Robin Ellacott has always wanted to be a private detective, and temping for one for a week seems like a possible dream come true before she goes off to be properly married to her new fiancé. She didn’t count on Cormoran Strike being both good and highly in need of office help for his new case — a brother of a celebrity who committed suicide wants Cormoran to find out if it really was suicide.
What I Liked
The case is deliciously messy, with therapy, adoptions, birth mothers, sordid histories, difficult families, etc. And for the first time when Cormoran and Robin both want the same thing but are afraid to say it outright, it’s fun to see them struggle to keep Robin past the first week (even if their reluctance to speak candidly is way overused as a plot device later). And I love the solution to the issue of the witness who couldn’t have witnessed what she claimed to have seen and heard, yet smacks of some semblance of truth.
What I Didn’t Like
There is a lot of confusion about what happened the night Lula died, and major players are relatively ignored for long periods of time with very little explanation of why. Some of it lacks a way to coerce cooperation if the person isn’t interested in cooperating with a private detective; some is just a red herring left to rot too long in the story.
Ah, January. When a young reader’s heart turns to updating all of his lists of various books to read, collect, etc. Okay, so I’m not exactly young and most people’s hearts may not turn that way. But mine does in January.
This past fall, I did a deep dive into Calibre, the ebook library manager program that I use. I’ve used the Windows version on my computer for about, umm, 10 years now, I think. I’ve often had multiple “libraries” of ebooks on my computer … ones that were waiting to be looked at, others that were actually part of collections / series that I’m working on, some from the library that I hadn’t sorted out yet when I would get to them. Tons of books I got way back in the heyday of Kindle ownership where people gave away dozens of ebooks free each day in the yearly teens of the new millennium. Plus books I had read, were reviewing, etc.
I found it hard to effectively manage my ebooks in multiple libraries, and I looked online for the forums, asked questions, explained how I “saw” my library and asked for tips on how to do it better. Which a bunch of fellow bibliophiles responded to with lots of suggestions. In the end, all of them basically said, “Put them all in one library and let the computer give you filtered views when you want to see different “sets” of books”. It is, after all, mostly a giant database with links to the book files.
I am now quite happy with the majority of my setup in the library. I’m down to 10 main workflow categories, all mutually exclusive ones that books “move” through from acquisition to having been read and reviewed:
TBR: Fiction
TBR: Series
TBR: Non-fiction
ACTIVE
REVIEWING: Backlog
REVIEWING: Current
FINAL: Fiction
FINAL: Non-Fiction
FINAL: Reference
FINAL: Did not finish
Admittedly, the TBRs categories are nominally huge but I won’t be reading all of them. Some of them came from a huge data dump of free books I got at some point, and while I weeded out a bunch (from 20K down to 10K), there’s probably another 5K to get rid of at some point. It’ll still lead me with about 20 years’ worth of reading. 🙂
But as I was playing with the recent additions, I realized that there are some other features I can add to the library manager that will actually give me some stats. Every January, I set goals, but somewhere as the year goes on, I kind of lose track. Dead tree versions are particularly problematic to keep track of, but even the ebooks get backlogged. But I went through basically everything I have from #5 to #10 above.
It brings my total up to about 475 books that are in the “read” stage or beyond, even though my actual reviewed list is a little less than half of that (225 or so). For the 475, I’ve added the years in which I’ve read them…goes back all the way to 1978, but there are lots in the last 7-8 years…and that gives me a bit of data to play with and share. The reviews could be new or old, but there’s a reason the backlog grew. 🙂
20 books read, 16 reviews
22 books read, 5 reviews
58 books read, 53 reviews
78 books read, 17 reviews
32 books read, 9 reviews
57 books read, 19 reviews
63 books read, 18 reviews
1 book read (so far), 0 reviews
So that means 137 recent books reviewed, plus another 88 old ones added to the website. That still leaves 47 to review from the last year or so, and another 187 in backlog.
Of course, I also have 332 ones to read “soon” in my “active” folder. Which I used to have all synched to my Kindle, which was looney toons to manage. So, I cut that back to about 20 for now. I probably should add a new category around 4B to the top set which is “Books to read this year”, and only pull 10-20 of those forward to the Kindle.
What I don’t know what to do is how to prioritize my TBR list. 🙂 Do I read the first / next one in each series? Or binge my way through like a rabid reader hooked on Netflix more than phonics? Do I set myself a rigid balance of Fiction to Non-fiction?
A lovely first-world problem to have, I know. What really warms my cockles is that I’ve managed to write about 20 new reviews each year over the last seven years (while still putting everything else up, and blogging almost 2M words), and averaging about 47 books a year. My goal is always 52, which I managed to surpass 4 times. And that’s just on the stats I *know* that I have so far. Other books will turn up and add to those titles, again mostly dead tree versions.
But for the first time in a really long time, I kind of feel like my library is mostly where I want it to be and I know what’s happening with it. Now I can start prioritizing dumping the dead tree versions of some old stuff while reading the 332 books I have in my active list hehehe
Subtitled “Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves”, this book recounts the history of Americans setting up rogue radio stations across the Mexican border and blasting their shows all over the world.
What I Liked
I first heard about rogue radio stations from ZZ Top. They released an album way back in ’75 that included the song, “Heard it on the X”, and it’s referring to one of these stations. It was an “outlaw” station, which has that immediate appeal to it…subverting the rules, blasting rock ‘n’ roll, etc. And so the legend is quite attractive.
But the reality is way more magnificent than the legend. The book gives a great account of attempts by various people to establish radio stations and build a business empire with it. Some of it was pure snake oil sales, cancer cures, etc. Others were the start for mainstreaming hillbilly music, R&B, country and western, and later rock ‘n’ roll too. Individually, any of the chapters are fascinating. International conferences to try and deal with it, duels, armed gangs taking over stations, politicians running for election, bigger and bigger transmitters, FCC investigations, it has it all.
I particularly enjoyed the sections dealing with early rock ‘n’ roll, and Wolfman Jack.
What I Didn’t Like
The organization of the book is terrible. It appears that many of the chapters were originally released individually for journals and newspapers. As such, they cover a particular person’s story arc, their rise to fame and their regular drop to ignominy. However, for the next chapter, they frequently have to repeat some of the information from a previous chapter. Almost every chapter covers 1920 to 1950, and thus, many of these people were broadcasting at the same time, tripping over each other with the same issues, mostly competing but sometimes collaborating. After the first chapter, I wanted to rip the book apart and put it back together completely chronologically. Too often, I was reading a segment and thinking, “Oh, wow, that was the same experience as person X a few chapters back”. Then I would flip back and go, “Oh, no, it isn’t; it’s the SAME story, same person, slightly different name and intro”. So I didn’t recognize them. Then later, I’d see the same story, assume it was a repeat, only to realize no, this time it was actually someone new. If it was told in chronological order, I probably would have given it a 4 or 5 stars. In its present form, it gets 3 for content, and about a 1 or 2 for frustration. And I wanted WAY more about the rock ‘n’ roll era in the 60s and 70s.
The Bottom Line
Come for the music, stay for the snake oil shenanigans
Three women carry a dark secret from their homecoming dance, and an eccentric billionaire’s death may force the secret into the light.
What I Liked/Didn’t Like
The premise of the story is that an unidentified baby was found buried in a park 18 years before, and a billionaire’s widow offers a $1M lottery if people will donate their DNA to solve the case. The three girls are affected by the premise, and you know something happened with a baby that ties them somehow to the case; you’re not sure what, but they’re “involved”.
I struggled to finish the book…normally, if I’m reading a book that isn’t singing to me, I stop, and I don’t review it. Equally, if it is a debut author and I’m likely to rate it less than 3 stars, I also don’t review it. But I liked the premise of the DNA lottery. It was new, it was diffferent, how would it affect the ending? So I kept with it.
The writing was okay, but I was increasingly unsatisfied. There are multiple scenes with intentionally vague language to hide the “solution”, but it only works because the story has a slight PoV shift before each one. It’s not quite as egregious as someone thinking of a killer and using the personal pronoun “they” instead of “he or she” or “Jack or Jane”, not because it fits their actual pronoun or how they think of that person, it’s just “they” so the reader doesn’t figure out the mystery too early.
Plus, there were a couple of weird coincidences and a completely wonky character shift in a tertiary character at the end. And one deliberate misdirect to make you think one of the characters might have been raped, but wasn’t, and yet the possible rape was one of the few things explaining her weird behaviour as a high-schooler prior to the secret event. Plus, all three women are each acting “off” during the day of the secret event, to make you think they’re possibly pregnant, yet it has nothing to do with the outcome and is never explained.
By this time, I was 3/4 of the way through, so I had to finish. And yet I expected to be ticked at the ending — I thought it would either be something trite and superficially handled OR it would be a giant twist that made no sense. But then something wonderful happened.
The author tied up the story with a neat twist. Sure, part of it relied on a giant coincidence that I wish had been handled better, but the explanation explained stuff way better and didn’t end like any of the two obvious solutions. And the epilogues were pretty good. A bit short, but interesting. I had to bump it up to 3 stars. I confess that not all of the stories are tied up equally well. Some behaviour is explained, other bits are left dangling and seemingly the antithesis of the rest of the character’s behaviour, but whatever. It was worth finishing.
Disclosure
I received a free copy of this book from Amazon, however, I am not personal friends with the author, nor have I interacted with them on social media.
Zoey has become isolated from her friends, thanks to Neferet’s machinations, just as a big baddie named Kalona is trying to return to Earth.
What I Liked
Aphrodite’s role and friendship with Stevie Rae and Zoey is starting to gel at this point, and it is far better than that of the nerd herd. I don’t just mean that they’ve deserted her in the book, as they feel hurt she didn’t share certain info with them, but just that their “contribution” is highly repetitive and doesn’t add much most of the time. And the introduction of the Street Cats charity with nuns running it is a fun addition. It adds some much-needed light to otherwise dark storylines.
What I Didn’t Like
The nerd herd. Yawn. And the ending is a bit chaotic in too-short of time.
