Sunday Status Update: January 24, 2021

Kelly: I’m currently in the middle of my ARC of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife. I’m not sure what’s more chilling, the science or the interpersonal dynamics. And there’s a lot of overlap between the two, of course. Good, and unsettling.

Bill: This week I read the excellent The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, the good On Fragile Wavesby E. Lily Yu, and the somewhat disappointing Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore, along with a solid book of poems, Not For Luck by Derek Sheffield. In genre video, I’m finding Wandavision creepily solid in its journey through sitcom history, though a bit overplayed at times, and I’m glad they’re beginning to expand beyond that focus. And because a few seconds of genre film appears in it, I’m going to use that as an excuse to note that a group of five of us watched my all-time favorite film — Cinema Paradiso — in a theater this week, and it’s still humming in my brain, which is my way of highly recommending it to everyone (the subtitled, not dubbed version, and the original, not the Director’s Cut)

Marion: I got little reading done last week. I’m meandering through Erica Benner’s Be Like the Fox, her biography of Niccolo Machiavelli. To use a shallow term, Benner is a Machiavelli fan. The book is readable and very accessible for a lay reader like me. My other reading adventure was to approve the proofs and the layout pages for the book Falstaff will be releasing soon. And Wednesday, all I did was watch television.

Sandy: Moi? Having just finished one Lost World/Lost Race novel from the fine folks at Armchair Fiction, namely Eden Phillpotts’ The Golden Fetich (1903), I have decided to dive right into another. Thus, at the moment, I am reading Roy Norton’s exciting tale entitled The Glyphs (1919). The book has sucked me right in and I look forward to reporting back to you on both of these very shortly….

Terry: I’m one of those folks who finishes every book I start, which is something I’m going to have to quit, because I don’t have time for this! Anton Strout’s Dead to Me, the first in his SIMON CANDEROUS series, was a book I should never have picked up, but couldn’t bring myself to put down permanently. I’m much more enjoying The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick and Blood Heir by Ilona Andrews.