What are you reading these days?

Finished The Poisoners Handbook for Tildes book club this month. It's a history of early forensic toxicology in the US. It's organized as a biography of two professionals in the New York City coroner's office, but it's subdivided by poisonous substance as used in murder or discovered in relation to accidental death. It's not a heavy book, but the history is interesting.

I'm nearly finished with a fantasy pirate adventure, The adventures of Amina Al Sirafi
Amina is a loveable rogue who makes choices that seem good but lead her and her friends deeper and deeper into magical trouble.

I finished the novella A River Runs through it, which was made into a beautiful movie.

Next up will be Stephen King's Fairy Tale

I’m halfway through The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which is an excellent read if you want to know more about early American capitalism. Wild, terrible stuff. He was clearly mean, highly competitive, physically intimidating, and only occasionally honest, but this was apparently not uncommon in 19th century New York, he was just more successful at it. The vibe is sort of like a Western. Includes steamboat races and explosions and train wrecks and sabotage and legal maneuvers.

There’s an interesting contrast with what came before, which was more genteel but also pretty terrible by modern standards. Apparently the New York state government was controlled by the elites (most people couldn’t vote) and their way of doing big projects was to grant legal monopolies. The most famous and successful was the Erie canal, financed via state bonds and private investors. There were also a lot of other projects like that with other states, many of which failed, and there was lots of corruption.

The Wigs promoted government projects and the Jacksonian Democrats thought they were corrupt and they weren’t wrong, and almost everyone hated the idea of corporations which barely existed and weren’t very well understood by most. Vanderbilt competed against a state government monopoly and there was a famous court case, Gibbons v. Ogden, which ruled that the state of New York could not grant a monopoly on steamboat traffic on the Hudson river.

I finished How To Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix, and when I say it was the scariest book I've ever read, I mean it. It was so, so good. Body horror, puppets, dolls, possession. I don't know how Hendrix manages to also perfectly capture the female experience in the US as well. A+.

On the other hand, I just DNF'd Practical Magic by Emily Grimoire. I had to nope out when she compared herself to Taylor Swift, but also there was apparently a Donald Trump reference in the book too (gross). I really wanted to like it. The premise was cute, but I should have known it would suck when the book was compared to Gilmore Girls. I'm not a fan of that show.

Well, finally finished Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, after stalling the last fifty pages out over three days. It's fun, it's dark as hell, the whole thing is written in dense bebop rhythms and dripping in noir cheese. I will need to reread it. Perhaps beginning today.

I kept thinking "is this Pynchon's most perfect novel?" and it might just be. Most of his acclaim is for books that go on for 600+ pages and defy the origins of the novel as stories of character, instead leaning mennippean and epic. His more traditional novels often seem trapped between his desire to situate character in the narration and an awareness that to do so is to alienate a large number of potential readers. Not here, though. If anything, this one felt like maybe half of the book was dedicated to slow dripping the themes through character development.

Loved reading it. The kind of love that means I genuinely remember very little, because the linguistic acrobatics were so dazzling. As such, I honestly don't know if I particularly liked it, after having read most of his other books at least twice. Gonna need time to tell, I guess.

Started War & War, by the latest Nobel Laureate in Literature. Only a few pages in, and very excited to see where this bridgetop mugging of a man communing with god (?) goes.

It's been a long time since I participated in these threads, so I'll mention as well that I started reading The Mahabharata last year, and have been slowly working through it. Only lately have I made it to the Vana Parda, aka past the inciting incident. I really don't know what I was expecting with it, but this has to be one of the most interesting works of art on the planet. Especially witnessing the hindutva phenomenon from afar, it boggles the mind. Wanna know why patriarchy exists? It's got an answer, and it's not what you're thinking! Wanna learn about the origins of caste? Well, this will perplex you! Wanna drift between shockingly realistic marital conflicts and theophanic scams? The Mahabharata has got you covered.