I finished a couple of books recently, neither of which is entirely new, but they were new to me, so it’s all good.
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen:
This is from 2006, in the period where I had stopped picking up every new Hiaasen book, but a few months back when I decided to read more books on paper, this is one of the ones I picked up. I think the best description of this might be something along the lines of “Inventive and entertaining, but not surprising.” That is, if you’ve read any of Hiaasen’s other books, this is doing more or less exactly what you would expect: a colorful cast of weirdos, some sympathetic and others not, collide with each other in South Florida.
Some of these characters are good fun— I liked Honey and Fry and Sammy— while others are a bit stock— Perry and Dealey are standard-issue good guys from a Hiaasen book— and Piejack was a bit much. It’s got no shortage of clever bits, though, and the final payoff to the running joke about aphenphosmphobia genuinely made me chuckle audibly. This isn’t breaking new ground, but if you enjoy his stuff in general, this scratches that same basic itch.
Memory’s Legion by James S. A. Corey:
This is a new release in this form, though as noted above, it’s not entirely new. It’s mostly a collection of stories that were previously published, largely as stand-alone ebooks. I believe the only entirely new content here is the final story, “The Sins of Our Fathers.” Its existence now as a single collection largely justifies my prior decision not to buy any of the stand-alone stories over the last several years…
A number of elements from the stories here were incorporated into the recently wrapped up TV series, which made reading them now kind of an odd experience. There’s enough of a difference between the book and the show that they weren’t completely predictable, but there was a definite “Oh, this is where that bit came from…” feel to a bunch of them.
In much the same way as the novel series, there’s a bit of a tonal shift as these go on, with the stories from later in the chronology being a bit more grim. “Strange Dogs” is a bit of a tough read because we know what happens to those characters in the long term, and the new story is awfully bleak.
Nothing in these feels truly essential or revelatory, but they’re all well done stories. The authors’ notes at the end of each story may have been the most interesting part of the whole thing, providing a bit of insight into the process of writing these. They do fill in some bits of backstory, and it’s kind of cool to see what became of Erich, but these mostly serve as a kind of space-operatic methadone, hopefully easing the transition to whatever they’re going to write next.
And that’s this week in recent light reading. I’m not quite sure what’s next in the queue, but if you want to find out as soon as I finish whatever it ends up being, here’s a button:
And if you want to quibble with my characterization of either of these, the comments will be open: