It’s off to a good start after reading the first 54 pages.
I finished reading “Washington Square” by Henry James. I was a little reluctant to start another novel by Mr. James after reading “The Ambassadors” (which was a bit of a slog), but I saw that he held his own story in contempt so I thought it was worth a shot. I liked it. The story starts with a typical 19th century plot of a sweet naive rich girl being wooed by a fortune-hunting scoundrel, but the characters were interesting, the writing was witty, and the plot wasn’t predictable. And it wasn’t too long, either.
I’m not finished with my book, but I expect after today I won’t be posting until the new year.
Currently reading an anthology, In Sunlight or In Shadow: stories inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. I picked it up because it has stories by two of my favorite authors, Stephen King and Joe R. Lansdale, and those were pretty good. However, my favorite tale so far was by Craig Ferguson (yeah, that Craig Ferguson).
Of course, the paintings are nice too.
I’m almost done with The Daily Show: An Oral History, a gift from my wife (who wants to read it next).
I’ve been reading and re-reading a bunch of stuff about Atlantis, including Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, L. Sprague de Camp’s Lost Continents, C.J. Cutcliffe-Hynde’s The Lost Continent, The Films of George Pal, Edgar Cayce on Atlantis and much random other stuff. It’s a follow-up to my summer reading of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.
And I am very nearly at the end of my year-and-a-half long project to read six translations of the Koran simultaneously. I’m thirty pages from the end of the Penguin Dawood translation, but the number of remaining pages ranges up to sixty in the other translations, and 100 in the heavily annotated one.
Next up: A book by a Utah humorist, sent to me by a friend there, and Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon, Guest of Honor at this year’s Arisia.
“The Hundred-Year House”, by Rebecca Makkai. Just started, she is a clever writer and I like her style, but it remains to be seen if there is a story and interesting characters here.
Also, just received “The Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson, which I’ve wanted for a long time, but my library didn’t have it. I bought it (.01 + SH) and will donate it to the library when finished.
I just finished Smoke, a Victorian-England supernatural thriller with a premise unlike anything else I’ve read (The Golden Compass comes closest). Wow! This is one of my favorite reads of the year. I highly recommend it.
I’m with your wife 
I need to read that too
I loved Castle Hangnail, it’s aimed to the 8 to 13 set but was a lot of fun to read and I liked the message of responsibility in it.
Excellent book! One of my favorites.
I am currently reading The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathon Stroud. I do think The Lockwood & co books are the superior series, but I’m enjoying this anyway (Actually I’ve been down with a horrible sinus infection, aggravated by a bad reaction to one of the meds, this week so I’ve been reading fanfiction in between sleeping. 
)
Another big yee-haw for Devil in the White City. Erik Larson can do no wrong, as far as I am concerned.
I just finished The Martian by Andy Weir and I loved it. I am scientifically illiterate as far as physics, botany and chemistry go, so I missed much of the details of how Mark Watney dealt with the problem of being marooned on Mars, but I do know a ripping yarn when I read one. This was a ripping yarn. Highly recommended.
Just finished Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.It’s a series of vignettes focusing on the economic planners in the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s, and their attempts to solve the problems of a planned economy. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I guess the closest description I can think of is to imagine a Neal Stephenson novel with more thoroughly-researched infodumps and the adventure-story plot removed.
Still reading Lafeyette; last week finished The March, and liked it very much. Largely accurate historically except for one major event, which was dramatic but, as far as I’ve been able to determine from reading elsewhere, never happened:
An assassination attempt against Gen. Sherman in a small North Carolina town by a Confederate deserter pretending to be an itinerant photographer.
What a good idea for an anthology! I assume the writers got to pick their own paintings.
I really liked it, too. The movie is also very good.
At a friend’s recommendation, I’m also reading the last long chapter of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War trilogy, “Lucifer in Starlight,” about Lincoln’s death and the immediate aftermath of the war. So far, so good.
Finished Sycamore Row, by John Grisham. A wealthy, white, terminally ill recluse commits suicide and leaves his fortune to his black housekeeper in fictional Ford County, Mississippi. Much better than many of his recent offerings even though I could see the Big Secret coming a mile away. Not preachy like he’s been prone to get recently, and it’s nice visiting the protagonist Jake Brigance again.
Next up is Grisham’s 2015 novel, Rogue Lawyer.
After I finished Blood Money I immediately downloaded the next book in the Joe Dillard series, but decided not to start it right away. It took me longer than usual to pick my next book, and ultimately I decided not to go with any of the books I’d downloaded sample chapters of (my “to read” list). I felt like staying in the legal thriller world, so I looked up some “best of” lists and decided to give The Lincoln Lawyer a try. I never saw the movie (I’m not a McConaughey fan), but I already know/like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch character and several lists rated this book highly. So far so good…
Ha! Exactly what I thought/said. My entire review: “Grisham’s writing style remains enjoyable, and it was interesting to revisit this protagonist, but there’s no mystery or suspense here: I’m not the type to try to figure out twists or endings, and even I found it utterly predictable.”
I read Rogue Lawyer in March. No Goodreads review, though; just a star rating. I tend to like Grisham. 
I LOVE the Lincoln Lawyer series, Mickey Haller is the bomb. 
I’m on an Tana French kick. In the past few weeks I polished off Broken Harbour, The Trespasser, Faithful Place and I just started The Secret Place. They are all part of an Irish Murder Squad series featuring different detectives. Each book is a multileveled, character-driven psychological thriller and …damn! They’re so good I’m popping them like m&ms.
I also read and recommend Craig Johnson’s Spirit of Steamboat, a short novel I never got to before because I thought it would be a gooey Christmas feel-good thing. It really wasn’t that at all. In fact, the only Christmassy thing about it is that the frame of the story happens on Christmas Eve. It also features Walt Longmire’s predecessor, Lucian Connelly, arguably the most entertaining character of the series.
Man, I have a lot of catching up to do! Books I’ve finished since I last posted in one of these threads:
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. My god I loved this book. It’s one of those books that’s a bit nerdy and laugh-out-loud funny, with a good dose of adventure and some colorful characters. I zipped through this one in just a few days.
The Lost and the Found by Cat Clarke, which is a novel about a girl returning to her family after being kidnapped and held hostage for thirteen years. The storyline is right up my alley – I gobble up memoirs written by kidnapping victims as soon as they’re published – but the writing was just okay. Not bad (good enough to finish), but not super-impressive, either.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. A non-fiction book about when some unfortunate news about a person gets published and the person is a victim of mass hatred from strangers. This one – it was weird. I actually really enjoyed reading it, and I found the subject matter interesting. The problem was that it didn’t seem to have any sort of ultimate point, or even a logical proceeding from one idea to the next. It was just a collection of interviews and experiences, written out as he experienced it.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente. I loved this book! I think it was targeted for young adults. It was an adventure story about a 12-year old girl going on a quest in a magical land, coming across witches and wyverns all kinds of mythical creatures. It’s charming, but with just enough substance thrown in to make it not quite aimed for little kids.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. This book sort of irritated me. It starts out as a memoir of his childhood, and midway through, it transitions into guidance on how to write well. Though I think “transitions” is putting it kindly; King starts a new chapter and suddenly it’s like I’m reading a different book. Both parts of the book were good on their own, but the first part of the book was so different in tone from the second part that the shift was too jarring for me, and I don’t think I came into the second part of the book in the proper mood to fully appreciate it.
The Witch of Belladonna Bay by Suzanne Pamieri. This is a murder mystery with magical realism thrown in, narrated partly by a young woman, partly by a young girl, and occasionally by a ghost. It was charming, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but it feels rather unplotted. Like, when the mystery is solved, it doesn’t really feel like the character development and clues sprinkled throughout the story really led to it, and it was more that the author needed a way to end it.
Currently reading Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates.
I felt the same way. The beginningwas a nice memoir in a relaxed style and then suddenly it was a preachy, prententious lecture on HOW TO WRITE. His tone totally set me off and I never finished the book.
Just read Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren. Fascinating, and very reminiscent of 1950’s SF, except the “alien life forms” she studies are plants on Earth.
So good! I’m considering it for my next read-aloud for my third graders. It’s been several years since I’ve read it–do you remember there being anything in it that parents could object to (other than the fantasy element, which pffffft)?
In case you don’t know, it’s the first in a series; there are three or four now, I think. And her adult novels are much more experimental, and I’m not convinced by all of them, but the ones I like, I love. Deathless, a sort-of-retelling of some dark Russian fairy tales in an early Soviet setting, is delicious.
I just finished The True Meaning of Smek Day, the book on which the movie Home was based. It’s a very fun, and very irreverent, children’s book. Not good for a public third grade, due to the cussing and the (very mild) raciness in parts, but very fun.
And last night I finished A Man Lies Dreaming. What a fucked-up mess of a book. I can’t believe how much I giggled. Here’s what I can say without giving away too much (i.e., anything beyond the first two pages): it’s set in London in 1939 in an alternate history, stars a down-on-his luck, thoroughly despicable private eye. Very well-researched, appalling, and somehow gripping beyond what it has any right to be.
No, I don’t remember anything that would be legitimately considered too mature for a third-grade audience. I didn’t figure out that it was the first in the series until the end of the book, when the publisher had included excerpts from a few of the other books in the series. It was kind of funny, because I was reading it on my Kindle, and I was dismayed when the book finished at only 80% (you know how the Kindle says what percentage of the way you are through the book at the bottom?). So I turned to my husband and told him how sad I was, then saw the excerpt and turned to my husband and exclaimed “Oh my god there’s a whole nother book she wrote!!!”
Thanks for the Deathless recommendation, I added it to my to read list. When I finished her book I knew I wanted to read more from her, but she’s written so much that I couldn’t very well go and add every book she ever wrote to my list! So I had just added her sequel and left it at that until you gave me the additional recommendation.