Whatcha Readin' Sept 2010 Edition

Fall is just around the corner! Cool evenings, colored leaves, football!

OK, so I’ve been lax in getting the threads started these last few months. Today I actually put an appointment into Outlook to remind me! :slight_smile:

I am reading *The Sorceress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel) *the third book in the series. So far I am enjoying it, but looking at the rest of the series, I worry that he may not intend to end it any time soon. I usually prefer series with a closed ending.

After that, I have a bunch in my queue - I was just out to Borders this past Saturday.

Link to last month’s thread.

Just finished The Birth of Venus, about 80 pages into Medicus. I’ve always liked ancient Roman/Renaissance/Medieval fiction, got these two books for less than four dollars which makes it even better.

Got a good start last night on Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay, which I’ve been looking forward to.

My new audiobook as of this morning is Flashman, beautifully narrated by David Case. However, I’m already feeling some trepidation about the condition of the library’s cassette tapes.

Thanks, K, you know these are important to me! :slight_smile:

I’ll be off on a ten-day holiday later this month (next week today, to be exact! Woohoo!), so there’s a bunch of things that I bought specifically for light-fluff reading and re-reading:

Jim Butcher’s Cursor’s Fury, part three of the Codex Alera. I rather like the series. It’s not quite as hilarious as the Dresden Files, and Tavi isn’t going to be my favorite character ever, but it’s engaging enough.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. Just 'cause. Part of an ongoing endeavor to get up to speed on contemporary U.S. fiction.
David Weber’s Mission of Honor. Because that annoying bastard didn’t put any meat at all in Storm from the Shadows and I need to know how it goes on!
Robert Mayer/Grant Morrison’s Superfolks. Alternative superhero comics. Yay!
Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March. Such a great book, vacation re-read.

I’m about 1/4 of the way through Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer. I don’t have anything on deck but I’d like to read Packing For Mars, Bonk and/or Stiff by Mary Roach.

Just finished The Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Even with editing, it was a slow slog. Also finished The Mind’s Sky, by Timothy Ferris. He’s an excellent science writer, but parts of it were tough going. I’m still plowing through A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, a bit at a time: it’s interesting, but I have to be in the mood for that sort of thing. For lighter fare, I’m zipping through A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. It’s a curiously negative and cranky account of his hike on the Appalachian Trail, but with some very amusing bits. Lastly, I just picked up Death in the Sahara.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Anyone read this? Does she get the science right?

Almost halfway through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. This is a truly excellent read. We’ve purposely not seen the movie yet, so as not to spoil the story. A “locked-room mystery” so to speak, only on a Swedish island, with a disappearance, presumably a murder, to be solved 36 years after the fact.

This is the first of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy of crime novels. He died of a heart attack in 2004 at age 50 after finishing the trilogy, and the books were published posthumously. He never knew how succesful they would become, or that he would be listed as the second best-selling author in the world in 2008, behind behind Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. Sad.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.

I read it, but couldn’t say if the science is correct.

Don Quixote. I read about three-quarters of it over my vacation and I hope I can wrap it up soon, although back home I’m sure I won’t keep to that pace. It’s the 1771 Tobias Smollet translation - so not a modern style at all - which I picked because Salman Rushdie said good things about it. I’m not laughing out loud a lot but some parts are very funny, and I’m enjoying the experience of finding out what the story is actually like as opposed to its reputation.

My wife and I just finished …Played With Fire, and since the paperback version of …Kicked The Hornet’s Nest doesn’t come out here for another year or two, it looks like I’ll be picking up the hardcover of that one shortly.

The paperback version of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is available in Thailand. We just bought it this past Saturday, so now we have the whole trilogy to work through.

I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein. I bought a stack of his books at a second hand book sale two weeks ago because I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and so far I’m enjoying it a lot.

After hearing about it in another Cafe Society thread, I picked up and read F. Paul Wilson’s The Tomb.

Repairman Jack fixes things. Not plumbing or appliances… but other, specialized things. In his first adventure, he’s fixing some ancient Indian demons let loose on New York City.

The writing is good, the character is fun, but what I really liked about this book is that we get to see a normal guy’s first exposure to otherworldly goings-ons. We get to experience Jack’s realization that demons exist… and that he has to find a way to fight them. Also, Jack is just a normal dude. Sure, he’s a specialized kind of a dude. A dude that comes with incendiary bombs and black-jacks. But just a regular dude. This is pretty refreshing in a genre where EVERY hero is a vampire, half-vampire, werewolf, magician, necromancer, etc.

I’m in the middle of Matter by Banks right now, in an effeort to read all the Culture novels before the new one in October!

Squirt!

Up next is David Mitchells latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. Also, The Dervish House by Ian McDonald based on a suggestion from Richard K. Morgan.

Still in Humboldt’s Gift (since August 7), but now, almost, finally, done.

Next up - Liar, Liar, because a friend is one of the three writers behind the pen name K.J. Larsen.

I tried to get it a year or two back, when it was recommended in one of these threads. Amazon didn’t ship it for 3 months and I finally canceled the order. Maybe I’ll have to try again…

I got The Art of Racing in the Rain as a birthday present. Sad, but good.