I finished the book this afternoon and do recommend it. The prose is unpolished but his words were obviously selected with much care. Howard Dully seems like a man desperate to tell his story and make it understood. He didn’t get many concrete answers about why this horrible procedure had been done to him, so it seems like he is trying to find some of them from within.
And somewhere in the back of my head, I hear Wash from Firefly saying, “But not boring, like she made it sound.”
My car audiobook is The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb. I’ve read it before and liked it, but it’s not really an ideal audiobook for commuting to and from work. There’s a lot about the school shootings at Columbine, which makes me very emotional. I need to take a little time to compose myself after listening. Good book, though.
I haven’t been posting in these threads for a while, largely because I’m embarrassed about how little I’m reading these days. Somehow reading has been dropped in the juggle, and because I’m also a couple of months behind in podcasts (I’ve just caught up to all the Darwin’s Birthday celebrations on Nature, Quirks and Quarks, RadioLab, etc.), when I’ve had only fifteen minutes to myself, I’ve been listening rather than reading.
Anyway, now that I’m out of town working and have more free time than is safe, I’m re-reading Iain Banks’ “The Business”. In the on-deck stack are -
Robert Goddard - Name to a Face
Stella Rimington - Illegal Action
Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia
Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon in Retrospect
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
and Stella Rimington - Open Secret
I’ll be interested to see how much of that I actually finish before it’s time to leave. On the one hand, I’m filling my days with all the other stuff I don’t get enough time for at home, so I’m also working out, practicing piano and practicing guitar; on the other hand, there’s only so much my arms are going to take, so reading is a good way to give my hands a rest.
Noninterference by Harry Turtledove. Sci-fi, but interesting take on how a culture could be accelerated by one wise benevolent ruler that becomes immortal. I’m not sure what I’ll be reading next, as I came home from the used-book store with a whole sack full…after taking them a whole box full of discards from my shelves. 
I’m reading The Search for the Pink-headed Duck, by Rory Nugent. Entertaining travelogue through India by someone I suspect is a complete loon. I like it. 
So I quit reading River of Gods by Ian McDonald. Just couldn’t keep my interest.
I am 2/3 through Coraline by Neil Gaiman. It’s fun.
Don’t feel embarrassed. Many of us have to squeeze reading in when we can. I’m on a pretty quick-reading Dan Brown book right now, Digital Fortress, but even though I like it, I’ve not been able to look at it for a couple of days now and probably can’t pick it up again for a couple more.
My book club has some very smart, well-read, thoughtful people, and all of us either hated or were unmoved by this book. Don’t know why it’s so widely considered a classic.
As for me, I just finished Victor Gischler’s Pistol Poets, a crime thriller/comedy about a poetry-loving gangster trying to go straight in an Oklahoma cow college. Some laugh-out-loud moments, but overall didn’t live up to its potential.
Now I’m starting John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, the third in his excellent military sf series. Just a few pages into it, but so far, so good.
Kiddos?
May I recommend David Gibbins’ books The Lost Tomb, Atlantis and Crusader Gold?
Get ready though, for a “James Michener” kinda “history lesson”, okay?
I mean if you read any of these books, you may need to prepare yourself for a beginning in early Rome (before Jesus) and stuff.
Also, once y’all get into the action itself?
It may help to have a Foley put in.
Q
I love that book myself, but I studied it in a Latin American literature class taught by a prof who was an expert on Colombia. We may have gotten a bit more out of it because of that. The book is chock-a-block with all sorts of odd little personal details.
‘Embarrassed’ is probably not the right word - I’m after something that describes a feeling that is very similar to the reticence you feel when you haven’t called a friend in too long. I think it was Daniel Pennac in ‘Comme un Roman’ who said ‘all time spent reading is stolen from other tasks that someone else might consider more useful; that is one of its pleasures. Reading is like having an affair with yourself…’
However much I enjoy books and reading, I just can’t seem to bring myself to post in these threads when all I can say is “My book sits idle on the bedside table, and I’ve almost reached that point where I’d be better off to pull the bookmark out and start again, because I’ve no idea which one is Telemon anymore. I’d do it, except I’ve read the opening 20 pages 6 times now.” So instead, I keep quiet and say to myself “Someday soon, I will have more than enough time to read.”
I recently flew through three books by Martin Millar: The Good Fairies of New York, Lonely Werewolf Girl, and Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me. They’re a blast; imagine Neil Gaiman with a short attention span and a really excellent music collection. Speaking of which, I also recently read Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It was good; one of his let’s-channel-another-author efforts, only this time it was Beagle.
I just started rereading the Lensman series, and am off-and-on reading The Body Has a Mind of its Own by Blakeslee & Blakeslee; it’s a pop-sci book about psychophysics.
Finished Turn Coat. Enjoyed it as I do all of Jim Butcher’s stuff, but did find it somewhat predictable - I figured out the bad guy pretty quickly. It did have some nice twists and some great moments, so I can’t say it was a let down.
Spent the afternoon lying on the sofa reading American Wife, the fictionalized version of Laura Bush’s life told as a first-person narrative. Delighted to discover it’s an actual well-crafted novel, neither sensationalized nor gimmicky. I’m about halfway through it.
I loved Lonely Werewolf Girl but didn’t find the descriptions of his other books that compelling. Should I reconsider?
TGFoNY is pretty similar to LWG, but a little more brash; if you liked one you’ll probably like the other.
I loved SLZaM; think of it as being vaguely similar to the “Adrian Mole” books, but with Millar’s writing style. And you just gotta appreciate any book where the author comes out and admits that he’s writing in chapters just a page or two long because most of his readers have short attention spans 
I finished Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater over the weekend. It’s an account of his experiences of opium and the problems in his life that led him to take it. The first part is great, the middle part (Suspiria de Profundis) drags on–it’s about his sister’s death–, and the last part, The English Mail-Coach is also great. That part talks about riding the mail coaches across the country before trains were invented.
I finally got a copy of The Born Queen which is the last volume of Greg Keyes’ The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. It’s been a while since I’ve read the first three, but I’m remembering the plot as it comes up. I also got a copy of H.R. Ellis Davidson’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe which I haven’t read since a long-ago mythology course. We also read The Hobbit in that class. That was a good class.
I’ve suddenly been inundated with reading material, not all of it relevant to anything that I’m doing. I’m also reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s hugely enjoyable, mainly thanks to Marquez’s wry tone.
I finished yesterday Jeff Smith’s Bone (the 1-volume edition), which is really up there in the graphic novel top ten. I’m not sure it tops Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth overall, but it was a much more enjoyable read. Funny as hell, too.
Among the other books currently cracked open are Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Charles Esdaile’s Napoleon’s Wars, and Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. Crane is a re-read, and it’s still as good as it was the first time around. Esdaile’s book is outstanding, a really fresh look at the Napoleonic Wars. People may take issue with his analysis, but it holds up for me. Ross’s book I got to finally get behind what the horrible sounds Schoenberg, Berg, etc. created are supposed to mean. He’s not yet convinced me that there’s actually a need to listen to their music, rather than merely to acknowledge what they tried to do, but maybe that’ll come later.
I’m convinced. I’ll try another. Thanks.
I just read The Hobbit aloud to my nine-year-old over several weeks’ worth of nights. He really liked it, although my Gollum voice kinda freaked him out. We finished Robert McCloskey’s 1943 small-town-gentle-comedy classic Homer Price last night.