I finished 4 books this week:
ORIGAMY, Rachel Armstrong
THE ARMORED SAINT, Myke Cole
A MAN’S HEAD, Georges Simenon
THE YELLOW DOG, Georges Simenon

If you ever feel the need for a great detective novel I highly recommend the Inspector Maigret novels by Georges Simenon.

Maigret is a french police detective of the “Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris”. Between 1931 and 1972 Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories about Maigret. They’ve been adapted into multiple films, television shows, radio programs and comics. 

The novels are all very short and they move at a steady clip. Brilliantly plotted and without an ounce of fat on any of them (at least the 6 I’ve read so far). Based on the stories I’ve read so far it seems like you can probably jump in anywhere you want. I highly recommend the audio books read by Gareth Armstrong.

I’m sure you’ll come to love the gruff, pipe-smoking inspector as much as I do.

I’ve started a few more books since these but they’re all longer than most of what I’ve read so far in 2020. (at ~800,000 words The Unabridged ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS will likely take me the better part of a year to read.) I will probably be dipping into some Manga and Graphic Novels next week so that the next book roundup isn’t just a gif of me shrugging and looking illiterate. I picked up a couple things today that I’ll probably crack in the next few days:

Currently Playing: Moe Shop – “Moe Moe”

Currently Reading: ROSEANNA, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö (GR)

Audio Books easily account for 75-80% of my book reading in a given year. It’s gratifying to me that I see fewer and fewer people interested in arguing that listening to an audio book somehow “doesn’t count” as reading, but feel free to say so in the comments… on somebody else’s blog. 

I subscribed to the leading purveyor of audio books in May of 2008 and have, at last count, 480 titles in my library. The size of this library was the primary reason I continued to subscribe to said purveyor even though I hated the Digital Rights Management (DRM) my books were saddled with.

Yesterday I discovered a utility that will let me convert my legally purchased but locked-up books into books I’m allowed to choose how and where to listen to! Imagine that! I actually get to do what I want with something I bought and paid for! No longer do I have to be chained up in this walled garden! (A friend recently pointed out that “walled garden” is a bad metaphor because it actually sounds like a nice place. I suggest the alternative “bottom of a well”).

Now I have a new project: Downloading and converting my entire library of audio books, backing them up, and then setting up a plex server on a raspberry pi to stream them to my phone and never shutting up about it! I love projects like this, which is good because this is going to take me a while to complete. 

With the cancellation of my membership to said leading purveyor of audio books I’m down to only 2 recurring subscriptions! Netflix and Disney+. I’d be happy to cancel those also but I’ve been warned by The Bride that under no circumstances am I allowed to. *grumble, grumble*. It makes me feel GOOD not to be renting bits. I want to own the things I own. I love physical media, but there are practicalities to consider.

If I keep bringing armloads of books, blu-rays, comics and video games home The Bride is going to mutilate me in my sleep with one of those cigar snippers. I must be more selective about what physical objects I deem necessary to have on the shelf. Thankfully, I really LIKE the experience of reading eBooks and listening to audio books, but that doesn’t mean I should have to pay Jeff Bezos for the privilege (at least not beyond the initial vending).

I could go on at length about this issue, and no doubt will in future. (It’s not lost on me that I link to the amazon listings for eBooks in my currently reading footer. That’s the next thing I aim to fix in my life.) But, for now I’m going to go listen to a book. 

Currently Playing: riverrun – “The Same Silent Hill”

Currently Reading: THE YELLOW DOG, Georges Simenon (CA) (US)

The books I’ve read so far this year:

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, Olga Tokarczuk
THE NIGHT PARADE OF ONE HUNDRED DEMONS, Matthew Meyer
DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES, James Sallis
BATTLETECH: DECISION AT THUNDER RIFT, William H. Keith
THE BOOK OF YOKAI, Michael Dylan Foster
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, Thornton Wilder
THE ONLY HARMLESS GREAT THING, Brooke Bolander
CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, Sayaka Murata

My brain has been on fire the last couple months so I had planned on reading a lot more light, escapist fare this year, but so far this has been mostly a lot of “capital-L” Literature. Probably some Maigret and more Battletech novels in the near-future. We’ll see.

The clear winner so far has been DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (CA) (US). 

I don’t want to say too much about the plot as a basic synopsis really doesn’t do it justice, but it concerns a hermit living in southern Poland, not far from the Czech border. One day, another of the hermits who lives near her dies under some mysterious circumstances and she begins to investigate what might have happened.

It’s an exceptional portrait of isolation, loneliness and mental illness. I can’t recall a protagonist I’ve related to more in a long time. I feel like I couldn’t be more like this person while having almost nothing in common with them. The extremes she believes in are pretty far from the ones in me, but the fervor of her dedication to them is eerily familiar. 
   

“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye     that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”

“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
    

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

Currently Playing: Bomani Armah – “Read a Book“
Currently Reading: THE ARMORED SAINT, Myke Cole (CA) (US)