Welcome to theend of winter in the Western US! (And the rest of the Northern Hemisphere) Here in Northern Utah, we’ve had all four seasons in the last week…and it’s snowing again. The only thing to do is curl up with a warm blanket and a book and wait for Ragnarok!
I’m currently reading several books because I have the attention span of a hyper caffeinated grasshopper on meth…and because you all read such interesting things that I can’t wait to finish one book before jumping into another because my fellow Dopers loved it!
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of the SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, and he started these monthly book threads. Sadly, he passed away in January 2013, and we decided to rename these monthly threads in his honor.
I read Hope Unseen: The Story of the U.S. Army’s First Blind Active Duty Officer by Scotty Smiley. I enjoyed the book and was pleasantly surprised at how humble the writer was. I do think the book got a lot more interesting and inspiring once we got to the point in the story where the writer was blinded from his injury. I think he could have spent less time talking about his experiences in the army prior to the injury, or maybe I just wasn’t the target audience for that part of the book. I will warn that the author’s Christianity is featured pretty prominently in the book, so if that’s not your thing it might bother you.
I read Get In Trouble by Kelly Link, and I wouldn’t recommend it. She writes these surreal, dream-like short stories, and sometimes she hits the mark, and sometimes her stories seem to be trying so hard to be weird that they miss a good hook and storyline. There were two stories in this book which I think solidly hit the mark (“Secret Identity” and “The New Boyfriend”), and two stories out of nine just isn’t enough to warrant a recommendation.
I read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, which I wound up liking but it took me a little while to get into. At the beginning, Coyle’s primary message seemed to be “You get talented at something by practicing a lot,” which was such an obvious statement that I didn’t see how you could sell a book about that. But once he started offering specific examples about how certain talent hotbeds treated practice differently than the standard, and succeeded because of their unique approaches, I started learning from the book.
I’m about halfway through Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories Arrival and have been enjoying it. My library audiobook of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was badly scratched and kept skipping, so I’ll have to get another before I can resume listening - about half an hour in, though, I can’t say I was wowed. I’m also several chapters into C.J. Sansom’s alt-hist novel Dominion, about drab, dreary, impoverished Great Britain in 1952 as a virtual vassal-state of Nazi Germany, and the book’s getting more complicated (and tense and interesting) as I go.
Link hits the mark for me a little more often than she does for you, but I agree it feels like a unusually huge gulf between the stories that work for me and those that don’t. I think the one I liked the best in that collection was “The Summer People.”
I did Ragnorak in February with Norse Mythology, which would be a great read over a few snowy nights. Currently 1/3 thru Neal Stephenson’s SevenEves which offers a somewhat warmer end times scenario.
Just finished Clare Vanderpool’s Moon over Manifest, which I read as part of my quest to finish all of the Newbery Medal winners. It wasn’t bad, although it full of cliches. In fact, the author lampshaded that by having the main character (who traveled a lot) say that she was used to seeing “universals”–the sort of people and things you see wherever you go.
Next up: Advent and Christmas: Wisdom from G.K. Chesterton, edited by Thom Satterlee and Robert Moore-Jumonville.
All ready to start in on Mordecai Richler’s “Solomon Gursky Was Here”. It’ll be the first book I’ve ever read by him, even though his brother was my optometrist 40 years ago.
I’m a little slow to the party, but I finished The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch today. As usual the pace never let up and I read right through my naptime today
In anticipation for the third season of Twin Peaks, I’m reading The Secret History of Twin Peaks.
I’m about halfway through and I’m deeply disappointed. The book discusses Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest and various UFO sightings, but very little of it is related to Twin Peaks.
Finished Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson. I see what jsgoddess meant. A quirky narrative but enjoyable and educational.
Next up is A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving.
I just finished “The Blood of Emmett Till”. A devastating indictment of race relations in America, and a true horror story about a brutal murder. This happened in my lifetime, but I was too young to be aware of it, and I never heard the whole story. Highly recommended to all.
Finished Advent and Christmas: Wisdom from G.K. Chesterton, edited by Thom Satterlee and Robert Moore-Jumonville. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this, which basically I only read because I’m a fan of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. I may read more of his works on religion and his poetry, too.
Next up: A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy.
I read Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception by Claudia Hammond. I found it to be an interesting book with some new concepts, but I think it could have benefited from some tighter editing. There were certain points in the book where the author would have you do an exercise, and then for some reason, she felt the need to talk at length about the results she got. So, for example, to prove the effectiveness of short term-memory, she would ask you to recall everything you could about some recent experience, and then she would actually tell you everything she recalled about some trip she took last week. That was weird, so whatever you do, don’t read this as an audio book because there will be some parts where you want to skip ahead.
I also finished the third book in the Freakonomics series, Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I was a little apprehensive going in, because some of the reviews I read made it sound like some cheap, junky effort purely meant to cash in on the success of the other Freakonomics books. But I loved it, perhaps more than the other Freakonomics books because it was a little more instructive, as opposed to just retelling amusing statistics and anecdotes.
