I just finished Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. I stated the series New Year’s Day, and it sat idle for a couple of month because I could not find a copy of Song of Susannah.
Current read is a treasure I picked up at a Friends of the Library sale: Dennis Smith’s Report From Engine Company 82.
I just finished Sarah Vowell’s offbeat but funny Assassination Vacation, in which she visits various sites associated with the Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley assassinations, with lots of smartass observations along the way. I liked it. The audiobook has several Big Names providing voices of various historical figures: Assassination Vacation - Wikipedia. Stephen King makes a surprisingly good Lincoln!
I finished the audio book “Dear John,” by Nicholas Sparks. I’m really getting into the audio book thing. It gives me something new to look forward to during my workouts. My new audio book is “The Jane Austen Book Club.” I’ve seen the movie already, but thought it might be fun.
I’m afraid that I have given up for “The Crimson Petal and the White” for the time being. It just didn’t grab me. Maybe some other time. In its place I’ve started “Lonesome Dove.” I’m also still reading “Prodigal Summer.” I’m just over halfway through and really like the chapters that are about Garnett and Lusa, but I’m struggling through the Deanna chapters. I just don’t like her or Eddie.
Finished Unshapely Things by Mark Del Franko.
Conner Grey is a druid who’s powers have been damaged during an altercation with an elf bent on terrorism at a nuclear plant. He is no longer an official member of the Guild, whose job it is to investigate and enforce the laws of all things magical. A human cop throws him work regularly to help in investigating crimes in the Weird.
Fans of Jim Butcher will be at home in the world of Conner Grey in this first of the Conner Grey series. Those who have trouble with the fact that in Butcher’s novels non-magical people are oblivious to magic will prefer this world in as much as Fairy and Elves and such are “out”.
There is a nice cast of supporting characters, a self-contained story that still includes a long story arc (finding the elf that crippled Conner’s ability) and a budding romance.
This first book was a little slow starting, but picked up mid-way through and overall I enjoyed it. I’ll get the next one (eventually) and probably follow the series.
B+
Nope, at 4:00 this morning, I said, and I quote, “fuck this.” I was 150 pages into it and it was a slog.
Plus I got Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Changed Mankind from Amazon yesterday (used it to get to $25 when I ordered a book on knitting socks), and it has been beckoning to me alluringly since I opened the package. Damn those hussy books on botanic history!
The Keepsake by Tess Garritsen. Like her style, fast moving.
Well, it’s the last thing on earth I expected to do, but I abandoned this last night, around 160 pages in. And I’d been so looking forward to it!
My problem was that a lot of characters were rapidly introduced, with a lot of hints about the profound friendships and the life-changing meaningfulness and the dark histories that abounded among and betwixt them all (you know how Pat does), and then blip! Skip forward many years and here’s all these cardboard characters at a party. See if you can figure out what’s happened in the meantime by the way they behave towards each other, or even remember which is which…is that the gay guy or the rich one? Wait, aren’t those two twins? And Superbitch is named Sheba? I thought she jumped off a bridge in that other book, or was she the suicidal poet… Hey, I don’t care about any of this at all.
Then I picked up Believer, Beware: first-person dispatches from the margins of faith, edited by Jeff Sharlet. It’s a book of (so far, pointless and dull) essays about people’s experiences with religion. I’ve read threads on this message board a hundred times more interesting, so I’ll likely ditch this one too as soon as I have time to start a new book.
If you want to read some great Pat Conroy, try The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, or his college-basketball memoir My Losing Season. Good, good stuff.
Elendil’s Heir, I read and loved all those. I don’t know why this one didn’t work for me. Maybe because, unlike those others, there didn’t seem to be much story going on.
I’m in Seattle visiting family. Don’t like any of the books I brought with me but son had a copy of The Unquiet by John Connolly – it’s a crime thriller and I’m liking it.
I just finished The Next 100 Years by George Friedman. I learned that around Thanksgiving 2050 the US should protect their Battle Stars from a sneak attack launched by Japan from their moonbase.
Friedman is the founder of STRATFOR. He compares strategic forecasting of geopolitics to chess. At any given juncture there are a seemingly large number of moves, but a skilled player knows that most of these moves are losers. He makes compelling cases for the events he predicts, but the further out he goes the more it sounds implausible. Japan attacking our Battle Stars is an example. More immediately, the upcoming labor shortage and immigration battle makes sense, as does the battle for North America between the US and Mexico at the end the century. I could start a number of GD threads on the ideas in this book. It made me think and was an entertaining read. I recommend it.
I finished “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingsolver yesterday. It really picked up in the last half of the book, and I ended up liking it a lot. For a while I disliked the Deanna and Eddie characters very much, and I was afraid that it was heading in the direction of “The Poisonwood Bible,” which I hated because I found pretty much every single one of the characters repulsive. In the end, the affection I felt for Lusa, Crystal, Jewel, Garnett, and Nannie balanced it out, and I even started to like Deanna a little bit by the end (though only a little).
I have now started “Letter from Peking” by Pearl S. Buck. It’s good so far. I’m also reading “Lonesome Dove,” which I am loving, and listening to “The Jane Austen Book Club.”
I actually made it through, and there were even a couple in there that didn’t suck, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Just started Ad Nauseam: a survivor’s guide to American consumer culture, edited by Carrie MacLaren. It’s a bunch of different articles from some online magazine about advertising, and it’s been pretty interesting.
Finished All Quiet on the Western Front last night. Wow. What a book.
Then I started Elie Wiesel’s Night. I wonder if Night, about a piece of the holocaust, is going to make me no longer empathize with the protagonist of All Quiet on the Western Front, because GERMANY.
Probably not, because it’s WWI, first of all, and so they’re not Nazis, and besides, the book is partly about how the grunts are just average Josef’s fighting some other people’s fight. But I did once see Das Boot right after seeing a movie about the holocaust, and was happy during Das Boot’s tragic final scene.
While I’m still nominally reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, I also lucked out in getting a few used books that are turning out interesting.
First up, David Halberstam’s recent The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. I’ll not hesitate to say that it was poorly annotated and I wouldn’t trust it as my only history of the Korean War, especially since it ends in mid-1951 and rather casually suggests that nothing much of interest happened after; but if you need a good read about the first year of the Korean War, especially the relationship between MacArthur in Tokyo, Truman in Washington, and the commanders in the field, by all means read this book. It is a quite shocking portrayal of the sheer ineptitude of the U.S. Army in Korea, with a few glimpses of brillance in some men. And it’s a tremendously well-written book.
I also finished S.G Browne’s Breathers, a zombie love-tragicomedy. True wheat among the chaff of zombie fiction.
I started reading Pete Dexter’s Deadwood, which promises to be great – I’m at page thirty, and so far I’m very happy with Dexter’s writing. Tongue in cheek, cheerful, slightly off-beat.
An update on my doomed journey through The Gone Away World: after spending July and August slogging through it too slowly to enjoy it properly, I got to about 100 pages of the end and was going to read straight through. That was the night that a family member had a temper tantrum and destroyed my ebook reader, which it was on. Now I’m waiting for a replacement device so I can put this book to rest and get on with my reading life, already!
David McCullough’s Truman covers this well, with (not surprisingly) an emphasis on the growing gulf between POTUS and the man he later called “God’s right-hand man.”
I’d already read about it in the various MacArthur biographies I’ve read (Geoffrey Perret’s Old Soldiers Never Die, William Manchester’s American Caesar, and Clayton James’s The Years of MacArthur. These, obviously, are slightly pro-MacArthur (as much as you can be, given the facts of the matter); but Halberstam’s condension of the whole into a couple of readable pages is very good. Pro-Truman, of course, but then it’s hard not to be.
I should read McCullough’s Truman, I liked his John Adams (didn’t like his overhyped 1776, which fell short of any originality).
Furthing my latest jag of re-reading books I read 20 years ago, I just picked up *Red Storm Rising *by Tom Clancy.
Truman is simply excellent. Haven’t read John Adams, just because I’m not much of an Adams fan, although many people have praised the book to me (and suggested the HBO series, too). I’d agree with you about 1776, although overall I thought it was worthwhile. For other McCullough books, you might want to take a look at Mornings on Horseback, which is about Theodore Roosevelt’s childhood and early adulthood, and how he became the man he did. Also, *Brave Companions * is a nice collection of short profiles of famous people from American history. Both well worth your time.
McCullough graduated from my high school (many years before I did) and when I met him at a book-signing last year, I made sure to mention it. He lit right up! He said his next book will be about Americans in Paris (Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Hemingway and the Lost Generation, etc.).