In September I read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and last month I read the prequels. This month I’m reading the sequels. Nice books, perhaps not all they’re cracked up to be, but they do keep one involved.
I’ve been reading The Fountainhead, but I’m about halfway through and can’t think of a reason to continue with that drivel.
Someone started thread said that Dracula was a good book, and got a lot of agreement, so I’m thinking I’ll give it a go sometime this month.
The first three Foundation books are simply-crafted, nicely-moving pulp sci-fi with some interesting ideas in them - you can read them when young and be totally caught up in them or read them as an adult and enjoy them for what they are.
As for Fountainhead, well, when I read it when I was 17, it was a call to arms - kinda like when I was 12 and KISS Alive was a cool album. 
Finished Anno Dracula yesterday. It picked up steam as it went on, so I ended up liking it a lot better than I thought I would after the first few chapters. Not sure yet if I’ll continue with the series, though.
Next up–The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.
John Grisham makes no bones about the fact that that’s why he wrote The Broker.
Finished Confessions of a D-List Supervillain (Volume 1).
It reads like every teen-boy nerd’s fantasy (I know, I was a teen nerd), with the geeky engineer building a suit of armor and joining the world of supers - but for all that it is a light take on the superhero/supervillain genre and can be amusing at times. It is filled with hokey super-names (on purpose) and many references to comic book tropes we all know.
Though it is not great literature, I enjoyed it and if there is a volume II I will likely read it.
Finished Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Very good finally to read it.
Next up: Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad.
I was saddened recently to hear of the death of author William Sleator. I went right home that day to look at a couple of his books that I own, and wound up reading about 70% of Singularity at one shot(he wrote YA novels, very simple and fast-paced).
I’m now reading Blackbriar, a haunted house tale. It was his first novel and I’ve somehow missed reading it before. Next, I’ll be reading The Phantom Limb, his final work, partially written by Ann Monticone.
Typed a big long post and lost it, so suffice it to say I wanted to recommend Clavell’s King Rat to those who’ve never read it, and James Thom’s Follow the River if you like historical fiction.
So now I’ve bumped the thread and hope to get some more recommendations for new stuff to read!
I’ve read all of Clavell, and King Rat is very good. My favorite may be Noble House, set in 1963 Hong Kong. Clavell seems to have put himself in it, as it contains a very Clavell-type character who is an author who wrote a book amazingly similar to King Rat that was also based on personal experience. Shogun is good too, set in 1600 feudal Japan, and in most of his later novels – but I don’t think King Rat – descendants of the characters in that story appear.
Listening to Reamde on audiobook now. It’s good, so that helps keep me motivated to go to the gym.
I liked Ready Player One but I don’t know what someone who’s not into 80s pop culture would make of it.
Correcting myself: Follow the River by James Thom was based on a true incident about two women who were held captive by the Shawnee and escaped by walking out hundreds of miles. I found it to be a riveting book, if anyone enjoys that sort of non-fiction. 
Just started reading Wreck of The Medusa, by Jonathan Wiles. The Medusa was a ship that was run aground off the coast of Africa by an incompetent captain back in the early 1800s. The captain and officers bolted on the lifeboats, leaving 115 men to fend for themselves by making a homemade raft. Cannibalism and madness ensued and only a few survived to tell the tale. A very interesting side story to this was the story of the artist who painted ‘Raft of The Medusa’ by Theodore Gericault. He collaborated with one of the survivors and nearly went mad himself in the process. Fascinating.
Totally awesome, best book I’ve read this year. Thoughtful and cerebral but at the same time creative and thrilling, an excellent addition to the genre. I think it is getting some comparison to The Road by Cormac McCarthy- it’s being called the literary zombie novel like that’s a bad thing. All the readers in my family are getting it for Christmas. Like half my shopping is done now.
I’m also reading Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? as sort of a digestif. It’s chatty and gossipy and fun. And I don’t even watch The Office.
I just tried to read Cloud Splitter by Russell Banks, a novel written as a memoir by the abolitionist John Brown’s last surviving son. The source material and the inspiration is certainly good, but Banks writes like a Creative Writing professor.
I’m not bashing all people in that field, some are very good, but the bad ones are unreadable. To begin with Banks is one of many academic writers who doesn’t believe in saying in a concise sentence what one can say in 12 pages (I understand describing the hardscrabble farm with the many kids and the scrawny cows, but do we really need to know what direction the wind was blowing the smoke from the chimney or a page long reflection on a not particularly interesting or relevant Devon milk cow?). Further, in my experience academic novelists are at their bloated worst when they write in first person: they almost invariably choose a voice that nobody would use for writing their memoirs, especially at the turn of the century when that would entail hand writing it on paper.
Ultimately it became a salvage job: let’s skip around and get to Harper’s Ferry and hope he describes the raid and its aftermath without obsessing on a vine of bougainvillea for 12 pages and then mentioning “by the way, a couple of brothers got killed and Pa got captured” only as a device to write an homage to a grandfather clock in the hallway of the courthouse.
Finished Dracula a few days ago. What an awesome book. Having never read it, I wasn’t entirely sure how it would end, so I was a bit surprised at the conclusion.
Next up is some boring non-fiction I have to read for a class. It’s called Know-How by Ram Charan. Actually, the first chapter wasn’t too boring. But I feel like most of these books on how-to-be-a-leader are spouting the same rhetoric.
I’m reading At Home by Bill Bryson. It’s more like A Shorty History of Nearly Everything than his travel books, but entertaining nonetheless. I need to finish it soon, too, so I can read The Postmortal by Drew Magary. I’m going to his reading at the end of the month, and I want to have finished it by the time I go.
I just read The Great Mortality, a book about the history of the Black Death, which wiped out between 30-50% of the population of nearly every place it hit. I expected it to be horrifying, but it wasn’t. It was just fascinating. The author more or less went through the locations on record that were hit by the plague and described how the locale’s culture influenced its response. He uses quite a bit of detail setting up the environment of each city before explaining how the plague affected it, too. For example, environmental upheaval and a long period of global cooling seems to have affected the plague outbreak substantially. The high mortality rate is also linked to the Great Famine that preceded the outbreak - which left tons of children with compromised immune systems.
The book is thoroughly researched and includes extensive exploration of the various theories on the cause and nature of the plague. Apparently there were like three different strains, some caused by rat fleas and some caused by human fleas.
Also, it’s a real pick-me-up if you’re feeling sorry for yourself in any way. The Middle Ages was a pretty horrible time to be alive, plague or no plague.
Continuing my Jane Eyre phase…I picked up Sharon Shinn’s Jenna Starborn since I had heard it was “Jane Eyre in space!” and this sounded like a cute idea.
Well, it literally is Jane Eyre in space. Every character and every scene in this book is taken note-for-note out of Jane Eyre, almost as if Shinn had just done a find-replace with “Ravenbeck” for “Rochester” and “aircar” for “horse.” All of the scenes in Jane Eyre are here, all of the conversations go the same way and are in the same order…* It’s no fun at all. There’s nothing new here except the sci-fi trappings, and somehow, she’s made the characters – the draw in the first place – flat and uninteresting. I won’t be finishing it.
*She even begins the last chapter with, “Reeder, I married him”, “Reeder” being the name she gives to her journal. I mean, come on.
This Amazon review articulates my problems with the book perfectly.
I read the last of the Amelia Peabody mysteries, Tomb of the Golden Bird. I will miss Emerson and Peabody! The author is still writing about them, but she’s inserting the new novels chronologically earlier in the series. I have so enjoyed watching this family age and grow together (there are three generations of Emersons in the last few books) that I’m not sure I want to regress them. This finale describes the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.
I just started Flashman and the Dragon, which is going to be about the Taiping Rebellion and the Peking Expedition. It’s hilariously offensive so far, as usual. I know nothing about Chinese history, so I’m sure to appreciate the glossary, four pages of maps, three appendices and 15 pages of footnotes.
I just got this in the mail today. May be a couple of days before I have time to start it, but I am eager to read it.