Interesting, thank you! I’ve enjoyed most of Conroy’s books, except South of Broad. I couldn’t choke that one down for some reason.
I just picked up Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, and the first few chapters have been just delightful. There are some really excellent turns of phrase in there. I’m looking forward to reading the rest. So, thanks to those of you who mentioned it previously!
I just finished Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore last week and really enjoyed it.
Also just finished (this morning!) Starhawk by Jack McDevitt. It’s a prequel to his Academy series featuring space pilot Priscilla Hutchins. I read the first volume, The Engines of God, back when it came out in 1996 and again just a couple of years ago, wthout ever getting round to reading it’s five sequels…
Anyway, Starhawk is a fairly east read and pretty good, set 200 years in the future not long after interstellar travel is discovered. It covers three or four months of her life as she gets her pilot’s licence and acquires her nickname of ‘Hutch’. Lots of action but the early chapters seemed rather perfunctory without really gripping me. I knew she’d win through and go on to be a hot-shot pilot so it took a while to become engaged with it.
Something like six years elapses between the end of this book and main action of The Engines of God although there’s only three months between Epilog and Prelude, so I’m hoping he won’t try to squeeze in another volume between them.
Now about to start the new Robert Charles Wilson book, an alternate history of sorts called Burning Paradise.
I just scored A Game of Thrones from the lost and found box at work. 
It’s headed straight for one of the alluvial plains of Mt. ToBeRead.
About 25% of the way through Dan Simmons’ The Abominable set around a 1925 expedition to climb Everest. Enjoying it so far though it’s a slow book full of details about early mountaineering. I really enjoyed about 90% of The Terror but thought Simmons really flubbed the ending. Hoping this is better.
About to start Leviathan Wakes for a bit of space opera.
Recently finished The Moon Maze Game, the fourth and (so far) last Dream Park book by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes.
Current house book is Evolution - SF, by Stephen Baxter.
Current car book is The Last Present, the fourth and last book in a kids’ series by Wendy Mass.
Just put in an ILL request for He Went with Marco Polo, children’s historical fiction by Louise Andrews Kent. This is the only book that I can actually remember someone’s reading to me - my 5th-grade teacher read it to us in class.
I finished Death of Santini, and I gots ta say…I didn’t like it. Conroy’s father was abusive to the whole family, and Conroy has a lot to say about hating him, but then by the end, he pretty much accepts that that was just who the man was, and by the way, a hell of a fighter pilot. His mom, who raised seven kids in this hellish environment, gets canonized as well. Also the grandmother who abandoned her children during the Great Depression. They were all really swell people if you overlook the part about them behaving like total shits all the time.
The writing style got on my nerves as well, although I knew what to expect. Either he’s gotten worse at it, or I’ve gotten less tolerant. Every few paragraphs, I would stop, pick out a random sentence, and just marvel that Conroy and his editor thought it was okay. My advice: skip this one and read The Lords of Discipline instead.
This morning I started on Susan Hill’s The Small Hand and Dolly, two short ghost stories in the same volume. Halfway through The Small Hand, I am loving the atmosphere.
Finished Tatiana, the sixth (?) Arkady Renko novel by Martin Cruz Smith. The first – Gorky Parkwas a huge hit and a successful movie.
I like these books but Smith could do a better job connecting the dots. There’s too much going on that doesn’t advance the plot. Those parts are still good reading, but the effect is to lose me, in time and place, and character motivation. In this book, a former lover takes up with a gangster being investigated by Renko. It’s never made clear if she was trying to help Renko or make him jealous.
I picked up More Than This, recommended by the ever-reliable Dung Beetle, but I’m not liking the writing style. I’m gonna give it another go, but in the meantime I started the new one by Laura Lippman (forgot the damn title).
ETA: The Lippman title is After I’m Gone. It’ll be released in February.
Thanks for the advice, which I will take. I didn’t much like the excerpt on the NPR website I provided above, anyway (and TLOD is a great book!).
Yeah, I like Conroy’s dialogue a lot in TLOD. He’s a good fiction writer.
Thanks very much for those, Elendil’s Heir. The Spitfire film was really great – what a cool story. I loved watching the veteran’s face while he watched the war footage.
I had the same reaction to The Terror. Simmons was at the Tattered Cover in downtown Denver a couple of weeks ago to read from and sign The Abominable. He’s one of the most personable authors I’ve ever met – he apologized to everybody for keeping them waiting in line so long, but he said he’d been cooped up in a basement for months writing the book and it was good to talk to people again. This new one is near the top of my “next-to-be-read” pile.
Me, too. My pleasure.
Everest? Horror? Mountain climbing geekery? I’m there. Outfitted, acclimated and without bottled oxygen!
I read “The Invisible Man”. Most other stuff by Welles I’ve read I’ve liked (when I was a kid we had a bunch of audio-tapes of his short stories we’d listen to during long car-trips). I wasn’t really a fan of this one though. The point of the story seems to be that while everyone thinks invisibility would help one get away with all sorts of crimes and mischief, its actually kind of a crappy ability. Especially in England, where its really cold to be running around without clothes on, and its dirty and rainy all the time, so even when your invisible your likely to get some mud or water on you that will let people see you, and they’ll think your a demon and try and run you out of town.
Which is a fair point, but “invisibility sucks, especially in England” wasn’t really enough to hang a whole book on, IMHO.
I just got done reading The Small Hand and Dolly, as well as Douglas Clegg’s Isis. They all had lovely atmosphere and mood and settings, all the puzzle pieces were there…but I never quite felt the click. If you like the ghostly stuff, you might like these, but I doubt they’ll be remembered long.
Next I read The Storyteller, by Jodi Picault. This book asks, what would you do if you found out someone you knew had been a Nazi? I won’t generally read about the Holocaust, but I liked Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, so I decided to see what this author did with the same idea. There was a book within a book here, and I liked the inner book more than the outer one. Overall, it was just okay. I don’t plan to seek out more by Picault.
Now I’m on to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which has been scaring me off with its Oprahesque title for years. I’m not sure if I like it yet.
I thought Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was a fun read. Next, I tore through *The Rook *in a couple of days, and thought that was very entertaining as well. It’s been a very SDMB-inspired week of reading!
Now I’m not sure what’s next, as I’m not particularly enthusiastic about anything on my list. Maybe the new Bridget Jones book? Anyone read that?
Quite possibly me. I’m the one who read the entire thing in one Saturday, skipping all other responsibilities to do so. Glad you liked it. 
Me, I’m in a bit of a book slump. The new Temeraire book, Blood of Tyrants… weeeeeelll… it’s just not doing it for me. At all. I think I’m writing it off and hoping for better with the next entry; I can read the wikipedia summary to catch up, if I must. 
What’s next? I’m not sure. Possibly something from my thread asking for thief/grifter recommendations. Or maybe I’ll re-read something. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a good winter read, so I might pick up the Kindle edition so’s not to have to lug around my hardback and read that. Or one of the Flashman novels, or maybe a re-read of the whole Vlad Taltos series. Basically, I think I need to read something that I know will satisfy.
I’ve got the last Flashman book in my TBR pile, and I keep pushing it away because then they’ll all be gone…
I’ve started Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life for one of my book clubs, and so far it hasn’t hooked me. Haven’t hit p. 50, though, so she’s still got a chance.
I’m enjoying Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, another book club pick, but not as much as I thought I would. Some good laughs, though.
Hope to get back to Roy Jenkins’s masterful Churchill soon, as well.