Time Travel Thursday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. This is where I take a look back at what I was reading this time last year (or the year before or the year before that…) and compare it to what I am reading now.

Books I was Reading on This Day in 2023:

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell

From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it.

Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art—as well as extensive evidence—points to another name, one that’s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material—including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause—and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.

Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.

See my review of this book here.

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen

In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves.

Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.

See my review of this book here.

Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Published by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb

Your Expert Guide to Writing and Publishing a NovelIn this revised and expanded edition of Your First Novel, novelist Laura Whitcomb, seasoned literary agent Ann Rittenberg, and her knowledgeable assistant, Camille Goldin, team up to provide you with the essential skills needed to craft the best novel you can–and the savvy business know-how to get it published. Complete with updated references, analysis of new best-selling novels, and the same detailed instruction, Whitcomb will show you how    • Practice the craft of writing, using both your right- and left-brain   • Develop a flexible card system for organizing and outlining plot   • Create dynamic characters that readers love–and love to hate   • Study classic novels and story structure to adapt with your ideasFeaturing two new chapters on choosing your path as an author and understanding the world of self-publishing, Rittenberg and Goldin dive into the business side of publishing,    • What agents can–and should–do for your future   • Who you should target as an agent for your burgeoning career   • How the mysterious auction for novels actually goes down   • Why you should learn to work with your agent through thick and thin. Guiding your first novel from early words to a spot on the bookshelf can be an exciting and terrifying journey, but you’re not alone. Alongside the advice of industry veterans, Your First Novel Revised and Expanded also includes plenty of firsthand accounts from published authors on their journeys, including Dennis Lehane, C.J. Box, Kathleen McCleary, David Kazzie, and more.

See my review of this book here.

What I’m Reading Now:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 599 of 724

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
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This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 132 of 270

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 58%

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

Progress: page 27 of 241

Holus Bolus by William Pauley III

OUR PROTAGONIST is pretty sure he’s just committed a murder. The body is newly dead, he’s the only one around, and a quick look at the evidence suggests he’s guilty as sin.

Also, he’s totally insane.

A rare brain condition causes his memories to reset every day, and because of this, he often wakes up in strange places with no memory of how he got there. He can’t even remember his own name. When he’s not racking his brain over his shoddy memory, he’s arguing incessantly with a disembodied voice that doesn’t seem to belong to him, one he can only hear inside his head.

He may not know much about the troubling situation he just woke up to, but he knows, without a doubt, that he’s completely f*cked.

While the odds are certainly stacked against him, there may be hope for our protagonist yet, for clutched in the corpse’s cold, clammy hands is a handwritten tome that suggests not only his innocence, but also reveals some bizarre and dangerous secrets, leading him to believe his own apartment building may be to blame… or is, at the very least, an accomplice.

That sounded better inside his head.

Luckily he’s not the only one trying to solve the case. The book also leads him to a group of outcasts who are in the midst of their own investigation. The only problem? They all suspect one another!

One thing’s for certain, someone inside the tower is a cold-blooded killer. Can our protagonist solve the murder before he falls asleep and his memories reset? Or worse, before the killer strikes again?

Find out in HOLUS BOLUS. You’ll be pushed to the very edge of sanity!

Progress: Audiobook 90%

Elsie’s Tune: One Last Song to Overcome by Jonathan Watson

“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”

Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune. 

Progress: page 54 of 334