Perhaps it’s not worth noting because it’s so short, but I read “The Giaour” by Lord Byron. I thought it was kind of a muddle; “The Corsair” was a better poem along similar lines.
That’s the reason why I couldn’t stand Cees Nooteboom’s All Soul’s Day. The narrator was so wrapped up in his own b.s. he refused to notice all the other characters’ troubles, even when they banged him over the head with it.
I just finished J.V. Jones’ A Fortress of Grey Ice, the second of a four-book series. I adore her books, but this series is hard to read. I love the characters and I can’t stand the absolute hell she’s dragging them through. After what happened to Raina in the first book and Ark in the second, I’m going to have to take a break before I resume. So I’m reading Tom Jones for some lighthearted frolicking.
The Glass Castle a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, recommended by others up thread. Yeah, Welch, WV is a place.
Several times while reading this book I had to take a break. To let it sink in. To get away from it. Her chaotic childhood led to Welch holler, one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the US, and they were the poorest people in it. But she didn’t let the places where they’d lived become a state of mind, and just presents the bare-bone truth infused with what good was there.
My MIL and I shared similar pasts, a bond that she regularly glossed over with her Cadillac and “help.” (A maid.) But she told me about, because of circumstances, her and some of her siblings being taken from the farm where they were born and sent to live at a little mining camp in Harlan, Kentucky. We took a day trip up there for her to see it one more time. It was dotted with towering heaps of slag. She said that, all of a sudden, she’d had to look straight up to see the sky.
This book shows us a view.
I read The Glass Castle about two months ago. Wonderful memoir and to be made into a movie according to Wiki.
I’ve read a couple of McMahons so far and liked 'em fine, right up until the endings, which were :dubious:. But I still had a good enough time that I’m going to try some more.
Currently I’m reading The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper, which I picked up after Lucretia posted a quote in a different thread.
A cow eats grass, so a cow is grass?
I’m a big fan of Keller. It is very entertaining to watch the authour make a likable and sympathetic character of a guy who, when all is said and done, kills people for a living.
You might want to see In Bruges. A violent but very funny comedy about two hitmen tryng to lie low in a picturesque Belgian town.
Heh, I meant to check that out when it came out, and forgot all about it. Good call. 
Thanks, I’ll be looking for it chiroptera.
I’m reading Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945, a fascinating memoir by cryptographer Leo Marks. He was the son of the co-owner of the Marks & Co antiquarian bookshop, which was made famous by Helene Hanff’s book 84 Charing Cross Road (a nice read for bibliophiles). At the age of 22 Marks was deemed unsuitable for Bletchley Park due to his “originality” and flippant sense of humor (much in evidence in the book) and was sent to work for the Special Operations Executive instead, where he supervised encoded messages to and from intelligence agents in the field.
The book has a very narrow focus. So far it’s mostly concerned with two of Marks’s most urgent goals, and it’s astonishing to read about the inter-departmental rivalries which hindered these goals and risked or wasted the lives of heroic field agents.
First he wanted to replace the alarmingly insecure poem codes used by agents with the much safer “worked-out-codes”, which would be printed on silk for agents to carry. (Silk is easy to hide in clothing - it won’t rustle during a pat-down search.)
Marks’s second goal was to convince his superiors that many, if not all, of the Dutch intelligence agents had been captured and their messages were in fact being manufactured by the Germans. (The Germans called it Das Englandspiel, “The England Game”.) Marks became suspicious because the messages from the Netherlands had a markedly low rate of coding errors, a much lower rate than the agents of any other country.
I don’t understand every single point that Marks makes in the book, but I’m riveted by the story and entertained by his self-deprecating humor.
I read a harrowing, but very good, memoir by a Cambodian woman about her childhood growing up under the Khmer Rouge. It is called First They Killed My Father. I thought it was very well written; and naturally, emotionally draining. The horrors she experienced are made all the worse by the fact she was a young chld, yet old enough to understand them.
The same author has written two other books about her experiences later in life - I have ordered them. In particular, her second book looks interesting - it deals with her immediate post-Khmer Rouge life, after she has immigrated to America. It is called Lucky Child and it deals, I understand, with her eventual reunion with her beloved sister who also survived the Khmer Rouge, but remained in Cambodia (the surviving extended family only had enough cash to get the authour out, and her sister had to stay behind - that’s why the author is the “lucky child” of the title).
Funny you should mention that. Somehow it came up the other day that my father who was an English major at a Really Good School had never read TKAM. I said, aaaawww, I love that book you have to read it. “Nah, I’ve seen the movie”. :eek:
I had flu all last week,consequently my attention span wasn’t up to a full book (neither was my wrist since I spend three of the five days lying down) but I read several volumes of Ouran High School Host Club, Ai Ore, Kizuna and Awkward Silence…
All of which are manga, perfect for short attention spans and a tendency to fall asleep, not to mention much easier to hold while lying down.
Surely you exaggerate. I cannot believe an English major would say that.
:dubious:
A cow eats many grasses. If it is lucky. And if you are lucky, you get to munch on a grass-eating cow.
Six Years by Harlan Coben, and I’m on the home stretch of Snuff by Terry Pratchett. I love a good mystery.
I was shocked because he reads Very Important Books and I’d never heard him resort to “I’ve seen the movie”.
Finished up The Book of Joe, a quick easy read about a guy who writes a tell-all book about his hometown. When his father becomes ill, he has to return to this town where everyone is pissed off at him, and try to deal with events that happened during his senior year of high school.
Now on to Wintersmith.
I’m about 30% into Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder. Terrific book. William Herschel just discovered Uranus. I remember this event being mentioned in Pynchon’s hilarious Mason and Dixon, and it was a pleasure to have the episode fleshed out so vividly. Herschel was more a musician and composer than anything else; and, like Handel, a product of 18th-century friendship (at the royal level, too, as embodied by the king) between parts of Germany (especially Hanover) and England – driven partly by their having a common enemy in France.