Bought today:
Whatever Happened to the Metric System-How America Kept Its Feet by John Bemelmans Marciano
More Word Smart-How to Build an Impressive Vocabulary-by Adam Robinson & the Staff of the Princeton Review
Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War-The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864 by Earl J. Hess
Well, I DO have exquisite taste in fiction 
I bet it goes both ways, I feel like I’ve enjoyed your recs before too…
I read Kipling’s The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales. It was short, but very good. The most famous story from it is The Man Who Would Be King, but I thought The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes was just as good.
I had some time to spend during a holiday reading stuff that’s accumulated in my “read when there’s time” list:
David Wong’s two volumes, John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders. I may have taken them as too light reading, since I’m baffled at wondering how they worked. I really, really enjoyed both of them: very inventive, very interesting characters, great stories; but possibly a bit deus ex machina. I say possibly simply because I cannot remember if the solutions were actually prepared for in any way before. Too complicated for my holiday brain.
I also read Allan Mallinson’s The Making of the British Army. If obliged to sum up its thesis in a sentence, it would be “regimental traditions make the BA unique and cause it to fight well even in the absence of combat experience”. I’m not sure I totally buy this thesis, but the presentation was well done, and the book was a very good read, too.
And just last night, I read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I’m underwhelmed. Interesting book, but I’m not sure he’s done all he could with the premise. The backflap said “greatest Dick novel ever,” which, even in my limited Dick experience, I can say it isn’t.
Check out Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Len Deighton’s SS-GB if you want much better “Hitler wins WWII” alt-hist than The Man in the High Castle.
Over vacation, I finished A Game of Thrones. It was my second time to try it. I loved it this time; not sure what my issue was with the first go-round. Too many other good books perhaps.
I also read The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding. Oh, I ADORED it. Loved it as much as Retribution Falls if not more. The characters just get more interesting with time, the escapades as entertaining or more. Others have said this even better, but if I can’t have new episodes of Firefly, at least I’ve got this series to read: it captures the same ‘feel’ to me as that show (though the characters are different, FYI).
Right now I’ve got a couple of things going: Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman for nonfiction and Joanne Harris’ The Gospel of Loki for fiction. Both are good thus far (I’m halfway through each).
I was actually more interested in the Japan winning angle, and to see where it would go. Still not sure what it actually did.
I still have a week off, so I am reading fun stuff. Right now cracked open Stephen Jones’s Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, which has a faintly ridiculous title but an interesting form: lots of different documents, from historical newspapers to blogs and radio transcriptions. Interesting so far. After it, I will go into Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which I picked up in the neat Everyman’s Library ed.
I’m currently reading The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce. Goodreads has recommended it to me for so long I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s about a girl learning herbal medicine and midwifery in the 1960’s. I’ll finish it, but it’s only mildly interesting at best.
I’ve read other alt-hist books by Peter Tsouras and enjoyed them, but haven’t gotten around to this one: Amazon.com: Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War eBook : Tsouras, Peter G.: Kindle Store
I just finished A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly. I really like Terry McCaleb, but I’m beginning to wonder about Connelly’s opinion of women… In Blood Work Graciela was all over investigating her sister’s murder, but in this one she’s a total shrew about Terry doing what he does or did, profile killers.
He has had a heart transplant and is supposed to be taking it easy. She just doesn’t want to lose him now. That’s understandable. In Blood Work, she didn’t even know him.
Yeah, I understand that… just… Ah well I enjoyed the book a lot. I hope Connelly writes more books about Terry.
Could conceivable be construed as a spoiler but really isn’t, I don’t think:
Boy are you in for a surprise. 
Meanwhile, I just finished The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever. The tale of an eccentric family that hails from a Massachusetts fishing village. A charming book. Semi-autobiographical (the author resembles the character of Coverley). Published in 1957, it is ranked 63rd on the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. It also holds the distinction of being – really – the first Book of the Month Club selection to contain the word “fuck” in the narrative.
Next, I decided to try some nonfiction, as it’s been awhile. The nonfiction section in our library is a little limited. I had a small hope of finding something like Manhunt or Blood on the Moon, both about the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination, or 1491 or 1493. But nothing doing. Settled for The Wars of the Roses, by John Gillingham. My knowledge of that period is woefully inadequate, and I understand George RR Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire is at least partially based on these wars.
Moby-Dick was quite enjoyable. Interrupted it with Scalzi’s novella Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (which will be followed by Lock In when it’s available on 8/26). Back to Burning Paradise now, but I picked up 5 extra-chunky texts at a professional conference and have two books to review for a newsletter, so more technical reading soon.
What’s that you say? You’d like to know which delicious extra-chunkies appealed?
Addressing Cultural Complexities in Practice: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Therapy
Medically Unexplained Illness: Gender and Biopsychosocial Implications
HIV+ Sex: The Psychological and Interpersonal Dynamics of HIV-Seropositive Gay and Bisexual Men’s Relationships
Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence
Ethics in HIV-Related Psychotherapy: Clinical Decision Making in Complex Cases
By which you may infer that my field requires a subtitle for extra-special professionalism.
Siam Sam, I LKE surprise… most of the time 
I finally finished Pale Fire (Nabakov). I hated just about every single word of it. If it was set up differently I probably could have put it down after I was 50 pages into it, however, I had to get about 150 pages in before I realized I was going to hate it as much as I did. I really liked Lolita so I was surprised at how much I disliked this one.
I needed an easy one next and I got a lot of people (here and GB) telling me to do Girl, Interrupted so that’s what I’m reading now. I’m surprised at how fast it’s going. I’m not a fast reader by any means. A book a month is pretty typical for me but if I set some real time aside I could easily knock this out in a weekend. It’ll probably take me a week and half or two weeks.
After that I’ve got Gone Girl, Dad Is Fat (Jim Gaffigan) and Paddle Your Own Canoe (Nick Offerman) to chose from.
I’ve also got shoulder surgery coming up so it might be wise to find some books I can put on my Kindle and read with one hand.
It’s not a real scholarly work unless the title contains a colon. At least, that’s what they told me when I was writing my thesis.
Damn you. As if Mt. ToBeRead wasn’t tall enough.
Speaking of Mt. TBR, let’s look at what’s fallen off the alluvial plain onto my reading pile.
*Memory and Dream, Charles de Lint - I’d like this more if the writing weren’t so clunky. I’m also not too keen on how the story’s arranged, switching between the the early 1990s in one chapter to the 1970s in the next. Too much is being revealed in the 1990s section that ruins the surprise when it actually happens twenty years earlier.
*Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein - This is going to be my last read-through of my copy of this book. It’s falling apart so much it can’t be saved. 
I’ve found a way to get over my aversion to throwing away decent books though–it’s next life will be shredded in the worm bin to become compost. (This is also how I got rid of The Life of Samuel Johnson.)
*The Silver Gryphon, Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - A nice light fantasy read to help me get over the darkness and despair of J.V. Jones and Greg Keyes.
*Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell - I felt the need for a Victorian novel. I really like this so far. The Evil Stepmother, Mrs. Gibson, is delightfully hypocritical and I’m sure she’ll be getting her comeuppance somewhere in the story.
*The Longman Anthology of British Literature Volume 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries - I discovered I really like the Longman Anthologies during my Death March through British and American Literature in college. For some reason, this is the only one I kept.
*Shadows, Robin McKinley - I actually got this for my birthday, which was back in January. It got filed away on the alluvial plain and I’ve finally pulled it off the shelf for my summer vacation read.
Ugh. Yuk. I finished but wish I hadn’t bothered.
I then read a short story by Truman Capote, which I’ve read before, but it’s all I had time for: A Christmas Memory. Too sad now…
I just finished Mike Carey’s new novel, The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s not what I expected it to be. The blurbs and book cover are coy about the subject, and I came into it cold, reading only the most general reviews. If I had known the subject I might not have picked it up so readily, but I liked it after all. It has an enthusiastic blurb from Joss Whedon, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on a novel.
The beginning works best if the reader is as mystified as the titular girl, who doesn’t understand what she is or what kind of world exists outside her extremely confined captivity, where a wary soldier keeps a gun pointed at her whenever she’s unstrapped from her chair.
Many online reviews openly discuss the book’s premise, but since the author obviously wants the reader to be surprised, I’ll spoiler my general description (no plot spoilers, though):
[spoiler]It’s a zombie apocalypse novel. The world (or at least England, anyway) is overrun with zombies, and “The girl with all the gifts” is a little girl zombie, captured by what’s left of the government which wants to study her because, while she is still subject to fits of irrepressible hunger for human flesh, she has retained consciousness and intelligence, rather than being mindless like 99% of all the other zombies.
Accompanied by her beloved teacher, two nervous armed soldiers, and a doctor who plans to dissect her at the first opportunity, she goes on an odyssey of discovery.[/spoiler]
Concealing the essential nature of a book would seem to have mixed results. I suppose it lures in readers who would otherwise avoid a certain genre, but then it fails to attract readers who are specifically looking for that genre. Carey is even using a slightly different pen name for this novel (M.R. Carey) than he does for his comic books and urban fantasy novels.
But how else do you preserve that sense of mystery in the first few chapters, which seems to be the goal here, rather than deception? Even this only works for readers who have avoided reviews altogether, because it’s very difficult to review a book without mentioning what it’s about.
I finally got to Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes. Only about halfway through, but I’m still annoyed by his two references in an early chapter to his books It and Christine (although he referenced the movies, not the actual books.) Still annoying. I wish he wouldn’t do that.