top ten tuesday

Damn Glad to Meet You was a great memoir. I didn’t realize that Tim Matheson had been an actor since he was a kid. He’s worked with everyone from Lucille Ball to John Belushi up to today. He has stories to tell. He wasn’t always the best guy in his personal life and he doesn’t sugar coat that either.

The Quiet Damage is a look at the ways different people got drawn into QAnon. The families are from all different backgrounds to show the variety of ways to get into conspiracy thinking.

Turns of Fate was a book I was so worried about. I love Anne Bishop’s Others series. I despise the sadism of her Black Jewels books. I wanted this one to be more like the Others. It turned out not to be as cozy for me as the Others but I still liked this story of an island controlled by Fae that interacts with the humans on the other side of the river. I’ll be reading the next book when it comes out.

The Notebook was excellent. This is the history of notebooks. Why did Renaissance painters get suddenly better? Could it be because sketchbooks were newly available and they could practice more? When Venetians learned to do accounting in those new notebooks they took over the world. The ability to write things down in portable books changes many areas of life.

Quarter Share is the start of a series that I’ve been living in for the last several months. It is a fairly low stakes sci-fi story about a teenager that goes to work on a space freighter when he is out of options. The series follows his life. It gets more high stakes as he gets older and gets more responsibility but it is mainly about getting along with people and doing the right thing. I’ve listening to the books and then relistened with the husband. I love this world.

Blind Date with a Werewolf was a surprise. You have to have read the rest of the books in her werewolf series to understand the surprise in this one. Otherwise it is sort of a silly concept. One of the side character werewolves in her story is set up on a series of blind dates. All of them go wrong and chaos ensues. They are interesting short stories but that would be it and they would be pretty forgettable if she hadn’t just oh so casually dropped in the answer to a major question from the whole series in the last few pages. I swear it was like a teacher sliding something in to see if you were paying attention. “You thought this was just a little side project, phoning-it -in book? Here’s a bonus for those of you who actually read to the end.” I gasped and then laughed at the audacity.