Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
1870 / Audiobook / 142 pages / UK***
Maybe I'll get into Dickens one day. I'd been meaning to read this one since reading Dan Simmons' pretend meta backstory Drood, and the recognition of names and parallel events still worked the wrong way around. It starts promisingly with an eloquent tour of opium dens, cloisters and graveyards, but then customarily fills up with characters and their tedious love quadrangles. The titular mystery is one of the least mysterious I've ever come across, so leaving it open-ended turned out to be more satisfying. RIP.
David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon (a.k.a. A Tale of Deadly Obsession)
2009 / Audiobook / 304 pages / USA***
I haven't read the original New Yorker article that was expanded to book length, but the padding's still clear. Grann's own Amazonian adventure is intermittently teased while he tells the stories of those whose footsteps he's foolishly following. It's about the journey, but the destination is surprisingly non-anticlimactic too, even if I found it hard to care about a few privileged missing-presumed-dead glory-hunters against the backdrop of colonial rape and genocide.
Count Zhoaren von Bvcegi, Making Sense of UFO: The Bvcegi Report
2016 / Ebook / 72 pages / ?
*
I haven't really kept up with the UFO world since I was about 12, so I trusted the Count to fill me in on what's been going on. There are a couple of contemporary photos of "pyramid"-shaped Mars rocks and Giza UFOs presented without comment, but he's more interested in giving his brief thoughts on the pages of website, forum and Yahoo! image search screenshots he includes without permission, covering old-hat topics primarily based on research from 100 years ago. Sometimes he copies the same text more than once to fill up more pages, sometimes they're too small and blurry to actually read, sometimes the page didn't actually load before he screenshat, but at least that's a respite from his own writing, which is made as difficult to read as possible in italicised, multicolour-highlighted, abnormally punctuated, randomly capitalised Comic Sans to weed out all but the troo loons.
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Guy's too busy researching to proofread |
Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier2017 / Audiobook / 160 pages / USA
**
A companion piece to the shaky 2017 revival, this mainly catches up on some of the dull backstory that the series or the cast couldn't be bothered to, then it gets more interesting when clarifying some of the stranger happenings. No explanations though; no need to ruin it.
Michelle McNamara, Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
2018 / Audiobook / 352 pages / USA***
I don't normally read true crime – the world's bleak enough generally without making myself paranoid – but reading that the self-described obessed amateur sleuth died so close to the finish line was the extra context that nudged me (even if her death wasn't related to the case, because real life isn't as good as stories). It doesn't glamourise the prolific rotter as much as I imagine these things normally do, but it all gets a bit technical and boring after a while.
