The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. A novel about three young people in New York in 2001. It uses 9/11 as a plot device, but only in a minor way. Messud is a brilliant writer, maybe the best new novelist I have read in a decade, but her half-page long sentences, full of semi colons and dashes, leave me exhausted.
The Miracle of St. Anthony, by Adrian Wojnarowski. The story of Bob Hurley, basketball coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, NJ. A tiny school, abandoned by the church but held together by a group of dedicated nuns, educating the poorest of the poor, somehow manages to win 22 state basketball titles and send nearly every senior to college.
I have on order Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris.
I just started the Anubis Gates. About 15 pages in, so no discussion points yet. I also just finished Drawing of The Dark by Powers.
I just ordered Pynchon’s new one on Amazon (rotten pre-order!), and pre-ordered Gene Wolfe’s new one (the name escapes me now, but it’s in the Latro series).
Recently finished:
[ul]
[li]1776[/li][li]An omnibus work of Tom Holt’s[/li][li]Independent People (Halldor Laxness?)[/li][li]Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)[/li][li]And…tried Finnegan’s Wake again (feeling arrogant), got through page 43!!![/li][/ul]
-Cem (who hopes one day to get into triple-digits on FW)
I’m in grad school, goin’ for the ol’ English MA – up to my butt in Victorian lit this semester. Carlyle, Coleridge, Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot, Mill, Bronte (both of 'em) and on and on and on. Enjoying it? Nope, but I knew it wasn’t going to be fun.
That has one of my favorite science fiction short stories: Hinterlands
I’m reading 1919 by John Dos Passos, a sort of epic many slices of many lives around the time of WWI. The second book in his USA trilogy.
I took some time during my vacation to read The DaVinci Code.
Being a cheapskate with limited shelf space (my books may be reaching critical mass; if a new black hole appears near St. Louis, MO, it’s just my book collection finally imploding under its own mass), I’m waiting for the paperback, but The Protector’s War came out recently, and I’m working my way through it.
Assuming you enjoy the book, should you ever stumble across the animated film, I reccommend it. It’s one of the few animated film adaptations I’ve ever seen that holds faithful to the novel.
For that matter, should you get sick of the book, the film is a good way to find out how the rest of the book goes in 90min
I’m currently reading A Concise History of Poland by Jerzy Lukowski & Hubert Zawadzki. They managed to boil 1,040 years of history down into three hundred seventy pages so I’m guessing that’s pretty concise. I still need to finish Guns, Germs & Steel and a biography I have on Abigail Adams but the Poland book was bought for a research paper I’m doing so it got top billing.
I’m finding it fascinating but slow going. Huge areas of personal ignorance are being cleared away, but I’ll need to read it through again so that some of the names will stick…
Very Good, Jeeves, War of the Worlds, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Neverwhere, Soul Music (for our Discworld Reading Club threads), Tender is the Night, and Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz (I remember checking the book out of the library and reading about his death two or three days later, on the BBCNewsworld feed, and having a moment of “He can’t be dead, I’m still reading one of his books!”)
I’m due back at the libary tomorrow, so I’ll have a host of new books then.
I finished Fall of Hyperion this month, which I didn’t like as much as Hyperion while reading it, but in retrospect I do.
I finished A Wild Sheep Chase, my first by Haruki Murakami. I was underwhelmed, but will give him another try since I want to like him.
In my new effort to include short stories in my reading, I’ll slip some Burning Chrome in between reading my next book, which may jump-start me into continuing that series.
My next read will be The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, because I like reading the book before seeing the movie, which will be out next month. I’m also hoping to start River of Gods, by Ian McDonald soon.
…My next read will be The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, because I like reading a book before seeing the movie, which will be out next month. I’m in the mood after just seeing the probably inferior film, The Illusionist. I’m also hoping to start River of Gods, by Ian McDonald soon.
twickster, I’m sorry you’re not enjoying The Orchid Thief, which is obviously nothing like the film, but I really loved the book for the amazing history of orchid collecting, the bizarre people inhabiting the sub-culture, and the extremes people will go to for the plants. The swamps and odd folks reminded me of southern gothic fiction.
I’ve got a real soft-spot for Margaret George. I love her books though sometimes the historian in me gets irked at inaccuracies.
I just finished her latest, Helen of Troy. Quite good. I suggest, though, that you skip, Mary, Called Magdalene. I thought it was tedious. Her books Autobiography of Henry VIII and Mary, Queen of Scots are great and stand among my all-time favorites.
This morning I finished Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters, the second in the Percy Jackson series. Highly recommended for fans of Harry Potter.
Earlier this week I finished Madeleine Brent’s Golden Urchin (someone on the Dope recommended Brent), Patricia Wrede’s (and someone else) Sorcery and Cecelia, the second book in the York series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (can’t recommend it), and Elizabeth Young’s A Girl’s Best Friend.
Currently reading Bujold’s The Vor Game. Getting ready to start Angie Sage’s Flyte, Charles Stross’s The Family Trade, and Edith Pattou’s East.
And I want to plug a book I read a couple of weeks ago: Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer. This is great fantasy. Read it! (And the author swears he won’t fall prey to Robert Jordan syndrome when I questioned him on his blog.)
Just finished Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s . I thought it was good in that it taught me a lot about Roman/Papal history, but it wasn’t great in a literary sense. It did make me go to the library yesterday, and pick up biographies of Michaelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci.
In the middle of Garlic and Sapphires . I had read Ruth Reichl’s other 2 books, and considered them okay. I love this one. Sometimes you just read a book by an author that reaches you, when all of his/her other ones don’t.
Tried to read Grass by Sherri Tepper, but I just couldn’t get into it. I had loved Beauty , so I had high hopes.
Read Blue Screen in one night. I always felt that Parker’s Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone books were too similar, so I’m not sure that I liked
That they became a couple at the end. Then again, his Spenser novels are not high literature either, and I don’t expect them to be.
And in between, I reread Feet of Clay,Thud! and Going Postal . There’s something funny about Pratchett’s later novels; it takes me time to get to like them, but they do improve on reread.
Up next? Well, I’ve got a stack of about 30 books out from the library, and a bunch of unread books on my shelves, so it’ll be what hits me right. Top contender is Never Let Me Go, and I have several by Octavia Butler and Charles deLint.
