I'm partway through What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher's retelling of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." I don't read much horror, and this book definitely qualifies. It's really good, and I'm interested in the characters and where she's taking the plot, but gah. Also, I called one of the issues early on, so the horror is compounded by me thinking, "No, no, no, do not touch . . . oh, crap. Well, you're probably screwed now, sorry dude."

Anyway, if you like or are even ok-ish with horror, I'm inclined to recommend the book. If the author doesn't stick the landing I'll probably come back and edit this, but her history on that has been pretty good.

I pre-ordered that, but I haven't started it yet because I know how much her other horror creeped me out so I'm trying to figure out a non-scary time to read it. Like, 4 am when I am theoretically trying to go back to sleep probably does not qualify. I know I've read Fall of the House of Usher, and I think I read another retelling of it within the last decade, but I don't know that I remember either one. Poe all blends together in my head. But I had no familiarity at all with the last two retellings she did and I enjoyed those, so I'm sure this will also be fine when I get up the nerve to read it.

I finished it last night, and it kept me awake a fair bit afterwards. I get insomnia at the drop of a hat, though, so YIMV.

I also reread Poe's story before I started Kingfisher's book. "Fall of the House of Usher" is shorter than I remembered—it probably didn't take me half an hour to read. And it was nice to see the relationship between the two works.

I am listening to Mike Schur’s ethics book, is this where we were talking about it? I don’t remember. But the footnotes are done with a little *boop* and then the footnote and a *bip* to show the footnote is over and you are back to the main text. You don’t have the option to skip the footnotes, I suppose, but it’s working fine for me so far.

It's not really a book where skipping the footnotes would occur to me. But interesting approach

It's really intuitive as you listen. And I wouldn't want to skip the footnotes, so that aspect doesn't trouble me at all.

I've only gotten through the first chapter. I was kind of resistant to starting it because I already feel like I'm much worse of a person than I should be and I didn't want more reason for that, but that was pretty groundless. I have more of an appreciation for Aristotle than I did previously, for sure (my inner historian of math has way more input in my opinions of many things than would seem to be warranted, and Aristotle's math was extremely weak tea, but his approach to ethics is apparently not so bad)

I am suffering over this month's book club selection. It is an autobiography written by a local woodswoman environmentalist type. Anyway, it is one page after another of minutia of her daily life, with alternating pages of how great am I blathering. I have adapted to the high school method of reading the first and last paragraphs of the chapter with some skimming of first sentences. It is pure torture. Yes, it is super cool that she builds her own cabin and fights acid rain battles and all that, but it would be much easier to read a 4 page article in National Geographic about her rather than hundreds of pages of self-aggrandizing.

This reminds me of why I so dearly love fiction.

Oh, too bad, Laura. It's so hard to tell if that sort of thing is going to be for you or not except by actually reading it.

I wouldn't normally pick this sort of thing, but it is a very small community here and I actually was in elementary school with the librarian. It is the local library book club. So I'm kind of hoping I am not alone with my utter boredom. I am able to say nice things about the author to be polite and all that.

Last month was even more bizarre with the pick being #13 in Louise Penny Gamache series. Glass Houses. I had read the previous 12 but none of the other people had so we had a different experience. It was one of my least favorites of a great series too! I told them all they really had to start with Still Life.