I really liked Smoke and Mirrors.
I am currently struggling through Blindness - I think I’m going just skim through it and give it up. I hate reading books that are unconventionally formatted (this one uses no quotation marks and the paragraphs are pages long) with no real purpose other than to be postmodern and clever. I think the writer was trying to simmulate the confusion and disorientedness that the characters were going through but it just ended up being distracting and boring for me.
I just finished Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation and can’t raise my thumbs high enough. Wonderful travelogue (sans pictures, alas) of sites associated with the first three presidential assassinations- funny, interesting, neurotic, and very informative. Highest recs I’ve given any book in a long time.
And Happy Birthday Khadaji! (It’s my birthday too- so irritating- just think, if our mothers had just done jumping jacks a day before [just a few hours before in my case] we could have had the same birthday as Mark Twain instead of Woody Allen.)
I just finished Never Surrender, a novel covering the first three weeks of Churchill’s tenure as Prime Minister. Very impressed
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
I didn’t particularly care for this. She’s a beautiful writer but the parts don’t add up to a whole for me.
Housekeeping - Marilyn Robinson
See above.
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England - Brock Clarke
Didn’t enjoy this either.
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
I didn’t think I would like this at all but this turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read all year.
Three Bags Full - Leonie Swann
A really fun mystery about sheep who solve the murder of their shepherd.
I’m currently reading Dingley Falls by Michael Malone…so far so good.
Still on Mr. American, by George MacDonald Fraser. Just started it last week. Unfortunately, my reading time is limited, but I’m enjoying it immensely. My own grandfather was 33 years old in 1909, about the same age as the main character in the book. Although of course my grandfather was not in England, it’s interesting to read about someone of a similar age occupying the same world.
I hate that too. I don’t see it as “postmodern and clever” or however the author intends it, I see it as someone who’s too lazy to use the punctuation that we as writers of the language have all agreed on.
I’m about halfway through The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle… I can’t stand the guy’s smarmy new-age tone of voice, but I think the book contains some very valuable ideas. It has definitely contributed to my happiness over the last few weeks.
I’m also reading Alice in Quantumland, an allegory of quantum physics. It is both adorable and informative, with the added bonus of making me feel smart for learning about quantum physics for no good reason other than curiosity.
I just started Omnivore’s Dilemna by Michael Pollan. I’m a big plant biology geek so I’m loving everything about corn. But I’m also a bit in awe of how skillful a writer he is.
I started it years back and found it tough to read. I still want to dig it out and try it again some day.
They guy looks like a leprechaun doesn’t he?
Right now, on audiobook, I’m listening to The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s very, good, but of course doesn’t stand up against The Golden Compass.
So far as hard copy reading, I’m reading Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux. I’m not very far in, but I emphatically recommend it. It sidesteps the questions of “what is a self?” by going straight for the physiological underpinnings, synapses. Not a bad writer at all.
Lazy? Try writing an unpunctuated nine page paragraph without having your brain explode.
I read it over the summer. It doesn’t pick up much–the pace is pretty static, and what you’re looking forward to most never even happens. God knows why they compared it to Tolkein; it’s not even close. Still, I enjoyed the read, although I won’t sit through it again.
Right now it’s Little New York Bastard, a memoir by M. Dylan Raskin.
I’m not too far in yet, but I like it so far. I’ve always wanted to live in NYC, although I’ve never been there. The author makes the city sound really horrible, though.
Currently reading;
Inside the Genome War by James Shreeve. It describes the race to map the human genome between Craig Venter and the Human Genome Project originally headed by James Watson. It’s very well written with Shreee having spent a lot of time “inside” Venter’s team. I’m about a third of the way through the book.
Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project by Spencer Wells. Wells heads the Genographic Project in conjunction with the National Geographic Society. I’m about 75 pages in. I’m enjoying it, but at least so far am findng it a fairly lightly written book.
I’m currently reading Appetite for Life, a biography of Julia Child. I’m only about thirty pages in, but so far it’s going well. She had such an interesting life (or maybe she’s just an interesting person). I just finished Julie and Julia, written by a woman who spent a year cooking 524 of Julia Child’s recipes. It was okay; the style was more blog-like than book-like, and frankly I’d never eat in her kitchen because she sounds like the worst housekeeper ever. Spoiler’d for the weak of stomach:
She can’t figure out where all the flies are coming from, until one day she decides to pick up her dish drying rack and discovers a maggot community living under there! How can you cook in that environment?? Guests would go to use the guest bath and not be able to wash their hands because she had cow brains soaking in the sink!
I’ve also been paging through Mastering the Art of French Cooking and have developed an unholy fascination with aspic, although I think it sounds absolutely disgusting.
Also I recently finished The Enigma Woman, about one of the first women to be sentenced to death in California. It was quite good; Nellie Madison was convicted in 1934 of murdering her husband; it’s her biography, and it covers the era quite well. Of course, it’s intended to be pitched to a noir-focused audience, but it delivers.
I’m also partway through Guns, Germs, and Steel, but unfortunately started it at the wrong time (on an airplane, when I was already tired), so I need to pick that back up.
Oh, the Maus books made me so depressed. When I picked them up, I thought, how cute, a cartoon! Good luck getting through them.
Please let us know how it was. I tried picking up some books on physics, but I unfortunately started them during a pretty chaotic time in my life, and so made no progress. I’m planning to turn back to them once things settle down in the next couple weeks, but the Alice book sounds interesting.
Hey, I just finished that, too. It took me a while, because like you said, it’s just okay, but I have a newfound fascination for Julia Child now, and I’ve put a couple of compilations of her show on my Netflix list. I might look into the biography you’re reading now.
World Without End, Follett. I cracked it 2 weeks ago, read one chapter, now its taunting me on the nightstand. I gotta spend less time on the computer.
Just finished The Accidental Florist by Jill Churchill. Fluffy, but left me wondering if she’s ending her Jane Jeffreys series.
Also reading Monarchy by David Starkey. Its an overview of the English monarchy starting with the Tudors. Very readable, as are Starkey’s other books.
CROSS COUNTRY: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant.
Is there a prize for longest title? 
I can’t recommend the bio I’m reading (yet – haven’t gotten far enough in it), but I recently finished My Life in France, which Julia wrote with her grand-nephew Alex Prud’homme. I thought it was marvelous, and it kicked off my own Julia Child fascination. If I were you, I’d start with that. I think it retains Julia’s voice and joie de vivre, and provides a good outline of her life after she married Paul.
Finished them in one day. Brilliant, incredible, even funny at times, but horribly, horribly sad.
Shoshana, save the Pol Pot book for New Years Eve, 'kay? I like to distribute my holiday gloom proportionately, so it lasts the whole season.
I’m currently re-reading the entire Foundation series. It’s been almost 15 years since I last read these books.
In the past week I’ve gone through The Stars Like Dust, The Currents of Space, and Pebble in the Sky, in that order. I’m now in The Caves of Steel, which I should finish by tomorrow. Then it’s off to The Naked Sun, then The Robots of Dawn. I’ll then break with the normal recommended order and read Prelude to Foundation, then Forward the Foundation, then Foundation. I’ll then jump to Robots and Empire, and then Foundation and Empire. I find events flow a little better with this reading order. Next it’s Second Foundation, then Foundation’s Edge, finishing up with Foundation and Earth.
The reason for putting myself through this all again is because I just received a gift of Foundation’s Fear, Foundation and Chaos, and Foundation’s Triumph. Before I read any of these commisioned works I want to reacquaint myself with Asimov’s universe.
Ahhhh…reading for pleasure. I’d almost forgotten how good this feels.