How come I’ve never heard of Shirfley Hazzard before? I’m reading ‘The Great Fire’, and it is by far the best book I’ve read this year. It’s taking me a long time because I keep going back and rereading sentences just to savor them.
I totally agree with you. It was so cruel it didn’t seem real. i also had a hard time buying the notion that a starving sixteen year old could outwit almost everyone else.
I am reading** The War on Women in Israel: A Story of Religious Radicalism and the Women Fighting for Freedom** by Elana Sztokman. It is depressing as well but meshes well with what my Israeli friends have told me. The Israelis have to stop giving the damned Haredim so much power.
I’m almost done with Dean Koontz’s Innocence. As always, he writes a tight story at an 8th grade reading level so it’s an easy and engaging read.
This. I thought it was sooooo stupid. Don’t understand the wild popularity of stupid.
I finished the complete manga series No. 6 by Asuko Asano & Hinoki Kino. It’s a graphic adaptation of a series of lite novels in Japan. I’m told that the adaptation is quite faithful to the books. I enjoyed it quite a bit, it was tense and I cried a couple times. Part of it I knew ahead of time, the pitfalls of having read too much SF in my life. My only complaint was that there just wasn’t enough time to adequately explore the behavior of the main character, he would one moment be super sweet and niave and the next be a killing machine. I’m sure the books go into it more fully but I would have liked some explanation of why he was that way.
Finished A Bend in the River, by VS Naipaul. An ethnic-Indian shopkeeper in a small central-African town in the post-colonial 1960s. Very good, but I did not enjoy it as much as Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.
Next up? Will know after I hit the library and/or bookstore today.
Well, one of my New Year’s Resolutions really needs to be to write at least 2-3 sentences about each book I have read/am reading - cause my “Needs Review” shelf is GoodReads is embarrassingly large.
So here goes in an effort to catch up a bit before then:
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography - audiobook version, which required a bit of tweaking to the format, but it worked reasonably well. Bonus - audiobook was performed by NPH himself! In terms of a memoir, it was informative without being voyeuristic (mostly) and Neil didn’t seem to whitewash his past too badly, and his love for his husband and children shone through. Being a Disney (and Christmas fan) I especially enjoyed the chapter on his yearly participation in the Epcot Candlelight Processional program. I’ve put the Kindle version of this bio on my wish list, but may be revisiting the audiobook again in the feature.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (library book) While I still haven’t figured out quite what the title has to do with anything in the book, I found this novel engrossing - I enjoyed the “mundane” elements of the story at least asmuch as the mystical - I kinda want to be Holly Sykes when I grow up!
However, I kinda have to agree a bit with fellow GoodReader Nataliya when she wrote that “the overt inclusion of fantastical elements is what weakened the story.” While I found the good vs evil confrontation compelling, it felt like a separate story only peripherally related to Holly and Hugo.
I enjoyed Mitchell’s * The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet * as well as Black Swan Green, both of which remained moored in the “real world”. I still have Cloud Atlas to read, and plan to get around to it fairly soon.
Something like Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales is best read a bit a time; ebook format makes this a lot easier. While I’ve read several of these before (and a couple are on my all-time Favorite Short Story list!) there were plenty of new-to-me discoveries as well. Plenty of highlights with evocative turns of phrase, and sometimes more than a grain of truth: “That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different.”
Recommended if you are a Bradbury fan, or would like to know if you should be one. Glad to have this in my collection.
Love Bradbury’s short stories. My parents had a volume that was complete at the time it was published, sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, and I read through it. It’s really educational to read a “complete run” of an author in one big jag, to see his highlights and his lowpoints and his “M. Night” points. Makes the author seem vulnerable, if that makes sense.
I was a big Bradbury fan as a teenager, and really ought to go back and re-read him sometime.
I’ve heard good things about this book. Sheyngart is an Oberlin grad, as am I, and he’s gotten some attention among alums. For a fictional look at the long shadow WWII cast over the Soviet people, I recommend Tool of the Trade by Joe Haldeman, my favorite sf spy novel.
Just finished, in the last couple of days, David Sedaris’s audiobook Holidays on Ice, a great collection of Christmas-themed comic short stories and essays (including the deliriously funny "SantaLand Diaries), and Captain Trips, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s first volume of graphic novels based on Stephen King’s The Stand, which is written pretty well but illustrated somewhat amateurishly.
Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta. I finished it over a mere two days. Really liked it, and I’m jaded and hard to enthrall in my old age. The villains reminded me a bit of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.
Our library has The Stand but only the updated 1990 version, so that will have to do. I checked it out yesterday (Saturday). We’ll be upcountry for an extended New Year’s trip starting after next weekend, and I’ll start on it then.
But I also checked out some more John Grisham and will now read The Client first since that one’s a hardcover and I don’t want to schlep it around the country. (The Stand is big, but this copy is at least a paperback.) We saw the Tommy Lee Jones/Susan Sarandon film version of it 20 years ago, but I don’t remember that much about it.
I recently finished re-reading the updated version of* The Stand*. I’m a King fan and found it great fun but check out this thread about errors in books - there’s a bit of a SK pile-on. 
See how many errors you can spot! (Ignore the fact that I misspelled the author’s name in my post. Oops.)
I just started John Cleese’s So, Anyway… I had no idea he almost became a lawyer.
Of special note is the misspelling of Killeen, Texas as Kileen in 11/22/63. That shows you how long it’s been since I’ve lived in Texas. I didn’t even catch that when I read the book!
With King you can always tell yourself it’s an alternate universe.
Speaking of which, just finished American Nightmares, the second volume of the Stand graphic novels. As before, well-written, pretty true to the book, but amateurishly illustrated.
I finished The Vanishing, by Wendy Webb. It was touted as a scary tale about a haunted mansion, but it was just ridiculously cozy. The main character throws away her shameful past and is swept into a paradise filled with hot baths, protective dogs, a studly stable guy, vintage evening gowns that fit her like a glove, glasses of brandy, maids carrying trays of delicious food, a library full of rare books, etc. Oh, and something about ghosts. Whatev. This was really more of a romance novel, with an implausible twist at the end that turned it from silly into downright dumb. Maybe if the author tried telling it to us around the campfire at midnight while holding a flashlight under her chin…nah, not even then.
Started this morning on The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens. ** Hopeful Crow** recommended it back at the beginning of the thread and it’s pretty good so far.
In this specific case, I think it actually is. It’s been a while since I read 11/22/63, but I recall there being at least one Dark Tower dogwhistle in there–maybe a Takuro Spirit or something.
Let’s talk about what I’m not reading. Yesterday evening I considered starting:
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Catch-22
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Unfortunately, NONE of those are available for Kindle… and I am so spoiled by the digital revolution that either going to the library or housing another dead-tree book is unthinkable. So I guess I"m not reading them.
My next idea was Flowers For Algernon, which I haven’t read since I was about ten years old. Guess what? It’s on Kindle! Guess what else? The Kindle edition costs almost $8. For the digital version of a wafer-thin book that has been out for decades.
Fuggedaboudit. I am back to Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling now. I have been holding off on reading the end for months, because I’m so afraid of what might happen. YA fiction always does that to me–I expect gut-wrenching disaster.
Ain’t it the truth? It’s really quite hard for me to go for a dead tree book any more. I never thought I’d fall for digital books as hard as I have.
I finished this one day before yesterday and it was pretty darn good! I’ll be looking forward to more from this author.
I’m reading Twelve Desperate Miles: The Epic WWII Voyage of the SS Contessa, by Tim Brady. It’s interesting.