So this week I’m reading Before Midnight, a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout, which is one of the few Stout books that was not included in the box of paperback Wolfe mysteries that I received a year or two ago from my dad.
So this week, and probably for a week or two more, I’m reading Great North Road, a science fiction murder mystery by Peter F. Hamilton. As far as I know, this book, like the excellent Fallen Dragon, is a standalone novel, unrelated to and not set in the same universe as the “Commonwealth” novels (the also-excellent Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, the what-most-people-seem-to-consider-better-but-I-consider-only-pretty-good “Void” series, of which I’ve so far only read the first one) or the “Night’s Dawn” series, of which I’ve so far read, uh, nothing. It’s also, being Peter F. Hamilton, a doorstopper, or would be if it weren’t an eBook, which is why I’ll probably still be reading it next week. Fortunately, like most Hamilton books, it’s shaping up to be―you guessed it―excellent.
This week I’m partway through another dead tree book, A Family Affair, the final “proper” (i.e., written by Rex Stout) Nero Wolfe novel, although after this I do still have a book containing a few stories that were discovered and published posthumously. As for the other posthumous”Nero Wolfe” books, well, we aleady discussed how those don’t exist …
Not to be confused with “Family Affair”, “All in the Family”, “An Affair to Remember”, or anything written by Robert Goldsborough.
This week I was reading Please Pass the Guilt, another (gasp!) dead tree book, and the next to last in the proper Nero Wolfe canon. (I’ll just pretend that the Nero Wolfe books written by authors who aren’t named Rex Stout don’t exist, in much the same way I pretend that the “Matrix” film series consists of only one movie.)
So this week I’m still reading Brave New Worlds, but I’m also re-reading The Father Hunt, by Rex Stout. And since most of the stories in Brave New Worlds have been firmly on the “meh” side (it was heavily front-loaded with the better ones), I decided I would do something highly unusual and feature a print book Teaser Tuesday this week.
This week I’m reading Rebecca, the classic novel by Daphne du Maurier, in which a very young (and apparently nameless) narrator is swept off her feet by the dashing Maxim de Winter, quickly marries him, and goes off to live with him in his vast estate, Manderley, where it seems that―much like in the American South―the past is never really dead, and isn’t even past.
These days, I do nearly all my reading on an e-reader, currently an InkBook Obsidian, but I do on occasion return to the dead tree books of yore. Typically this will be because someone gave or loaned me said dead tree edition. Such was the case with Dune, which, being a door-stopper of a book, I eventually bought in e-form so I wouldn’t have to fight with it when reading at lunch; and such is the case with the Nero Wolfe books, which my father sent to me in a box a while back. I’ve read them all before, but now I’m reading them again, because who doesn’t like to spend some time visiting old friends? The one I’m currently into is Plot it Yourself, in which Wolfe goes up against a con artist with a fondness for pretending that popular novels are plagiarisms of his or her own work, and also for knives.