Finished Moonlight Mile; now beginning Lehane’s Sacred and Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum, both at the same time.
I’m working on this one currently. I can’t say I buy the premise that these movies and these fairy tales have any actual connection, but I don’t care. It’s fun to read anyway.
About halfway through “Concrete Blonde”, a Harry Bosch cop novel by Michael Connelly.
Still enjoying Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It fell to me to pick my book club’s book for our Feb. 25 meeting, so I picked this - it’ll give me an even better incentive to finish it soon! (It’s a big but very readable book).
I finished Side Jobs (great, as expected) and snuck in a trashy romance called Skintight (that I think I learned about in another Dope thread): it was ok, I guess, but reminded me why I don’t read trashy romances. :smack:
I’m currently reading UR, the Kindle-and-audio-only novella about a Kindle by Stephen King. It had a bit of a slow start, but I’m approaching the middle and it seems to be picking up steam. I’m hanging in there because it’s Stephen King, and I figure that by the end I’ll like it more than I think.
When I finished Side Jobs I also downloaded King’s Full Dark No Stars, Joe Hill’s Horns (thanks to the December thread), and Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (also thanks to the December thread). I’m also still reading Grimm Pictures, and I also still have As Meat Loves Salt waiting for me.
Yeah, some of the connections are a bit tenuous, but I find them all interesting to think about (even if I eventually conclude “that was a bit of a stretch”). 
I finished the Bryson book last night. I’m still a bit put off by his querulous tone, but then he was charming and funny at times. He rallied somewhat towards the end, perhaps trying to make up for his negativity by waxing poetically over the things he loves about Britain. I’ll try another of his books.
I’ve reading Bernard Cornwell’s novel Agincourt, which is the first of his books I’ve read outside the Sharpe series. It had a pretty clunky start, but I’m warming up to it. His characterization isn’t exactly deep, but I do like the dialogue.
Do you mean Bryson book about the history of the home? I liked that one very much. My other favorite of his is the one he wrote about Australia. His basic theme is that the entire country is filled with animals that will kill you.
I just finished:
It’s All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece has Shaped Our World by Charlotte Higgins;
Fannie’s Last Supper: Recreating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook by Charles Kimball;
Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul Offit
and
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.
If you’ve never taken any classes in classics you’ll find the book on ancient Greece very insightful. I only took one in college so I greatly enjoyed her perspective.
The basic theme of the book on Fannie Farmer is what the hell can we do to make this disgusting stuff edible. None of it makes you want to go out and actually use the recipes in the original book. Amusing but read only if you have a strong stomach.
Offit’s book is a must read. He’s a little too kind to the pharmaceutical companies but he does an excellent job skewering the anti-vax nuts.
Demick’s book is both heartbreaking and fascinating. The truly awful nature of the current North Korean government can hardly be believed. She chooses a narrative form that stresses the lives of individual North Koreans as they confront the lunacy of their government.
No, Notes from a Small Island, which is an account of his wandering from one small town to another, more or less at random, all over the island of Great Britain.
Although I can’t start it yet, I just got the latest Nikki Heat in (by Richard Castle).
The first one was light and fun and I will read it after I finish my current.
I’m reading **The Blue Hour **by T. Jefferson Parker.
Parker is an author who seems incapable of writing a bad, or even an indifferent, book.
Finished Wolfsbane (Aralorn) by Patricia Briggs.
I usually read Briggs for her urban fantasy which I enjoy, however this is a more traditional fantasy. It was fast-paced and overall I enjoyed it. I would have enjoyed it more had I known that it was not the first in a series (I think it was the second) and had I read the first book(s).
Next up: the new Nikki Heat novel by Richard Castle.
After reading a few books by Murakami, whom I love, I am now reading The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch. It’s okay. I got a Kindle a few weeks ago, and this is the second Kindle book I bought. I’m kind of disappointed that so many books I like aren’t on Kindle, or are but cost more than I’d ever spend on a book. Most of the books I’ve read in the last few years have come either from the library, which of course is free, the library used book store, or garage sales. I’m not used to paying full price for a book (as an author I hate to admit that), so my Kindle library is pretty thin.
Last year I read some great books, including several by Sarah Waters and The Outlander by Gil Adamson.
Finished Naked Heat the lastest Nikki Heat novel from Richard Castle.
As mentioned in the past the Heat novels are light quick reads that read pretty much like one of the shows. I enjoyed it, even if I did guess most of it early on.
Next up: I Am Number Four
Finished Concrete Blonde and Black Echo and am wrapping up Black Ice, all by Michael Connelly. I think I’m done with him for a very long while. Looking forward to starting Stalingrad, by Antony Beevor.
A year old, but well worth a read: The Onion marks the death of J.D. Salinger. Genius, sheer genius, I tell you!: Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
In order read, which also reflects order of increasing enthusiasm on my part:
Ibid by Mark Dunn. Guy who wrote Ella Minnow Pea, a wordplay comedy/satire that I liked quite a bit. This one is about a guy with three legs who invents men’s deodorant (:dubious:), and it’s told entirely through the footnotes of a lost manuscript. Comedy is hard, man (dying is easy) and this one didn’t work all that well. I smiled a few times, laughed out loud once, but mostly was just kind of disappointed that it didn’t work better.
How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis. Examination of four recent scandals: the diapered astronaut, Linda Tripp, and James Frey, plus one other one that happened in NY that I have zero recollection of. Kipnis had some interesting things to say about the dynamics of scandal.
The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry. The true story of the women murderesses in Chicago in the '20s, and the women who reported on them (plus a female attorney who defended at least one of them). Yup, this was all the basis of the movie Chicago, and the last section of the book looks at the path from the true events to that show and movie. [I did not know that story, so I enjoyed the “no shit, that’s what happened?” element of this, which I won’t spoiler if anyone else is equally ignorant of it.] Well done and interesting.
I’ve just read two more books in the Amelia Peabody series - The Falcon at the Portal and He Shall Thunder in the Sky. They were really great. This series has gradually evolved from light, rather silly mysteries into books that are more substantial and emotionally intense - but still amusing. A few books ago the author began to include a third-person narrative from Peabody’s son, interspersed with Peabody’s usual first-person narrative, and that has given the books a welcome new perspective. He Shall Thunder in the Sky takes place during WWI, when Britain has formally annexed Egypt, Cairo is under martial law, and the Suez Canal is in danger of being captured by the Turks.
I’m now reading the third book in Ruth Downie’s Gaius Petreius Ruso series, Persona Non Grata. These are murder mysteries set in Roman Britain, and they’re similar in tone to Lindsey Davis’s Falco books. The first one, called Medicus, is available free right now on Amazon for the Kindle.
Linkto February’s thread.
Just finished:
Corupted Science by John Grant. Excellent and compelling (although often brief) treatments of bad science. Now I want to get the other books in his series.
They Called me Mad by John Monahan. Bios of real-life “Mad Scientists”. I bought the book a couple of weeks ago from the author.
Is He Dead? a play by Mark Twain. I’m a big Twain fan, and I didn’t even know this existed, much less that it got produced, for the first time, only a couple of years ago. Fascinating, but disappointing.
Rumpole’s Christmas – one of the last of John Mortimer’s books
I’ve got a stack of books still waiting to be read, including the first volume of Twain’s newly-released autobiography.
A lot of what I’ve read lately was from recs in these threads.
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. Liked it.
Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan. Loved it, kept surprising me in good ways.
The first two Falco books by Lindsey Davis. The character has more depth than I thought at first, and this is the most use I’ve ever had for those two years of high school Latin I had to take.
I really tried with Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys but I just couldn’t get into it. I know how mood-dependent that can be, so I’ll try it again later.
Usually I can’t take twenty-somethings-in-NYC cuteness, but Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman, her story of getting dumped, was okay and often funny.
The last Dick Francis book, Crossfire, was decent.
More of my books have been via audiobooks recently. Now, there’s definitely a slightly lower standard there. I don’t want to listen to great literature as much as read it; otherwise you miss too much. The best audiobooks are a little junky so if you get a bit distracted and miss something, it doesn’t really matter and you don’t need to rewind.
The reader for The Help by Kathryn Stockett did the accents really well, and the story was perfect.
Sara Gruen’s Ape House was fine as an audiobook, kind of predictable, and not as good as Water for Elephants.
I listened to my first Elmore Leonard audiobook, Djibouti, and though the reader was good, I couldn’t tell if I would have found it equal to his best written works if I’d read it instead. I think Leonard goes into the read-only pile.
Davis Sedaris’* Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk* had a couple of mild laughs at unexpected phrases, but seemed like he only wrote it to pay some bills.
I swear I’m quitting Patricia Cornwell. I only finished Port Mortuary it because I was doing something mindless and boring and needed a distraction. The reader has kind of a distraught relentless monotone (even during mundane exposition), and the characters are so grim and joyless, I’m done.
I listened to several hours of Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn while I was literally digging a ditch. Thought it would help me get into the Vietnam hooch mentality, and I liked it mostly, but I think the pacing was just too slow to listen to without my mind wandering. I will try it in print where I can read it fast and keep things moving.
I’ve read most of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone books and am almost through my first audiobook. The reader has a nice pace and voices, but she mispronounces the heroine’s name. Is it just me, or is the shortened form of Sharon, “Shar”, pronounced as if you just left off the “or” and not to rhyme with “car”? I kept getting confused, thinking there was a character called Charlotte being referred to as “Char”. I know it’s a nitpick but it keeps taking me out of the performance.
Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars was almost as good as Stiff. The reader is good at transmitting her dry humor.