Looks like I found another expose of the crime syndicate known as the CIA.

The CIA As Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

Any recommendations for literary crime fiction? I’ve got a weakness for detective stories but am not interested if the prose is flat and cliche-ridden, and the characters are little more than placeholders moving through the story.

Richard Price. I've only read two, The Whites and Lush Life. Both are solid and will satisfy your criteria (i.e. no clichés, good characterization);

Joyce Carol Oates has a great review of The Whites in The New Yorker; it begins: “As the sonnet was the quintessential form of the Elizabethan poet, packing distilled and dazzling language into its sleek fourteen lines and challenging every virtuoso of the day, so the quintessential form of the contemporary crime writer is the interrogation: two individuals in a room, one of them the suspect and the other the detective.”

Michael Chabon wrote a nice review of Lush Life, which looks at Price’s earlier career and strongly recommends, in addition to that novel, Clockers, and Samaritan. He characterizes Price's writing as a "postmodern commingling of irony and yearning." https://www.nybooks.com/articles/200.../in-priceland/

Writing this makes me think I should now read more of his books.

Benjamin Black (John Banville)Christine Falls
Philip Kerr’s Prussian Blue
Perhaps the novels of Alan Furst

In the chick thriller category I've been known to dabble in, I'm enjoying You by Caroline Kepnes. She has a sharp ear for internal "dialogue", and this voice actor that's reading it on the CD is a true artiste, he really is. I should give him credit by name in fact, Santino Fontana.

I'm not sure I have any new titles to add; most of what I've read lately comes from this thread:

The Selfish Gene: Surprised I've never read it until now.
Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro's writing is good enough that I'll check out Ends of the Day, but I didn't love this
Silas Marner: Enjoyed
Children of Time: Liked it
Short Stories by Dostoyevsky: Too frantic; couldn't finish.
And Then There Were None: Decent, but traditional mysteries are not my thing.
The Stone Sky: Good finish to Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy
Starfish; Maelstrom; Behemoth: Peter Watts is twisted. Enjoyed.

Give Remains of the Day a shot. It's much better than his other stuff. Plus, if you can make it through Silas Marner, you can do anything.

Yeah, Remains of the Day is way better than Never Let Me Go.

I read about 250 pages into Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind which I'm surprised hasn't been reviewed here. Much like his food writing, he takes a very balanced view of the medicinal, therapeutic, and mystical nature of psychedelics.

Pollan reviews many of the contemporary and recent historical players in the field. Paul Stamets gets great press. Timothy Leary less so. A guy named Al Hubbard is shown as having a seminal part of the spread of LSD in the 50's and 60's.

Pollan gets into the weeds as to the clinical uses of psychedelics in the years since it was classified a Schedule 1 drug and is quite impressed with the results. In the course of the narrative, Pollan takes LSD, psliocybin and DMT and puts great emphasis on the set and setting of such experiences.

I've not yet read the final chapters were he gets into the neurological benefits of the experience but have enjoyed the book so far.

I loved both Never Let Me Go and Remains. Still need to see the movie version of the latter though.

200 or so pages into Pillars of the Earth and i have no clue what it is about really but im still enjoying it.

Wow, right up my alley. Thanks!

I loved previous books of Pollan’s particularly The Botany of Desire
Recently in an August issue of The New York Review there was a fine essay on this latest book. Coincidentally I was given a copy which sits on the shelf awaiting a reader. I should read it post haste since with all the wet weather this summer there are mushrooms populating the manure piles of my donkey.

Just read Remains Of The Day and I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about. My friend has disowned me.

Remains was a great movie! Very poignant, and Hopkins is perfect. Probably won't ever bother to read it now that I know the story. But I really thought the book Never Let Me Go was fantastic, as elite as it gets. Was gonna read more of him, still might.

And rightly so. Never Let Me Go is also amazing. Didn't love the latest one as much.

I loved the Buried Giant after the first 50 or so pages, although I'm a sucker for that time period and anything having to do with king Arthur.

You was ****ing awesome, the best bestseller thriller type book I've read in years, maybe since Caleb Carr's The Alienist. I'm waiting for La Biblioteca to come thru on Kepnes's sequel Hidden Bodies, supposed to be today. I bet I know who killed em!

I started a reread of The Kingkiller Chronicle. Kvothe is 1 of my all time favorite fiction characters.

I really wish Patrick Rothfuss would get off his lazy ass and finish/release the 3rd book.

I'm starting to think he has a bet with George R. R. Martin on who takes the longest to release their next book in the series that each are writing.

Just finished The Spy Who Came in From The Cold by John LeCarre.

I'm more of a non ficition guy these days and wasn't sure a spy novel would be up my street but it really is a fantastic book. Got through it very quickly as I couldn't put it down.

The movie with Richard Burton is just as good

Who's the author of 'You'?

Currently on Kate Atkinson's newest, very very good. Transcription.

Anne rice just released the newest vampire book. It’s the 3rd featuring Lestat in the last 4-5 years. This one has Lestat as the narrator. I got hooked on the VC when I was in high school and I’m glad she’s still making them. I enjoy the world she’s created and it’s good to see so many old friends all together.


Also reading Kingsbridge #1 by Follett (slowly)
Magicians nephew by cs Lewis


Have a stack ready to go after these. Trying to grind through them faster.

Looking forward to it. I loved her last two.