90% of all statistics on the net are bogus- Abraham Lincoln 
Anyway, I finished Reqieum for an Assasin by Barry Eisler this morning. This is one of those books that, if I had nuts to grab, would have grabbed them and hung on to the last page. The action was steady and the fights bloody.
Or this: http://up2.it/katym609/stuff/Abraham-lincoln-internet-quote11.png
I’ve started The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, who won the Pulitzer for it, but am underwhelmed so far. Man hides out in a Dutch hotel room. Boy goes through a museum with his mom. Yawn. Not sure I’ll get through it.
Speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, I spent all day Sunday reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. At first I was just going to read it for a little while but I slowly got sucked into it, especially with all the little teaser hints that kept coming out about Agnis’s past. The only complaint I have is that Wavey, the main love interest, was kind of a nonentity.
While we’re speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, I just finished Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. The prose is mesmerizing and I liked it very much, although it’s hauntingly sad. It’s a collection of short stories - mere vignettes, some of them - set in a small town in Maine and linked together by the title character. The best stories are from Olive’s point of view, but in several she has only a cameo.
There’s an HBO mini-series starring Frances McDormand, which I haven’t seen yet. Although McDormand doesn’t match Olive’s physical description, I kept picturing her as I read the book, and I bet she is fantastic in the role.
I read Barbara Hambly’s newest Benjamin January mystery, Crimson Angel. These are fun, with great characters, but the plots are increasingly far-fetched. This one has January traveling to Haiti, of all places, which in 1836 is not the least bit welcoming even for “a free man of color”.
I’m in the middle of Lamentation, C.J. Sansom’s newest Tudor mystery featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardlake. It concerns the fictional theft of the real book Lamentations of a Sinner, written by Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. It was published after the king’s death, but it was heretical at the time she wrote it, when Henry’s religious views were waffling. The novel opens with the execution of Anne Askew for heresy.
While I enjoy these books, they are improbably star-studded, which makes them seem too much like a history lesson at times.
Okay…
Finished Ceremony in Death J.D. Robb. It’s telling that the thing that sticks with me is: who the hell programs a droid dog to be a yapper?! Who the hell wants a droid dog anyway…
Overall a very bland book, easy to read but not especially engrossing or stimulating. Even the efinal conflict had no real sense of dread, it happened so close to the end you knew it would “come out okay.” The characters were two dimensional at best and none of them, other than Peabody, terribly interesting. There really was no question who the killer(s) were even with the red herring tossed into the ring in the last thirty pages.
Finished Bangkok Bob and the Missing Mormon, by local English writer Stephen Leather. Very good, very enjoyable, especially if you know Bangkok but even if you don’t. Long-time Bangkok resident and former New Orleans police cop Bob Turtledove, now a full-time antiques dealer and part-time private eye, is asked by a Mormon couple from Utah to find their son, a young man who disappeared in Thailand during his gap year. Some of the characters from Leather’s classic Private Dancer appear.
However, Leather could use a good editor, what with the grammatical errors and misspellings. This edition was published in Singapore, and that country’s publishing industry is usually more on the ball than Thailand’s. But it was originally published in Thailand, so maybe the Singaporean publisher just copied over all the errors, dunno. And Leather made a couple of glaring factual errors about Bangkok – a hotel existing where it could not possibly exist and a few years off regarding when they tore down the old Siam Intercontinental Hotel to build Siam Paragon shopping mall. It’s hard to believe someone who knows Thailand so well could make mistakes like those, but they didn’t seem made just to further the plot and he got everything else right. Dunno what’s up with that. But again, it was a good read, and errors or no I think I’ll be reading some more Leather.
Meanwile, it’s back to John Grisham with The Chamber.
I’m deathly afraid of how he portrayed us Utahns. There are some whackos here but that’s how it is everywere…
He was pretty soft on Utah people and Mormons actually. No weird caricatures.
Nice to hear, I’m not Mormon myself but still you dislike when your neighbors are portrayed as weirdos. (I’m the family weirdo actually)
So I just hit the midway point of Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen and I’m really liking it. I mentioned upthread that I was thinking about The Princess Bride next, but I think I might read another Hiaasen instead. He seems to get a lot of love on this board so I figured I would ask here for a suggestion since the reviews are sort of hit and miss on the rest of the internet. So, do I just pick a random book or should I just start from the beginning with Tourist Season? Since, from what I’ve read about his books, he carries a lot of his characters from one book to another so starting from the beginning seems like it would make the most sense.
I don’t think I’ve read every Hiaasen, but I have read quite a few and seem to recall only a couple of books that were sequels to another. They are all enjoyable but all seem to blend into each other. I couldn’t put a specific plot off the top of my head to most of the titles.
I don’t think they’re squeals or even that they’re written to be read in order, just that they all take place in the same area and have some recurring characters. I’m just wondering if they’re all equally (more or less) good and I can just start at the beginning or if there are (again, more or less) agreed upon good ones and not so good ones that so I can, for now, start with the good ones.
I listened to 3 out of 26 discs and gave up. Never grabbed me. Hard to see how she got the Pulitzer for it.
Still enjoying Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt. World War I has just broken out and T.R. is seething at Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality policy, even as Belgium is being brutalized by the German army. When the German military attache from the embassy in Washington, D.C. comes to call on Roosevelt on Long Island, the attache notes the fond regard Kaiser Wilhelm has for the former President, and the very congenial visit the Kaiser had with him a few years before.
Roosevelt says calmly, “Yes, I remember that well. I also remember the very warm welcome I had from King Albert of Belgium.”
I have not read a bad Hiaasen. They really are all enjoyable. Even Strip Tease, whose film version was panned mercilessly (I never saw it). But I don’t recall any recurring characters in most of them. They seem largely stand-alone.
I don’t know anything about Goldfinch, the only reason I’m even aware of it is because I saw the gigantic book at B&N. I’m curious as to how popular it is just due to it’s length. I’ve read a few reviews that said it could have been a few hundred pages shorter. I wonder if it would have been as popular if it was 500 pages (and looked like a normal book instead of, what 7 or 800.
I finally finished Gravity’s Rainbow toward the end of last week. What a relief it was. Afterward, I read some reviews on Goodreads that indicated the chief pleasure of the book lies in re-reading. That must be experienced by doughtier souls than I am; I don’t plan to look back on that book!
Since then, I’ve finished a couple of others too: The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson and Moondial by Helen Cresswell. The Shadow Cabinet is the third in the Shades of London series. I like the ‘supernatural police’ conceit that Johnson uses, though I don’t think her characters are as interesting or funny as Ben Aaronovitch’s are in his Rivers of London series (that also uses supernatural police). Johnson’s writing for a YA audience, and it shows, I think detrimentally. Her main character is supposed to be a folksy teen from Louisiana doing a fish-out-of-water thing in London, and in this book, it seems artificial. The whole thing’s a little clunky but still readable.
I enjoyed Moondial more. It was written for children and first published around 1988, I think. It concerns a young English girl whose mom leaves her with a family friend for the summer; the mom promptly has a traffic accident and ends up in a coma. Meanwhile, the girl, who has always had the ability to sense and see the supernatural, finds herself able to communicate with two ghosts from a century or more beforehand. Thanks to the moondial, the young girl can walk in their world, albeit as a ghost herself; through this means, she’ll be able to help these restless spirits and her mother as well. The ending felt very, very rushed, but most of the plot was well drawn, and the spirits were interesting.
I’ve got 2 books going at the moment: A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan and R**ainbow’s End** by Vernor Vinge. I nicked the Dragons recommendation out of jsgoddess’ ‘Recommend me some fantasy’ thread, and I’m glad I did. I’m a sucker for that Lady Isabella Bird Victorian explorer sort of tone, and the fantasy elements, with their particular take on dragons, are absorbing as well. Vinge has given me plenty to consider with his future-reality scenarios. I love Robert Gu; he’s such a colossal ass so far but still somehow sympathetic.
Finished The Brass Verdict by Michael COnnelly not 5 minutes ago 
I think each book is getting better and better and I find that I like Mickey Haller quite a lot, but my only complaint is the climatic confrontation scene felt hurried and was far too short, only about a page and a half long, to really raise the reader’s blood pressure and portray a convincing sense of doom. Most of the revelations of the second to last chapter, I had already worked out (or knew from reading earlier Bosch books), but they were well scripted nevertheless.
I’m continuing with the Mayan theme by reading an annotated translation of the Popol Vuh - the Quiche Maya creation myth. Just started the introduction.
Mayan mythology is wacky even by world mythology standards.
It’s as if Christianty revolved around a sacred volleyball court where, between games, they beheaded people.
A woman being raped by a rotting skull spitting on her also features prominently. Eeeww.
I started Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva, this is the 8th book about master spy and assasin Gabriel Allon. It looks like Silva is turning away from the Arab-Israeli conflict in this book and branching out into the remains of the Soviet state and it’s machinations.
I read the Popol Vuh a few months ago. If you don’t want to bother with the whole thing in print, there’s a comic book adaptation – a sort of Classics illustrated version:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hero-twins-dan-jolley/1008857254?ean=9781580138925
The Mayan myth does seen odd, but there are parallel myths of Divine Twins who have to undergo severe Trials in the Americas, especially in the American Southwest. The others don’t revolve around a mystical ball game in the Underworld, though. Have a look at the Dine Bahane of the Dine (Navaho):