It does appear to be self-published, by a local author. He should have known of and approved what boilerplate he was attaching to his text.

According to their online catalog, there in fact is a copy in my local public library. According to the statewide database, there's another library copy next county over (in the author's hometown).

The Middleman by Olen Steinhauer. This is a new author to me. It's about a group of left-wing activists who suddenly disappear and go off-grid. A lady FBI agent has been monitoring them for a while, even though there's no evidence they intend violence. Well, things happen, people die, and the surviving members are officially labeled terrorists. Anyway, I have about 100 pages left and some very suspicious characters haven't yet had their involvement adequately explained. If it finishes strong, I'll add Mr. Steinhauer to my list of authors I would read another book by.

I usually like Niven and Pournelle's stuff, and particularly recommend The Mote in God's Eye for a great first contact encounter. There's a sequel The Gripping Hand which is not as great, but still worth the read.

Started on Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. A lot of people say they like this one. Not far enough into it yet to say if I agree with them, but it looks like there's some detailed worldbuilding which is a good sign.

From a little free library, just finished Burn by Nevada Barr, part of her Anna Pigeon series. Normally these are all set in a national park, where the natural geology plays a major role in the mystery. This one happens near the New Orleans Jazz Historical Park, but doesn't have anything to do with the park, or jazz, or even New Orleans and could have taken place anywhere there's a black market for certain illicit services. I liked some of the more outdoorsy ones a bit better, but this was worth the read. I have to think about whether Anna Pigeon qualifies as an E5-caliber grump for bingo card.

It's Banned Books Week, so I downloaded a pdf of The Turner Diaries. I'm told this book is considered inspirational by those who think having a race war would be fun and glorious. It might also be of interest to non-racists with morbid curiosity about White Nationalist ideology. Otherwise, I do not recommend it for its literary value. I read this so you don't have to.

Finished Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time. Supposedly ranked the best crime novel of all time. I'm not sure I agree with the ranking, but can understand how it made the list. Detective Alan Grant, hospitalized from his previous case, investigates the historical murder of the Princes in the Tower, allegedly committed by Richard III. Grant's research brings this into dispute and he labels this narrative Tonypandy, after the Tonypandy Massacre where Winston Churchill ordered the British Calvary to violently put down a Welsh miners' strike. Which isn't at all what happened, but is repeated anyway because it's more politically expedient than the truth.

Moving on to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I intend to claim this one for the Late to the Party square as it's a classic that people who know my literary tastes would have expected me to have read at least twice by now. I have the 60th anniversary edition with a preface by Neil Gaiman, 100 pages of supplementary end commentaries, and extensive margin notes contributed by an anonymous previous owner.

Finished up Bones of Betrayal by Jefferson Bass. It's more fun for people familiar enough with Oak Ridge to recognize some of the landmarks. I do know Oak Ridge, but not as well as the person who recommended this book to me.

I think up next is going to be Purity by Jonathan Franzen who is a new author for me. The title character and most of the people she meets in the first 50 pages are, if not complete basket cases, deeply flawed humans, so it might get interesting.

A young niece is about to be gifted a copy of Who's Saying What in Jamestown, Thomas Savage? by Jean Fritz with illustrations by Sally Wern Comport. I was invited to quickly read it before mother mails it off as it pertains to all of our family history. It reads like a biography, but is rightly classified as fiction as the author confesses to a lot of interpolating between sparse historical records to make a child-friendly story. It's probably a little too advanced for a 1st grader, but in a few more years she might read it.

See if your local library occasionally runs a booksale. I get most of my books that way. Their prices are competitive with thrift stores, usually about $1 paperback and $2 hardcover. But because it's run by friends of the library, tends to be higher quality and better organized. At those prices, I can afford to be disappointed, and sometimes get pleasantly surprised.

This week I'll mention John Grisham's The Brethren.

The Brethren are three ex-judges in a low security federal prison who should have been in a harsher one because they're using their time catfishing (though the book predates that term) and extorting closeted gay men who answer pen pal ads. In another thread, I think it was @[email protected] who conjectured that the LGBTQ hard mode was easier than the easy mode. I'm therefore pleased to report that The Brethren contains mail fraud, wire fraud, bribery, tax evasion, embezzlement, legal malpractice, and even some light treason, but very little romance of any sort. Having seen the result of Grisham trying to write romantic scenes, this is probably for the best. He's much better at these sorts of characters.

I have two in progress.

• Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. Some of it more dated than I expected (The opening page mentions a sign in Yugoslavia.) Some of it I already knew (or at least had already been told, even if I'd forgotten the details). But linguistical trivia can be interesting and informative, so it's worth the read.

• Louis Sachar's The Cardturner. This is a blatant propaganda novel. The author is a bridge player and hopes to popularize the game among younger audiences (perhaps inspired by the million weaboos who took up Go inspired by Hikaru no Go.) At least it's a nobler cause than some of the propaganda I've been exposed to. The old, rich, blind bridge expert hires a kid to escort him to tournaments, look at his cards, tell him his hand and play it as he directs. The previous kid fucked up and got fired for learning enough bridge to question his decisions, but this new cardturner knows nothing. The book is intended for YA audiences and has the usual scenes of teenagers acting like teenagers, often while their parents act like toddlers, neither of which appeal to me, but they can be skimmed to get back to bridge scenes more comprehensive than I'd expected.

The Cardturner would be a great fit for the 4E (Game, Gamble, Contest) bingo square. This would also break a beautiful symmetry on my card. Not counting the central square, all 12 of my my scoring lines have an odd number of books completed. (2 lines are 1/5 completed, 8 are 3/5, and 2 are 5/5.) I don't think that specifies a unique arrangement (even up to rotational and reflectional symmetry), but it was surprising.

I'm reading two because they're related. Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, and White Fire by Preston and Child. I've mostly had second-hand exposure to Sherlock Holmes, and figured if I'm going to read / watch / play things inspired by the thing, it's time to read the original thing directly. At about the halfway point, I'm liking both and hoping they finish strong.

I'll claim 18 titles for 3 bingos: Row 1, Column B, and the main diagonal.

(This should duplicate what I submitted through the form and should be final. I cracked open a long one that I don't expect to finish this month.)

::: spoiler List

• 1A: The 47th Samauri by Steven Hunter
• 1B: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
• 1C: Meg by Steve Alten
• 1D: Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan
• 1E: The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
• 2B: The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
• 3A: Ireland by Frank Delaney
• 3B: The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharyn McCrumb
• 3C: Burn by Nevada Barr
• 3D: The Brethren by John Grisham
• 4B: The Cabinet of Curiosities by Preston and Child
• 4C: Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot
• 4D: Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews
• 4E: The Cardturner by Louis Sachar
• 5A: The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck
• 5B: The Middleman by Olen Steinhauer
• 5C: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• 5E: (sub for it takes two): The Bone Yard by Jefferson Bass :::

::: spoiler Favorites

• Saving fish from Drowning. Dead Bibi Chen's ghost was a charming tour guide through SE Asia, patiently and omnisciently watching unheard as her living charges do everything wrong. I thought it was beautifully written and culturally informative.

• Alice in Sunderland is a non-fiction comic book with a bibliography. My only complaint is that it should have had an index too. But mainly, I recommend it because it's clearly not the sort of thing you write just to fulfill a publisher's contract. Talbot must have strongly believed that such a book should exist, and that nobody else was going to make it. Moreover, it's a better fit for the category than I initially expected because in the middle of the book, he writes about the cover art, thus making it integral to the content.

Both of these have re-read potential. :::

::: spoiler Classics Three of these, I think are old enough to be considered classics. Steinbeck's wasn't nearly as funny as the cover blurbs said it was. Maybe political satire has a shorter half-life and it hit harder when it was fresh. While Bradbury uses some dated tropes typical of SF from that era, they don't detract from a central plot that is still disturbingly relevant today. Tey's was both old and British, and assumes the reader knows British history better than I do. It's still rather informative, but harder for me to properly appreciate. :::

::: spoiler Diversity Stats

• 5 from series I've enjoyed previously
• 2 standalone novels from authors I've read other works by
• 11 by authors I had no prior experience with. :::

Finished up Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Took a little longer to get through than I'd thought, either because I had other things on my mind, or because I reread the confusing parts. There are some complicated strands of plot, told out of chronological order, but I think it eventually fits together sensibly. I'd recommend this one and might take a chance on one of Franzen's other books.

There's probably a way to engineer a bingo here by reclassifying things that fit multiple boxes. I just put things in the better fitting or more interesting category.

• 1A: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd -- Agatha Christie. Missed Hard mode by 2 years. Old enough to read via wikisource. Everything else here was read in dead tree format.
• 1C: The Quantum Spy -- David Ignatius. Quantum computing, espionage thereof, and USA-China relations. Very Macguffin.
• 1D: Secrets to the Grave -- Tami Hoag. A single mother is brutally murdered. Her young daughter witnesses and survives the attack. Investigators wonder who the father is.
• 2C: Hannibal Fogg and The Supreme Secret of Man -- Tahir Shah. Hard Mode Published by and available free at http://secretum-mundi.com/
• 2D: The Cartographers -- Peng Shepherd. Hard Mode. About the 1930 General Drafting highway map of New York state, with the Agloe copyright trap. Additionally, includes a discreet, but significant shout-out to Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven.
• 2E: Boar Island -- Nevada Barr. A main character suffered a severe spinal injury (in a previous book, while mountain climbing with Anna Pigeon). She can walk with technological assistance. Boar Island was not designed for the mobility impaired; they move there for her teenage daughter's comfort, not her own.
• 3B: The Scent of Death -- Andrew Taylor. Hard Mode The narrator is a English clerk, assigned to New York City for the duration of the book, during the American Revolution. (I didn't look up the hard mode criteria, but assume it isn't this.)
• 3D: A Column of Fire -- Ken Follett. Follows Pillars of the Earth and World Without End in the Kingsbridge series.
• 4A: Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn. I haven't seen the movie, but am told they made one.
• 5E: The Illustrated Man -- Ray Bradbury. Short stories, the majority of which involve extraplanetary travel, interstellar in some cases.
• AltA: Fatal Error -- F. Paul Wilson. I read Implant some years ago, but nothing of his recently or from this series. Order matters in this series; don't start here.
• AltB: Bones to Ashes -- Kathy Reichs. The author is a well-credentialed and academically respected forensic anthropologist who cares about getting the science right in her novels.
• AltC: Demon Crown -- James Rollins, ne James Czajkowski
• AltD: Inferno -- Dante Alighieri tr. Allen Mandelbaum. Hard Mode. I couldn't read it in the original Italian.

Recently finished The Housemaid. It felt more like chick-lit than what I'd normally go for, but someone said I should read it and lent me a copy. The main plot premise was solid. The reveals were less surprising than perhaps the author intended, but well written regardless. I've scored it under film adaptation which is cheating, but I'm told Sydney Sweeny will make it valid before the bingo closes.

Up next I think is going to be Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan. Not far enough into it to recommend yet, but looks as if it could be interesting, and set in a part of the world I'm underinformed about.

The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel, the first book of his Benny Cooperman series. It's almost a parody of the private detective genre which may or may not have been the author's intent. The cover art isn't much, but I've concluded it's an African tribal sculpture, normally posing as office artwork, but also sturdy enough to bash in the skull of a crooked psychiatrist on page 60, so I've scored it in the weapon on the cover category hard mode.

"Dying cost nothing and could be done at home. Otherwise old man [I forget this character's name] might have lived forever."

From The Rosewood Casket by Sharon McCrumb.