Cool stuff! I may well get that comic book - even if I read the thing in print, my 9 year old son, who went with me to see the ruins of Palenque, may well find it interesting. 
I’m just reading about the nasty end of the people made of sticks, whose own tools rise up against them. A warning for us all! 
Yeah, I dug the Papol Vuh.
I recently read the first few chapters of Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. I’ll go back to it, I think, but since I turned 42 yesterday, I’ve taken a break to re-read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, and I still find myself snickering aloud on the metro. I love it when a book is as delicious as I remember.
I’m about 1/3 of the way through Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which I hadn’t read before. It’s a surprisingly fast read, considering the density of the material.
I finished In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Orange is the new Black on audio – library collections of audiodiscs are nothing if not eclectic. I’m listening to more of The Fellowship of the Ring right now, then will move onto Barbara Tuchman’s the Guns of August. Pepper Mil gave me a belated Christmas present* of a couple of Twilight Zone audios, too.
*translation: She hid them so well that she just found them recently while cleaning.
I thought it lost momentum, but it was still a pretty good read.
I just finished reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. I downloaded it more or less at random, but coincidentally it happens to be the 350th anniversary of the London plague so it was a timely choice. It was interesting, but I thought it was a bit repetitive (he’ll talk about a subject for a while then say “…as I’ll talk about in more detail later”).
I have that sitting in my “To Be Read” pile, I’m thinking of squeezing it in this autumn.
In addition to Colonel Roosevelt, I’ve been reading here and there in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. Two, ed. by Gordon Van Gelder. Some good stuff in it, including Robert Heinlein’s classic time-travel paradox short story, “–All You Zombies–,” which I got interested in again recently after seeing the movie based on it, Predestination.
Finished The Chamber, by John Grisham. The chamber referred to in the title is the gas chamber at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Sam Cayhall participated in a KKK bombing campaign that ended up killing two little Jewish boys in 1967. Now it’s 1990, and Cayhall is just weeks away from being executed for his crimes. The big Chicago law firm that has been handling his case for years pro bono sends a rookie associate to be in charge of the legal maneuverings. A rookie assigned to last-minute death-penalty duty? Well, it seems he has a secret connection to Cayhall. Very good, held my interest, but Grisham made an odd mistake. He seems to be under the impression that Texas used the gas chamber even as late as the 1980s, making a passing reference to that. I know it’s been awhile since I lived in Texas, but I’m pretty sure Texas never used the gas chamber. It was the electric chair until they switched to lethal injection. But no matter, still a good story.
Next up is one more Grisham: The Partner.
Recently completed:
Two YA novels, The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black, which was pretty awesome. Modern day small town that just happens to shove up against a faerie court, two teenage siblings intersect with the various magical goings-on. Romantic in a satisfying way. Also, The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds, which was a terrific, realistic novel about mourning and adapting.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., by Gina Nahai. This was very interesting, a multi-generational family story about Iranian Jews, set in both pre-revolution Tehran and current day LA. It was a little rambling and sprawling, in a good way if you like that sort of thing.
Academy Street, by Mary Costello. A very short book that examines the life of a woman who emigrates from Ireland to the US – one of those where most of the events are fairly commonplace, so like an average life examined in a literary way. It was fine.
I like most Grisham, and am very interested in the death penalty, but the book bored me and I put it down after the obligatory 50 pages. To each their own.
Now 40% of the way through King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard.
I read the Classics Comics version when I was 7 or 8, but hardly remember any of it.
After hearing a lot of “I started it numerous times…” from people I know, I finally got up the courage to crack open Wolf Hall. It sure isn’t anything like the difficult book I expected. I’m still pretty much at the beginning of a very long novel, but so far I’m struck by how gorgeously written and immediately gripping it is.
Reading Cheryl Strayed’s *Wild, *which is better than I thought it would be.
Last night I finished Revival. I really do enjoy Stephen King.
It was right on the heels of 11/22/63, though, so I want something different – and lighter – next: I think I’ve narrowed it down to either Finn Fancy Necromancy (mentioned by some Doper in one of these threads) or Bad Monkey (most recently mentioned by JoeyP). Or maybe some nonfiction, like Joss Whedon’s biography or As You Wish. I’ll decide at bedtime.
I really loved the prose style of Wolf Hall. The second book is good, but somehow not quite as mesmerizing.
I’ve since read two more of Mantel’s novels. I liked Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is based on her experiences living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980’s, but I was disappointed with The Giant, O’Brien, which sounded great - it’s about the 8-ft-tall Irishman who exhibited himself in London in 1782, and whose skeleton was stolen by John Hunter, the famous surgeon (and infamous body snatcher). The writing was nice, but I didn’t like the storytelling style or the lack of substance.
I just read and enjoyed C.J. Cherryh’s newest Foreigner novel, Tracker. (The titles often seem to have little to do with the plot of the books; I didn’t notice anybody tracking anything in this one.) I’ve caught up with this series now so I have to wait a year between books, and it’s worse because Cherryh’s very slow plotting stretches a single story into three books. I’m thoroughly absorbed by this series, though.
You Wolf Hall fans knew about the TV show, right?: Wolf Hall (TV series) - Wikipedia
I’m watching that, with great enjoyment; haven’t read the book yet. Though I do plan to.
Someone said to me that the book appears to appeal to a female more than to a male audience - to which I replied ‘yes, because of the well-established stereotype that women just love reading about the doings of Tudor bureaucrats like Cromwell’ 
.
I mostly just get books at Goodwill and stuff. (I am cheap—I mean FRUGAL.) But I had a plane trip recently and part of it was going to be by myself and part with someone I’d met once and I’d spend a day with people I’d never met! (It all turned out ok.)
So I splurged on myself and got the only fiction PTerry had written that I hadn’t read–Hat Full of Sky. I’d missed that one.
Damnit, Pterry! Even though the book isn’t sad, I of course, teared up reading the ending. Luckily the plane was descending and I had to yawn which makes me tear up anyway. (It’s better than the old ‘it’s dusty in here’!)
I’m sitting here (with a horrible cold–YAY air travel!) and I am trying to decide what to read next. I’m trying to clean out my house, so I’ve sworn I wont buy a new book (to me) until I get more books out.
I rummaged around and found a book called The Rackets, by Thomas Kelly. I’ll try that.
I finished Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva and while it’s not his worse, it’s far from the best. I’m closer to two and a half than three stars because while the book is highly readable, it is still a mess on several levels.
Firstly the narrative: Silva has always straddled the line between showing and telling but in this book he spends far too much time telling us what happened instead of showing the events.
Secondly: The book is marred by long stretches of nothing and while the art forgery was interesting, the intimate musings of the villa servants definitely were not.
The climax of the book was slow in coming and though it got tense, the suspense was never really ratcheted up to breath quickening, heart pounding levels. And the conclusion was so shckingly deus ex machina that it was almost funny.
New thread is live!