Finished Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy. A brilliant book that I’m delighted to recommend to anybody interested in reading. By turns hilarious, maudlin, sad, and hilarious again.
Then Amazon demanded I read David Weber’s new Honor Harrington-universe (sans Honor Harrington, in fact) Shadow of Freedom. Man, he’d better get better soon. It’s a very swift read for Weber fans, largely because by this volume you know that there’s nothing about the way he characterizes his cardboards that you can’t skip–if you need to know anything, better go back than read it all. Here’s Danny, the eighteen-year old Captain of the Planetary Guard whose sister, Cecily, died when he was but a toddler and who averaged about a B+ at Guards School, where his mum, Zephane, and his Dad, Shu-Dein, rarely ever met him but then it was on that backwater planet somewhere off and that’s that. He’s really not happy with President Xylophone, but he also hates the opposition, and his RANGER-class AFV is armored to withstand only the lightest of pulser fire as the dreary night wears on, and lo! the rises the sun, is it the new day? Poor Captain Danny: it is actually a impeller antitank missile that kills him and I’ve just frickin’ read three pages of description of a guy who was only in the book to bloody well die!. Plot wise, really, nothing much happens, and it’s confusing as all hell, because it ties in with the one published before and chronologically overlaps. And no real space battles! Sigh. Well. It was just 6 bucks for Kindle…
Edit: Oh, and also? In one chapter, the head honcho is called “Brewster.” In the next chapter (the VERY NEXT CHAPTER), the capital city of yet another new locale is called…Brewster. You gotta be kidding me!
I finished “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” by Peggy Orenstein. It was entertaining enough, but I didn’t feel like it really gave me anything helpful. I guess I was looking for some advice on how to raise a girl in this princess-crazy culture we live in, but all I really got was, “Hey, if I can’t stop it, no one can.”
I’m nearing the end of the “Wool” omnibus and have started reading “Still Alice” for my book club.
Finally finished The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. It was okay. It was interesting to see how he dealt with everything that happened during the Holocaust and after, but the !!DRAMA!! about how the play of the diary was written dragged on quite a bit.
I dropped if off at the library and picked up The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. I’m trying to make peace with Dickens by reading all his novels in chronological (by publication) order. So far it’s all been downhill since he exchanged the humor of The Pickwick Papers for the high melodrama of everything else since then.
I have a love/hate relationship with Dickens. I love a few of his books, but the others I’ve read I’ve slogged through. Yet I always feel the need to go back and try him again.
I just finished the Wool omnibus. I enjoyed it immensely.
Plugging along with The_Last_Apocalypse. It’s actually quite good and instead of being a dry book of facts, it’s written more as a narrative of the 10th century. I’ve learned MORE about Vikings than in any other work to date Being Danish on my mother’s mother’s side, this makes me happy
I’ve just finished Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton, a very interesting and thought-provoking book. While I disagreed with the author at least once every 5 pages, and strongly disagreed with him every 20 pages, the overall premise is an interesting and sound one. There are worthwhile ideas for responding to the needs of both individuals and society as a whole that can be found in religions and religious institutions that can be adopted and adapted by atheists. These religious ideas are detachable, if you will, from their religious context, and it is our loss that atheists over the years have tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater in their rejection of religion.
I just started on What Money Can’t Buy - the Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel. I don’t actually remember how I found this book; I put it on hold at the library sometime in October, and it only arrived at my branch a couple of weeks ago. It could have been mentioned on ‘Planet Money’, the NPR podcast that I enjoy, or it might have been mentioned by Tim Harford or Dan Arieli, two economists whose books I’ve read in the last year or so. No matter - it’s a great examination of the intrusion of market economics into the social sphere over the last 30 years. I’m enjoying it enough that I’m going to put some of his other books on hold at the library, in case I have to wait 3 months for them, too.
I was introduced to the idea of behavioural economics in one of the last chapters of the book I mentioned before (“50 Economics Ideas You Really Need To Know”), and I’m fascinated by it. I think I will also put that book on hold with my local library.
I made it just under the wire and finished The Last Apocalypse by James Reston jr today!
The book isn’t a straight history tome but more of a narrative of the shakers and movers of the tenth century in Europe. It is an excellent introduction to the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire and the forces that formed the beginnings of Europe as we know it. Reston looks minutely at the Vikings, the Moors, the Magyars, The Spanish and finally the Ottonian Dynasty in what would eventually become Germany. The book is infused with humour and is extremely readable even if you know nothing of the time period.
Being Danish on my mother’s mother’s side, this makes me happy