Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' - December 2013

The cold weather has settled in and it is nearly December. I’m so far behind, two clones and a time machine couldn’t get me caught up. I’m hoping I’ll get a bit more time to myself in the coming month, though I somehow doubt it.

I’ve only just finished ‘A Storm of Swords’, the third installment of George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. I get the feeling he thinks a day’s writing has been wasted if he hasn’t killed off a character.

I’ve moved on to re-reading Flying Colours, the next installment of the Hornblower series. For some reason, this one, with its long interlude in the Loire valley, has always been my favourite. Enjoying it thoroughly.

On top of Mount Toberead - Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book about which I know absolutely nothing. It was thrust into my hands with a vehement ‘You have to read this!!!’, and so, it’s next up.

And you - whatcha readin’?

A link to last month’s thread.
Khadaji - for those new to these threads, Khadaji was a long time Doper who always had a kind, supportive word for other posters. A passionate, omnivorous reader, he started this long chain of ‘Whatcha Readin’ threads many years ago. When he passed away in January of this year, we decided there was no better way to honour the memory of an old friend than to name these book discussion threads for him. Rest in peace, Khadaji!

No spoilers on George RR Martin, please! I’m almost finished with his second installment, A Clash of Kings.

It’s a very difficult series of books to discuss, I find. It’s so very plot driven, and the unexpectedness of the events are one of the series’ greatest pleasures.

It’s one of the main reasons I’m in such a hurry to catch up to the TV series - many of my Facebook friends are big fans, and I know it’s only a matter of time before someone gives something huge away. I swear by the seven, I will do my best not to spoil any of it for you. I am, however, curious what you think of it all…

Looking For Alaska by John Green. I started this after reading The Fault in Our Stars by the same author. Both are about a young protagonist who is learning how to grow up. The writing style is simple, but the story is very engaging.

I just finished reading The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. The writing is way more complicated than anything by John Green. I loved parts of it. The point of the whole story still eludes me even though a Google search tells me it has something to do with Wittgenstein and how words define people.

I put Infinite Jest on my toberead list.

Rocks fall. Everyone dies.

Should have spoilered that. Sorry.

:smiley:

I was enjoying The Yard (as in Scotland Yard) by Alex Grecian. London, 1889, detectives, murders, whores, etc. – a lot going on, maybe too much.

When I got to the part where a detective was drugged and laid out naked in a woman’s bed while her husband was away, I thought things were getting a bit silly. So I went to Amazon to check out the reviews. Apparently it will get even sillier, so I won’t be finishing this one. Too bad, because the characterization is quite good.

I’m enjoying the books very much, and I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre. Despite the odd dragon or mystical occurrence, this doesn’t really feel like fantasy. I can see all of this happening in Renaissance England. Perhaps worryingly, I don’t find the cruelty very disturbing. Could be I’ve been in the Third World too long, because I’m thinking of these guys in the books: “Pfft, amateurs.”

The wife was thinking of reading them too, but she feels she may be too busy to delve into them properly, and she’s still reading her way through Michael Connelly now too, so I think while we’re out and about today (Sunday), we’ll pick up the first season of the TV series.

And I have now finished George RR Martin’s A Clash of Kings, the second book in his series A Song of Ice and Fire. Very good, and I look forward to the next installment.

But first I’m going to take a few days to read through the Lonely Planet – Singapore guidebook since we’re probably going to spend some time there in a few months.

Whilst at the library the other day I happened to notice the Gideon Oliver mysteries, by Aaron Elkins. I’d never read the first one, but I’d read five of the next six - and he’s written ten more since then. So I’m starting at the beginning - finished Fellowship of Fear a couple days ago, and am now rereading The Dark Place.

That’s my current car book. At home, I’m still working on Arctic Rising (Buskell), to be followed by The Moonshine War (Leonard) and Burning Paradise (Wilson).

FYI - Amazon has over 4,000 Kindle books on sale for Cyber Monday - I picked up Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel by Thomas Berger based on reccos from a recent Arthurian Legend thread over here, along with a copy of Christopher Moore’s Fluke.

Just finished re-listening to His Majesty’s Dragon - the first in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series… it was quite enjoyable to “meet” the main characters again and see the relationship start to form. Simon Vance does such a wonderful job portraying Temeraire as well as Laurence, that I almost prefer the audiobooks to reading the novels on the page/screen.

Also working on The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough, who does an excellent job of bringing in just enough historical background to round out the story of this incredibly ambitious feat of construction and architecture - I’ve not (yet) seen it in person, but I think having read this book will give me a greater appreciation of The Bridge.
Mind you, it can be slow going, but not at all tedious, IMHO - reading the descriptions of working in the cassions (and finally getting a clear description of what they are and how they work!) and the danger of “blowouts” made me understand just how so many lives could be & were lost during the construction of a project as massive as this.

I picked up the first five Song of Ice and Fire books – $9.95 for all five. They’ll be re-reads, but it’s great to have them on the Kindle.

I’m reading War for the Oaks by Emma Bull and enjoying it immensely. Didn’t realize it had been around since 1987, but I didn’t start reading fantasy until about 2000 or so.

After a long resistance I’m finally trying out Pratchett. Starting with Guards! Guards!

Finished:

The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox - It took me a few chapters to get into this, then I enjoyed it up until the ending. Very unfulfilling denouement IMO.

Started:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin

And possibly Queen of the Masquerade by Tiffany Trent. I’ve read the earlier books in the series and while the second and third didn’t wow me, the fourth did. Here’s hoping this one will do the same.

I was one of those who recommended it. Hope you like it!

McCullough also narrated the very good Ken Burns documentary about the bridge, I believe.

I just finished Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, a pretty good fantasy/historical novel about an Englishwoman’s repeated reincarnation, set against a backdrop of the World Wars.

I’m re-reading Bertrand R. Brinley’s wonderfully mischievous Sixties collection of short stories, The Mad Scientists’ Club, with my youngest son.

I hope to get back to Roy Jenkins’s great bio Churchill soon, too.

I just finished Unbroken, which everyone has already heard of, I’m sure, and knows what it’s about, but it’s still an amazing story.

A couple years ago, I met a WWII pilot who’s mentioned in the book, and who has a photo credit in it (he took a brownie camera picture of Naoetsu from the air on one of the flights when he was dropping emergency supplies for POW’s at war’s end. He said the source of a lot of the supplies was from the just-nixed massive invasion the US had been preparing for).

Finished looking through the Lonely Planet – Singapore guidebook.

Now it’s back to George RR Martin and his series A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m taking up the third book, A Storm of Swords, Part 1: Steel and Snow. (This book is the longest in the series, and the set I have has it divided into two volumes – part one and part two.)

Finished re-reading H.G Wells’ the Invisible Man

Read William Boyd’s Solo, the latest James Bond novel. Pretty decent.

Now reading the second volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography that just came out. And I’m still trying to finish the Annotated Huckleberry Finn I’m so close to finishing I can taste it.

I hope you enjoy it immensely. :smiley: Terry Pratchett’s one of those authors that I wish I could read again for the first time.

Up for me: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (work book), Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped by Tony Perrottet (home non-fic), Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter’s Adventures in the African Bush by Peter Capstick (2nd home non-fic, and I think I got the recommendation from here, so thanks to whomever recommended it). I’ve put Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory next to the bed for fiction, but I did actually start the latest Charles Finch, An Old Betrayal, and will probably zip through that one first.

My favorite right now is definitely Capstick, even though I’m not keen on sport hunting. What a raconteur!

Currently just over a third of the way through Washington Irving’s book Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize Beyond the Rocky Mountains. It’s an account of John Jacob Astor’s failed attempt to found a fur-trading colony on the Pacific coast at the mouth of the Columbia River in about 1810. He wrote it in 1836, with access to all sorts of documents, etc. and, although apparently dismissed for a long time for inaccuracy, it’s now being reassessed. Well, I read somewhere that it was, but can’t find the claim now…
An easier read than I feared and quite enjoyable.

The one story in it I have checked, as it sounded fascinating, was the existence of a tall riverside mount 200+ feet high which the local tribes used as a burial site, with bodies placed in canoes on the sides and summit. The initial explorers called it Mount Coffin. Looking it up, I see that an early scientist used it for some astronomical observations in the 1840s and accidentally set fire to the burial canoes, and later, in 1929, it was levelled and used for gravel by local industry!
Also interesting to note that a ‘Lewis & Clark’ style expedition was in the works 20 years before theirs but was cancelled due to the American Revolution…

I’d never heard that. What was it to be called? Who was organizing it, and who was to lead it?