Khadaji's Whatcha Readin' Thread - April 2015 Edition

Cafe Society
21

I finished The King’s Bishop by Candace Robb, such an IMPROVEMENT over the previous book, it’s like it was written by a whole different person. Robb twines the real life events of courtly intrigue and politics in the last ten years of Edward III’s reign with a mystery of murder and conspiracy. Sadly not much has changed in 700 years, it’s still all about whose penis was in who and when. The book is well written and moves along nicely, the characters are realistic for their time period and the setting is believably presented.

Jumped into The Overlook by Michael Connelly. Apparently it is one of his weakest books, I cn see why but so far I’m still enjoying it.

22

My book club (at the behest of a conservative Christian member) selected The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn for our next meeting. I got it from the library as a six-disc audiobook, and gave up after the first disc. Badly-written, laughably “mysterious” tale which argues that 9-11 was God’s punishment for our sinful, secular ways. Ugh.

Still enjoying Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt, though.

23

Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr. is the story of Huguette Clark, the daughter of W. A. Clark, a certified Robber Baron, whose exploits were right up there with those the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould and the other rascals of the Gilded Age.

Huguette lived to be almost 105 and died in 2010 leaving an estate of $300,000,000. An eccentric, publicity-shy woman–that is by no means too strong a characterization–she owned mansions in New York City, Connecticut and Santa Barbara, but chose to live her last twenty years in excellent health in a hospital. A fascinating look at immense wealth and its effects on those in contact with it. Highly recommended.

24

Just finished Infandous, a YA novel by Elana K. Arnold. I couldn’t identify much with the main character (and her obsession with her mother was downright creepy), but overall it was a page-turner and I was surprised at the secret revealed near the end. Decent.

25

Reading - and greatly enjoying - A Forest of Kings: http://www.amazon.ca/Forest-Of-Kings-Linda-Schele/dp/0688112048

It’s a book that is, in part, a narrative history of selected ancient Mayan kingdoms - based solidly on the recently-deciphered hieroglyphic inscriptions and their associated monuments, and other achaeological evidence.

I myself find this sort of thing totally awesome - disovering a whole new (and highly alien in some ways) history out of monuments that have for centuries been wholly mysterious. Given that I have just come back from visiting some of these sites I find it really, really informative and wish I had read it before!

Thing is, it is now some 25 years old. I started a thread asking of anyone had recommendations for later stuff on the same topic - without a single reply (sighs).

26

I finished The Overlook by Michael Connelly last night. Overall it was a light easy read. Not long enough for Rachel’s issues to get annoying (sorry guys, I still don’t like her)but long enough for a decent story.

I started Requiem for an Assassin by Barry Eisler. I love a good action book that sucker punches you right from the start!

27

You might also like this. Not great, but not bad: The Lost City of Z (book) - Wikipedia

28

I guess I missed that thread. But you might check out 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. He goes into the Mayas to some extent.

29

I had some international travel recently (including entirely too much time sitting on planes that weren’t actually going anywhere), so I read a lot over the past couple of weeks. Most of the books I read were things I picked up from the used bookstore for a dollar or two, so I wouldn’t mind leaving them behind as I finished them. In the order I read them:

The Distant Hours, by Kate Morton. The protagonist has a stiff relationship with her mother and so tries to find out more about her mother’s history to try to understand her. The other half of the story is the family that the mother lived with for a while as a child after being evacuated from London during WWII. Pleasantly melodramatic.

Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. This is a novelization of the lives of two real women - Elizabeth Philpot and Mary Anning - who were English fossil hunters in the early 1800s. The story felt a little constrained by their real life biographies, but it was a really interesting look at class, gender, religion, and science in that context.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. I loved this book. Marina is a pharmacologist who is sent by her employer to a remote area of the Amazon for two reasons: to find out what happened to a colleague who has been reported dead, and to check on the status of a fertility drug that is supposedly being developed by the team there. That lab is headed up by one of Marina’s former professors, a woman she respects but finds very intimidating. It was beautifully written with such nice characterizations.

A Desirable Residence, by Madeleine Wickham. This book follows a handful of people in what must be an exurb of London. There’s entrepreneurship, adultery, overbearing parents, a little business fraud, and other drama. It was fine for a 7 hour flight, but I’ll probably forget I ever read it.

Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen. I bought this at an airport bookshop when it was clear that books I’d brought along weren’t going to be sufficient for yet another delayed flight. It was par for the course for Hiaasen’s books. Wacky characters, absurd plot, makes me never, ever want to go to Florida, but was fairly entertaining.

The Martian, by Andy Weir. I treated myself to this amazing book when I got home. Such a nailbiter. Human spaceflight is terrifying and awesome and we should do more of it.

I’m not sure what’s up next!

30

The Martian sounds good - a bit like a planetbound Gravity…?

31

Thanks folks - I’ve read The Lost City of Z (interesting stuff), I haven’t yet read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - which also looks good.

Right now, I’m reading The Ancient Maya (6th ed.), which is pretty clearly intended as an undergraduate text book for a 2nd or 3rd year anthro course - which has its advantages and disadvantages. Advantage is that it is reasonably up to date (2006) and comprehensive; disadvantage is that it is written in such an inclusive and didactic style as to be very dull - a complete contrast with A Forest of Kings, which is quite targeted and has a very strong and distinctive authorial ‘voice’ (even though it was a collaboration).

In short, in The Ancient Maya the author is clearly lecturing a bunch of undergraduates, while in A Forest of Kings the authors are relating their own interests - the latter is gonna make for a more fun read.

32

Actually, it is somewhat similar, but I think the science in The Martian is better. Not that I’m really an expert. Also, it will star Matt Damon rather than Sandra Bullock.

33

Missed March, so to catch you all up:

Spent much of March working on The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Seemed like I was getting a bit old to never have read a guy who is generally considered one of the 20th Century’s greats. What I thought I knew about Hemingway going in was that he wrote in short declarative sentences and that his heroes were generally macho, alcoholic jerks like himself. Turns out that, although he is amazingly skilled at building a suspenseful mood with a succession of short, simple sentences, he is also capable of turning out beautifully baroque run-on sentences. And although his protagonists generally fall into the “macho, alcoholic jerk” category, he doesn’t really glorify them (I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised – in the end it turned out he didn’t much like himself, either). My favorite was Big Two-Hearted River (parts one and two). Absolutely nothing happens except that a guy goes fishing, but you feel as though you are right there with him. But after about 250 pages, I had had enough and abandoned the project.

I chased that with Stephen King’s From a Buick 8. Not one of his best, but once I started it, I didn’t do anything else until I finished unless I had to.

I have also “read” two awesome and highly recommended graphic novels recently:

Rebel Woman, by Peter Bagge, best known for Hate comics, is a fascinating, informative, and often hilarious biography of Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization now known as Planned Parenthood.

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, by Roz Chast, best known for her New Yorker cartoons, is her account of dealing with the decline and eventual death of her parents, who both lived into their 90s. It is occasionally hilarious, frequently moving, and always extremely depressing. I am proud to have it on my bookshelf, but if you balk at spending $30 on a hardcover that will take at most two hours to read, you might want to use your library card on this one.

Currently I am into Strivers Row, the last volume in Kevin Baker’s trilogy of historical novels set in New York City, which I have gushed all over in previous months of this thread. This one takes place in Harlem during WW2, and departs from the others in having a major real-life historical figure as its protagonist (though the others had plenty of real people in minor roles). Its hero is Malcolm Little, who twenty years later would become notorious as Malcolm X, and I am already thinking I need to re-read his Autobiography to compare it to this account.

After this I plan to embark on a re-read of the last three books of the Dark Tower series.

34

Seconded, especially the part about “eccentric and publicity-shy” not being too strong a characterization!

35

Ooo, that’s good news! Thanks.

Anyone who reads Hemingway should grab Joe Haldeman’s clever, mind-bending The Hemingway Hoax. Highly recommended.

36

I read part of The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English, but I gave up in frustration. Some of it was pretty good (I liked Dickens’s story “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal Man” and Thackeray’s essay “On Being Found Out”). But I downloaded it for “Melmoth the Wanderer” and I didn’t realise it was only an excerpt. And they had the balls to suggest that the original story was boring and meandering and their condensed version was an improvement! Likewise, they had half of the Dickens story “The Haunted House”, which was kind of pointless.

After that, I read “The War in the Air” by H.G. Wells. I’ve read Michael Moorcock’s “Warlord of the Air” and “The Land Leviathan” a few times, so it was fun to see what some of the source material is like. And it was interesting to see which predictions (circa 1907) turned out to be true and which didn’t. For instance, predicting the U.S. and U.K. fighting a world war against Germany and Japan and the importance of aircraft carriers instead of battleships was pretty good. Building monorails and dirigibles? Not so much.

37

I read Black Ice: The Val James Story by Valmore James and John Gallagher. Val James was the first black American to play hockey in the NHL. It’s very much of a sports memoir – I’d only recommend it to someone who already was very up on 1970s junior hockey. If you are a hockey fan (I am), it’s really interesting to see who he crosses paths with, but if you’re not, it’s probably a lot of meaningless information about hockey rosters. And wow, I forgot how different fighting was back then. Somewhat contrary to my expectations going in, while it is a very moving account of the racism he personally experienced (it’s really tragic), there’s not a lot of connection to larger issues of race and society.

I’m in the middle-ish of Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror: Appraisals and Reappraisals of the Show That Was Supposed to Change TV, a collection of academic essays on Twin Peaks (similar in concept to Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, another collection of scholarly essays on the show, which is excellent). I had started it when I was really excited about the upcoming Twin Peaks, although given recent news, I’m less excited. The collection is a little uneven, it might be possible that we’ve exhausted how much there is to say about the show. There’s just not as much there there, you know? But if you are a big Twin Peaks fan, it’s mildly fun and nostalgic.

I just started The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. by Gina Nahai, a novel about an Iranian-Jewish family in the US.

38

I finished a couple a things that had been lying around for too long:

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. I rather liked it, but it’s not his best, I don’t think. The supernatural bits were rather compelling, and the characters quite well drawn; and he spared me the awful in-character writing that made me give up on the Thousand Autumns. But it’s not his choice probably, but the dustjacket really gave away much of the plot, too much, even. If the dust jacket tells me the main character will be followed to the 2030s, I’m just not going to be on the edge of the sofa when she’s in danger in 2020, am I?

I also finished David Ramirez’s utterly excellent The Forever Watch. The last vestiges of humanity are travelling through space after a cataclysmic convulsion on Earth. Two crewmembers find out out that there are hidden things going on and investigate, going on a journey that completely shifts their perception of things. Very good, very moving. Two thumbs up at least.

And I gave up on John Mosier’s Verdun. I quite liked Mosier’s first World War I study, despite its flaws, but here, Mosier’s just trying to hard to retain the mantle of fearless iconoclast. There were interesting bits and pieces in this book, but it was badly edited (some passages appeared three times), badly thought out, and hardly very illuminating at all.

39

Finished The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson. Very good. A Swedish explosives expert flees the Old Folks’ Home on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Chaos ensues. It turns out he was at or strongly influential in many of the top incidents of the 20th century. Sort of a Swedish Forrest Gump. I know it had to happen in the book for purposes of furthering along the plot, but I hope Jonasson doesn’t really think Harry Truman was in charge of overseeing the Manhattan Project in World War II. (In real life, Truman didn’t know about the development of the atomic bomb until they told him after he became president upon FDR’s death.) I hear it’s been made into a well-received Swedish film too.

Next up is Bangkok Bob and the Missing Mormon, by local English writer Stephen Leather. I’ve only read one other of his books, the one he’s best known for here in Thailand: Private Dancer, about the stormy relationship between a young Brit and a Bangkok bargirl. Very true to life.

40

I’m about 1/3 of the way into American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 by H.W. Brands, and struggling to figure out exactly what I think of the book. In fact, I think I actually discovered it here … let me find the recommendation.

Little Nemo recommended it in August 2012 … clearly book recommendations sit on the shelf for a while with me.

Anyways, my thoughts on it are this:

(1) I was very relieved to find a book on this subject, since I feel like I stand to learn a lot about recent American history. Most of my education in school stopped with World War II, and since I was born in the 1980s (and wasn’t much interested in politics as a young one), there was a bit of a gap in my knowledge.

(2) The book was written so much like a textbook that initially I was kind of turned off to the book. I figured I’d need to find a book that was more pleasurable, and alternate between pleasure reading and this book.

(3) And then, for whatever reason, I just kept reading this book and didn’t pick out a book for pleasure reading. I’m sure I’ll pick one out soon, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to be sucked in to the point of reading over a hundred pages without needing to take a break for some lighter reading. Thing is, I still think it reads too much like a textbook, but it still keeps me entertained and educated.

So I guess overall, I mildly recommend it.

Also bought Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan, because I had an amazing statistics teacher in high school who inspired me to actually like statistics. I haven’t started the book yet, so I can’t tell yet whether I’d recommend it, but I’m excited to get back to the subject.