details about the work camps not often found in other books. Black Hills by Dan Simmons -- high hopes, Simmons rarely disappoints, and it's about Custer. What could go wrong? Maybe this should have been marketed as a love story between Mr. and Mrs. Custer, because the book read like Penthouse Forum letters. Simmons would have us believe that the two of them, while on a mission with Custer's troops, stopped for oral sex behind some bushes while his troops waited nearby. The Last Good Day by Roger Brauner -- the whole plot hinges on a woman who's described as fearless, strong, independent, yet she's unable to tell an ex-boyfriend to go away. She never told him to buzz off. The whole plot hinged on this, and it was never believable. Devil Red by Joe Lansdale -- not sure what happened to one of my favorite writers, but this one is just nonsense. And not fun nonsense either. The Help by Kathryn Stockett -- white people born after 1980 need to stop writing about being black in the 1950's. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. This one came out about ten years ago, rave mainstream reviews -- huge disappointment. Big fat book where all the characters -- despite being from all over Europe -- talk and sound exactly the same -- and a convoluted plot that made no sense at all. One character drinks absinthe and becomes an amnesiac, forgets the woman he married. The ending is probably the worst ever devised for a horror novel, and that's saying something. The Last Policeman by Ben Winters -- decent book that commits the cardinal sin of not letting the reader know that it's the first in a series. You don't end a book with a cliffhanger unless you've warned the reader that the story's not finished!

Fans of mysteries, historicals, and Civil War fiction might like A Faded Coat of Blue, the first in a series featuring the diminutive Abel Jones, soldier and detective. I think there are five or six books all told. They're all interesting, and there's a running joke which I won't spoil. I was pleased with two by Christine McKenna -- The Disenchanted Widow and The Misremembered Man. If I remember right, they might be free on the Kindle, via the lending library. Set in Ireland in the 1980's, they're "adult" without being explicit -- "mature" might be a better word. Heartwarming and funny, but not sappy.

Favorite meaning "I'll buy whatever they write as soon as it's published" -- Stewart O'Nan (relationships and everyday people), Joe Abercrombie (gritty fantasy -- no elves for Joe),Iain Pears (historical fiction), Ron Hansen, Pat Barker, Sarah Waters (historical and psychological), Laura Lippman (crime fiction), Tom Franklin (Southern), Kate Atkinson (crime fiction), Donald Ray Pollock (Southern), Tim Powers (urban fantasy), David Mitchell. Former favorites who've dropped off that list are Stephen King, Peter Straub, Joe Lansdale, Dan Simmons, and David L. Martin. All it takes is one disappointment and I'm done. Life's too short.

I appreciate the Potter books for Rowling's imagination -- she created an intriguing world -- but after the first couple of books, she needed an editor -- too much repetition and exposition. Also, one of my pet peeves is dialogue tags, especially with adverbs. "She said, angrily." If a writer has done her job with characterization and story, we will know without being told (1) who's speaking and (2) their frame of mind. Rowling goes way overboard with dialogue tags, and adverbs in general. Is she being paid by the word?

Love Gaskell and Maugham. Really need to read some Austen and Dumas. Tolstoy's not for me -- War and Peace wasn't, anyway -- but I do like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov and Turgenev. Also Sinclair Lewis, Booth Tarkington, John O'Hara, Ben Ames Williams, Frank Yerby, Thomas Costain, Irwin Shaw, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, and I just recently read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn for the first time.

I love Abercrombie and have this one but haven't read it yet. I binged on epic fantasy for a few years and am taking a break from it for awhile. Just finished For the Love of Books, a collection of essays by writers talking about books that influenced them. Very heavy on the usual suspects -- Proust, Joyce, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf (or is it Wolff - I can never remember), etc., but also some praise for two of my favorites -- Ray Bradbury and Jack Finney. Also just finished an old collection of horror stories, Creeps by Night, with an intro by Dashiell Hammitt (sp?), and a novel about a manipulative woman, The Strange Woman by Ben Ames Williams. I'm fond of novels from the 40's and 50's. I'm getting a bit prudish in my old age, and it's nice to read something that's not full of unnecessary sex and violence. So the 40's and 50's are safe.

War and disasters -- fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues -- are my go-to categories for non-fiction. Occasionally I'll pick up something social or political, which sorta relates to war and disasters, because we see how people respond to cultural change as well as physical changes. I'd like to live long enough to read whatever will be written about climate change when it's all over, but I probably won't.

From your mouth to God's ears. I started watching Legends (because of Sean Bean) but dumped it about five minutes in, when Bean went to visit his estranged wife [check] and his young son [check] and she says to him "You can't keep doing this" [check]. Didn't I just see this on The Strain? So tiresome.

I think Fausto respects Marco. I can see Fausto taking out Robles and hoping that would be enough to appease Marco. "Here! Take this crime boss and I'll get out of your hair." Fausto is connected to Robles but is Fausto connected to the raped and murdered women?

My first thought at the end was "son of a BITCH!" And then I realized it was a perfect ending -- even if we weren't assured of a third season. If this had been the end, I'd be okay with it. Everything's up in the air but that's life -- is anything ever truly finished? I do wish Tawney had explained to Teddy -- or that he would have figured it out -- that Daniel told her about the coffee incident because he wanted her to understand why Teddy was being such an ass. Maybe she didn't understand it herself. Or maybe he told her to push her away. And she lets Teddy think the worst, about Daniel being with her in the motel. I suppose he wouldn't have believed nothing happened. I also wish Daniel wouldn't have taken the plea deal. Jon almost guarantees he'll be exonerated. Then again, Daniel wants it to be over. Maybe the judge won't accept the plea deal. The meeting was transcribed. The judge will hear Foulkes pressuring Daniel again, and Daniel's not much different now than when he was 18.

It was stupid in hindsight, but they did get a reaction from Ray -- they were sure they were on to something. Loved Charlotte listening to Eleanor's story, sitting there quietly, taking it all in and thinking "Holy shit, get me out of here." Or was she thinking "That's what I wanna be when I grow up"? Didn't Charlotte kill someone in S1? Or help bury a body?

"What's this little room for?" I don't suppose there's a stash room planned for every house in that development, but maybe. I feel worse for Jack than for Sonya. He was only 13, for pete's sake. Someone needs to tell Sonya that even if Dobbs had lived, he probably wouldn't have been able to explain why he chose Lisa.