Chronological publication date or chronological by the internal timeline of the story?
Henry James should be prescribed as a sleep aid. Boring doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Chronological by internal timeline.
Agreed on Henry James. I did like “The Turn of the Screw,” though, compared to many of his other works. At least there’s SOMETHING going on, although only Henry James could make ghosts / insanity into a bit of a snoozefest.
Currently reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. Entertaining and odd, a sardonic look at pre-WW1 Austo-Hungary that resonates with our own time. It’s a massive,sprawling novel of ideas - and unfinished (which somehow seems appropriate).
Henry James is the only person who can take a Ghost Story and make it boring.
I had to read this in high school. It was a slog. The teacher tried to push it through by racily suggesting that we explain what the title meant.
Oh, well, at least it wasn’t as boring as “The Beast in the Jungle”, another Henry James page-long sentence exercise. There is no Beast in the book, and no Jungle. It’s a book in which nothing happens, and that’s supposed to be the point. But with James’ writing it seems to take intolerably long.
astorian, I’ve tried to read all the books on your list, but the only one I managed to finish was Appointment in Samarra, which I really liked.
I just finished An Innocent Man, non-fiction by John Grisham, about two men convicted of a rape-murder in Oklahoma in the 1980s. Both men spent 12 years in prison before being cleared by DNA evidence. It’s a really sad story, and Grisham does a good job here.
I’m about a third of the way through Joyland and, against expectation, I find it flat and uninvolving. 1973? Haunted park by the sea? I should love this book!
Well, that’s not ironic! It should have had a dreadful accident involving an auger. Then there would be some connection with the screw, and things which are made for the purpose of boring. 
I’m on to The Last Man on Earth Club, which is a novel about survivors of different apocalypses, going through a therapy group.
I think most of what I read year-round is fluff, especially when I compare it to the heavy stuff some of y’all are into. But I have to groove at my own level.
I just bought We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, (link goes to amazon page) which I am being very cautious about googling - apparently there’s a too-easy-to-spoil twist? Which is being widely spoiled, obviously. It has great reviews so far.
I’m rereading lots of Diana Wynne Jones at the moment - my reading habits do seem to change a bit this time of year, since I’m teaching summer camp at the zoo and wind up absolutely exhausted in the evenings. So summer reading for me has to be bite-sizeable chunks. Rereading is good for this, and I save bigger chunks for the weekends. I seldom leave the house voluntarily in the summer - this is both a good thing and a bad thing.
I’m a little more than halfway through **11/22/63 **by Stephen King and am surprised to find I am enjoying it. It’s the first Stephen King book I have read in quite a while–in fact, I think the last one I read was The Stand, so it’s been a while.
Bit of a cheat, as it was the last of my free trial Audible audio books, but just finished Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. After about an hour in I was ready to give up, but then it suddenly gripped me and I loved the rest of it. It was the sort of book you make excuses to abandon your real life activities for (“children, go watch Dora for a moment, mummy’s got something I need to do”). I found it absorbing and atmospheric and really satisfying.
I’m also reading Mary Roach’s * Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void*. It’s about the human side of space travel, or at least it is so far - what astronauts go through. Her Stiff gets recommended a lot round here, which is how I first came across her. This is written in the same way - fascinating, personal, funny and really interesting. I absolutely recommend it so far.
I’m about halfway through The Sisters Brothers which I guess you’d call Western-Lit. I’m quite enjoying it… it seems to have an air of menace and sadness about it without much actually happening. It also has a fantastically designed cover, which is always important. 
For balance, the last book I read was **The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics **. Hilarious - if you’ve ever wanted to know who would win in a fight between Lord Byron and a dracula (sic) then this is your chance to find out…
Heh. Henry James takes his licks in this thread: "Reading Thomas Hardy is like eating a pillow." - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
I just finished Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, an excellent page-turner of a novel in which a woman disappears and her husband becomes the prime suspect in her (maybe) murder. The book alternates between his first-person account and her initially-undiscovered diary. Lots of twists and turns, and wickedly funny, with a lot to say about our crime-as-entertainment culture (Nancy Grace, Hard Copy, TMZ, Court TV, etc.).
Next up: The Great Gatsby by that Fitzgerald fellow. Haven’t read it since college, when I was underwhelmed by it, but it’s my book club’s latest pick, and I’ll be interested to see if 20-some years of additional semi-maturity change my outlook.
Still also enjoying Ron Chernow’s magisterial Washington: A Life, which has now become my favorite bio of the Father of His Country. Perfect reading for a Glorious Fourth.
I read this back in May, thanks to recommendations from **Zjastika **& sinjin, I was expecting the premise [the sole survivors of planet-wide catastrophes being brought together in therapy sessions] to be played a bit for laughs, but Hardy treated it pretty straight, with the survivors exhibiting varied PTSD symptoms and the therapist (herself a survivor) struggling to address their needs while dealing with her own personal issues. Hardy has done his homework in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and some of the scenarios seem to (uncomfortably) reflect dark episodes in human history.
The world building (both the central Hub and each characters’ home dimension/world) is well done, and the characters have depth to them. I wasn’t as impressed with the overarching story, preferring the character’s stories - Olivia (a doctor who faced a zombie apocalypse) and Pew (victim of genocide) in particular intrigued me.
I picked this up as a Kindle e-read for $2.99 (it’s $3.99 now) and would recommend it to anyone interested in apocalyptic scenarios and the emotional and psychological fallout of such.
I finished Marooned on Eden by Robert L. Forward and his wife, then read Lawrence P. Lessing’s Understanding Chemistry It’s a 1959 Mentor book, meant for the interested layman. It’s interesting, although its age shows in some incorrect assertions on, for instance, how long life has been on earth, and in the general attitude towards technological progress. (There’s clearly nothing thought to be wrong about tetra-ethyl-lead, or about chlorofluorocarbons). But the historical discussions are great, with a lot of stuff i hadn;t encountered before. It’s really an extended essay of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and not really an intro to chemistry, and once you realize that it’s a fascinating book.
Interesting tidbit: circa 1955 Herbert M. Strong and Theodore Wentorf, the reseachers at General Electric Research who produced artificial diamonds, got whimsical one day and decided to make some diamonds in the ultra-high-pressure press using as starting material — Peanut butter. They did, too.
I looked this up on the internet and found several references to people in Edinburgh and elsewhere making diamonds out od peanut butter circa 2007, but not referencing the earlier work at GE.
Other interesting tidbit – although I hadn’t heard about the “peanut butter diamonds”, I had been under the impresion that Strong and Wentorf’s artificia;l diamonds were the first to be made. But apparrently they were scooped by some 65 years. J. B. Hannay of Scotland apparently did it, starting with paraffin, bone oil, and lithium and his own high pressure vessel. Maybe if he used peanut butter instead of paraffin, he could’ve made peanut butter diamonds, too.
Next up: She and Allan. H. Rider Haggard succimbs to sequelmania and has the characters from King Solomon’s Mines meet Ayesha nd company from She. The completist in me is compelling me to read this. That, and I’ve had the copy sitting around for years.
I think Thomas Hardy takes even more of a whuppin’, and I’m currently reading The Mayor of Casterbridge.
I no doubt picked up The Last Man on Earth Club at your recommendation, so thanks!
I was reminded of SpazCat’s book ironies yesterday. I had gone in to clean the bathroom shared by my son and stepson, and one of them had left a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine.
I’m currently working my way through the thousand-page behemoth that it David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I can’t even begin to describe it, really, as it has about four or five different plotlines (which are more character studies than actual plots) and jumps around in time despite being set in what is apparently some near-future science-fictiony Earth.
I was about 400 pages in before the whole thing started to make some kind of sense to me and I’m now around page 550. I like it okay, but I don’t love it, so it’s a bit of a chore. Still, I’m committed to finishing it by the end of the summer as part of a loose reading-group-type thing.
I finished Possessing the Secret of Joy. It was well written with good characters, but I’ll never touch this book again. I’m going to have to do something frivolous for a while to recuperate from it.
I felt very similarly, it’s one of those books that I’m glad I read, but I didn’t *love *it or anything, the way many people seem to.
I (finally) got to read Joyland while on vacation, I enjoyed it a lot! It was very Stephen King being Stephen King, which I appreciated. It was brisk, had fun characters, and a good setting (a carny-ish sort of run down amusement park in the 1970s). In some ways, SK is showing his age a little bit – I had to roll my eyes a little at how set in his ways he is about creating female characters and showing relationships, but at the same time, I’ve liked him as an author for years and I should know that this is how it is. I think I’m the only person in the world who liked The Colorado Kid, his other book for the Hard Case Crime series, so maybe I should pick up more of these by other authors.
Travel often leads me to choose books that I feel okay about reading in small chunks – no big deal if I’m interrupted or stopping and starting a lot, which is about the extent that I’ll go with “beach reads” type books in the summer. If it’s something I’ve REALLY been looking forward to, and wanting to read without interruption, I won’t take that on a trip where I’m going to be getting on and off planes, listening for announcements, that sort of thing.
I’m now immersed in John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra.” I’ll read something lighter after that, and will then move on to “An American Tragedy.”