I’m reading Bringing Out The Dead by Joe Connelly. Four chapters in and I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s pretty grim, though, but well written.
Thanks Shoshana Ive just signed up.
I really really need to start a pit thread about the people that surround me, their lack of reading, their lack of knowledge about world events, etc. For instance, most of my fellow nurses (some RNs and some RPNs. but all at least college educated) had no idea who Benazir Bhutto was. Not only that they ACTIVELY DISAGREED that a woman from Pakistan could be in a position of power. And it was news to some of them that India and Pakistan don’t get along.
Ok, thats it, Im going to the pit with the rest of the story.
Yeah I need to talk about books (for a start) with people. Please.
I’m working my way through the two books I received for christmas, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide.
Great. Now go to Groups, find the SDMB one, join it, and post a thread asking everybody to “friend” you.
Done and done, and thank you. Now should I try to add every book Ive ever read to my list, or should I just add the new ones as they come along?
Whatever you choose. It’s a freaking anarchy over there.
Hint: click on anybody’s avatar or name–Koeeoaddi, for example. Click on any of that person’s shelf tags. You’ll see the books that person put on that shelf in their collection: Cover photo, title, author, person’s rating, blank stars for your rating, and dates. If you don’t see this, select “main” from “views” up to the left under the person’s name. Now you can scroll through that person’s books. If you’ve read one, rate it by clicking your stars. It’s now on your “read” shelf in your own collection. Later, you can go through your “read” shelf and add that book to other shelves in your collection (e.g., “2007” or “Vietnam”). ETA: You can also rate books you haven’t read yet, shift them to your “to-read” shelf, and then kill the ratings, but this is at least as tedious as just adding them individually to your “to-read” shelf, which you can do without rating them by clicking “add to my books” and pulling down the “to-read” tag.
You can also go to “add more books” in the upper right of your “home” page. Put in a topic like “cat” and you’ll get a mess of books listed on goodreads or via Amazon with “cat” in the title or subject. You can add them to your shelves by rating them as well.
I stalked and friended you, by the way.
I noticed. Thanks, I think. 
I like the Hornblower books, but not as well as Aubrey/Maturin. Have you tried Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series? Those are good, especially the older books.
I’m nearly finished with Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Ellen Datlow. It wasn’t bad, but it does inspire me to rant on a couple of different things.
One, I hate the kind of stories where the author is apparently just trying to be weird. One story in this book (I’m going to spoil it, but trust me, you’re not missing much) is about a couple whose child has gone missing. They are having a rocky time and probably on the road to divorce. There are strange stories in the news about people finding alien creatures. The man finds one of these creatures and brings it home. His wife starts spending a lot of time with it, apparently using it to sort of replace her child. One day, the man and his wife eat it. The End. WTF? Why did I bother getting to know these characters at all? Also, why are stories like this in so many horror anthologies? They aren’t scary, or even interesting. Maybe I’m supposed to be horrified that this meaningless drivel was published.
Two, the story I read this morning was so lousy, I wanted to immediately find someone else and ask them to read it so we could bash it together. It was The Bedroom Light, by Jeffrey Ford. It was nearly as pointless as the story in my first example, only even more poorly written. The first sentence that jarred me out of the story was during a scene where a man and his wife are chatting in bed about the little neighbor girl, and the man says, “Well, if I were writing a story about her, I’d describe her expression as ‘dour’”. (Oh, what a cute way to shoehorn in that word which is admittedly not often used in casual conversation.) A moment later, the man uses some other big vocabulary words, this time without having to excuse himself. I know, it sounds silly, but when writing causes my attention to be more drawn to the mechanics of writing a story than to the story itself, maybe the writing sucks. There were other things in this story that annoyed me, but no need to go on. This tale was the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.
Okay, so much for that.
I’m toying with the idea of keeping a list of what I read this year, but I can’t seem to decide on a convenient way to do it. I guess jotting down title and author in a memo pad is about my speed.
I put titles in a Word file, just the title and author. It came in handy today when someone in a Yahoo book group wanted suggestions for WWI novels. Eventually I would have remembered the ones I read, but it was easier to check the list.
In my 2007 reading I finished 43 books, one less than the year before. My three most recent were:
The River of Doubt by Candice Millard (Doubleday 2005), about Theodore Roosevelt’s trouble-beset, nearly fatal 1913-14 expedition down an Amazon tributary. Not as good as I’d hoped, with some simple mistakes I’m surprised the author didn’t catch. Still, worth a read.
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (Dunne Books 2007), a pop science book about what would happen if every human being disappeared simultaneously. Good news: most endangered species would bounce back in a few years. Bad news: Manhattan would flood, nuclear power plants and chemical plants would explode, and plastics and nuclear waste would still last for a loooooooooooong time. A very interesting book.
Heydrich: The Face of Evil by Mario R. Dederichs, tr. by Geoffrey Brooks (Greenhill Books 2006), a pretty chilling portrayal of the chair of the Wannsee Conference and Himmler’s right-hand man, assassinated by Czech commandos in 1942. Smart, ruthlessly cunning, utterly amoral, and troubled by persistent rumors that he had some Jewish blood of his own. The author followed up with Heydrich’s children and grandchildren today and was disappointed - but hardly surprised - that they either didn’t want to talk, or sorta-kinda defended the SS man.
Next on my list:
The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday 2007), a book given to me by two of aunts for Christmas, unbeknownst to each other! This profile of the contemporary Supreme Court has gotten good reviews, and I’m looking forward to diving in.
I only read a paltry 36 books this year, but then I did spend six months in hospital (of the mental kind) and full of drugs that made reading pretty much impossible. So conceivably I would have read more like 60-70 had I been well.
Currently I’m reading Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde, I’ve just discovered the Thursday Next books and am speeding through them.
I also have on the go The Fire From Within by Nemo, a book of essays on Satanism which I had on order for two months. It’s not that long so I’m dipping in and out of it rather than reading it straight through.
I also started Grass for his pillow by Lian Hearne, the 2nd in the Otori series - problem is it was about two years ago since I read the first book and all the characters are pseudo-Japanese so I’m struggling to remember who everyone is and the names aren’t commonplace so it’s quite hard. So I put it down again, to be picked up at a later date.
I’m working my way through Aubrey/Maturin for the first time. I’m on #4 (The Mauritius Command). I’m really enjoying the series.
You like Hornblower better?
(WRT the OP I am also re-reading *The Lord of the Rings * for the umpteenth time, but the first time in several years. It is really interesting re-reading the books after having seen the movies multiple times in the last few years).
No matter. I remember on year spent on reading only one book: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, whichever title translation you prefer.
Hey, I read the first book for a whole year one month, myself. 
Bah-dah-BOOM.
I’ve finally finished Moby Dick (that counts against my 2008 count of books read, although that seems a bit unfair…). It got even better in the final dozen or so pages than it was before, I thought. Highly interesting book. So now I’m left with Canterbury Tales (they’re getting better), as well as a couple of things I still need to finish up from last year: Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackwell, and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett (the later is a re-read, actually).
Just started The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Heidi Pitlor and Stephen King, foreword by Stephen King.
sigh, takes out memo pad I’ll have to do this low-tech, Auntie Pam. I don’t log on to a computer reliably enough to keep a spreadsheet.
I think of it like taxes–I may have done the work in December, but if I don’t get paid until January, the income goes in the next year’s return.
A plug for tracking books on goodreads or LiveJournal or anything of that bloggy ilk: You can tag your books as you read them, so that when someone asks for recommendations, you can click your tag and easily bring up all of your WWI novels.
Originally posted by Captain_C
I so loved World War Z! I’m not a big Zombie fan, but this just had me hooked from start, and I keep returning to it an reading bits here and there, it’s brilliant!
At the moment I’m reading Why We’re Losing the War on Terror by Paul Rogers and *The Eye: A Natural History * by Simon Ings, both really interesting.
Dipping into London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, absolutely fascinating but for me more of a dip-into book than a cover-to-cover read.