Happy Groundhog’s day all! Here is the February edition of our threads. Link to the Jan thread.
I am reading The Accidental Sorcerer. A very light fantasy set in fictitious medieval time. Our hero is a bungling grade 3 wizard who takes a job half way across the world to escape the embarrassment of a major screw-up. It is not great lit, but good enough to pass the time.
I’m 750 pages into Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson. The next book is queued up.
Halfway through Lady Chatterley’s Lover; also just started Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
A Deepness In The Sky, about a third of the way in so far.
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Enjoyable so far, but I’ve not gotten very far into it. But you can only love a book that manages to quote the Curse of Melkor in its entirety within the first dozen pages or so.
I’ve also graduated from the excellent The Rise of Silas Lapham to the less than stellar Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser. I tried to read this once before, and hoped I would have improved as a reader to now see something in it that I had failed to see before, but no dice…
Otherwise, I’m still going through Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk, which is still interesting, but less so as I get to be informed about various comic artists and their oeuvre that I’ve never seen, and for which Wolk provides (probably because of copyright) only the occasional example. As I get to Miller, Moore, and Eisner, I have a better background and may get back to enjoying the book more.
I’m about 3/4 of the way through Ireland: A Novel by Frank Delaney. I like the convention of telling the history of Ireland through stories told by various characters in the main plot, but the execution has so far fallen a little flat for me.
i’m getting through “the 9/11 commission report”. for a government publication it is surprizingly readable.
I’m currently about 150 pages into Peter Straub’s Koko and it hasn’t grabbed me. It’s one of those “confronting the horrors of Vietnam” books that were popular in the late 80’s. That ground is so well worn that it would take an exceptional Vietnam book to interest me and that book is not Koko.
On a better note for me I finally wrapped up reading all of the Hugo winning short fiction last night. The first forty years worth of the awards were easy to collect because with the exception of Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse series they were all collected into some easy to locate volumes. After about 1994, however, I had track down individual stories. There’s only about seven or eight non-fiction winners left and my collection of Hugo winners will be complete.
The next novels on my shelf is Lyonesse: Madouc by Jack Vance from which I don’t expect much and Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow which I’ve heard some mixed things about (though I’m reasonably sure I’m going to enjoy his Towing Jehova which is just far enough down my list that it may turn up for me in the March thread).
Mr. X is the Straub title that lost me. I liked Koko – it makes a trilogy with The Throat and Mystery, and I read them in close succession. Maybe that helped. It also helps that it’s still the only Vietnam novel I’ve read, so I don’t have anything to compare with
I like Morrow, but when I read more than one of his books in a short period of time, they start to seem gimmicky.
I’m reading The Gone-Away World (recommended by a Doper). The story started off with a bang but now we’re flashing back to the protagonist’s youth. It’s still interesting as hell, but it’s hard not to skip ahead and see what caused the apocalypse.
I just read:
Tim Russert’s “Big Russ And Me”, which is a good book.
Stephen King’s “Just After Sunset”, which was surprisingly good as a collection of short stories.
“The Road” by JohnnyWhat’sHisName, which was really bleak and wonderful in a sad, apocalyptic kinda way.
Am now reading “Edgar Sawtelle’s Story” and have been impressed quite a bit so far.
On top of my toilet tank, my favored copy of *Food Lover’s Companion *gets me through the shits just enough to consider eating again.
I forgot that I also read *John Lennon, The Life *by Philip Norman…also a reccommendable book.
I think it was the twenty year rule. It was twenty years later and a lot of authors and filmmakers thought to revisit the war in a way that wasn’t really done before. And once a few successes hit then everyone did it.
These days the stuff raised at that point has been so embedded in popular culture that just about any war is presented through a Vietnam filter. I’m not just talking about the good war/bad war dichotomy that divides simplistic writers, everything seems to be driven through an Asian jungle war involving 1960’s youths.
I’m probably going to read a ton of historical mysteries for a while. They are distracting and foreign. I give a hearty thumb’s up to distracting and foreign.
I decided that the very premise of Years of Rice and Salt depressed the hell out of me, so I took it back to the library unread.
Still on The Bonfires of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. A little more than two-thirds through. Quite a good read, and I’m enjoying it immensely, but it’s been slow going because I’ve been very busy the past few weeks. But the story involves a Wall Street bond salesman who gets involved in a traffic mishap in the Bronx and ends up the football in a political game. It was published in 1987 and is set about then.
I am reading Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry. It’s the story of a love triangle that spans forty years, and each participant tells a third of it, sort of Rashomonesque.
I still don’t know after two thirds of the book if I like it, but I would say it is not one of McMurtry’s better books, as much as I like his writing.
Aside from such last-semester delights as The M&A Process and International Commercial Arbitration, The New Penguin Russian Course is still my constant companion. It’s already got that familiar “well-loved” look about it from regular reference and travelling around in my backpack. (Edit: To anyone who chimed in on my original thread looking for Russian-learning advice, I did eventually decide to solicit a tutor for weekly lessons as a supplement to self-study. She, in turn, insisted that I learn Cyrillic script on my very first lesson, so now I hardly even pause when I see m for т or u for и. :D)
I’m also poking around in Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina Pars I: Familia Romana. I’m not sure how serious I am about picking up Latin right now, but I couldn’t resist having a look at a book that purports to teach Latin more or less by ‘immersion.’ Every word, from pagina I on, is in Latin. So far I’ve found it easy and interesting–but then, I’m only on Capitulum III.
For pleasure, I’m taking my second trip through The Thirteen and 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers. It’s every bit as much fun the second time round as it was the first–delightfully zany, silly, and whimsical. It’s a got a special something that I don’t often find outside of, say, Monty Python. After I finish that, I may have a go at finishing VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen–the last time I tried to read it, my copy quite literally fell apart before I could finish, so I’ve borrowed it from a friend. Other options include a second read of Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy, or Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
Then may I heartily recommend two alternative history/mysteries, SS-GB by Len Deighton and Fatherland by Robert Harris, two very different books set against a backdrop of the Germans winning WW2.
Right now I’m reading True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, a novel about Ned Kelly, Australia’s folk hero/outlaw of the late 1800s. So far it’s kinda meh. I’m also about halfway through John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades, which is not quite as good as its predecessor, Old Man’s War, but is still pretty damned good.
I finally finished The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 2. I got through the comic part pretty quickly, but I slogged through the last bit describing the mysterious locations the different Leagues explored all over the world. It was fun finding all the literary allusions I recognized in it, though. And now I’m going to have to move Orlando up to a higher place on Mt. ToBeRead so I can understand all the allusions to him/her.
Gorilla war?..
I recently finished Martian Quest: The Early Brackett and found it underwhelming. I’m a big fan of her later stories, but in these early works she was still developing her craft.
I just started Tales in a Jugular Vein; it’s a collection of Robert Bloch short stories from the '50s.
One of the best books I’ve read about confronting the horrors of Vietnam was written by someone who was about 10 years old when it being fought. The Names of the Dead, by Stewart O’Nan was a fabulous book, one of the few that, IMO, compares favorably to Tim O’Brien’s stuff. I loved Koko, though, so YMMV.
…oh, and I’m on a scifi kick. I’m reading Darwin’s Radio, by Greg Bear and giving Ringworld a second chance (this time on audiobook).
Hah! I just read LXG Vol. 2 a week ago. I esp. liked the reference to The Big Lebowski - did you catch it?