2026 Book Club [Discussion]

[overgeeked]

I'm on a bit of a hardboiled & noir kick. I finished the first Mike Hammer book yesterday. I The Jury by Mickey Spillane. The book was fast-paced if a bit scattered, lots of apparent side quests that eventually mattered to the main plot. It was a lot less racist and sexist than I assumed. Still quite racist and sexist, but nothing compared to say an H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard book. The worst of it was the attempt at phonetic spelling for the two African-American characters who appear in the book. So painful to read.

Mike is investigating the death of a close friend and war buddy. The dead guy saved Mike's life in WW2 and lost an arm for his troubles. There are three main female characters in the book, two femme fatales and Mike's secretary. Mike proposes marriage to two of them and sleeps with the third twice, including once after being engaged to one of the other two. Of course the main plot and string of murders were the fault of one of the femme fatales. I figured the whodunnit part by the halfway point of the book, though I was wrong about the how and why.

In all a fun, fast-paced book despite the racism and sexism.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm currently reading Titus Groan, the first Gormenghast novel.

I gather the series is well known in the UK but it's pretty obscure in the US and it's not hard to see why. The characters almost all act like refugees from Wonderland (which is to say, they're a bunch of loonies) and the Castle Gormenghast itself is a surreal mega-structure that doesn't make a lick of sense, but doesn't really need to, sort of like in Kafka's The Castle.

Until Steerpike appears about a quarter of the way through the novel (world class character names in this book, if nothing else), it's basically a series of vignettes about strange unpleasant people. Steerpike himself isn't a great person, but he has recognizable goals and ways of achieving them, so it's easy to latch onto him.

I'm not sure if I'm going to feel the need to read the rest of the series, but this certainly does make me want to run a mega-dungeon full of weirdo NPCs.

To balance out the real world's bleakness, I'm also reading Nine Goblins, which is my first T. Kingfisher book. I like the idea of it -- goofy goblins behind enemy (i.e. elf and human) lines, trying to get home -- but the execution is just OK. I'm sure I'm spoiled by Terry Pratchett, but this seems to be mostly coasting by on "hey, isn't this a fun idea" rather than really executing on it, whether in plot and characterization or simply funny writing, which Pratchett would nail in each case. It's not bad, but it's just fine.