I’m about halfway through The Blind Assassin. I keep setting it aside for other things. I want to read Oryx and Crake next.
I’m also going to start The DaVinci Code (as soon as I buy it) for my book club. It’s our November book.
BiblioCat, I loved Oryx and Crake (plan to re-read that one) . I’m not really into futuristic fiction but I greatly enjoyed the way Margaret Atwood pulled it off in that book, as well as in The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m only about 65 pages into The Blind Assassin - so far it hasn’t grown on me yet. 
I’m hoping it gets more interesting - so far I’ve not been disappointed by an Atwood book.
i always enjoyed nero wolfe, those books are, no doubt, why i always look to find a way to put a consevatory on my roof.
i’m trying to get through at least one box of books i bought and haven’t read yet.
Slainte, I’ve only read The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood. I loved that one.
The Blind Assassin is strange. It’s interesting, but boy, is it odd.
I’m really enjoying the bits where Iris talks about her childhood and growing up, but I’m wondering how it ties together with the bits where she talks about the present (where she’s old) and the bits with the unnamed people writing the sci-fi story. In another thread, someone mentioned that they liked it, but then in either a bookclub or online discussion group, realized they had missed the whole point of the book, so I’m trying to read more carefully.
** BiblioCat**, If you liked The Handmaid’s Tale, I think you’ll enjoy Oryx and Crake - they’re very different but both are well done.
It sounds like I have the same problem as you, and I’m only on page 65. I plan to stick with it though.
I will have to follow it a little more closely too, thanks for the info.
You might also enjoy History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom.
My winter reading project is to read The Tale of Genji. And I do mean project. I’ve tried to read it a couple of times now, but have never been able to get through it. For the modern reader, it can be very confusing, especially since the female characters (there are many) don’t have names. They have nicknames like the Lady of the Locust Shell, but even those aren’t always constant.
Thanks Lissa. I’ll add that to my copious list of future reading material.
Now if I could just get all the writers to take a year off I * might* get a pile or two read.
I intend to get around to some of the major fantasy series that I’ve managed to miss so far. I have Leguin’s Earthsea Cycle, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, and Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn on the shelf. Thanks to the wonders of used bookstores, I got these all for one or two dollars a volume.
I’m going to try to get through the rest of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches series. I have to read Merrickand Pandora in the vampire series and the entire Witches series, with Cry to Heaven thrown in for good measure. Along with that, I have about five other books I want to read:
Thornton Wilder’sThe Skin of Our Teeth, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. I’m looking forward to the last one because it seems that every time I’ve been to the library since August it’s been checked out.
I’m currently on a self-education in American history project. Next, I’m going to read up on the Christian Church in the 1st-4th centuries. Then I’m thinking I might do a “classics in history/literature” thing, to fill in the holes in that area. But by then I will probably have become sidetracked.
All that is what I’m trying to do, but I keep seeing interesting books at the library, too. So it’s a bit slow. My eyes are bigger than my brain, I guess; I just keep checking the books out, whether I have the time for them or not.
And I read Angels and demons, and it was terrible. I thought it would be an art history mystery, but it was more like an MST movie. Or something. I ain’t touching the DaVinci book, it would probably kill me.
Well I did it!
I finished The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman.
fans self One down some 400 hundred or so to go…
Oh yeah, and three more in transit, somewhere in the ether:D