Finished Spiral Hunt (Evie Scelan) a quite acceptable first novel by Margaret Ronald who mixes Celtic legends with urban fantasy. There weren’t too many surprises, but it wasn’t a bad read and if I see a sequel I will likely read it.
I’m interested to hear what you think of this. I read it a couple years ago and just didn’t get the humor, I guess. That was the first and last I’ve read of Moore.
Now reading Making Rounds With Oscar, by David Dosa, MD. Written by a doctor who worked with dementia patients, and the cat (Oscar) that seemed to know when patients were going to die.
Biff has some very amusing moments, and it’s quite sacreligious. Some of the humor is fairly sophomoric, but it’s a good read.
At 50 pages in (over my lunch break - I have to take my kid to another school thing tonight!) I think it’s pretty funny. But then I’ve read several books by Moore, and I usually enjoy the first half of the book more than the last half, because he tends to get a little too silly for me as the book progresses.
A Dirty Job is my favorite so far, but I’ve heard several people declare that *Lamb *is their favorite, so I’ve been looking forward to this one.
Sounds like a good plan, but I don’t think I could never bring myself to get out of bed earlier than necessary, even for extra reading time. I’d rather sacrifice sleep the night before.
Just finished Rounds With Oscar. My favorite quote: Dogs come when called; cats take a message and get back to you. 
Picked up John Le Carre’s Secret Pilgrim, surprised there was an old one I hadn’t already read. His usual wonderful writing with a different format, an old spy’s memories of his life in the Circus, with plenty of Smiley.
Also just finished Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, about a tropical island near the Solomons in the South Pacific. It’s about the turmoil of a civil war in the 1990’s, through the eyes of a young girl. I really didn’t know much about that part of the world in those years. It’s very affecting, and there are a few brutal shocks. The book popped up on my radar after I heard they they were filming the movie with Hugh Laurie. The story is still haunting me a few days after finishing it.
Finished Credos and Curios, a collection of essays and short stories by James Thurber. It was okay. Some were good, some not so good. Not worth going out of your way for.
Next up is Killer in the Rain, and Other Stories, by Raymond Chandler. I’m a big fan of Chandler (Dashiell Hammett, too). I picked this up from the bookstore when I recognized only one of the stories in it offhand. But I may have read at least some of the others, as the introduction mentions Chandler “cannibalized” some of these stories for his larger works. For example, his novel The Lady in the Lake was compiled from the stories “Bay City Blues,” “The Lady in the Lake” and “No Crime in the Mountains.” That sounds awfully familiar. Oh well, even if I’ve read them before, Chandler is always fun to revisit.
I finished the book last night, and I liked it. It wasn’t what I expected. It was funny and silly in places, like all of Moore’s work, but it took its subject very seriously indeed. It was certainly irreverent and would offend some people, but I thought it was pretty faithful, and not exactly disrespectful, to the biblical tradition of Jesus’s teachings. The ending was quite sad, obviously.
Finished Thorn Queen (Dark Swan, Book 2) and this one was even more ooky than the first. More lurid sex scenes and a detailed rape scene. I am done with this series.
At a friend’s encouragement, I took a stab at Paul Tillich’s massive Systematic Theology. Ugh. Left me utterly baffled - I soon realized that I have neither the philosophical nor the theological toolkit to scale this particular mountain. Fifty pages and I’m done.
I’m happy to report that I just finished a short novel called I Thought You Were Dead by Pete Nelson and I have to say that it is a wonderful little bit of fiction about a dreamer named Paul, his dog named Stella and his erstwhile girlfriend named Tamsen. I really recommend this book. Its very bittersweet and written in a way that I found to be compelling.
I am also currently enjoying Becoming Jimi Hendrix by Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber that details Jimi’s formative years before he was a famous solo guitar player, starting with his childhood, his days in the Army and his various bands he toured with before becoming the superstar he eventually became. Good book as well.
I’m finally reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. I, which I got for my birthday a few months back. I haven’t read it before because a.) i had lots of other books to read, and b.) It is HUGE. It’s over 600 verylarge pages long, and it’s inconvenient to carry with you, or to read in bed.
i’d read one of the three previous “atobiographies” by Twain, which were cobbled together from his many notes and manuscripts, but this is supposed to be the all-inclusive definitive one, including stuff that he pronounced could not be published until a century after his death.
I’m over a hundred and twenty pages in, still reading through the introduction and twain’s “false starts”, and won’t get to the actual Autobiography for another eighty pages. I’ll bet most people have skipped ahead, rather than plow through these preliminaries. It’s worth it, though, if you’re a Twain fan. One of the “false starts” found its way, at the hands of Alfred bigelow Paine, into the version I’d read earlier, and into some of the excerpts I have on audio 9and have listened to many times). So it was a surprise to me to find that the portion I was so familiar with had been abridged, and that I never read the full sequence until now.
Finished A Feast for Crows, the 4th book in George R.R. Martin’s series. It’s the weakest of the series, but I look forward to the next book.
I picked up 2 books recently and I’m not sure what’s next. It’s between Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke or Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold.
Ooo, ooo - read the first! It’s terrific!
The new Bismark biography, he was not as nice or interesting fellow as I had hoped.
I’m gonna say read the second… I’ve also added it to my shopping cart.
Finished Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin, a fictionalized account of an Alabama “range war” in the late 1800’s. Interesting story, and Franklin does a good job with vigilante justice, showing all the different reasons why it happens.
I’m following it with another Franklin, Smonk, fiction about a guy who terrorizes Alabama in 1911, more vigilante stuff. The violence in this one is downright pornographic (as is the sex) but there’s enough humor that I don’t feel dirty for reading it.
Those were Franklin’s first two novels. His third, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a rather sweet coming-of-age story with a mystery. Except for his gift for landscape, dialogue, and characterization, I wouldn’t think these books were written by the same guy.
Not sure what’s up next. I’ll see what’s free for the Kindle.
I finished a couple of interesting novels over the long Easter weekend.
Two by E.L. Doctorow, of whose output I’d not previously read anything: Ragtime and Book of Daniel; both are 1970s, I think. Ragtime was very enjoyable, smart and moving, and read a little like a fugue, with recurrent characters and repeated allusions to background characters as well. Very interesting examination of society in the early 1900s.
Book of Daniel was tougher, but ultimately the more rewarding book, I thought. Two kids’ messed up lives in the wake of their parents’ arrest as Soviet spies, and at the same time, a rather serious indictment of the political left in the United States–not because it’s left, but because it’s so ineffectual.
In the same vein, Chris Bachelder’s hilarious U.S.!: Upton Sinclair, famous muckraker, has spent the 20th century getting resurrected and assassinated, resurrected and re-assassinated. Interspersed with television shows, poetry contests, songs, and other things, a funny and thoughtful novel about unthinking antipathies towards things people don’t understand as well as a comment, also, on the U.S. left.
Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie With Maps, a geographical classic. It’s good, but less interesting than I would have thought; I’ve got some basic training in cartography, so the initial bits were not new and therefore not as shattering as they might have been (maps don’t show everything, and someone decides what to leave out!), but the later chapters were quite revealing as case studies.
Don DeLillo’s White Noise–yeah, I know, I’m way behind the curve with all of these books. But I liked White Noise, for all its postmodern wryness, it had the sort of dry humour and absurd moments I enjoy.
Finally, currently I’m reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders. This is very weird, but very funny. The five inhabitants of Inner Horner find themselves unable to stay out of the neighbouring country of Outer Horner, because their country is too small; conflicts ensue. And no, I’m not doing it justice…
I’m in two book clubs at the moment, both of which, coincidentally, have chosen chick lit written by women named Paula for this month’s reads. Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife is a romantic historical novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife; Paula Froelich’s Mercury in Retrograde is a Sex in the City-style name-dropping, fashion-obsessed NYC comic novel. The first is definitely better than the second. I doubt I’ll finish either - just not my cup of tea - but I’ll at least give them each the obligatory 50-page fair chance before setting them aside.