First, the important stuff: Tomorrow I turn 50. :eek:
Send cards! 
I am in the middle of The Dead Path. Well, actually, really near the beginning. I have not had time to form an opinion yet.
Life has gotten busy and I have not been reading much lately. But maybe over the Holidays it will slow down again.
Last month’s thread.
Glad to have you in the secret club of over-50’s!
Welcome to the 50s! You’ll find they’re not so bad. Except for all those pesky body parts falling off. But you won’t be needing those anymore anyway.
Just started The Firm, by John Grisham. He’s really very good. I’m rapidly becoming a fan.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.
I’ll try this again. Earth Abides by George Stewart. Not very far in but I love apocalyptic fiction and even though this is an oldie (1949) it’s holding my interest nicely. I couldn’t get into The Dead Path at all, and so gave up and took it back to the library. Just finished The Walking Dead graphic book - pretty different from the series. Also reading The Nine by Jeff Toobin and although I like it I keep putting it down to read other things. Also just finished Into the Wild, which I picked up to read again after having listened to the audiobook last year on vacation and thought must have been abridged, but it was just SHORT. I like Jon Krakauer and can recommend anything he writes without hesitation. (Also read Into Thin Air about the fateful Everest expedition and *Under the Banner of Heaven *about the FLDS. Both were good)
I just found a collection of all ten of the Amber novels by Roger Zelazny.
Nice thick book. Should keep me going for a while.
Heh, I read the Great Book of Amber back in October. My public library had all but the last one so I went several years never knowing how it all ended.
I just finished rereading Pinker’s The Language Instinct. I cannot get enough of that sort of book. But right now I’m working my way through The Great Gatsby. Next on the list is Flowers for Algernon and then we’ll see. (I don’t really have any demands on my time once I get home from work now that I’m no longer a college student and I’ve decided I’m going to read some of those classics that I avoided in school.)
Racing through Tim Dorsey’s ‘Florida Roadkill’ next up is either Will Self’s ‘The Book of Dave’ or Irvine Welsh’s ‘Crime’. 11.22.63 is on my library reserve list too so it may raise it’s head during December too.
Just finished 1Q84 - Book 1 and 2 and am now reading 1Q84 Book 3 by Haruki Murakami and I have to say that I’m enjoying them tremendously. Next up will be Reamde by Neal Stephenson
I just finished reading Jules Verne’s The Danube Pilot and am now flying through Q.R. Markham’s plagiarized spy thriller Assassin of Secrets, after which my wife and daughter insist I read The Hunger Games.
On audio, I’ve been listening to the unabridged The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, a report on the first World war by H.G. Wells, and The Hand of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, with Verne’s Michael Strogoff next in the queue. I picked up a stack of unabridged “classics” in library bindings recently. The 20K Leagues is, unfortunately, the Mercier Lewis translation, which is butchered and abridged, but is in the public domain. I can hear every mistake in it. But I’m glad to have Verne on audio. I haven’t read the Burroughs book since I started college, and this reminds me why. Burroughs had a fabulous imagination for situations and concepts, but his strories are repetitive and rote, and his characters would generally need more depth to be even two-dimensional. The Rohmer book is a fascinating piece of romantic racist adventure. I’d never veven heard of the Wells book before. The Mysterious Stranger is the Paine version, of course, which is public domain. Again, I’m happy to have audio versions of these classics, but the reading they give of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog (the book is an anthology of Twain) manages to use all of Twain’s colloquial words and phrases, yet sucks all the life out of them.
Happy birthday, Khadaji!
This is the time of year I tend to go through a lot of new kidlit and YA titles, as I like to have read as many of them as possible before the Newbery and other awards are announced in January.
I liked A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, it wasn’t as intense as the Chaos Walking series, but nice to have a recent work by an author I love.
Between Shades of Gray is a YA title about an exiled Lithuanian family during the Soviet occupation during WWII. It reminded me a lot of The Endless Steppe. It was okay, and interesting because not a lot of fiction (relatively speaking) covers this aspect of WWII.
Mo Wren, Lost and Found by Tricia Springstubb was fine, but I don’t think an award-contender.
I am now taking a little break from books for kids with a collection of Connie Willis short stories, Impossible Things. So far, I am realizing I either love or hate Connie Willis stories.
Gosh, they are SO awful and I ADORE them. I found (most of) the series in a box of dusty old paperbacks at my grandmother’s house when I was a kid, and read them over and over. Let’s hope they didn’t have too much of an impact on my moral compass.
Reading Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun, recommended in the November thread.
Yeah, mostly I love her, but some of her short stories are seriously WTF? I just bought an electronic copy of the December Asimov’s magazine, because Willis has a new Christmas story in it.
My copy of Diana Gabaldon’s new book is on its way to me: The Scottish Prisoner. The Lord John books aren’t as good as the Outlander series, but this one is Lord John Grey/Jamie Fraser. The slash may be appropriate.
Finished The Procedure by Harry Mulisch (compulsively readable but the narrator was unlikable and the ending was odd) and barely started Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.
Most everything I’ve read in the last few months has been from the library sale – older stuff that nobody’s talking about anymore (if they ever talked about it at all). With newer books, you can usually find a discussion somewhere, even if it’s just Amazon.
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet gets a lot of praise around here, doesn’t it? I’m 100 pages in and I’m not really feeling it. I don’t hate it. The humor is similar to that of Christopher Moore’s Lamb (the only book of his I’ve read), which I did not like. Good Omens at least has a somewhat amusing plot, so I’ll finish it unless things really start going downhill.
After finishing that book of short stories, I’ve decided I will pass on her when she is trying to be funny - her sense of humor doesn’t resonate with me at all. (To Say Nothing of the Dog must be an exception, because I do like that). I loved the story about Shakespeare, that was a high point.
Another quick kidlit read - Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, a book told in poems from the POV of a 10 year old Vietnamese girl who fled to the US after the fall of Saigon. I was not expecting to like this as much as I did, because it seems like a book that is supposed to teach kids something, but it ended up being very sweet and compelling.
I’m about 1/3 the way though Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose, non-fiction that focuses on the diary as a deliberate literary effort.
Finished The Hideout by Kathleen George; now on The Burning Soul by John Connolly.
I’m almost halfway through Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake. It’s a YA novel about a boy who hunts and “kills” ghosts. Five-star title, three-star tale so far.
I re-read The Big Short by Michael Lewis over the weekend. It’s a look at the sub-prime backed mortgage bond mess through the eyes of about 12 bankers at 3-4 hedge funds that saw the collapse coming years in advance.
Fools Gold, which looks at the same topic from the other side (or so I understand) is up next, but right now I’m on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.