# Whatcha Readin' Jan 10 Edition **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 31, 2009, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210 "2009-12-31T18:38:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2010, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/41 "2010-01-06T20:36:18Z")
> [@Eleanor\_of\_Aquitaine](#): > > I just finished _The Blade Itself_, and I really loved it. Great writing, terrific characterization and amazing fight scenes. I’m off to order the rest of the trilogy. Great! Since you liked the first (slowest) one, you’re in for a real treat with the other two. Abercrombie’s my favorite fantasy writer right now. ---
**Author:** ![Lethal\_Babydoll](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3be4f8/32.png) [@Lethal\_Babydoll](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lethal_Babydoll)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/42 "2010-01-08T05:03:18Z")
> [@SuntanTigerTamer](#): > > Just finished Hyperion and Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. Man, those are great books. I just finished my first Steven Brust novel, **The Phoenix Guards**. Very enjoyable. I’m reading Poul Anderson’s **For Love and Glory** and Umberto Eco’s **Baudolino**. Eco is one of the most unique authors ever. ---
**Author:** ![valleyofthedolls](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a4c791/32.png) [@valleyofthedolls](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/valleyofthedolls)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/43 "2010-01-08T08:03:00Z")
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. After that, comes Early Bird by Rodney Rothman. And after that, I’ve been stuck on pg. 72 of the Magic Mountain for the past couple of years, my monthly pledge is to plow through it. Maybe this time I’ll actually do it. ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/44 "2010-01-08T12:55:22Z")
Finished _Sandman Slim_ a sort of magic noir thriller. James Stark is a young magician betrayed by his fellow magicians and sent to hell - alive. He lives there for 11 years as gladiator in their arena - until his girlfriend is killed on earth. He breaks free from hell and seeks vengeance. It was a fast-paced and mostly enjoyable ride. Stark (we never find out why he is called Sandman Slim, that name shows up late in the book with little explanation) is a likeable antihero and fans of Jim Butcher will feel at home in this world. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I do Butcher’s work, but it was a good beginning (if indeed it becomes a series) to a series that has potential. ---
**Author:** ![yellowval](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/919ad9/32.png) [@yellowval](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowval)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/45 "2010-01-08T14:17:24Z")
I’m halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo. That’s 616 pages, the end of the first volume of my library’s copy. Unfortunately the library has been closed because of the weather but hopefully I can get there today to get Volume II. Meanwhile I started Light on Snow by Anita Shreve. It should be a quick read, and a nice break from Monte Cristo. Still listening to Pillars of the Earth as well. I’ll admit, I’m not loving it so far (11 discs into it or so). ---
**Author:** ![TheMerchandise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b487fb/32.png) [@TheMerchandise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheMerchandise)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/46 "2010-01-08T15:05:38Z")
> [@Khadaji](#): > > Finished _Sandman Slim_ a sort of magic noir thriller. James Stark is a young magician betrayed by his fellow magicians and sent to hell - alive. He lives there for 11 years as gladiator in their arena - until his girlfriend is killed on earth. He breaks free from hell and seeks vengeance. > > It was a fast-paced and mostly enjoyable ride. Stark (we never find out why he is called Sandman Slim, that name shows up late in the book with little explanation) is a likeable antihero and fans of Jim Butcher will feel at home in this world. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I do Butcher’s work, but it was a good beginning (if indeed it becomes a series) to a series that has potential. I definitely felt that _Sandman Slim_ belonged below The Dresden Files but above Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, in the grand scheme of “Urban Fantasy with Gritty Male Detective Heroes” literature. I’m working on that genre name, by the way. ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/47 "2010-01-08T16:22:45Z")
> [@TheMerchandise](#): > > I definitely felt that _Sandman Slim_ belonged below The Dresden Files but above Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, in the grand scheme of “Urban Fantasy with Gritty Male Detective Heroes” literature. I’m working on that genre name, by the way. Yes, I totally agree. I still read Green, but only as filler. ---
**Author:** ![Surly\_Chick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Surly\_Chick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surly_Chick)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2010, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/48 "2010-01-08T16:31:49Z")
I love these threads because there are so many good suggestions! Although I, too, just read The Little Stranger and was vastly annoyed by it. I think someone recommended it in last month’s thread. I just finished the Samantha Kincaid series by Alafair Burke. Light, diverting, detective fiction. ---
**Author:** ![delphica](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@delphica](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/delphica)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2010, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/49 "2010-01-09T01:46:30Z")
I will try to track down that book about the death of the Sherlock Holmes scholar and report back. _The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane_ by Katherine Howe. Meh, based on reviews, I was expecting more from this. Grad student gets involved in mystical goings-on while researching a Salem witch. Overall, too flighty for my taste. _Satchel_ by Larry Tye. Biography of Satchel Paige, it was pretty good and a nice overview of the era of Negro League Baseball and then the integration of the Major Leagues. I felt the author was a little too hesitant to examine some of Paige’s foibles with a more critical eye. _A Quiet Belief in Angel_ by R.J. Ellory. Excellent! Recommended by sigmagirl (I think) in a previous Whatcha Readin thread. The plot is driven by a series of child murders … but it’s not a thriller style book in any way, it’s very thoughtful and complex and touching. My only tiny quibble is that it’s a very atmospheric book … and sometimes I was all set with the atmospheric description and yet it kept going ON and ON. _Sea of Poppies_ by Amitav Ghosh. So awesome. Pirates, opium, and romance set in India (and on the high seas) during the Raj. Historical fiction/adventure type stuff, but a lot of substance as well. It’s the first in a planned trilogy, so it just kinda ends in the middle of events, but I’m very much looking forward to future books. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/50 "2010-01-10T02:27:14Z")
Just picked up at the library and read, all in one day, _Resistance_ by Owen Sheers. It’s an alt-history novel set in the immediate aftermath of a Nazi invasion of the U.K. A small German patrol is sent to occupy an isolated area of Wales and settles into an uneasy peace with the women of the local farms, all of whose husbands have gone off to join the British Resistance movement. It was an interesting premise (all the more so because I’d not long ago read a nonfiction account of the long-secret preparations for resisting a German invasion, _The Last Ditch_ by David Lampe), but the book fell short of its potential, I thought. ---
**Author:** ![Billy-o](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@Billy-o](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Billy-o)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/51 "2010-01-10T03:15:15Z")
_Zorba the Greek_, by Nikos Kazantzakis. I just finished reading his _The Greek Passion_, which I mostly enjoyed, though I had definite mixed feelings about it from a plausibility standpoint. _Zorba_ is a much easier read, and certainly much more optimistic. Has anyone who’s read _Zorba_ here seen the movie? Do you recommend it? ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/52 "2010-01-10T05:14:26Z")
I just this minute finished “Ysabel” by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’m happy to report that this is the best thing he’s written in years. I’ve enjoyed his writing for years, but I have found the last few to have become formulaic. Well written, engaging, but formulaic. “Ysabel” is quite a departure for him - the setting is _not_ an alternative history and there’s more of the supernatural in this story, yet he has not lost the intrigue and engaging plots that make him such a pleasure to read. I loved it, and I’m so glad to see an author I like throwing me a change up. Next up - “Music Criticisms” by Eduard Hanslick, translated by Henry Pleasants. [Eduard Hanslick](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Hanslick) was a music critic for the Wiener Musik-Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse who is now chiefly remembered for his anti-Wagnerian aesthetic. He was the real-life prototype for the character Beckmesser in Wagner’s 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg". There’s a certain deliciousness in the fact that this collection of his music criticisms is translated by [Henry Pleasants](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Pleasants_(music_critic)), who was himself a conservative (some would say ‘reactionary’) music critic. Pleasants was the author of “The Agony of Modern Music”. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/53 "2010-01-10T06:53:04Z")
I’ve recently been reading a lot of late 19th/early 20th century history. I just started _After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905_ by Patricia Beard. ---
**Author:** ![Enterprise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/76d3ee/32.png) [@Enterprise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enterprise)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/54 "2010-01-10T09:48:15Z")
I’m a bit undecided about what’s next on my reading list. I just finished two installments from the Dresden Files – _Dead Beat_ and _Proven Guilty_. I emjoyed them both, as usual. Surprisingly, Butcher’s schtick of ending every chapter with a new difficulty for Harry isn’t really getting old, and there was quite a bit of movement in the last couple of books that I thought went over really well. But I’d like to save the next volumes for sometime in the summer, so I got a couple of books that I could start now: Jim Butcher’s _Furies of Calderon_, the first book of his fantasy series Codex Alera. _The Mammoth Book of Men O’War_, edited by Mike Ashley – a compilation of short story-esque age-of-fighting sail texts. I say “esque” because it appears some of them are chapters from books. Jason Lutes’s _Berlin: City of Stones_ graphic novel. This looks interesting, but among graphic novels, I still could also start (in earnest, rather than just browse through) Charles Burns’s _Black Hole_ or Craig Thompson’s _Blankets_. I got a cheap copy of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ by Robert E. Heinlein, and an even cheaper one of Alexander McCall Smith’s _The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency_. Plus oodles of unread zombie fiction… Not sure what I’ll start on. Meanwhile, for work (not that I want to bore you!) I’m reading Anthony D. Smith’s _Nationalism_, David Waldstreicher’s _In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes_ and Berube and Roodgard’s _A Call to the Sea: Commodore Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution_. ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/55 "2010-01-10T13:37:22Z")
> [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](#): > > I just this minute finished “Ysabel” by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’m happy to report that this is the best thing he’s written in years. I’ve enjoyed his writing for years, but I have found the last few to have become formulaic. Well written, engaging, but formulaic. “Ysabel” is quite a departure for him - the setting is _not_ an alternative history and there’s more of the supernatural in this story, yet he has not lost the intrigue and engaging plots that make him such a pleasure to read. I loved it, and I’m so glad to see an author I like throwing me a change up. > \ I enjoyed it too - and enjoyed seeing some “old friends” in it. I stopped reading him a while ago, even though I used to really enjoy his work, but this was a good one. ---
**Author:** ![ivan\_astikov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/58f4c7/32.png) [@ivan\_astikov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivan_astikov)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/56 "2010-01-10T14:01:37Z")
I’ve just finished Milan Kundera’s The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting. A disjointed, yet strangely flowing experience, that resonates within for reasons I can’t put my finger on at this moment. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/57 "2010-01-10T18:43:36Z")
> [@Enterprise](#): > > …Alexander McCall Smith’s _The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency_… Highly recommended. My book club read that, the first book in the series, several years ago and we all liked it: funny, quirky, whimsical mysteries with a serious core. There’s a BBC/HBO television series based on the books, too. ---
**Author:** ![Eleanor\_of\_Aquitaine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a88e4f/32.png) [@Eleanor\_of\_Aquitaine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eleanor_of_Aquitaine)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/58 "2010-01-10T19:54:10Z")
I just finished another installment of the Amelia Peabody mysteries, _Lion in the Valley_. These are fun, light reads, set in the late 19th century, and are partly a parody of old adventure novels. The Englishwoman Peabody solves mysteries during archeological expeditions in Egypt, along with her dynamic husband and extremely precocious son. While waiting for my Abercrombie books I’ve gotten in the in the mood for some hard science fiction, so I’ve started Vinge’s _A Deepness in the Sky_, the Hugo winner from 2000. I wasn’t blown away by _A Fire Upon the Deep_, but I liked it well enough to try another of Vinge’s books. ---
**Author:** ![Gulo\_gulo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bcef8e/32.png) [@Gulo\_gulo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gulo_gulo)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/59 "2010-01-10T20:58:56Z")
Finished: **Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales** ~ For the most part a cool collection of myths, stories, and tranditions but drags in some places. **In the Woods by Tana French** ~ Loved this book. I can’t wait to read her next one. **Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres** ~ I was thinking to start focusing on classics again this year. I enjoyed this but the ending chapters just infuriated me. **Lift by Rebecca O’Connor** ~ Wonderful memoir written by a falconer who trains her first peregrine falcon. My only complaint is this book is too short. Presently Reading: **Empress (Godspeaker Trilogy, Book One) by Karen Miller** All this talk about Sherlock Holmes makes me want to reread the stories. Of course they’re still in boxes. I haven’t been able to unpack any books yet since I have nowhere to put them. ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2010, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210/60 "2010-01-10T22:53:35Z")
> [@Gulo\_gulo](#): > > **In the Woods by Tana French** ~ Loved this book. I can’t wait to read her next one. I usually like the books you like, so I went to Amazon to check this one out. There were a lot of one-star reviews complaining that French left the central mystery unsolved. Do you agree? Does it matter? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whatcha-readin-jan-10-edition/523210.md?page=4)