As I just finished the last book of Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant series (and have also read both of her nonseries mysteries, Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes), it occurred to me that there is a third "series reading" master post I should keep, in addition to the First in Series and Ongoing Series posts that I created a while ago, as inspired by Moonlight Reader; namely, one to collect all my completed reading. So this post collects everything from books / series recently finished to those that I read a long time ago in a galaxy much further away than I care to think about: in the latter case, if fiction, I can't guarantee that I remember much about the plot or the characters (which just might mean that it's time for a reread, but that's a different matter); if nonfiction, whatever I remember of their contents has long merged into the general muddle of information about our world, past and present, that has passed through my brain over the years, mostly without taking permanent residence and definitely without me still being able to pinpoint any specific source. But so help me, I did read all of these -- some only once, some have become favorite comfort reads.

I'll only be collecting completed series or other similarly definable groups of books here (e.g., "all novels / short stories by ..."); beginning with actually completed books and concluding with a section listing the series I have abandoned.  This is not intended as a master post listing all of my completed reading.

COMPLETED

MYSTERIES

Dermot Bolger

- Finbar's Hotel (ed.)

G.K. Chesterton

- Father Brown

Agatha Christie

- all mystery novels and short stories:
     - Miss Marple
     - Poirot
     - Tommy & Tuppence
     - Superintendent Battle (incl. Bundle Brent)
     - Colonel Race
     - Parker Pyne
     - Qin & Satterthwaite
     - Nonseries mysteries

Arthur Conan Doyle

- Sherlock Holmes

Michael Connelly

- Terry McCaleb

The Detection Club

- The Floating Admiral

Colin Dexter

- Inspector Morse

J. Jefferson Farjeon

- Inspector Kendall

Caroline Graham

- Midsomer Murders

George Heyer

- All mysteries:
     - Inspector Hannasyde
     - Inspector Hemingway
     - Nonseries

Tony Hillerman

- Leaphorn & Chee

P.D. James

- Adam Dalgliesh
- Cordelia Gray

Stephen King

- The Green Mile

Stieg Larsson

- Millennium (original series)

Dennis Lehane

- Kenzie & Gennaro

Henning Mankell

- Wallander

Ngaio Marsh

- Roderick Alleyn

Denise Mina

- Garnethill Trilogy

George Pelecanos

- Derek Strange & Terry Quinn

Catherine Louisa Pirkis

- Loveday Brooke

Edgar Allan Poe

- Dupin Tales

Ian Rankin

- Jack Harvey Thrillers

Dorothy L. Sayers

- Lord Peter Wimsey (incl. Wimsey & Vane subseries)

Josephine Tey

- All mysteries:
     - Inspector Grant series
     - Nonseries mysteries (Brat Farrar & Miss Pym Disposes)

HISTORICAL FICTION (ICNL. HISTORICAL MYSTERIES)

Robert van Gulik

- Judge Dee

Anthony Horowitz

- Sherlock Holmes sequels

John Jakes

- North and South Trilogy

Patrick O'Brian

- Aubrey & Maturin

Ellis Peters

- Brother Cadfael

David Pirie

- The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

Jean Plaidy

- Mary Stuart

Tony Riches

- Tudor Trilogy

FANTASY / FAIRY TALES / SUPERNATURAL

Hans Christian Andersen

- Complete Fairy Tales

Brothers Grimm

- Complete Fairy Tales

Wilhelm Hauff

- Complete Fairy Tales

C.S. Lewis

- Chronicles of Narnia

Tamora Pierce

- Song of the Lioness

J.K. Rowling

- Harry Potter (minus The Cursed Child, which contrary to the sales hype wasn't actually written by Rowling)

J.R.R. Tolkien

- Middle Earth: The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings

T.H. White

- The Once and Future King

Tad Williams

- Memory, Sorrow & Thorn

CLASSICS & LITFIC

Aeschylus

- Oresteia (Agamemnon / The Libarion Bearers / The Eumenides)

Louisa May Alcott

- Little Women (incl. Good Wives, Little Men & Jo's Boys)

Margaret Atwood

- Gilead (The Handmaid's Tale & The Testaments)

Jane Austen

- Novels and fragments (minus juvenalia, except for The History of England)

Gabriel Chevalier

- Clochemerle (Clochemerle & Clochemerle Babylon)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

- Faust (Parts I & II and Urfaust)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

- A Scots Quair

Robert Graves

- I, Claudius

- Books on Greek mythology (The Greek Myths; Greek Gods and Heroes)

Selma Lagerlöf

- Jerusalem

D.H. Lawrence

- Brangwen Family (The Rainbow & Women in Love)

Naguib Mahfouz

- Cairo Trilogy

- Novels & stories of Ancient Egypt (Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War, Akhenaten, Voices from the Other World)

Thomas Mann

- All novels and short stories

Edna O'Brien

- Country Girls Trilogy

William Shakespeare

- All plays, sonnets and short poems

Sophocles

- Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonnus, Antigone)

Wallace Stegner

- Joe Allston (All the Little Live Things & The Spectator Bird)

Anthony Trollope

- The Pallisers

HISTORY, (AUTO)BIOGRAPHY & OTHER NONFICTION

Will & Ariel Durant

- The Story of Civilization

Fischer Weltgeschichte

(various authors; elsewhere known as Universal History and Storia Unversale)

Antonia Fraser

- A Royal History of England (ed.)

Hugo Hamilton

- Childhood Memoirs

Hans J. Massaquoi

- Destine to Witness

Hans Silvester

- Cats in the Sun

ABANDONED

SERIES

Renée Ahdieh: The Wrath and the Dawn (after book 1, The Wrath and the Dawn)
Alan Bradley: Flavia de Luce (after book 1, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
Dan Brown: Robert Langdon (after book 2, The Da Vinci Code; no other books from series read)
Miles Burton: Desmond Merrion (after book 1, The Secret of High Eldersham)
Trudi Canavan: Black Magician Trilogy (after book 1, The Magicians' Guild)
Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown (after book 1, Sorcerer to the Crown)
Jennifer Estep: Crown of Shards (after book 1, Kill the Queen)
Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones's Diary (after book 1, Bridget Jones's Diary)
James Forrester: Clarenceux Trilogy (after book 1, Sacred Treason)
Elizabeth George: Inspector Lynley (after book 16, This Body of Death)
Lee Goldberg: Even Ronin (after book 1, Lost Hills)
Kerry Greenwood: Phryne Fischer (after book 1, Cocaine Blues, aka Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates)
Philippa Gregory: Tudor Court (after book 3, The Other Boleyn Girl; no other books from series read)
L.B. Hathaway: Posie Parker (DNF book 6.5, A Christmas Case; no other books from series read)
Martha Grimes: Richard Jury (after book 21, Dust)
Dorothy B. Hughes: Griselda Satterlee (after book 1, The So Blue Marble)
E.L. James: Fifty Shades (after book 1, Fifty Shades of Grey)
Carole Lawrence: Ian Hamilton (after book 1, Edinburgh Twilight)
Edward Marston: Christopher Redmayne (after book 1, The King's Evil)
Francine Matthews: Caroline Carmichael (after book 1, The Cutout)
Pat McIntosh: Gil Cunningham (after book 1, The Harper's Quine)
Stephenie Meyer: Twilight (after book 1, Twilight)
S.J. Parris: Giordano Bruno (after book 1, Heresy)
Louise Penny: Armand Gamache (after book 1, Still Life)
Elizabeth Peters: Amelia Peabody (after book 1, Crocodile on the Sandbank)
Valerie Plame Wilson & Sarah Lovett: Vanessa Pierson (after book 1, Blowback)
Patrick Senécal: Le vide (after book 1, Vivre au Max)
Helene Tursten: Inspector Irene Huss (after book 2, Night Rounds)

AUTHORS

Anne Rice

Read:

- Maifair Witches through book 2 (Lasher)

- Vampire Chronicles through book 6 (The Vampire Armand)

- Stand-alones: Cry to Heaven, Violin, Vittorio the Vampire

Beyond Forever is done nicely. It more of the conclusion of the series. Though it leaves with guessing Finn best bud Mac and his wife Jules lives are like. It more to do with Finn and Olivia life is like a little before and after having their little one.

We get this feeling and how all their plans start to change. There are twists and turns throughout the book. Olivia sister Jane states they are moving to Austin, Texas. All family starts thinking about that and pondering their moves.

Finn has a surprise plan for Olivia and his little girl. He seems to be traveling a lot and his business and they want to expand their business. Finn and Tex decide to create a surprise plan for their wives.

Jules brother mentions a few time throughout the book and his ASL fundraisers. Do you realize the family is more important or not? Will Olivia get her own home that sees dreams of? Part of it that her friends are a bit important to her as well.

DD Max does a sweet job of finishing off Olivia and Finn story. I now wish to read about Mac and Jules and find out what they have. It so was like seeing how their little girl and learning more about the guardian angels are about.

Book themes for Dōngzhì Festival: Read a book set in China or written by a Chinese author / an author of Chinese origin; or read a book that has a pink or white cover.

I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.  It started off interesting, but for some reason I became progressively less interested as the story continued and I put the book down more and more frequently.  I also didn’t find it as funny.  It had humor, but it didn’t make me laugh as much.  I think it intentionally took a more serious tone, which I might have appreciated better if I’d been more interested in the story.

The first book had a mixture of elements from both science fiction and fantasy, but I thought it leaned more toward science fiction.  This book, on the other hand, was purely in the fantasy category with Norse gods playing a large role in the story.  In many ways this reminded me of American Gods, at least in terms of the basic premise, except without the “American” part.  This book was published first, so maybe I would feel differently if I had read it first, but I preferred American Gods.

I’m not really sure why this one didn’t work as well for me as Dirk Gently did but, by the end, I was happy to be done with it.

Next Book

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders.  I don’t know anything about this story, but I’ve seen it reviewed quite a bit in recent months and I’ve skimmed those reviews for general impressions.  My general impression of other people’s general impressions is that a lot of people hate it and a lot of people love it, so it will be interesting to see where I end up.

I liked this a lot more than I expected to.  I had read the author’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about 20 years ago and, while I remember finding it mildly amusing and clever at times, I also found it too unrealistically silly to take seriously and didn’t much care for it.  My memory of that book is too fuzzy for me to say if this book is significantly different in style, or if I’ve just become more tolerant of the type of humor.  I do think Pratchett’s Discworld series taught me how to enjoy silly books now and then.

I really didn’t find this book overly silly, though.  It was very funny and I giggled madly through quite a bit of it, but the humor mostly felt like an integral part of the story.  In the past, I've had more trouble when the story just feels like a vehicle for the humor.  The electric monk was the only part I considered to be completely absurd, but he was funny so I forgave him. :)

This is a science fiction story, set mostly in the present day on our world at around the time it was published in 1987.  A computer programmer named Richard seems to be having a lot of strange things happen lately.  There’s a couch stuck in the stairwell to his flat that nobody can figure out how to move up or down, he has an odd visit with a former university counselor, and a rather shocking experience while he’s driving, and so on.  If I attempt to give any more detail than that, I think it would spoil the story. 

There are a lot of different elements packed into a fairly short book, but it was all coherent and easy to follow for the most part.  I did think the resolution was very fuzzy.  I understood the gist of it, but I think it was stretching things a little and failed to take into account other possibilities.  Overall though, I enjoyed the book and I loved the humor.

Next Book

I have the above book in an omnibus which includes the sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, so I’m moving on to that next.

In the Cities of Coin and Spice is the sequel to In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente.  The books share the same structure, with stories nested inside of stories, up to seven levels including the framing story.  As for that framing story, it continues in this book and finally gets a satisfying conclusion.

I enjoyed this one as much as the first one.  The format has lost its newness factor, though; at this point it feels perfectly normal.  It also didn’t seem quite as complexly structured as the first book, but maybe that’s just because I was so used to it.  It seemed like the stories were more concentrated in a couple layers.  As before, the stories were interconnected.  There were also a <i>lot</i> of ties back to the first book, some obvious and some more subtle.

The stories themselves were darker than in the first book, especially in the first half, and I think I liked them a bit better.  I did still occasionally lose interest in some parts, but not too much.  The author wove everything together from both books in a satisfying and intricate way.  I suspect a reader would enjoy the series as much if not more on a re-read, because the conclusion sheds new light on everything that happened before.

This was my first time reading anything by Valente, and I was impressed.  I’ll likely try more of her work in the future.

Next Book

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  I don’t know anything about this book, but I vaguely remember seeing comments that left me with the impression it would be pretty dark and/or bleak.