Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' - April 2013 Edition

I’m starting the thread a little early this month - I’ll be out of reach of the internet at Grandmother’s house in a little while, and I didn’t want to leave it until it actually is April. The sun is now out, it has been warm enough to open the windows as I clean the house, and I’m looking forward to reading on the front porch someday very soon. This is the first time in 5 years that I’ll have a garden; I’m feeling like Cicero himself!

I’m mostly using the e-reader this month, as I’m zipping back and forth to rehearsals and I don’t want to a) schelp large books around nor b) run out of reading material when I have an hour’s wait ahead of me. So for the present, it’s Logic, by Carveth Read, The Young Hornblower Omnibus by C. S. Forester, and The Travels of Marco Polo in the Project Gutenberg edition of the Sir Henry Yule translation. I have to say, the first two work just fine on the Kobo; the Marco Polo is something where I give it another couple of chapters before I give up and just get a paper copy. I don’t mind the copious notes; I just want to make my own decisions about when and how I choose to read them. I have to say, Kobos aren’t particularly good with footnotes.
And you, fellow bibliophiles - what are you reading these days?

Here is a link to last month’s thread.

For those who are new - Khadaji was a much loved Doper who passed away in January of this year. He was a very kind and compassionate poster, who is fondly remembered for all his encouragement in the ‘couch to 5K’ and ‘I’m quitting smoking’ threads. He was also an omnivorous reader who started this long chain of book discussion threads, and it in fond remembrance of him that they are now re-named “Khadaji’s Whatcha Readin’”

My current pile of books:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson – I’m really liking this one. Very creepy.
Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens – I finally got through the infamous American section. Okay, Chuck, we get it: you don’t like Americans! Can we get back to the Pecksniffs now?
Polgara the Sorceress, David & Leigh Eddings – I’m at the Battle of Vo Mimbre section which goes on FOREVER. I liked it much better in Belgarath. Polgara’s starting to irk my nerves.
Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem, Stuart Friebert and David Young – This one probably won’t go back on the shelf.
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga – This one definitely will go back. I love this book. A poor Rhodesian girl in the late 1960s is taken by her uncle to get a “proper” education in the mission school. She gets a firsthand look at her cousin, who lived in England for a while, slowly disintegrating under cultural imperialism.
And on the Eighth Day, Ellery Queen – A very strange mystery about a very strange religious cult out in the Californian desert during WWII. It’s better than some of the other Queen books I’ve read.

I’m about four-fifths through Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, by Grady McWhiney, a retired Texas Christian University history professor. (The book came out 25 years ago, so he may be dead now, dunno.) Very interesting. His claim is that the Civil War was above all a continuation of the centuries-old tension and conflict between the English and the British Celts, English culture having predominated in the North, especially New England, and Celtic culture in the South. He makes a good case.

Unfortunately the only things I’ll be reading in April are my textbooks (A&P, Pharmacology, First Aid, and Medical Terminology).
But, I did just finish Infovore’s book The Forgotten(see the link to the Amazon listing in the Marketplace) and it was wonderful!

I will listen to a great number of books in April however, because I fall asleep listening to Audible every night. But, I’m broke so I’ll just be relistening to the Discworld and Redwall books with 1984 and a couple Dean Koontz thrown in just for good measure.

Just finished Michael Moorcock’s History of the Runestaff series, chronicling the exploits of Dorian Hawkmoon. This was my second time through. I’d first read it years ago in university.

The first Hawkmoon series is nowhere near as ominous, brooding, or depressing as the Elric or Corum books, so they were much more fun to read through. Moorcock apparently wrote them all in a month, and it only took me a week or two to read them all.

Yesterday I started China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. I’m enjoying it much more than “Kraken” or “UnLunDun” so far.

I’ve been reading all of these books on my Kindle. After I finish “Perdido Street Station” I’m planning on starting the next Hawkmoon series. I have the old Berkley paperback versions with the gorgeous Robert Gould covers, so I’m looking forward to reading these on paper.

I’m reading Don Quixote. Edith Grossman’s translation in paperback. I read the first half a while back, now on part two.

My reading habits have slackened to an alarming and embarrassing degree over the last few years. I don’t have a ton of time for reading (which is part of the reason it has taken me months to get 3/4 through George R R Martin’s A Dance with Dragons), so I’ve tried to start listening to audiobooks on my commute.

I’m starting with Myke Cole’s Control Point, which can be a difficult listen because of the unfamiliar military jargon. But I’m enjoying it! I much prefer reading, but this will have to do.

Finished The Accounting by William Lashner. It’s sort of a cross between a thriller and a caper novel. Three teenage boys rip off drug dealers (almost a million bucks) as retaliation for being sold some bad weed. They play it smart, don’t even buy new bicycles. Years pass, they grow up and leave town, spend the money gradually, pretty sure they’ve gotten away with it. But nope.

Started Mystical Union by Don Robertson, one of my favorite writers. It reminds me of Spoon River Anthology, short chapters about people and their relationships. Robertson’s writing is very rich. He really should be better known. Most of his books are out of print.

Finished Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, by Grady McWhiney. It was very interesting. A root element of the antagonisms between Northerners and Southerners in the antebellum American South is shown to be the English-Celtic cultural differences that were imported into the New World, an age-old conflict that stretched back to the British Roman days, although most if any of the Civil War combatants were not aware of this aspect. He makes a very good case.

Next up: The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco. That should take me up to when we leave for Japan next weekend, where I’m also taking with me the two Michael Connelly books I’ve not yet read: The Drop and The Black Box. But it’s not clear how much time I’ll have for reading there.

I’m about halfway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I don’t know if I love it or despise it. Yes, it’s unusual in its structure and is quite funny in places, but the narrator/protagonist is a huge pain in the ass. Incredibly self-centered and self referential and wildly unrealistic (It’s San Francisco in the earely nineties) and I keep expecting to hear Holden Caulfield weigh in about all the Goddam phonies,

I dunno. I read it for about three hours this afternoon and was facinated and appalled at the same time. Should I finish it, or let Bear chew the cover off it and chuck it?

Well I gave up on Gormenghast :frowning:

Decided to treat to my mind to some light-weighted sci-fi so am working my way now through Julian May’s books - Intervention, Galactic Milieu trilogy and Pliocene saga

You lasted for three hours? I read twenty minutes of that book and I couldn’t get it away from me fast enough. If that crap’s staggering genius, I’ll take outright idiocy.

I’ll get my hands on that one eventually. I added it to my Amazon wish list, and tried to get it through interlibrary loan as well, but no dice. Ah, well, birthday’s coming up in a few months.

I’m nearing the end of The Rook, which I’ve enjoyed very much. Sort of Bridget Jones battles the Elder Gods.

I just finished three non-fiction books:

  1. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling.
    I’ve maybe seen two or three episodes of The Office and hadn’t seen any episodes of her show either. I frankly don’t know why I picked up this book. I will say that it was entertaining for certain, but it just wasn’t amusing for me.

  2. *Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape *by Jenna Miscavige Hill and Lisa Pulitzer.
    I was watching videos on youtube and somehow found a Scientology protester dressed up as a gay pope stomping around the L.A. church and holding up this book. I was intrigued. It turned out to be quite the fascinating and horrifying tale of a girl who was brought up in Scientology, separated from her parents for most of her lift growing up, forced into labor and obeying the cult demands, and how she finally got out. It’s only more interesting that she’s the niece of the leader. I highly recommend reading this book.

  3. Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet by Heather Poole.
    There are some interesting stories in here, but sometimes it’s a bit…I don’t know. Scattershot? Self-involved? Wink-wink? What it probably is is just a bunch of short personal stories that are probably best not all digested at once.

Currently Reading:

  1. Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman.
    After reading Beyond Belief, I wanted to round out the weirdness of it all with this book. The struggle to be objective in a non-fiction book to obtain credibility seems to be at the author’s forefront. It’s interesting enough info so I’lll finish for sure.
  2. *I Am America (And So Can You!) *by Stephen Colbert.
    I’ll pop in for a chapter or two now and then.

Still puttering around w/ Lovecraft, currently most of the way through At the Mountains of Madness. Obviously Lovecraft saw one of this guy Roerich’s paintings and got rather fascinated with it. I’m tempted to visit the Roerich Museum, which is located here in NYC.

I had a busy March, but I got in a few reads.

I was disappointed in Nick Trout’s Tell Me Where It Hurts, A Day of Humor, Healing and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon. It’s a collection of largely unsatisfying anecdotes, and not very well written. The author performs expensive surgical procedures on pets, and he does demonstrate the controversy behind this, albeit without an in-depth discussion. For instance, he tells the story of an old man who is willing to spend money he can hardly spare on a complex, risky procedure to save the life of an elderly dog.

But I was pleasantly surprised by a goofy little military sci-fi novel I picked up called The Myriad, by R.M. Meluch. Despite some serious faults, particularly the jarring sexism, it was a lot of fun. The dialog is snappy and I loved the ending. Also, it has Romans in Space.

The followup novel to Call the Midwife, by Jennifer Worth, is called Shadows of the Workhouse, and it’s worth reading, but not as good as the first book. It has more stories about poor people living in London’s East End in the 1950’s, particularly those who grew up in the notorious workhouses. The first season of the BBC television series seems to cover both of these books and possibly the third one as well.

I just finished Nancy Mitford’s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, combined in an omnibus edition. I’m glad I had them both because I think they’d each be rather insubstantial alone. These are amusing stories about an eccentric aristocratic English family, set between the World Wars. Mitford was a “Bright Young Thing” in London society in the 1920’s, and these are based on her own experiences. They read a lot like a memoir, actually.

I’m about halfway through Mrs. Ames by E.F. Benson, the author of the glorious Mapp & Lucia novels. I’m not loving it as much as I thought I would but can see glimpses of characters that show up later in Tilling.

After reading Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (which I really enjoyed but had to totally engage my brain to get through), I’m now starting Montaigne’s Complete Essays edited by M.A. Screech.

And I’m working my way for about the fifth time through Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire series and also re-reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice because this year is its 200th anniversary of publication.

Well, not surprisingly A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius crashed and burned just past the halfway mark. I offered it to my cat who enjoys chewing covers from books and he wouldn’t touch it, so to my local used book store it will go, and some other schlub can have a shot at it.

:eek:
That is true rejection!

ETA: I just had a thought–you should leave a note at the point where you gave up that says “sucker!” for the next unlucky person who picks up that book.

I’m about halfway through Incarnate, by Ramsey Campbell, and I’m liking it very much.
S’about dreams, and a group of five people who appear to have different abilities to use them to predict or interpret events.
Campbell is always slow moving horror, very much influenced by Lovecraft, and I’m just beginning to see some nasty things lurking in the peripherals of the different characters’ eyes.