Tomorrow is March and we are supposed to have ice pellets here. Bleah. At least it will be a perfect day to catch up on your reading!
Here is a link to last month’s thread!
I am in the middle of Beat the Reaper which I am mostly enjoying so far.
Just started The Dust of 100 Dogs by AS King and am thoroughly enjoying it so far. I also picked up Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood at the library yesterday. Been a while since I read Atwood, so I’m looking forward to it.
I just wrapped up Christopher Priest’s The Prestige and enjoyed it quite a bit. I appreciated how he used the point-of-views of two very flawed feuding men to color everything. Unfortunately his magician trick in the novel was spoiled for me so going into it I thought that it might lesson my enjoyment of the book but it turned in ways I didn’t expect.
Next up for me is James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah and on that note may I say that used book sellers online who charge the full shipping price allowed from the aggregate site and then ship media mail need to be beaten; they can go in the same pile with used book sellers who copy and paste their business description into the field for the book’s condition. That should have been the last book I read but it only arrived yesterday. Anyhow I enjoyed Only Begotten Daughter despite its flaws so I think I’m going to like this one too.
That’ll be followed by Godmother Night and The Physiognomy.
I’m on a nonfiction kick lately. I’m choosing psych books since I’m starting grad school this fall (!!!) and will specialize in and research the treatment of psychological disorders. I’m just getting myself psyched up. Heh.
I just finished Seligman’s *Learned Optimism * (for which I’m thinking about starting a discussion thread) and am just now diving into Descartes’ Error. Descartes’ Error is pretty promising so far as Damasio’s perception of emotion seems similar to my own – emotion as a response to the body’s physiology (at least that’s my guess as to his argument… he hasn’t completely laid it out yet.) I think next will be Trauma and Recovery, which I read several years ago. I’m in a different place now, though, so it will be a different experience. I am soliciting any and all recommendations for nonfiction in the fields of psychology and mental health treatment.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison. A little bit of :eek:, but mostly :(.
I have thought about reading this and would enjoy hearing more of your input (and the input of others) on it.
I failed miserably at keeping track of what I was reading in February, so I am turning over a new leaf for March!
Just checked out of the library:
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Has anyone read this? It’s for my book club and I don’t know very much about it.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet. Mystery for kids with art history theme.
A really good recent read was Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon. It’s a collection of essays about his relationship with reading and literature. I like this author a lot, and loved reading this.
I really liked it. It’s a relationship story that manages to be bittersweet without being smarmy or sentimental.
I’m still reading The Brothers K, but not making much progress (still sick and don’t feel like reading).
Mudville is waiting, as is Joe Hill’s new novella, Gunpowder, which I haven’t even taken out of the wrapper. I don’t even know what it’s about.
Yesterday I finished up a few books that have been hanging around the reading pile for far too long. Now most of the reading pile is new!
Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales: A Selection. (One day I shall have all of his stories.)
Every Insomniac Has a Story to Tell: Poems by Patrick Bizarro (He used to teach at my university. Took one of his classes a couple of years ago. Nice guy.)
No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff (Library sale find–it’s in hardcover! :D)
Widdershins by Charles de Lint (Finally I have reached the last of the library’s de Lint collection.)
Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert (After this comes the new additions to the main series.)
Master and Fool by J.V. Jones (Third in the “Book of Words” trilogy)
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (“Where to start with Rushdie?” I wondered. “How about the book that started a fatwa? That’s a good place.”)
I’m still making my way through Crime and Punishment, at a rate of a chapter a day. At this rate it’ll take me half-way through March to finish it. Occasionally it’ll pique my interest, but for the most part… meh.
Currently: Pratchett’s Jingo. Coming up next: Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
I’m most of the way through The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass. I picked up the entire trilogy for cheap to have for places where I didn’t want to risk taking library materials. So far it’s pretty good, and I say that as someone who’s read too many fantasy series.
From the library I have Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon. The book opened with a bang, then slowed down considerably while characters were introduced, but now the adventurous stuff has kicked in. The POV shifts abruptly among characters which is a minor annoyance, but I like the premise (‘hard’ scifi, alternate universe) enough to continue.
I made a book run to the discount and used bookstores downtown, and now have a hefty stack.
Just finishing off Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was surprisingly breezy. Very grim, but compelling.
After that I have The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, which I believe is his only book I haven’t read yet.
I started Replay by Ken Grimwood today.
Just last night finished Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, which I picked up after seeing a couple of glowing recommendations here on the Dope. Overall it’s pretty good, and the science fiction elements are fairly novel and reasonably well worked out (I had several serious Fridge Logic moments afterwards, but while reading nothing made me go “arggh”), but I didn’t like it as much as I might have had it been written by someone else.
It’s heavily overwritten and self-conscious, particularly in the beginning, and, worse, it’s a very male book; most of the important male characters are manly, manly men who blow things up and whose self-worth is measured in whom they can beat the crap out of, and most of the important female characters are hot sexy babes who blow things up and see to it that the important male characters get frequently and heroically laid. Since I can’t stand either of these character types, I enjoyed the last 100 pages or so, when the hypercompetent hypermasculine protagonist suffers horrible revelations, gets semifatally shot and becomes temporarily weak and dependent, a lot more that the preceding 400. But kudos for the cool mimes.
Starting tomorrow will be Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for bus reading and Christopher Moore’s Fool for at-home reading (I have them both on interlibrary loan and will probably have to finish them quick since they will both probably be recalled).
Having been reminded of it in another thread, I’m reading Farham’s Freehold for the first time in over 20 years.
Still reading:
The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
Supreme Courtship, by Christopher Buckley
In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson
Seven Choices: Finding Daylight, by Elizabeth Harper Neeld
The Vesuvius Club, by Mark Gatiss
Ship of Magic, by Robin Hobb
I am about two thirds through The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie, and I am enjoying the hell out of it. Laurie has a wicked sense of humor, and a very arch way of describing things.
But I can’t visualize the protagonist as anyone but Dr House.
Still on Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, by George MacDonald Fraser, and enjoying it thoroughly, as I always do with Flashman.
Song of Solomon is on the table for me in the near future. Right now, I’m reading a biography of Nixon.