Oooo, that’s a good one! A great WW2 espionage thriller.
Just finished The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, which I didn’t think I’d like but really did, by the end. Gave Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera my usual 50-page college try, but couldn’t get into it and finally put it down with a sigh of relief. I’ve also been working my way through the 30 Days of Night vampires-in-Alaska graphic novel series, which are OK, all in all.
Next up on my reading list are The River of Doubt by Candice Millard, about Theodore Roosevelt’s near-fatal post-White House Amazon Basin adventure, and Greg Mortenson’s and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea, about trying to encourage civil society and peacefully defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both have gotten good reviews.
I’ll try, but I’ve got a book on Walter Freeman, father of the icepick lobotomy, to read and excerpt as I write my lectures in early January.
I’m just back from a week’s break, the goal for which was to relax and read in the sun. I read:
Alex Beam: Gracefully Insane
Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle
D. J. MacHale: The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon #2)
Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies
Michael Zielenziger: Shutting out the Sun
Neil Gaiman: Coraline
Working on Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West, which is not uninteresting but suffers mightily from a lack of framework.
And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi. I’d seen the movie a couple times in passing on cable, story seemed interesting and I loved Helter Skelter back in the day, so I thought I’d grab it from the used book store. Pretty enjoyable true crime story, so far.
Three Cups of Tea is a fantastic book! I loved it. Greg spoke at our bookstore, and it was our most successful event ever.
Incidentally, it isn’t about what you think it’s about. At least not directly. It’s about building schools and providing a proper secular education for the youth of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some of the kids would go without formal education at all if it wasn’t for Greg’s work. Others would receive fundamentalist indoctrination.
He started his talk with, “Terrorism is not a problem. (long pause while room goes silent) Terrorism is a symptom. Ignorance is the problem.”
I don’t understand all the negativity being levelled against Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell as it was a fantastic book - I couldn’t put it down! And to add to the Gaiman debate, I think he’s so so personally. I enjoyed American Gods but Neverwhere was TERRIBLE. Anansi Boys was okay but nothing to get excited about, and as others have said Good Omens is propped up squarely by Pratchett so it’s not a like-for-like comparison.
Well I’ve finally given up on Shogun by James Clavell after having “breaks” from it; I’m 300 pages to the end and I just can’t bring myself to go back to it, I really don’t care what happens next to be honest.
I just finished reading Rupert Everett’s autobiography which was very good, although the humour dries up towards the end (the last three chapters are just sheer bleak!). Quite an easy read too, I read half of it in one sitting.
Currently I’m reading The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss, his second novel centred around the character Lucifer Box. His first book was very good and I didn’t even know this one existed until I saw it whilst browsing in a book shop. It’s also a very easy read, I’m 100 pages in and I’ve only been reading it a day.
After I finish that (and it won’t be long) I have God save the Queen?: Monarchy and the truth about the Windsors by Johann Hari who’s a newspaper columnist here in Blighty. I like his columns so I expect to enjoy this, and anything that argues for an abolition of that pointless anachronism is good from my point of view.
I’ve read all of Clavell’s work. My favorite is Noble House, with Tai-Pan a very close second; my least favorite was Whirlwind. Enjoyed *Shogun * very much, though. I also find it interesting how descendants of characters in one book tend to show up in other books set hundreds of years later, no matter how briefly.
But I think King Rat stands apart from all of the others in its own category, seeing as it was so autobiographical. Now that I think about it, that one is probably my absolute favorite of his.
Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Walter Benjamin. It’s a little, well, Walter Benjamin-ish, but I enjoyed it in a more emotional way than I expected to.
Mystery Mile, Marjery Allingham. This was a lot of fun, I haven’t read anything by Allingham before. Classic British mystery – manor house, a vicar, wacky gentry. Usually when the back of mystery novel says something like “Dorothy Sayers fans will love this!” it is the kiss of death for me, because really, Dorothy Sayers is a very high standard and it generally sets me up for disappointment, but I ended up loving this and am excited because Allingham wrote about a million books.
The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge, Dan O’Neill. This worked out well for a bargain bin purchase. It’s like a tribute to Dave Hopkins, the scientist who figured out how the land bridge thing worked. All the science parts are clear and interesting for non-science people like myself, and I learned all sorts of things about Alaska.
Currently reading:
Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade, Marvin Mondlin, Roy Meador. I would only recommend this to people who are really into books. It is page after page of descriptions of bookstores formerly located in New York City’s 4th Avenue book sellers’ district. It is very enthusiastic, the authors are excited about every bookstore and what kinds of books they sold. It has this “… and one time, at band camp…” vibe, it’s like “And then there was this bookstore, and it was really good, and then there was this other bookstore, and that was very jolly indeed, and then this other bookstore …”
I’m still on “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker and “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin – haven’t made much headway in either one for a month or two, as I’ve been splitting my time between homework and the Dope. With winter break looming, though, I expect to finish one or both soon. Next up is some combination of “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, “Murder in Amsterdam” by Ian Buruma, and/or “The Great Gatsby”. I may also try to tackle “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson again, and/or “How Are We to Live?” by Peter Singer.
I hope you have better luck than I’ve had. Not with Allingham – I’ve never read her – but I’m forever falling in love with an author, buying everything they’ve written, and realizing that the one book I read was their only good one.
As mentioned upthread I did pick up Butcher’s Captain’s Fury. This is the first book in a while that I am whole heartedly enjoying. I once again recommend this series to fans of Butcher or fantasy fans who want something new. (Note though that unlike his Dresden files, it is more traditional fantasy.)
I picked up and read in one evening Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree which is the middle school tale of a socially distant girl ( Emma Jean) possibly autistic, but it doesn’t matter. who prefers to watch her classmates rather than socialize with them. All that changes one day when she is asked for the first time to Help someone and she gets involved.
