I’m grinding my way through Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. I just picked it up because it was on the list of 100 best book of the 20th centrury. I’ve been trying to read this book for months now. I have to have complete scilence to read it at all and even then it tends to put me to sleep. I will finish this book if it kills me!
I’m also starting The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. It’s my very first book of his. In fact, I’d never even heard of him until I started reading the SDMB. I’m looking forward to it.
Jarbaby’s gripe was about “The Little Friend” which was not a sequel but rather a long-awaited second book by author Donna Tartt.
At the moment I’m reading “The Prestige” by Christopher somebody. It’s a book twickster sent me. In my car I have a book on CD called “A Prize for Sister Catherine.” I love nun literature.
Then I’ll be reading “The Ladies #1 Detective Agency” which delphica gave me and I cleverly wrangled my book club into selecting for their June meeting.
Just finished Good Faith by Jane Smiley and enjoyed it very much. I will be reading more of her books.
Working on The Devil Wears Prada. What can I say, the wife checked it out and I picked it up. Not bad, kind of funny, but sort of a one joke book. OK, your boss is really a bitch. Got it.
Stiff by Mary Roach is a good read. Informative, morbid and humorous all in one handy package.
Twain’s A Tramp Abroad is what I’m reading on the PDA lately.
lilbtagna, if you’re enjoying The Orchid Thief, pick up Orlean’s The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, a collection of essays she’s published in various magazines. Also, If Chins Could Kill is unfathomably funny. “This is my boomstick,” indeed.
As for the OP. I’m finishing up Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, which I’ve been enjoying, but now I can’t stop looking at my social interactions and trying to figure out how they relate to animal behavior. In my bag right now I have The Cheese Monkeys by a guy named Chip Kidd, a visual artist and book cover designer who’s written a pseudo-autobiographical account of a man going to design school in the 1950s. The book itself is a nifty work of art, reminiscent of Dave Eggers’s manipulation of the cover and text for the paperback edition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Come to think of it, I’ve been walking around with two books mentioning simians in the titles. Hmmmm.
At home I’ve got John Sandford’s Mortal Prey loitering in the bedcovers for my decompression reading before bedtime. I’ve never read any of the Prey series, but my father sent me this one and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I also need to start Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World for my book group.
Blocking out some time this summer to read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Out loud, to my wife and children. June 21st!
I listened to an abridged version of The Pickwick Papers in my car while commuting, and it made me want to go back and reread the complete original, which is entirely charming. And I am still trying to psych myself up to read The Education of Henry Adams, because it was picked the best novel of all time by somebody or other. Or The Aenead, which I have not read yet.
Q is For Quarry was OK, although not as good as earlier in the series. I think I might be getting too familiar with the conventions of the series.
Right now I’m rereading the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries because I love the stories, and he’s one of my literary crushes.
I just finished **Good Omens** which was fabulous. Amazingly, I had never noticed Dopers talking about it. I just noticed it in the bookstore, and the silly blurb on the front comparing it to Hitchhiker's drew me in. So many of the books mentioned are on my top ten or at least top fifty. ::grin::
I love Hitchhiker’s and The Count of Monte Cristo . The Three Musketeers I found not quite as good but still right up there.
If **Lord Jim** is anything like **Heart of Darkness** , I really pity you, **Leifsmama** . I've had to read HoD for two different classes, and I've hated it both times.
Today I’m reading An Old Man’s Love by Anthony Trollope, because I realized it had been a while since I’d read a Trollope book. (And, with 47 novels, I need to keep at it if I’m to get to all of them. Though his non-fiction – the last book of his I read was the travel book The West Indies and the Spanish Main – is even more appealing to me, for some unfathomable reason.)
Yesterday I read First Degree, an excellent mystery/legal thriller by David Rosenfelt, which is also set very close to my own Jersey stomping grounds. The hero/narrator is just this side of being an annoying smart-ass, which I thought took great skill on Rosenfelt’s part. His first novel was Open and Shut, out in paperback now. Both books are serious mysteries, but with some character-based humor. I devoured each of them in one day as soon as I got them, which is a pretty good recomendation.
Monday I read Summer Moonshine, a P.G. Wodehouse novel from 1937. It’s relatively dark, for Wodehouse, but as wonderful and funny as all of his stuff. I also read it in the new Overlook hardcover edition, and I urge everyone to chase after them, too. Great books in cute little hardcovers – how can you go wrong? There’s about a dozen or so out now, and they seem to be coming out in clumps two or three times a year. They’re fun to read and look great on a shelf; my life is now complete.
And over the weekend I read two not-yet published manuscripts for work, so I won’t talk about them.
I just finished 2 books & am working on… oh, about 3 or 4
Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett - a collection of short stories with interwoven characters & an overarching theme of science. Quite good.
Towing Jehovah by James Morrow. A disgraced tanker captain is commanded by the angel Gabriel to find the corpse of God (which has fallen into the Atlantic (?) ocean) and bring it to the Arctic where the angels have carved a tomb. Bizzare premise - excellent book.,
Working on the following:
*Confederates in the Attic[/1] - Tony Horowitz. A cultural travelogue through the South, exploring attitudes towards the War Between The States.
*The Worthing Saga[/1] - Orson Scott Card. An SDMB Book Swap (thanks, Medea’s Child!) - the story of Jason Worthing and his descendants (who have varous psychic powers), told through flashbacks. Am about halfway through and enjoying it!
*Cemetery stories : haunted graveyards, embalming secrets, and the life of a corpse after death[/1] - Katherine M. Ramsland. The subtitle sums it up nicely - a bit more basic & apocryphical than I would have liked, but an interesting read if you’re not easily squicked about the topic.
I just finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan and thought it was FASCINATING. I angrily finished Donna Tartt’s THe Little Friend which really got in my craw.
But Ellen, the first book Donna Tartt wrote is called The Secret History and it’s in my top three books of all time. So detailed, wonderful odd characters, a TON of literary and mythical parallels and references. I’ve read it three times and I LOVE IT.
I think next I’ll be reading The Devil In the White City or Everyone’s Burning
I just finished The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which was rather good. There are some things that bothered me about it, such as the lampoonish characterizatons of most minor characters juxtaposed with a very serious treatment of the main characters. That said, I devoured the thing, and bawled at all the sad parts. Sheesh, I’m a sap.
I’m just starting Mother of Storms by John Barnes, a hard sci-fi author I’ve just discovered. He is compared with Heinlein, which I can see, though he doesn’t display the same level of mastery, I don’t think. This book seems to be more in a Neal Stephenson vein, though–near future setting, post-cyberpunk elements, large cast of characters destined to be drawn together by events, etc. Not bad so far.
Next in the queue: Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. I needs me some Japanese surrealism.
I agree about Basket Case. I had given up on him after that trilogy of dreck: Stormy Weather, Lucky You and Sick Puppy.
If one only reads one Hiaasen ever, it should be Native Tongue.
Don’t be surprised if you’re disappointed. I was. It was my first Pratchett and after reading it, I couldn’t understand what everyone was raving about. He get’s steadily better with time and his latest efforts can actually be accused of being literature. CoM sets up his whole DiscWorld franchise, but it’s not until Guards, Guards!, that he hits his stride. Have patience and you will be rewarded. I envy everyone with all of Pterry’s books in front of them. Nowadays I have to wait anxiously for the six months between them, and re-read his older stuff when the withdrawal gets to tough!
I went to my local bookstore yesterday and bought four books, which were on my list of ‘ought to read’: White Teeth - Zadie Smith Selected Tales - E.A. Poe Generation X - Douglas Coupland Man and Boy - Tony Parsons
Just finished “The Stingray Shuffle” by Tim Dorsey. Great stuff, better than Haissen. Just started “Triggerfish Twist.” Really should get around to finishing “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates” by Tom Robbins.
aaargh - that’s what I get for rushing to post before leaving for lunch - lousy coding!
I forgot one more book: At home with books : how booklovers live and care for their libraries - Caroline Seebohm, Estelle Ellis & , Christopher Simon Sykes. Again, the subtitle pretty much covers it - a coffee table book with lots of pictures of gorgeous homes and lovely libraries. There’s a bit of useful advice for us plebes now and then, and a bit of history about personal libraries as well.
I just finished half of The Corrections and then let it lay around in my car till the library reminded me to bring it back. I hated how it went from realistic to semi- fantastical all the damn time.
I am now reading a biography of Queen Victoria given to me by my husband. Don’t tell him my big interest is actually Elizabeth I or he’ll feel bad.
