I just finished Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. It’s sort of a mystery novel. I’ve just put the TV series based on this book on the Netflix queue. Has anyone seen it? Is it worth watching?
I just zoomed through The Girl on The Train, by Paula Hawkins. I really liked it and will try this author again. Apparently this book is “the next Gone Girl”. I have to admit I’ve never read Gone Girl and the fact that everyone is talking about it makes me stubbornly want to avoid it, but if it’s as good as Girl on the Train maybe I should.
At the moment I’m uncharacteristically reading some non-fiction, Severed: a history of heads lost and heads found, by Frances Larson.
Oh my… sounds like something I would LOVE to read!
After reading three samples and still having to think about it for a minute, I finally decided to proceed with Finn Fancy Necromancy. So far I’m enjoying it. 
(I liked all three samples, and will most likely buy/finish the other two [Bad Monkey and Kitty and the Midnight Hour] later.)
It’s got nice pictures too! :eek:…
Finished ***Promised Land ***fast, and am back to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
You sold me! On the Christmas list with you!
I lied- I started reading Philip Dick’s ***Man in the High Castle ***instead.
I finished The Defector by Daniel Silva. In spite of a somewhat Deus Ex Machina ending (and I suspect most of the world’s problems are “solved” by the use of money and leverage anyway) the end was heart pounding, page turning and my eyes could not move fast enough across the page.
The book was well paced and populated by interesting characters and situations. I liked that the end had realistic effects on the survivors, it’s one of the things lacking in the earlier book, where everyone walked away from all the killing with a shrug.
I’m in the last hundred pages or so of Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt. The U.S. is about to enter WWI, and family tragedy lies ahead for T.R. and his doting wife Edith.
I’m amazed there’s enough material on that subject for an entire book. A long article, maybe, but a book…?
When you’re done with that, try (the much better IMHO) SS-GB by Len Deighton and Fatherland by Robert Harris.
In honour of the upcoming Victoria Day long weekend, I finished Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. The profiles of Cardinal Manning (and the Oxford Movement) and “Chinese” Gordon were interesting, the profile of Florence Nightingale was okay, and the profile of Dr. Arnold seemed like filler.
Now I have a better idea what Trollope means when he uses terms like “Newmanite”, “Puseyite” or “Oxfordian”!
I’m currently enjoying The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father, by Roy Lewis. Light and really amusing…I wanted to thank whichever one of you recommended it, but I’m not sure he posts here anymore. It was an SDMB member through Goodreads, possibly Mr. Bus Guy? Anyway. It’s good.
I finished Hunted by Kevin Hearne today… The series started strong, in spite of the Mary Sueness of the lead character, it had interesting characters a strong plot and just enough reality to build dreams upon. But this book was like sitting in on a Live Action Role Playing game, the whole plot was the three main characters running across Europe… yes that was it. There were a couple of battles in there and the obligatory once a book contractual obligation death and near death for Atticus, but since the former happened very early in the book it lacked a sense of disaster. It was more of an “Oh that’s inconvenient…” moment.
Granuaile remains a cardboard cutout being dragged along by the flashier Atticus. Hell, Oberon the dog has better lines and way more personality than Granuaile. And please, Sir, do NOT try to write from a female perspective again, you can’t do it.
I’m still reading The Princess Bride and really liking it. Probably as much as the movie since it has stuff that wasn’t in the movie which is, obviously, pretty common.
I’ve got a few books on deck, but it’s looking like Valley Of The Dolls next.
I finished Cryptonomicon, and am reading Shakespeare’s Star Wars, which is much better than I expected. I’m also reading Vonda McIntire’s novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which I didn’t read when it came out. I also picked up a copy of her novelization of Star Trek III at the same time. Next up is the second volume of William H. Patterson’s bio of Robert Heinlein.
On audio, I finished Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, and also The Fellowship of the Ring that I picked up, used. I now have the entire Lord of the Rings on audio, except for a few missing and scratched-up discs. I’m now going through the 2006 series of Twilight Zone radio plays made by Stacey Keach and company, which Pepper Mill picked up for me for Christmas, but forgot about until she did some cleaning last week. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard about these before – they’re very well done, adapting the original scripts for radio and updating the references, and using a cast with lots of famous names. Two of the actors were even in the original 1960s TV show – Orson Bean and Shelley Berman.
Orson Bean! My very own SDMB wannabe meme.
I’ve finished the main text and am now enjoying the endnotes (a lot of nifty, if relatively trivial, stuff buried there) in Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt.
Next up: The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, about building an orbital elevator. I read it years ago and recently had a hankering to read it again.
I am reading Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey. The book is great – a detailed narrative that sheds new light on all of the people in question. He uses firsthand sources to create a highly intriguing narrative that holds together very well. This is a much visited subject but he makes it new and worth thinking about yet again.
Read In The Kingdom of Ice, by Hampton Sides, an excellent account of the ill-fated Arctic exploration of the USS Jennette in the 1800s.
Now reading Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, by Peter Stark. This is an account of the both the overland and sea expeditions to establish the beginnings of Astor’s fur trading empire in the PNW in the early 1800s.
If you liked Fountains of Paradise, you might was to read Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds, which came out about the same time, and is eerily similar – a science fiction novel written by a British engineer about the construction of the first “Skyhook” orbital tower made of single-crystal fiber by the engineer who built the world’s longest suspension bridge. The craft that climbs the fiber is called “Spider”.
The two novels were so similar that they actually had Arthur C. Clarke write a forward to Sheffield’s book, saying that the similarities are coincidence (mixed with the topic being a hot one at the time), but that the books are sufficiently different to make them nothing like carbon copies of each other.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Web-Between-Worlds/dp/0671319736/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt
I finished Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. It was an interesting mood piece, and I liked the fact that it was a collection of short stories and not a bunch of vignettes glued into novel format like One Hundred Years of Solitude.