What I’m Reading!

 I’ve been downloading and bingeing recently. In the old days I had to wait until I could get to a bookshop, but now that you can just pay and download, why wait? The only problem is, getting through them. 

So, here are some books I have bought recently on either Apple Books or Kindle, and am still reading.

Today’s download was Eating With The Tudors by Brigitte Webster. It’s a cookbook with history. You get the originals but also adapted recipes because in those days recipe books were aimed at professionals who knew what they meant and didn’t need details.

I’ve actually read Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. I assumed I had it in ebook, till I was telling a friend about it and realised I didn’t. I had to buy it , of course. I loved it! It’s basically a police procedural murder mystery set in a world where cops are telepaths, so murder shouldn’t be possible to get away with, but it happens anyway. Very clever, and provided the inspiration for a theme in Babylon 5, where they cheekily call the villainous head of the Psi Corps Alfred Bester. 

I got a free audiobook of Treasure Island, published by Apple Books. I’m listening to that now.

There are some mentioned on Twitter, usually by the author, and I couldn’t resist. 

The only print book in the lot is The Impudent Edda by Rowdy Geirsson. It arrived yesterday from Amazon. It is, as the title suggests, a reworked version of the Norse myths, written humorously by someone who really knows them well. I’ve just started. I couldn’t get it in ebook. The print book does seem to be available everywhere on line, though.

The same guy was reading a book called Seven Viking Romances, which he mentioned on social media and, of course, I had to buy it. I haven’t started it yet, but it looks good.

There has been a lot of discussion of the Princes in the Tower on Twitter recently, due to a documentary on the subject on the BBC. I haven’t seen it, as it has only been shown in the UK and the US so far, but there was so much discussion I just slipped out and bought The Survival Of The Princes In The Tower, the book by Matthew Lewis, whose work I first discovered in a discount bookshop, Book Grocer. He is big in the Richard III Society. Again - just starting it. 

I haven’t yet bought Philippa Langley’s book on the subject, though that was getting a lot of discussion on Twitter too. I thought she did a great job finding Richard III and I have her book about that and the film based on it, which has become one of my comfort viewing films, but I think I’ll wait till I have read some others first.

Just for the heck of it, I went to Project Gutenberg and downloaded some works by  Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber, two of the classic spec fic writers whose stuff I love. I do have some of their later books in ebook and print, but their earlier short pieces are available on Gutenberg, so why not? 

There is a lot more, but I’ll finish here with one last book. I was in the mood to reread some Connie Willis books, so I  bought Passage, a novel about “near death experiences” in which the heroine, a scientist working on this, finds herself on the Titanic! I do have the print book somewhere…

Do you have a large TBR pile? Especially in ebook?