I guess it’s time for the Monthly State of the Book Pile. Right now the pile consists of:
The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith: I’ve been meaning to reread this after I went through the collected works of the Brontë sisters a while back. This was the book they used in the English classes they taught in Belgium.
Mistletoe Mysteries, edited by Charlotte McLeod: One of my mom’s old mystery books. It’s a collection of short stories that all take place around Christmas. Pretty good so far; I’m about five or six stories in.
Luka and the Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie. As I said last month, I enjoy Rushdie’s sense of humor in the bleak, depressing landscape of Indian literature.
Heretics of Dune, Frank Herbert. I like the Duncan Idaho ghola in this book. He’s not as bitter as the one in *God Emperor *or as wishy-washy as the one in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens. Those of you who are reading David Copperfield now might enjoy the “Patriarchal” chapter in this book. It features Flora Finching who is what Dora Copperfield might have turned into. (Note: I hate Dora Copperfield more than any other saintly Dickens heroine. And, to coin a phrase, her little dog, too.)
Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old, edited by Ralph Mannheim. I’m reading this in bits and pieces whenever I need a quick story.
Currently reading The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman, due to Eleanor of Acquitaine’s praise for the Merrily Watkins series in last month’s thread. Very good so far.
I’ve just finished ‘The Stranger House’ by Reginald Hill. I’ve been reading the Dalziel-Pascoe series, and I’m barely into the books he wrote in the 1980s, so the quality of his writing in the last ten years was a bit of a surprise. I mean, the Dalziel-Pascoe books are good, but this was great. So great that I put up with the supernatural touches; so great that I stayed up 2 1/2 hours past my bedtime last night to finish it.
Confederates in the Attic was interesting, educational, and a little scary.
Now reading Michio Kaku’s Beyond Einstein, and so far (it’s early still) I’m underwhelmed. I didn’t realize it was written in the 80’s, which is ancient for a string theory lay reader book. But he seems to breeze over the stuff about Maxwell’s insight into magnetism, electricity and the speed of light, and Einstein’s relativity. So you could go around pretending to understand it (“hey, you go really fast, you shrink and time slows down”) without understanding why or really what you’re talking about. But like I said, early in the book.
I finished a couple of books over the weekend. Mistletoe Mysteries was a pretty solid collection of mystery/ghost stories. I’m debating whether or not I want to keep it. Part of me wants to take it to the used bookstore based solely on the holiday theme, but then I take that part of me over to my hardcover shelf and point out the copy of Dickens’ Christmas tales.
I also finished Luka and the Fire of Life. Loved. It. It’s the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories which I read a few years ago when I went on a Rushdie binge. Luka travels to the World of Magic to steal the Fire of Life to save his father. I especially enjoyed when Ra shows up and starts speaking in the Wingding font.
Their place in the book pile have been filled by Ellen Ullman’s By Blood and Louisa May Alcott’s A Double Life.
Hope you end up liking it! I’ve just read the fourth book, and I’m still very impressed with Rickman’s writing.
I recently read The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord, which is a light science fiction novel set in a galaxy populated by humanoids. The home planet of a Vulcan-like race has been destroyed, and the survivors are trying to determine the best way to preserve their race and culture. The action all takes place on a colony world where they are visiting settlements and taking genetic samples, trying to find people with whom they can intermarry.
The book is well written and I enjoyed it. It succeeds best when it’s a small, character-driven story; whenever the author widened her scope the plot became a little unsatisfying. There’s also a lot of telepathy, more than I really like in my sci-fi. Still, recommended if you like this genre.
I read another Christopher Brookmyre novel, The Sacred Art of Stealing. It’s a caper novel, featuring a bank robber vs. Angelique de Xavier, the petite, erudite and lethal member of the Glasgow police force. She’s a recurring character. These novels are in the “tartan noir” genre, Scottish crime stories, but they have more comedy than grit. Brookmyre’s work is clever and funny, if also violent and exceedingly crude.
Right now I’m in the middle of Farewell to the East End, the third book in Jennifer Worth’s trilogy. The Call the Midwife BBC TV series is based on these books. The second book veered away from midwifery, but this one is back to stories about delivering babies in the terribly impoverished conditions of England’s East End in the 1950’s.
I’m also reading Einstein, by Walter Isaacson. It’s very good - I enjoyed Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, and he’s the one who wrote the recent Steve Jobs bio. Isaacson is doing a great job of explaining Einstein’s work, but oh, has it been a long time since my physics classes.
I just finished *The Dragonbone Chair *by Tad Williams and was very impressed by it. It is the first of a four-book series and is very dense, with loads of appendix guides to the multitude of characters, names of places and things, guides to pronunciation, names of days of the week and months, etc. It also fit into my personal fantasy guidelines:
I just finished From the Fatherland, with love by Ryu Murakami (author of Audition) and I truly enjoyed it…a bunch of outcasts/psychopaths/sociopaths take on a North Korean invasion force in a (very realistic) near-future Japan…
I have now started on Harvest by Jim Crace. I quite enjoyed his Quarantaine and his latest one is shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. So far it reminds of the Vilage which was shown on the BBC earlier except maybe earlier in history and smaller in scope but equally as bleak
I’ve been tearing through a lot of books this summer. After finishing Infinite Jest (which I loved by the end), the process of reading has apparently become a lot faster for me.
Some of the highlights were NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, and The Moonstone by Willkie Collins (which I read based on recommendations here). I also enjoyed King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, which detailed the Belgian colonization of the Congo and the related atrocities during the rubber boom of the 1890s. Pretty horrific stuff, which served as the inspiration for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Right now, I’m reading The Master and Margarita, a novel about the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s.
You are in for a treat. The Master and Margarita is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, in my opinion.
Try to get an annotated edition - many of the jokes and references you will not get without annotations. It helps to have at least a cursory knowlege of what life was like under Stalin, to get the sometimes understated humour.
Non-fiction: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel. I was mixed on this. The story of the wives of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts is FASCINATING and even in addition to the details about the space program, is a great look at life, especially for women, during the 1960s. This book felt, though, like the author tried to make a grander, overarching narrative out of a string of legitimately interesting anecdotes, and that aspect felt very forced.
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. I thought this was awesome, but I think you probably have to be at least a little bit of a tech geek to love this. At some point, I realized I had read 150 pages that was essentially detailing the trial and error process used by various guys to test various aspects of the phone system. And there’s a lot about the history of the equipment used by AT&T, which I find fascinating. But it was one of those things where even when I was describing it (with great enthusiasm) to other people, I could tell I sounded like a lunatic.
Fiction: Astor Place Vintage, by Stephanie Lehmann. Eh, this was okay, I guess. Two intertwined stories about women in New York City, one in the present day and the other at the turn of the (last) century. There were some nice “old New York” details, but mostly, nothing about this particularly stands out.
YA fiction: Wise Young Fool, by Sean Beaudoin. New YA novel about a kid in a youth detention facility that backtracks over the story of how he came to be there. Nothing about the plot seemed like anything I would be interested in (the kid is in a hard core band, and there’s A LOT about what teenage boys think about hard core bands), but the writing is sharp and funny and overall really impressive, so I ended up thinking it’s one of the best of this year’s YA titles. I think actual teenage boys would enjoy this.
The Truth About Forever by Sara Dessen. Fairly typical but very sweet teen romance.
I’m finding myself bogging down a bit in Musashi. While I enjoy the installments that follow Miyamoto Musashi himself, the chapters that focus on Otsu, Akemi, Matahachi, and to a lesser extent, Jotaro, all to just crawl. I want more Way of the Sword and samurai action, less pining for Musashi. So I’m finding myself devoting a bit more time to comics at the moment, thanks to the wonder of Comixology. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a reader of comics, not a collector; I’ve no interest in having to buy multiple copies of a comic just so that I can read one and lovingly board and bag another.)
Aside from my regular reads at this point (The Manhattan Projects, Saga, Batman '66 and Legends of the Dark Knight–I’m not quite ready to try catching up on Fables, Jack of Fables, whatever other Fables spinoffs have come out since I fell out of reading it, or Elephantmen yet), I picked up the first TPB of the newish Hawkeye series last night, based on the strong recommendation from The Incomparable podcast. Now, for the most part, I shy away from main continuity superhero comics. There are too many crossovers, too many spin-offs (yet I read Fables :p), too many decades of history. I love Batman as a character and a myth, so I do dabble in stand-alone story collections and things that aren’t part of the main continuity. And my eyes have never crossed a print Marvel property. So this is not exactly my usual fare.
But I’m a few pages in, and I like what I’m seeing so far. It’s gorgeous (more than I can say for some of my regular stable–I’m looking at you, Manhattan Projects). And it’s funny. And it’s showing signs of being very good. It is, to paraphrase the title page of the first issue, what Hawkeye, a non-super part of a superhero team, does when he’s not being part of the Avengers. So far, that seems to be fall out of the sky and break most of his body, kick his wheelchair into traffic, and get into a fight with the “tracksuit mafia” (bro) that’s trying to evict everyone out of his apartment building in Bed-Stuy. So far as I can recommend a title based on just a few pages, I’m recommending this one.
I have discovered Guy Gavriel Kay! Read **Under Heaven **first – the images of Tai working among the bleached bones burying the dead at Kuala Nor will stay with me forever. Took a break to read a little Steven Brust (the Vlad Taltos series), then went back to Kay and read **The Last Light of the Sun **and am currently halfway through Ysabel. The world Kay creates in each book is wrenchingly difficult to leave when the book is over.
I’ve been re-reading all the James Herriot books, falling in love with them all over again … and discovering, to my dismay, that the American and English editions are not the same. There are episodes missing from the American editions, and I’ve noticed passages that have been rewritten to be more … trite.
Thanks for the advice; I’ll look for an annotated edition. Before I started, I did a little background research on Stalin and that period of Soviet history. It’s definitely helping so far.
Ha! Nice to hear someone else reads Brust. I’ve been enjoying the Taltos series for… roughly ever, give or take a few years. I think he’s got another one on the way currently. Seems to be a cool guy besides; responds to emails. (One in particular, I quoted him a little snippet from a muck where I’d quoted a line from one of the Khaavren romances and someone thought it was Mark Twain. He was flattered.) I’d love to go out to Vegas some day, haunt the casinos until I found him, and play a hand or two of poker with him.
