Oh good, glad to be of service! 
I’m still only halfway through but it’s got lots of good reviews.
Finished Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, which I enjoyed a lot for its wonderful anecdotes about the film as well as the authors’ memoirs.
Now I’m reading Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher.
I am reading I’ll Stop the World, which is a teen angsty time travel book. I think I heard about it in one of these threads?
@Dendarii_Dame, I really enjoyed Dear Committee Members. It made me laugh out loud and feel good about my decision not to go into academia.
I just finished Search by a writer named Michelle Huneven. It’s a novel about a search committee looking for a new minister for their Unitarian Universalist congregation somewhere in southern California.
As an elevator pitch, it sounds pretty boring. But it’s outstanding. I’m biased, I suppose, because I have served on search committees before (including two for a new priest in my own church, which is Episcopal rather than UU), and I can say it rings absolutely true: the dynamics between the committee members, the little alliances that form and re-form, the tension between what you personally want and what you think the congregation wants. There’s a lot of quoting from the materials sent in by the various candidates, and that’s all on target as well.
Anyway, there’s an enormous amount of drama as the committee approaches the time when it must make its choice, and I got extremely caught up in who I wanted to be the chosen minister (who happened to be the same as the one the narrator wanted, hmm); at one point I had to put the novel aside for a few hours because I was too invested in which minister (and which faction) would “win.”
Yes, it’s about religion (though because it’s UU there’s very little about God–indeed, there’s one character who does talk fairly often about God, which makes everybody else uncomfortable), but it’s mostly about people, and about institutions and how they do or don’t work, and I thought it was wonderful and funny, well-written and often wise. It is certainly a pre-candidate (UU search committee lingo) for my Top Ten books of 2024 list. Indeed, it will be quite a year in reading for me if it fails to make that list.
Oh, there’s also a lot about food in here–the narrator is a food writer and the concept is that she is writing a book about how food fit into the search process, so there are lots of descriptions of meals and several recipes at the end. These didn’t grab me at all, but might be an inducement to a reader who is more of a foodie than I am.
Welcome back, Misnomer!
Ooo, sounds great! Just put the audiobook on hold with my local library.
I started The Pursuit of Perfection: And How It Harms Writers by Kathryn Rusch. Very short and to the point. Rusch takes aim at the traditional workshop model of feedback and asserts that the only people you should be trying to please with your work are your readers. Moreover she emphasizes focusing more on one’s writing career as a whole rather than one particular book. Lessons learned from the first book should be carried over into the second book etc. rather than dithering over and rewriting the first book ad infinitum.
This is a perspective I need, as I had no less than twenty people review my first novel, most of them not even romance readers. I can recall specific things I changed to please people way outside of my target demographic. I spent six years tearing my book apart and putting it back together and I’m still not happy with it, so I’m working on the second book in the trilogy right now, trying to decide what to do with the first one, and Rusch would say, “stop screwing around with it and ship it.”
It’s very simple advice but difficult to implement. I have a really hard time finishing something that looks flawed to me, and it always looks flawed to me. Well, it is flawed, of course. But Rusch argues that those flaws might actually be the thing readers like the most about it.
I’m thinking about it.
I may have to check this out, having worked in the office of a United Church of Canada congregation where church politics triggered a senior minister’s stress leave, early retirement, a restructuring of the board governing the church, a transition minister. Then Covid hit…
Here in Toronto, our public library’s on-line catalogue and hold system has been completely shut down since a cyber attack on Oct. 27th. It’s driving me crazy!!
If there are any other Chief Inspector Gamache fans in the house, yesterday author Louise Penny announced that the next book (#19) will published on October 29 with the title The Grey Wolf.
Thank you!
I’ve been in and out of these threads for even longer than I thought: after posting in the “25th anniversary of SDMB!” thread the other day I did some wandering down memory lane, and it turns out that my second-ever post (in July 2004) was in a “Whatcha Readin’?” thread! And Dung Beetle replied to me first back then, too. 
Spice, da Vinci is said to have remarked, “Great art is never finished, it is only abandoned.”
I just knew you were a kindred spirit. 
Vanderbilt, by Anderson Cooper, who, if you were unaware, is a direct descendent of the robber baron. Cooper does his homework and is a decent writer. I’ve already read Astor, his companion piece, which was also quite good.
Finished Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading Wearing My Mother’s Heart: Poems, by Sophia Thakur.
Keeping Here Begins the Dark Sea as my “go to sleep” book (not because I found it boring but because it relaxes me), I’ve gone on a Gillian Bradshaw binge and read
The Bearkeeper’s Daughter, about a guy who goes to Constantinopla during Justinian’s reign and has some link to the empress Theodora.
and
The beacon of Alexandria about a girl who wants to practice medicine in the IV century and is not allowed to do so because she’s a woman.
I liked both, specially the second one.
Currently reading London in chains by the same author.
Also took the time to read Miguel Bonasso’s El Palacio y la calle. Cronicas de Insurgentes y Conspiradores. (The Palace and the Street, Chronicles of Insurgents and Conspirators) about the Argentina crisis of 2001, because I fear he may need to write a sequel in a few years… 
, I found it informative and terrifying.
Finished Wearing My Mother’s Heart: Poems, by Sophia Thakur, of which “Observe” was the best.
Now I’m reading Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty, a science fiction mystery. (It’s the second in a series called The Midsolar Murders–I haven’t read the first yet.)
That sounds awful! Can’t imagine being without an online catalog, still less a hold system. Hope the situation improves soon.
If you do read Search, hope you enjoy it (and it doesn’t hit too close to home).
Finished Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, which became un-putdownable at about the 75% mark and kept me up too late finishing, but anyway, I really liked it. Enough to continue reading the series, though I think I’m going to take a break for something more depressing.
I’m looking at you, Cormac McCarthy.
Finished London London in chains by Gillian Bradshaw which I liked, more for the info about the English Civil War than for the book itself (not that the book wasn’t good, it was ok).
So following Bradshaw’s recommendation at the end I started The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, so far so good, I would prefer more narrative and a bit less anthropology (I’m not interested in the inventory of all the goods a middle class london family had in its house when the owner died no matter how much info it gives about their lives) but it’s not excessive and the time period is very interesting.
Finished Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann. Very good. Osage Indians were relegated to what was thought worthless land in present-day Oklahoma. But when oil was discovered there, they started getting murdered willy-nilly in the 1920s by white men who ingratiated themselves into the tribe in an effort to steal their mineral rights, marrying their women and using any other means they could to become close to them. None of this is surprising to me. I grew up in West Texas and knew many people quite capable of such a deed. Always I have said that as much as I hated Texas, if I had to live in Oklahoma I would slit my wrists. To this day, I cannot meet anyone from Texas or Oklahoma without thinking they probably ought to be skinned alive just to be on the safe side.
I have started the same author’s latest book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. The true story of shenanigans among the crew of an 18th-century British man-of-war that runs into trouble off of South America’s Patagonian coast. Named the top book of 2023 in several quarters.
Reading Tyranny of the Minority, a followup to How Democracies Die by the same authors. It’s fascinating and depressing as you would imagine. In the first chapter alone is a recounting of how a Right Wing mob stormed the Bastille in France in February 1934 to disrupt their Parliament. There were hundreds of injuries and several deaths. Rather than fully persecute the perpetrators of the riot, the Right Wing party used their power in government to disrupt any real investigation and lionized them as heroes and patriots. French democracy, one of the oldest in Europe rotted away and was gone by the end of the decade and the people who helped kill it were absorbed into the Vichy Government under the Nazis.
It also touches on how rocky America’s first peaceful transfer of power (possibly the first of its kind in the world) went when Adams transfered the Presidency to Jefferson. Really interesting and only the start of the book.
Started The Road by Cormac McCarthy. For those who don’t know, it’s a bleak story about a man and his (I presume) son wandering around after the apocalypse. Nothing good or particularly interesting has happened so far. Oh, and it uses that precious technique of omitting quotation marks, which annoys me.
It started off very boring, and then I kind of resented its bleakness, thinking it’s a bit over-the-top, and now the narrative is starting to reveal a little more about the characters which is making it a bit more interesting. It’s not a long read (under 300 easy pages) so I will probably finish it.