Wow, 6 books added to my wish list from one post!
Well, I finished it.
It’s way too much like Atonement–at least parts of the book are supposed to be the mad ramblings of the main character, and not really “true”, but I was fooled by one of the devices used. Damn it. Just like every movie has to have a twist at the end, these damn books where nothing you supposed was real was.
OMG! How did I not know this! :eek: “Find out what happens to Sophie” Adds to Amazon shopping cart Thanks so much for mentioning this.
Heh. I like to give back to these threads. I found The Terror through a Whatcha Reading thread last year, actually. Enjoy!
I’m a couple chapters into it and have been SQUUUUUUEEEEEEING in delight like a total spaz to ANYONE who makes eye contact with me over the wonderfulness of the mixture of Jane Austen and Zombies.
“Excuse me, you’ve got Jane Austen in my zombie massacre.”
" Well, you have zombies in my Jane Austen novel!"
Two! Two! Two genres in One!
I’ll shut up now…ok, maybe I won’t.
Quoth me:
I’m very disappointed that nobody called me on this one… OK, I was a little early for the 1st, but it was the April thread, after all, and I referenced the next day.
Oh, excellent! I’m so excited, I had not heard about that.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the book I got by mistake from the library because I confused the title with a book that a Doper recommended in last month’s reading thread is completely goofy. The Spiritualist … the spiritualist of the title is supposed to be a French Creole, and so he sprinkles Ouis and Nons in all of his dialogue, making him sound like a Saturday Night Live skit about the French.
I’m also reading Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain which is pretty good. I’m a big fan of his other books … but being a severely tone deaf person myself, it’s weird to read him describing my experience of the world as a defect. It’s more entertaining to read about other people’s brain defects, it turns out. 
YA titles: A Curse Dark As Gold, by Elizabeth Bunce. This was not bad – a retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin story, somewhat similar in tone to Robin McKinney’s stuff.
And another YA: The Compound by S.A. Bodeen, which was DELICIOUS in its melodramatic, overwroughty teen lamentation. I mean that as a compliment, really. A family goes underground in a high-tech luxury fallout shelter, and then the teen protagonist starts discovering deep, dark family secrets. Completely unbelievable but extremely satisfying, like On the Beach meets Flowers In The Attic. Awesome.
Books in progress:
Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher - too much forced cleverness, not her best
Tales From Moominvalley, Tove Jansson - quirky kid tales, wonderful
A Matter of Justice, Charles Todd - post WWI mystery, pretty engaging, so far
and the winner is:
Who knew war poetry could be beautiful?
Dracula, by Bram Stoker. It’s awesome.
A book about the classic horror movie stars. (Did you ever notice that Michael Jackson looks a LOT like Lon Chaney Sr. did in The Phantom of the Opera?)
And the Twilight series, just to see if it’s as bad as everyone says it is. (I haven’t gotten to the sparkle scenes yet, though)
Very cool. Is there anything like that for LXG: Black Dossier (the ending of which left me baffled)?
I’ve not got much interesting on my April plate, I’m afraid. I don’t know why, it’s not for a lack of books certainly. I’m reading Tad Williams’s Mountain of Black Glass, third in the Otherland quadrilogy (finally SOME answers!), which is going to be done tomorrow, I think, or at the latest Monday on the train. Then I have Robert J. Butow’s The John Doe Associates on the desk, hoping to gain an insight into some of the goings-on behind the scenes during the pivotal last twelve months before Pearl Harbor. It’s a tougher read than Butow’s Tojo and the Coming of the War, so far. I’m also reading Akhil Reed Amar’s America’s Constitution: A Biography, which is really excellent, but I’m getting to loath his cliff-hanger sentences, like “this was one of the only two times were this or that happened,” without telling us what the other time was. Come on man, that’s not too hard.
And that’s it already…
Bought this when a friend gave me a Kindle (went through my Amazon wishlist looking for books available on Kindle, and this was one – it was on my wishlist as an SDMB recommendation).
I liked it a lot through about the first half, maybe 3/4 – but then it just started getting tedious and confusing. With the possible exception of the three main characters, everyone in it is a complete cardboard cutout, so I was having problems keeping straight who was who. I kept thinking that it would be a great movie, in which you could just sort them out visually and watch all the running around.
Apparently a sequel just came out – I’m not feeling a burning need to read it.
I liked this a whole lot when I read it on vacation four or five years ago (vacation is the time to read it – I polished the whole thing off in a little more than 24 hours). There was a really good thread at that time, which you wouldn’t want to disinter, of course, but might be worth reading.
gallows fodder: One thing I recall discussing in that thread was the ending – I read the book too long ago to want to read the companion book, but am curious about that. Let me spoiler my question:
It was my interpretation that the body they found at the end wasn’t the wife’s – sorry, I don’t recall any character names at all – and that she had “escaped.” Was it or was it not the wife?
In this crowd, complete works of Augustine isn’t out of the question. 
I borrowed this from a friend but couldn’t get into it, which was a disappointment, because my recollection of his early books (which I read more than a decade ago, probably longer) was that I enjoyed them. The problem I had was that it was all just little bits and pieces of things, no coherent narrative or overall theoretical structure that it fit into. Put it down and have been utterly uninterested in picking it back up.
I had been reading Richard Dawkins’s Ancestor’s Tale, and I’m about halfway through it (that puppy is long) and fully intend to return to it, but paused to read several things on sustainability to prep for a job interview (Garbage Land, You Are Here, etc.).
Then The Seance came in, which I’d requested at the library after Dung Beetle’s reference in last month’s thread, so I stopped the first detour for a second detour. Totally not what I expected, which is more about my reading comprehension of her post and not what she said. I was expecting it to be about fake spiritualists, which has long been a side interest of mine (my academic background is sociology of religion/American cults), which is where it starts, but not at all where it ends up. Very twisty plot. Not my usual thing, but entertaining. One question, for Dung Beetle or anyone else who has read it, about the mysterious armor in the gallery.
It turns out that Uncle Cornelius wasn’t an alchemy buff/dabbler in electricity – so why was the armor built, and who had it built and installed?
And now I’m back to sustainability stuff, though the interview was yesterday and I’m feeling this morning like I totally fucking blew it (sigh). Currently reading Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming, which is about not only about the phenomenon itself, but various scientists whose theories help explain/describe it, the tycoons whose factories were a major cause of it, the Anasazi Indians whose disappearance has been attributed to it, etc. Entertaining read.
We have similar tastes! like Bill Bryson a lot, I liked the book you are reading very very much and I also enjoyed a lot of his travel books. I read GEB by Hoftstadter, it took me three tries to get through it. I have pushed it on many a friend and none of them have read it all the way through and I have lacked anyone to pontificate about it with. Now it’s fading from my memory. It was a searingly ambitious, fascinating, whimsical yet challenging read. Though written decades and decades ago now (hard to believe), it seems that the way that he advocated looking at the mind (and considering and defining ‘intelligence’) and consciousness more or less prevailed. There are endless felicities to be found hidden in that book, too- hidden ‘Easter Eggs’, relevant patterns, etc…
I am currently reading something entirely different, though it’s the second time around with these books for me- Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima, the first in his Tetralogy called The Sea of Fertility. It’s INCREDIBLE. If I start in about it I may never stop, it’s unbearably beautiful, poignant writing. Of course I’m reading it in English, which bugs me (the idea of translation) but what am I gonna do?
Speaking of translation, Hofstadter wrote a flawed but entertaining and incredibly thoughtful book called Le Ton Beau de Marot. Despite the title, it’s in English, and all about translation. I seem to remember that it wasn’t received well, but I REALLY enjoyed it all the same. Ever since reading that book, reading translated literature has had an added dimension of wonder and mystery for me.
twickster:
[spoiler]Agnes’s fate isn’t addressed directly, but in one of the stories, a 50-something William thinks about Agnes and asks himself again if he is sure the woman in the morgue was his wife. Personally, I think these doubts are supposed to indicate to the reader that the woman wasn’t Agnes, but who knows? (William basically tells himself, “Of course she was, silly!” but William was always self-deluding.)
The big reveal at the end of The Apple is that Sugar and Sophie traveled the world together after their flight from London. The story focuses on events in 1908 and is narrated by Sophie’s son, Henry. Sophie was a suffragette and lived in Australia with her husband, son, and live-in female companion/probable lover for a time, and then they all moved back to England in 1908. Sugar, presumably dead by now, had left her fortune to Sophie. The plot of the story involves Sophie and young Henry wandering away from a women’s rights march in London and trying to find the Rackham house in Chepstow Villas.[/spoiler]
I’ll look for that old Crimson Petal thread and perhaps start a new one in a week or so.
I’m reading two books at present. The first is Sabriel by Garth Nix, which IIRC was recommended on this board. The setting is really unusual and the characters are well drawn. My only problem is that I need to know what the immediate sequel is called and the library catalog system isn’t being helpful. Any YA fans know the sequence of titles in this series (I assume it’s a series)?
The other book is Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh. It’s the sequel to Cyteen, which I re-read just last year so the story was relatively fresh in my mind. Which is good because this one picks up just weeks after Cyteen ended. It’s not a book I would recommend as an introduction to Cherryh, or even science fiction in general, because it’s a long psychological drama and stuff doesn’t start blowing up until over halfway through. I’m digging it, but then I loved the previous book.
Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen.
I really enjoyed the Abhorsen trilogy. I’ll be interested in hearing what you think.
My niece, who reads voraciously and is smart as a whip, really enjoyed Sabriel. Don’t know if she ever read beyond the first book, though. Here’s the Wiki article on it: Sabriel - Wikipedia
One of the neat things, IMO, is that Nix has created a (what I believe to be) unique world of magic. His magic works unlike any other fantasy realm that I have seen. That is part of what made it fun for me.
Thanks! My interpretation was that she had lived,-- because would he really recognize her headless body? – but a lot of people in that other thread disagreed.
Oooooh, really? 
I’d like to say I’m continuing with the Dresden Files series, but my library has yet to get me Blood Rites, which is next up. Maybe in a day or two…
In the meantime, I’m about to pick up Robert Rankin’s Necrophenia, which will be light, forgettable, and fun. I’d have started already, but it didn’t seem like quite the thing for reading at the Department of Motor Vehicles.