I’m reading The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. I’ve had the book for 20 years, since I met one of the authors, and I have no idea why I haven’t read it until now. I love old country blues, and although Leadbelly doesn’t fit strictly into that, he’s a fascinating guy and recorded a lot of cool music.
Turns out it’s pretty well written, too.
Just finished Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and starting now on a short story collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman.
I also just got done with Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. It had some new material, but the best stuff is already there on her blog: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/ You should go there immediately and read The God of Cake, or anything to do with the dogs. I find her writing only fairly amusing, but when combined with her artwork it can be piss-yourself funny.
I’m sorry about that. May I ask (if I haven’t already) what you didn’t like?
Huh - I didn’t know there was a “best of” collection. Some of his short stories are just fantastic. Amazon doesn’t have a full list of what’s in that book; I’ll check at my library and recommend some others that might not appear there, if you like.
I finished “The Snow Child” by Eowyn Ivey. I loved it pretty much from the start. It’s so magical, and I needed a little magic in the post-Christmas letdown. It even made this hellish winter I’m in the middle of seem almost lovely. Almost.
I’m stopping at the library today to pick up Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and The Tragedy Paper by Elizabeth LaBan.
Lookaway, Lookaway: A Novel by Wilton Barnhardt I’m only about 1/3 of the way through. I’m finding most of the characters unlikeable.
In the car I just finished The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott about a maid/seamstress on the Titanic, and evidently based on many true characters and facts. I now have The Husband List by Janet Evanovich in the car.
Between Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, it certainly ought to be a good book!
Mount Toberead was looking like some kind of Jenga-like game; I finally decided on a recently bought copy of Joe Haldeman’s “Camouflage”, which I’m devouring! Frankly, I blame Elendil’s Heir for reminding me of how much I’ve enjoyed his other books. 
About halfway through We Are Gathered Here by Micah Perks. (Kindle version is only $1.99)
I’m liking it. It’s set in a mining camp in the Adirondacks in the late (?) 1800’s. A young woman newly married to a miner is asked to help care for the epileptic niece of the mine owner. It’s feminist without being preachy. There’s a lot of rich detail and no unnecessary exposition – very well-written.
I’ve a couple of books cracked open, not sure if some of them really count as being “read” yet. But anyway:
Terry Pratchett’s latest Raising Steam is, sad to say, a bit of a slog. The train comes to Ankh-Morpork, and Moist van Lipwik must set up a railway network. It feels ever so slightly like a farewell–I’m halfway in and already we’ve had cameos by the wizards, Vimes, Death, William de Worde of the Times, and major roles for the Low King and various others. Most regrettably, however, it’s barely funny and not very exciting. I guess most of us could have predicted this outing anyway (after the bank, the post office, and the mint), but still. Well, it’s a fair enough way to spend some time before bed.
John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven, a “portrait” of Johann Sebastian Bach. I am a great fan of Gardiner’s Bach interpretations, and he writes remarkably well. I’ve only browsed sections of the book, but it promises to be a fascinating biography of a man who seems personally to have been quite boring–I’m hoping Gardiner’s knowledge of the music will be helpful here.
John McCumber’s Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought. I’m reading this as something of a primer for the last two hundred years of Western philosophy, and it’s doing its job admirably well; though I already gather that it’s main plot for continental philosophy might find people disagreeing. I’ll deal with that once I’m through with it.
And I’m still on Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers on the outbreak of World War I. A bit hard by know to keep all the figures straight, especially in the East; but it’s becoming ever more terrifying in its progression through the various follies committed, wittingly and unwittingly, by the various governments.
You might prefer Barbara Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August, which JFK recommended to his national security team to teach them about the risks of accidental global war.
I finished reading Life After Life. My wife borrowed an electronic copy from the library, so I figured I might as well download it on my e-reader. It was pretty good, although I wasn’t blown away by the ending.
Finished my first book of 2014 - 142 more to go to match my 2013 total!
Picked up Rule 34 from the library based mostly on the title, but also on the author (Charles Stross) as well as a mention on Blaster.com. What I didn’t realize was that it was a sequel of sorts. I also didn’t realize it was told in second person, from the viewpoint of multiple persons, which got a bit tough to follow at times (tho makes sense at the novel’s conclusion). I would recommend reading this in as close to one sitting as possible.
Our main characters are DI Liz Kavanaugh, who gets pulled away from her normal police task of monitoring internet porn to be assigned to an suspicious death/homicide and Anwar, an ex-con trying to keep his nose clean by taking an position as consul to a breakaway -istan republic. But we also meet the Toymaker, whose meds are wearing off as he deals with managing an underground criminal operation; Dorothy Straight, Liz’s former love interest; and a cast of other oddball characters.
The story itself builds a bit slowly at first, as there are many puzzle pieces to put together, and Stross expects his readers to have some sort of tech/Internet background (assuming if the title clicks, you are the intended audience). He’s not quite as demanding as Stephenson, but you’re not just along for the ride. The book is also heavily skewed towards a Scotland/UK background, including some of the dialog, which I found occasionally a bit tough to puzzle out. (that, or I started channeling Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, which is a serious mismatch with Stross!)
I enjoyed the book and will probably check out the first book in the series Halting State as well as continuing to explore Stross’s work, as I also quite enjoyed The Atrocity Archives.
Just started a re-read of Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal; inspired by reading Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night last month.
They’re both alternate takes on Jesus Christ’s life, with Unholy Night focussing on the story of the Three Wise Men and Jesus’s birth/first few days of life.
The main character is Balthazar, also known as the Antioch Ghost. While Grahame-Smith’s book has touches of humor that remind me of Moore, the story is much more action-oriented, as Balthazar is a thief bent on a mission of revenge, who meets Melchior and Gaspar in Herod’s prison.
They break out, and as they flee the soldiers, happen upon a stable in Bethlehem with legendary results. The story is surprisingly violent at times (tho, considering the Old Testament, perhaps not so surprisingly) and there are some gory scenes reminiscent of Grahame-Smith’s previous work. However, there is very little of the supernatural in this novel (beyond the obvious religious connections).
The historical research seems quite solid to this amateur, and the characters are very engaging and believable. It’s been interesting to see Grahame-Smith move from creating a clever pastiche, to an alternate history that leans heavily on a historical figure, to an alternate history using a mostly-fictional character as its lead. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.
I humbly accept your blame and hope you love the book!
I wanted to like that book, I really did, but the ratio of plodding-to-funny was 'way too high, I thought. His summary of Jesus’s message was on the mark, though.
I just finished Letters to Jackie, edited by Ellen Fitzpatrick, a collection of some of the hundreds of thousands of condolence notes and letters sent to the First Lady after the tragedy in Dallas. Many of them are quite moving, as people high and low, from all walks of life, seek to console Mrs. Kennedy and also come to grips with the horrible and public death of her husband. Particularly striking were notes from a great-grandson of President Garfield (“Your bitter experiences of the past few days [have] happened to very few families who had previously given their husbands and fathers to the lonely responsibility of the Presidency”), and the widows Mrs. Medgar Evers (“I know words can be of little comfort now for I lost my husband on June 12th in the same way”) and Mrs. J.D. Tippit (“My personal loss in this great tragedy prepares me to sympathize more deeply with you”).
Continuing my JFK reading, I’m now starting Listening In, edited by Ted Widmer, a collection of transcribed White House recordings from during the Kennedy Administration, focusing on the Civil Rights Movement, foreign policy and contemporary politics. It includes a forward by Caroline Kennedy, and two CDs of the recordings.
Finished off The Squared Circle. If you’re even a casual wrestling fan, it’s a great read; the series of brief biographies of wrestlers, almost all dead long before their time from the abuse their bodies took in the ring and the abuse they gave their bodies outside of the ring, is chosen to illustrate the history and development of the “sport,” from its earliest, semi-legitimate days, through the Territorial and 1980s Wrestlemania eras, and on through to today. There are short pieces between the bios focusing on individual aspects of the wrestling game–race, nationality, lady wrestling–as well as introductions for each era, setting the stage. I’m not familiar with the original Deadspin columns, so I don’t know how much of this is just repackaging from those. Naturally, I especially enjoyed the pieces on the wrestlers from when I was growing up–Macho Man Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, and so on, as well as legends (I could swear) I heard my father talk about, like Gorgeous George. (Dad says now GG was a bit before his time, and I think he’s right–still could swear I heard him talk about him.) Perhaps most telling, it’s gotten me excited enough about wrestling to turn it on again, despite my visceral distaste for John Cena. (I was watching back in the early 2000s, when he first showed up, and found him boring from the start–and couldn’t believe it when it became obvious they were positioning him to be a top face.)
As mentioned in the last thread, I’ve been watching the old A&E “A Nero Wolfe Mystery,” from the halcyon days of A&E, when they did high quality original drama, rather than bigoted duck hunting reality TV, so I decided to return to my long-running project of working my way through the canon in publication order. Next in line turned out to be Prisoner’s Base, which just happened to be one of the early first season episodes, so I’m getting to see how they edited it down to two hours, as well as getting to have all of Archie’s/Nero’s/Cramer’s lines delivered in my head by Hutton/Chaykin/Smitrovich.
Following this, I may check out a book that was sorta pimped on the BBC History Extra podcast this week: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Given that I just recently finished Iron Curtain, regarding the post-war Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe, much of the talk the author gave on the podcast sounded quite familiar, but I wouldn’t mind getting deeper into the aftermath generally.
I had a roommate once who was a huge Undertaker fan and she couldn’t stand John Cena either. Seems like it’s a common complaint of modern wrestling fans.
I just finished Keri Hulme’s The Bone People the other day. I love this book, but it’s one of the few books that I recommend with a huge trigger warning: it features two scenes of brutal physical child abuse. I first read it in grad school and the worst scene was accidentally spoiled for me by a classmate, so I was prepared for it. Other than that it’s a beautifully written book about redemption and love and acceptance but not in the usual ways.
Reading my first Pratchett, The Truth, and finding it amusing. I envy Auntie Pam’s starting the Matthew Scudder series by Lawrence Block. My daughter is devouring Larson’s The Girl Who…books so I might finish …**Kicked The Hornet’s Nest **next.
I’ve gotten diverted into Alex by Pierre Lemaitre. The translation isn’t quite right but so far I’m interested. Mostly because my father (whose library book it is) said it kept him guessing, and he usually figures out thrillers.
I read the novella “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson over the weekend. I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. Yesterday I started “The Tragedy Paper” by Elizabeth LaBan. It’s really great so far. After that I need to start “Catch-22” for my book club.
Oh, forgot to mention: I’m catching up on Fables, going through the TPBs one per night until I’m up to date. This means a lot of re-reading, as I was up through at least the 100th issue, but I’m fine with that–Fables is fun. 