Move on Down to Mexico by Nicholas Grant
★★★☆☆ | Travel and Nature | Digital | Borrow
Up to date guide on the requirements and steps to move to Mexico.
Reading
Real Tigers by Mick Herron
★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third Slow Horses book. The plot of this one followed the TV series pretty closely, though there are more differences than the first two. The allure here is the continued depth of characters that grow and develop from book to book. Herron throws these well-established characters into tension and conflict and they respond predictably. It’s up to the author to put them into tighter and tighter binds to avoid becoming cliche. I’ll bet in later books, he has the characters become less predictable, otherwise this could feel a little too much like Star Trek novels. We’ll see.
…You Like It Darker by Stephen King
★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This is a wonderful collection of short stories and novellas by our generation’s master storyteller. I enjoyed every piece, but particularly liked Rattlesnakes, a sequel of sorts to Cujo. It’s meditation on the persistent grief of losing a child masquerading as ghost story. I’ve read most of Stephen King’s shorter works. This newest one tops them all.
Dead Lions by Mick Herron
★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The second installment of the Slow Horses series. This one departed enough from the TV series to keep me guessing. Jackson Lamb is such a terrific character. Perhaps not great literature, but engaging and fun.
…Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction| Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed the setting of the fictional small town on Puget Sound. I liked the premise of the story. I loved the octopus. But, in the end, the author was too young/naive to be inside the head of a grief-stricken 70-year-old woman. It would have been better had she let us imagine what she felt by her actions and words alone. Some big themes were drawn in magic marker when they deserved an artist’s paintbrush.
Consolations by David Whyte
★★★★★ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiosity, Heartbreak, and Forgiveness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:
Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.
…The Regulators by Stephen King
★★★☆☆ | Horror | Print / Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Continuing my quest to read every Stephen King novel … The Regulators was published on the same day as Desperation. Many of the same characters bedeviled by the same evil spirit Tak, but set in a parallel universe. The book covers of the two novels make up a single scene:
…Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
★★★☆☆ | Horror | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This book was nothing like I expected. Frankenstein (the scientist) is arrogant, self-absorbed, and makes incredibly bad decisions. The story itself is unbelievably far-fetched. There were times I wanted to throw my Kindle on the floor at the dumb-assedness of our unreliable protagonist.
Taken more broadly, it’s a cautionary tale about mankind’s continual push for scientific advancement, which feels more relevant today than ever.
…David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
★★★★★ | Literature | Digital + Audio | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters you meet will eventually make sense. I was distrustful at first, my head spinning with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I was wrong to be critical of the master. By the end of this story, every character, no matter how minor, was reintroduced and I understood their purpose in the story. Sure, this involved a lot of happy coincidences for our protagonist, but it brought me happiness to have these loose threads woven together.
…84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
★★★★☆ | Reading and Books | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I read the first half of this short epistolary book as an excerpt in Stories of Books and Libraries by Jane Holloway. I bought the print edition because the library didn’t offer it and the Kindle version cost too much. I read the rest of it over the course of an hour or two. I suspected it couldn’t end on a bright note and I was right. I shed a few tears at the sudden ending. Such is the way of life. Helene, as the crazy, run-at-the-mouth American contrasts nicely with the British reserve of Mr. Frank Doel. We learn all these bizarre details about Helene’s life, but have to coax the smallest of things from Frank. The spare book without any explanatory text to accompany the letters worked perfectly.
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