I finished ‘City of Shadows’, the Arianna Franklin book that I got sucked into. It’s fascinating to read someone who responds so deeply to history. In this particular case, the factual ‘seed’ for the story was the interesting case of Anna Anderson, an imposter who claimed to be Anastasia. The rest of the story that Franklin weaves, coupled with the tone of 1920s/1930s Berlin, was fantastic.
Now I want to track down my copy of Christopher Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, which I found myself thinking about often…
I lucked into an ARC (free - yay!) so I’ll be reading The Shining Girls.
Finished The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne. I like Boyne’s writing but it’s hard to recommend the book. His view of the Russian Revolution is very simplistic. The book might be a good one for a teen.
Started Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – so far, it’s brilliant.
Also started Homecoming by Carsten Stroud. It’s a sequel to Niceville, which was a fun supernatural/espionage/thriller mashup. Elmore Leonard blurbed about it, and I can see why. If you crossed Supernatural with Justified, you’d be in Niceville.
Just picked up at the library today: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, a kids’ intro to American history written by President Obama and beautifully illustrated by Loren Long, and The Spirit of the Dog by Tamsin Pickeral, a big coffee-table book about the major dog breeds with some great photos by Astrid Harrisson.
I just now finished this, and enjoyed it very much. Some of the one-star reviews at Amazon are kinda funny, people complaining that there was no proper ending, and asking “Well? Did she kill Hitler or didn’t she?”
It’s the best account of life in London during the Blitz that I’ve ever read. Maybe because Atkinson had so many tries to tell that story.
I very much enjoyed it, too, especially the scenes during the war.
Have you read Connie Willis’s *Blackout *and All Clear? Those have some very good scenes during the Blitz. The characters are time travelers who have memorized the time and location of every bomb, but they have great difficulty trusting that information when they’re in the midst of the action.
I’ve just finished Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, the sequel to Wolf Hall. This one covers the last year or so of Anne Boleyn’s reign. It’s good, but not quite as mesmerizing as Wolf Hall. Mantel is supposedly working on the third book of this “Thomas Cromwell” trilogy.
A blogger on Tor.com is suggesting these novels as a way to tide yourself over until the next season of Game of Thrones - describing Cromwell as “the Littlefinger of Henry VIII’s court”.
Sounds a lot like Ken Grimwood’s Replay, except that’s about a man who keeps finding himself back in his college days after he dies. Great book. Some minor spoilers here: In 'Replay,' A Life Full Of Second Chances : NPR
I finished The God of Small Things yesterday and immediately walked it back to the library rather than keep it in the house another day. If you’re one of those people who thinks Great Literature has to be miserable, dreary, and destroy the lives of all the characters then buddy do I have a book for you. I think from now on I’ll get my Indian literature from Salman Rushdie. He actually has a sense of humor to soften the misery.
I really enjoyed that one, and I’m not usually a fan of that genre of fantasy - it is really well written and basically a delight to read. I was amazed to discover it was a first novel.
I haven’t, but I’ve been tempted. I liked most of Doomsday Book.
Elendil’s Heir, Life After Life reminded me of Replay. The big difference is that until the end, it’s not clear how much of her previous lives she remembers. It’s more a sense of deja vu with her – until the end anyway.
I didn’t think I’d ever like a time-jump novel as much as Replay, but Atkinson’s book is equal to it, IMHO.
I went back to the library today (and forgot to drop off my box of to-donate books :smack:) and got a couple more for the pile:
Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker–hoping this won’t be quite as despairing as The God of Small Things Damia, Anne McCaffrey–after all those Heavy Subjects I need a bit of a soap opera to cleanse the palate
I finished After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn. The daughter of the city’s most famous superheroes has no powers of her own, and is tired of living in her parents’ shadow. She tries to build a life of her own, and a career of her own as a forensic accountant. Then her firm takes on the case of trying to nail a supervillain for tax fraud. I liked it a lot - I enjoy superhero stories but never got into comics (the format just doesn’t do it for me).
I read The Blue Book by A. L. Kennedy and was blown away by it. The writing is just masterful. It’s the kind of book where language is the point, the plot is more like an afterthought. I would recommend it to people who like writerly writing, if that makes sense … and a note that it’s a lot of stream of consciousness, which I know is often annoying (and sometimes I’m not in the mood for it).
Also Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Pop science, reporting on research about competitiveness and brain chemistry. I picked this up because I liked their last book, which was about child development. The big difference (for me) is that I’m interested in child development and not really interested in competitiveness, so there wasn’t a lot that really intrigued me about this book. Eh, I have no one to blame but myself.
I’m currently halfway through The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, which is AWESOME, about the contributions of Alice Kober to the deciphering of Linear B. Despite the fact that I have zero linguistic abilities myself, I love armchair discussions about linguistic issues.
I’m about 40 pages into Bad Monkey and so far I’m entertained. If our 50-something Gary-Stu hero winds up with a lissome 24 year old beach bunny, though, I’m going to toss the thing into the nearest mangrove swamp. This is Mr. Hiaasen’s last chance.
Finished Homecoming. Turns out it’s #2 in a trilogy. There’s a lot of plot carried over from the first book. I didn’t remember everything from Book #1, but Stroud managed to remind me, using conversations where one character brings a new character up to date on what’s happened.
The Shining Girls arrived today, so I’ve started on that one. Liking it so far.
I’m rereading Robert Grave’s autobiography Goodbye to All That. It starts off recounting the very odd experiences one used to have in the English Public Schools, eventually becoming an elegy for the amazing generation of English poets and intellectuals ruined by service in WW1, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, T.E.Lawrence, Graves himself. I’m so envious of the old European education, here in Texas all they cared about was getting us smartened up enuff not to choke on our snuff.
