Silence is not always a good sign…

Lack of posting due to (a) Back of Evil and (b) a seriously unlucky streak of reading.

I’m not going to go into too much detail here because I’m fully aware that the Back of Evil (and the pain of it) may be contributing to an air of general crankiness that makes it harder for books to impress me. Or for me to persevere with books that grate on me for some reason. Please bear that in mind when reading what follows.

At present I am still trying to make my way through More than it Hurts You by Darin Strauss and am hopelessly stuck at the start of part 2, having taken a week to get through a particularly nasty sequence at the end of part 1. Part of the problem is the horrible subject matter (Münchhausen by proxy) and part is the emotional manipulativeness of it all. I loved Chang and Eng but this is one I may have to put aside unfinished.

It also has taken me quite a bit of time to get through Tethered by Amy MacKinnon which I almost bought based on the blurb, and then discovered I had a proof of at home (they mount up those proofs). As it was an uncorrected proof, I’m going to posit that the finished version might be a bit less purple and the clunky bits have been smoothed out some. Still, it wasn’t great.

I did fly through reading China Lake by Meg Gardiner which is every bit as good as you’d expect an Edgar winner to be. And later today (on the way to get my MRI, lying around in bangy tubes FTL) I’ll be starting Tom Rob Smith’s The Secret Speech which, based on how much I enjoyed Child 44, should also be a fast and enjoyable read.

At least I hope so.