Polished off Gulp last night. Not a lot to say there: If you know and like Mary Roach, you’ll enjoy it. It’s full of everything you know and like about Mary Roach.
I’m reading this book called Screwed by Eoin Colfer and I must say I really like this. It’s so much fun and terrifically hilarious. Anyone else read any of this guy’s stuff? It’s such an over the top violent and irreverent poke at crime and mystery novels. Lots of pop culture references, tough guys, gun molls…I think it’s brilliant for a quick and fun read.
I also finished The Blood Of Gods by Conn Iggulden and enjoyed it very much. I absolutely love fictionalized history, and this did not disappoint (mostly…felt it could have been fleshed out more).
If there are any sci-fi fans that haven’t read Bova’s “Asteroid Wars” series, it’s worth a read. Just finished book four. It’s a very plausible look into a near future of a colonized moon and Ceres, a climactically shattered Earth and the corporate wars and intrigues over the raw materials mined from the asteroid belt that Earth so desperately needs to pull itself from destruction.
I’ve had some time at the beach to read, and am now about a third of the way through Roy Jenkins’s magisterial but very readable bio Churchill, and also halfway through Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, an offbeat, often funny exploration of the enduring appeal of Lost Cause mythology in the Southern U.S.
Annnd…Stephen King strikes again! I just finished From a Buick 8 and enjoyed it immensely. A highly unusual Aliens Have Landed And We Are In Deep Yogurt story.
Just finished it. Wry, funny, sometimes tragicomic. Horwitz, who won the Pulitzer for his Wall Street Journal reporting on low-wage workers, rubs shoulders with Confederate reenactors, slavery apologists, Confederate flag “defenders,” historian Shelby Foote, and lots of other odd ducks. Chapt. 11, “Gone with the Window,” is all about old-and-new Atlanta, Gone with the Wind and the enduring appeal of Mitchell’s novel, including, oddly enough, to the Japanese. Definitely worth reading.
Also raced this weekend through Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, the first of a trilogy. A real page-turner about first contact with aliens on Mars (although it turns out they’re not from Mars) by a spunky young female member of the first small permanent Earth colony there. I look forward to the next book, crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that it’s not a letdown… as every other damned Haldeman sequel has ever been for me.
I think I was supposed to report in when I finished The Knife Man (about John Hunter, a revolutionary surgeon/physician in 1700’s England).
It started good, and it continued good. There was a lot less about body snatching toward the end, although it was still going on. But everybody should know about this guy. It’s amazing how close he came to being Charles Darwin without ever having the one crucial insight that random permutation would naturally lead to adaptation.
Now I’m reading Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
bup, I’m going to have to let Anatomies go back to the library unfinished. The TBR pile is getting out of control! But I think you would like this book. Aldersey-Williams isn’t funny like Mary Roach (nor trying to be), but he is accessible.
This time around I’m understanding God Emperor of Dune much more than I have the previous times I’ve read it. Thank Leto for Wikipedia! I was looking up something else Dune-related and found the entry for the book which explained several plot points I never really got (like the specifics of the Golden Path–you know, the driving force of half of the series? Never understood it with all of Leto II’s talking circles around himself).
I read the third book in Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series, A Crown of Lights. These are paranormal mysteries set in modern rural England, and I’m still surprised by how good they are: they’re spooky and suspenseful with great character development. In this one a young pagan couple has bought some land on which sits an old, decommissioned church, and they are looking forward to “reclaiming an old, pagan sacred place”. A fiery evangelical minister seizes this opportunity for a “spiritual battle”, but his motivations are suspect. Our vicar Merrily, a liberal yet conventional Anglican, finds herself called upon to intervene.
I just finished In Conquest Born, by C.S. Friedman, which is a sci-fi novel from the 80’s. The plot is hard to describe but every single page is just as dramatic as the title: we get fierce warriors, devoted women, vengeful telepaths, cunning assassins, paranoid infiltrators, and so on. It’s not entirely satisfying, but I kind of liked it. It felt more like a collection of related short stories than a novel.
I just started reading Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters. It’s Victorian historical fiction about a girl who has been kindly raised by a family of thieves and swindlers in London. She’s agreed to pose as a lady’s maid to a naive, wealthy young gentlewoman as part of a plot to steal the gentlewoman’s inheritance. It’s well written, and so far it’s a straightforward story, but supposedly there are some twists and thrills coming.
David McCullough reveals the true source of his inspiration to write great history:
I’ve finished Jim Butcher’s Storm Fronnt (the first Harry Desden book), which I hadn’t read. Somehow I missed the TV series, too, but I picked it up on DVD and have been watching it as well. Before I go on to Fool’s Moon, though, I wanted to read some other things.
I’ve gotten back to my bedside reading – The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, which I’ve been working my way through for way too long. reading all those pages-long footnotes really slows you down. But I want to finish it, if only to get to The Annotated Peter Pan, which I just found a copy of, cheap.
when I don’t want to lug an immense volume around, I’m reading a Dog Before a Soldier, a collection of articles on virtually forgotten episodes of the Civil War Naval history, written by Chuck Veit. I have his book Raising Missouri as well. It’s on the salvage of the US Steam Frigate Missouri. I met veit at a Civil War Encampment, where he had a display of Civil war Naval History, including a big poster of the Alligator, the first Civil war submarine (there were lots of others besides the much-publicized Hunley.) He autographed my copies. Good stuff.
Finally starting this today!
I just finished a kind-of accidental reread of the entire Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, and will be diving in to Omens by Kelley Armstrong, the first in a new series by her. I adored her Otherworld series, and she manages to build a world and populate it with characters I both love and hate without coming off as pedantic or boring me to tears. I’m really looking forward to starting this tonight.
I keep hearing great things about this author, but haven’t gotten around to reading anything by her yet.
I finished a great non-fiction book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I thought this was a wonderful read, it’s a pop science review of some of the recent research on traffic issues, both looking at how systems work (or fail to work) and the psychology behind how people make decisions about driving (or fail to make decisions).
I also read Bittersweet, a YA novel written by a local author that I got a kick out of. Nothing outstanding, but enjoyable. A figure skating girl gets involved with training her high school hockey team.
I’m more than halfway through it (Fingersmith), and it’s very well written, but I’m not at all sure that I like it. Ever since the first twist (which did impress me) the story has been wretched: a steady flow of abuse, betrayal and victimization. I can’t be specific without spoiling it, since the book depends heavily on surprising the reader with unexpected plot twists.
I liked that *Traffic *book, too! Need to get my teenager to read it.
I am currently re-reading Day Two: The Wise Man’s Fear from The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.
An excellent fantasy book series which I can recommend.
I feel a bit bad for finding this tread. It means I will have to do a lot more reading.
That’s just the risk you take.
Just finished a couple of good books, one of which was recommended in this thread - last month, I think?
I polished off Margalit Fox’s The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. I enjoyed the tri-part structure focusing around the three main figures who led to the decipherment of Linear B. I wish I could say I comprehended the syllabary, grids, etc with equal facility, but those did go over my head at times, despite my semi-linguistics background. Still, it was the kind of book that I’d pick up again just to get a finer understanding of these points. And now I want to endow a scholarship or something in memory of Alice Kober, not that I have the money to do so. 
Poster who recommend this, thanks!
Also knocked out Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Were Hanged, the second book in the First Law trilogy. I love his fantasy! Despite the multiple characters and some familiar tropes - barbarian, quest, magus, etc - Abercrombie gives everything a fresh twist with surprising depth of character development. Can’t wait to pick up the final volume in the trilogy, but first I need to finish Ben Pastor’s Lumen.
So far, Lumen is an historical mystery that makes me flinch, set as it is within Nazi-occupied Poland with a thus-far unrepentant Nazi as the main character. I’m not terribly far in, but the attitudes of the soldiers and the populace seem accurate to period, if cringe-inducing at times.
Finished Where Things Come Back, a very quick read. I can’t say I liked it, although I wasn’t bored and I got what I wanted at the end. Mostly, I’m wondering why the author included all the extraneous stuff (like, say, Oslo or John Barling). I couldn’t connect to Cullen, the main character. At one point, he says hearing the voice of his friend’s girlfriend makes him ashamed to be human; a few pages later, he has decided he likes her. (Okay dude, well, I don’t trust you anymore). A weird one.
Next up, The Complete Drive-In, by Joe R. Lansdale. Oh, fluffy gory cheezy Joe, how I loves ya. 