I finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I enjoyed most of it. I thought it started slow and dragged on at the end after the big mystery was solved. I started reading Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People over the weekend. It just might take me forever to read this one, or I may have to start skimming a bit. I think I’ll also start Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time. The movie, though cheesy, is one of my favorites and I’ve been meaning to read this for quite some time.
And I’ll have to look up that edition - thanks!
I’m halfway through with Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. Very uplifting stuff.
I am also reading my son the Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson, Book 2). We will probably plow through this series and then tackle Harry Potter and then the Vampire’s Assistant.
Next up for me personally are Water Follies, Kitchen Confidential, and Pacific Rift.
I might throw in The Book of Joe by Jonathan Topper just to break up that string of nonfiction.
U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton. A teeny bit long and repetitious, but it’s getting pretty good now.
Next on my list is The First Rule (featuring Joe Pike) by Robert Crais.
That’s what I’m reading now. I wish I were a member of that bookreading group, because I often have no idea what’s going on. They are very narrative and conversational stories, which suddenly take weird twists and turns.
Was Blackout more like her funny books, like To Say Nothing of the Dog (which I absolutely have to reread), or more serious like … that other one about the plague? Either way, I’ll read it eventually, but I’m in the mood for funny.
Barbara Hambly has another historical mystery series I really like, the Benjamin January series that starts with A Free Man Of Color and is about (duh) a free black man in antebellum New Orleans who solves crimes in the demimonde. Not supernatural, though.
It wasn’t as sad as Doomsday Book, but it wasn’t a comedy, either. Other than a few funny scenes it’s pretty serious.
I’ve just looked up Hambly. The Benjamin January books sound good. Looks like she writes in several genres. And ooh, there’s a sequel to Those Who Hunt The Night.
This evening I read Something’s Not Quite Right by the New Yorker artist Guy Billout with my boys. It’s a collection of surreal, almost photorealistic paintings with odd titles. We all liked it.
I’ve started Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel Star Trek: The Next Generation: Q&A, set not long after the events of the movie ST Nemesis. Q shows up to bedevil Capt. Picard yet again, as well as his mostly-new crew (but with Worf as his new First Officer and LaForge still as his Chief Engineer). I’m about halfway through and it’s so-so; the dialogue is a little clunky.
Nice romantic scene at the end, I agree, but it couldn’t make me overlook the paternal (and slightly creepy) nature of their relationship up to that point. And boy, Heyer’s classism (almost racism?) was really overt in this book. I enjoy Heyer’s more sensible heroines, and the couples who are more equally matched, so I look forward to Devil’s Cub.
I read The Man Who Folded Himself last night, a short time-travel novel written in 1973 by David Gerrold (of The Trouble With Tribbles fame). It was interesting, but not really my cup of tea. It read like a treatise on the possibilities of a certain flavor of time travel, rather than a novel.
I’m about to start Three Men in a Boat.
I gave up on *The Secret Atlas *by Michael Stackpole. By page 35 I had my fill of unpronounceable names, unidentifiable characters and wooden writing, so back to the used book store it goes.
I started Honor’s Kingdom, by Owen Parry, set in 1860s London and involving Confederate diplomatic shenanigans. Muuuch better.
I too gave it up. I have enjoyed a few of his books, most specifically *Talion: Revenant *but lately he’s been a disappointment. I wish he would return to Talion: Revenant it had potential.
I finally decided that ‘The Service’ is just not a very good book; anyone wanting to check out the oeuvre of the late Paul Quarrington would do well to pass it over and start with King Leary, Whale Music or Home Game. Sorry, Paul.
Meanwhile, I’ve been burning through the poetry during rehearsals. Some of these are first encounters, some are re-readings. From most recommended to least (though all of these are worth reading) -
Crabwise to the Hounds - Jeramy Dodds
Kinetic Mustache - Arthur Clark
The Hayflick Limit - Matthew Tierney
Strike/Slip - Don McKay
The Cinnamon Peeler - Michael Ondaatje
A Well-Mannered Storm - Kate Braid
To This Cedar Fountain - Kate Braid
The Essential Don Coles - Don Coles
Letters to a Musical Friend - William Aide
The Reflecting Pool - Maleea Acker
In the Ward - Lawren Harris
I’m not sure what I’ll read next for prose - perhaps the biography of Gabriel Fauré by Jessica Duchen or perhaps I’ll get started on Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. I also just picked up a copy of Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder - he’s the Science Fiction Writer in Residence at the Toronto Public Library this year. I’ve immensely enjoyed Ventus and Lady of Mazes.
And I have a ton of poetry to get through while I have the time…
Just finished Cast Member Confidential: a Disneyfied memoir, by Chris Mitchell. The experiences of a young man working as a photographer at Disney World. It’s an interesting look behind the scenes, but I could have done without some of the details of people’s sex lives. My daughter thought the same.
Beginning on Priceless: the myth of fair value (and how to take advantage of it), by William Poundstone.
You know, I completely agree with this. Maybe it’s why I love his writing so much, it’s so evocative and yet his vision of the world is so different and so much more inventive than mine that I’m never bored. I completely understand those who can’t get into his novels, or think that he’s too wordy or metaphorical. But when I read sentences like this (from Winter’s Tale):
and this:
almost right along side bits like this:
I’ve gotta love the guy. 
Yeah – I’m [resolutely? pathologically? obnoxiously?] against prose that draws any kind of attention to itself, but Helprin absolutely gets a pass from me on it. Perhaps because of the “is/isn’t our world” thing? Because how else can you communicate it? I’m thinking here of the rather brief section about Peter Lake living above the ceiling in Grand Central Station, for instance.
Of course, his stuff doesn’t always work – speaking of Hardesty, the interlude with the incompetent dwarf really pulled me out of the story. (I’m not much past that right now – he just met Virginia.)
Definitely enjoying it – he’s a hell of a writer. *Con brio! *
Heh. It did kind of step out of the narrative, but I enjoyed it. It reminded me a little of a Looney Toons intermission. Heck, I even got GQ thread out of it
(minor spoilers in the thread).
Discarded in favor of Flow: the Cultural Story of Menstruation, by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim.
Finished Enigma, by Robert Harris. Good, but not quite as good as his Roman stories I’ve read. That could be because I got bogged down a bit in the code-breaking esoterica; some of that was a little hard to follow. But still good, and a nice little twist at the end. Reminded me a little of John le Carre.
And good news! I was going to break down and finally order Harris’ Fatherland from Kinokuniya Bookstore, but first I again checked the two branches that are convenient to me. And it was on the shelf of the second one I checked, in The Emporium. Bought it and one other of his that I had not read, a newer book called The Ghost. I’m saving those to take with me to Vietnam in early April.
Meanwhile, I’ve checked one more of his out of the library: Archangel.
Hope you like Fatherland as much as I did. There was a movie based on Enigma a few years back: Enigma (2001 film) - Wikipedia
Finished it tonight. Meh. Not the best Trek novel I’ve read, not by a long shot, although it had a nice series of scenes set in alternate universes. I’m a sucker for alternate universes.
Also finished Kin Platt’s The Blue Man, a 1961 juvenile sf/adventure novel that I barely remembered from my elementary school days. I’d liked it then, but it didn’t live up to my admittedly-vague recollection. Pretty good setup but a disappointing conclusion.
On to Twain next.
Finished The Magician the second book of the *Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel *series. Although this is a YA book, I am quite enjoying it. It is fast-paced, has an intricate plot and is well-written.
Twin 15-year-old siblings Sophie and Josh Newman take summer jobs in San Francisco across the street from one another: she at a coffee shop, he at a bookstore owned by Nick and Perry Fleming. Nick turns out to be the legendary (and immortal) Nicholas Flammel and he and his wife take the twins on adventure to prevent the return of the Elders.
In scope it is easily on par with Harry Potter and IMO better written. (This is not to imply that this series is derivative. Both series are YA and both are fantasy and magic - but that is where the comparison ends.)