After seeing so many people here praising To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis I decided to make it my very first download on my new Kindle. I’m only a few chapters into it but I’m liking it a lot so far.
Excellent book! Although while Jude may have been the last novel he wrote, the last one he published was The Well-Beloved, or at least I think it was. It’s worth reading alongside The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved its companion piece. Anyway, Jude is one of the most affecting books I’ve ever read - the day I finished it, I had to leave the room I was in with my friends and sit for about a half hour just taking it all in.
I just finished another Hardy novel (he’s my favorite author), The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I have to say was not as engaging as his best work. Now I’m reading The Deportees by Roddy Doyle, but it’s no Woman Who Walked Into Doors.
Yes, looking it up I see The Well-Beloved, as yet unread by me, was written before Jude the Obscure but published two years after. Published in whole, that is; it appeared in serial form in 1892, before Jude the Obscure was serialized from 1894-95.
I’m reading Sleepless, Charlie Huston’s newest novel. It’s an apocalyptic sort of story, where civilization is starting to fall apart, oddly set in 2010 instead of the future, so it’s an alternate history. Not only has society gone to hell, there’s an illness spreading that makes people unable to sleep - something akin to Fatal familial insomnia.
Huston has changed his characteristic prose format - this book has quotations marks around dialogue. There is still a bit of strange formatting, and the POV jumps between first and third person. So far I don’t like the book as well as his previous work, but it’s slowly getting better as I read on.
Sounds like early portions of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. Apt comparison?
I haven’t read that, so I couldn’t say.
Ghost Light by Joseph O’Conner, about the May-December romance/relationship between a Dublin actress and playwright John Synge. I love books from the POV of an old person. Decline is more interesting to me than success.
Recently finished Music and Silence by Rose Tremain. It’s about King Christian IV of Denmark, two years in his life, his troubles with his second wife Kirsten, troubles with his mother, troubles with his treasury, lotsa troubles. The story spends as much time with non-royal characters, and I thought they were fascinating. I liked the book, but the ending sorta petered out. With historical fiction focusing on royalty, the story usually ends with death, or the end of a reign. Here, people were sort of restarting their lives, so the ending didn’t feel “right”.
Also on the night table are Into the Woods by Tana French, Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan, and the new one by Erik Larson, In the Garden of the Beast.
I recommend it then!
I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but be careful. You’ll find there’s a whole lot of hate for it here. I benefited from having studied it in school under a Colombia expert who pointed out all the little esoterica, but I would have enjoyed it anyway.
I’m also on the George R R Martin bandwagon! I bought and read the first three books (well, four since my copy of Book 3 came in two parts) and then forgot about it as there was such a long wait between that and Book 4. This was in the days before Amazon’s wishlists and reminders etc so it wasn’t until the renewed interest sparked by the TV series that I thought about the continuation of the story.
I started re-reading the first three on my Kindle and am now a quarter of the way through the fourth, while the fifth book is sitting there taunting me because I can’t possibly start it until I’ve finished the one I’m no now.
Luckily I have a potentially free day on Sunday. I think I know exactly what I’ll be doing!
Just finished Everything is Obvious, Once you Know the Answer by Duncan Watts.
It is presented as a sociologist’s case against the notion of “common sense” - i.e., we evolved with a way to prioritize and filter rules to get food, defend ourselves and procreate. But we can’t rely on “common sense” in the more macro settings of the economy, managing large groups, administering government - and yet we naturally fall into that habit to our detriment and unknowing dismay.
He uses many examples that force you to step back and genuinely question what we accept and assume as we frame decisions, and even question what we can know vs. what we can’t. A lot of this is based on a philosophical line of thought known as Empirical Skepticism - originating in ancient Greece, up through Montaigne and even today in a book I reviewed on the Dope a few months ago, The Black Swan by Nassem Taleb - but you don’t need any grounding in Philosophy (thank Og) to understand or appreciate the points this book is trying to make.
Shakester, from my very limited exposure to you, I suspect you would love this book, in its spirit of challenging pre-conceived thinking and ideas.
I could geek out about how I am thinking about tying this together with a few other threads of thought I have and implications for how to approach managing a business, but I suspect that is a different conversation 
Either way, the book is well done; I recommend it.
I finally finished The Journeyer, by Gary Jennings. It’s not my cup of tea. It’s good enough, I guess, but I get tired of the Gary Stu-ness of the main character. Aside from the times they live in and where they go, The Journeyer’s Marco Polo and Aztec’s Mixtli are exactly the same person: they have no faults (except perhaps being too trusting), every woman wants to sex them, they charm everyone and rarely have any conflict, they find one woman but she dies early of some catastrophe, they have a loveless marriage but it’s the woman’s fault and eventually they patch it up at the end of life because “oh well, we’ve lived to long together now to change,” and it’s just pretty ick. Once it gets going, the story’s engaging enough mainly for the look at Mongol life in the 1200s, but I do tire of the main character. It’s too bad, because I know that this book (and Jenning’s other books) really work for other Dopers. They just don’t work for me, I guess.
Finished Dance with Dragons. I wish more had happened. And I wish what did happen had gotten trimmed a bit. I liked it, but it almost feels like a pointless book. And that’s too bad too.
I just started Day by Day Armageddon, a zombie survival novel written in the form of a journal by the protagonist. I’m not far into it, but found it good enough to buy based on the sample on my Kindle.
I’m off on vacation starting tomorrow, so I loaded up the Kindle with a bunch of books for the houseboat. Will be most excellent.
Thanks for the recommendation, that does sound interesting. I’ll keep an eye out for it. I’m quite ill at the moment and my poor brain is only fit for light reading, but I’ll be feeling better soon.
I loves me some Morris! Great stuff. Very well-researched but lively and interesting. I have on my shelf Colonel Roosevelt, the third in the trilogy, about T.R. in the 1912 campaign and in retirement, and hope to get to it someday.
I’m taking a break from Theodore Sorensen’s massive Kennedy, since I have to get it back to the library. Next up: Martin’s A Dance with Dragons and the latest Locke & Key horror comics.
Snickers, sorry The Journeyer didn’t do it for you. All I’ve read of Jennings was Aztec, which was and still is one of my all-time favorite historical novels.
I’m slowly working my way through Great Expectations on my Kindle. I read an excerpted version way back in high school–ninth grade, I think–but I’ve forgotten so much that while there’s often a certain familiarity, it’s basically fresh to me. Quite enjoying it–my only complaint is that the Kindle version doesn’t include the original illustrations. I may look for PDFs that include the illustrations for any further Dickens (these things are long since in the public domain, right?).
Next may be starting into Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire–not something I plan to do in a single session. I’ll have to find something else to go along with it, perhaps something light and fluffy–Walter Moers’s *The Alchemaster’s Apprentice *is on Kindle, so that might be it. Sleepless, mentioned upthread, also sounds intriguing.
Just finished the fifth book in the Raine Benares series. This one was a little better, she drifted a little from you usual recipe. But I’m unsure I will buy future releases.
Having read both, I can say that Snickers has some fair points. I’ve noticed both books have a sort of “love them or hate them” effect on readers, with little area in between. If you liked one, you’ll probably like the other, but if you didn’t like one, I’d not bother with the other. Liked them both myself. Might have been good for the author to have come out with another book featuring a different character in the same time period who says: “Here’s where that lying bastard Polo got it wrong …”
Among Others was pretty good, although I wasn’t nuts about the ending. It’s a YA novel with a little romance and a little faerie magic thrown in. The protagonist is a girl sent away to boarding school, and she’s big into science fiction and fantasy, so if you are a fan, there are a lot of good and satisfying references to classics of the genres.
I just figured out how to check out e-books from the library, so that’s an exciting development for my budget. I’m reading two kidlit titles, Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt, this is a companion to his Newbery honor book, The Wednesday Wars, and The Penderwicks at Point Mouette - I had thought the first two Penderwick books were okay but not outstanding, but friends have said this third one is quite a bit better so I’m hoping they are right.
Actual books that came home from the library are the new Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes, about the annexation of Hawaii; Chime, another YA book about witchcraft (this already seems like a chore); and Pardonable Lies, one of the Maisie Dobbs series – contemporary mysteries written in the style, sort of, of the great interwar British classics. She’s no Harriet Vane, I’ll tell you what.
I just finished Tinkers by Paul Harding. It’s a short book, only 190 pages, but it took longer than I figured it would to read it. It’s decidedly post-modern with a non-linear storyline, multiple narrators (including excerpts from a book about the history of clocks), no quotemarks around dialogue etc. Still, it was interesting, maybe not enough to justify its Pulitzer win, but interesting enough.
Other than that I’m reading my way through the Forest of Hands and Teeth series by Carrie Ryan, and The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare. I’m on the third book of each series, and they’re both fascinating in different ways. The MI characters and narration are more compelling, but the whole idea of a world full of zombies plunging us back into pre-tech days in the other series is wonderful.
Oh, and I took The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi out of the library…someone tells me that it gets more interesting after the first few pages. please.