Thanks for the recommendations, Siam, I’ll probably look into both in due time.
Still waiting for the new David Mitchell – two day Amazon shipping, my ass.
I rummaged through the closet and found The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. Never saw the movie so don’t know what to expect. An alien comes to Earth and hires an attorney to patent a bunch of inventions because he needs half a billion dollars. Not sure why he needs the money, but the planet he came from is dying and water is precious. Maybe he needs to build a water-making machine? Whatever, I really like Tevis and so far, I’m enjoying this.
Thanks, I may look for that - I haven’t read it myself.
I’ve just picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward. I haven’t seen the TV series yet. I’ve only read one other Sawyer book, Hominds, and while I liked the story, I didn’t care for his writing. But he’s popular, so I thought I’d try one more book.
Just finished rereading one of my favorite books, Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, a novel about the lives and loves of three men vying to become British prime minister. Very readable, very interesting.
Now I’ve started George Washington: Writings by the Library of America, a collection of Washington’s letters, journals, reports, speeches and proclamations. I’ve worked my way up to the French and Indian War, and the young Virginia militia colonel’s report on General Braddock’s defeat. The book is more than 1000 pages on very thin archival paper. I kind of doubt I’ll read it all the way through - may jump around a bit and try to catch the highlights.
As alluded to in the post-apocalyptic book thread I am currently reading Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx. It is, to paraphrase from here, a farce on the human condition masquerading as a dystopian science-fiction story.
Also I am in the middle of Remember You’re a One-Ball! by Quentin S. Crisp. It’s a kind of psychological-horror coming-of-age story about that one kid who seems to be nearly universally picked on in school.
Awesome. I didn’t know he had a new book. I’ll have to get it, I really love his work.
As for me, I just finished Perdido Street Station by China Mieville which I liked a lot and am now going back and forth between the Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I recently read The Passage by Justin Cronin. It was really good. As I’m now into the Stieg Larsson trilogy (second book–don’t spoil it).
The Passage reminded me of The Stand, maybe that’s why Uncle Steve liked it so much. Do all undead things go to Vegas?
Is that the new marketing meme?
I really did like The Passage and I’m looking forward to the next book 
Finished Heal Your Mind, Rewire Your Brain.
While I don’t disagree with the core of her message, a lot of the book felt like pseudoscience.
I do strongly believe that meditation can have some real health benefits, I even think that much of the techniques she teaches have benefit - but I also felt that her explanations were often psychobabble.
For now I say skip it, but I after I read some of the other books on the market I may change my mind.
The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains
This one is kind of pissing me off. Carr starts out laying out a very interesting history of communication media and how it affected thought. He even points out the times in history when there was fear among the scholars that a new medium would destroy learning.
…and then he starts whining about how the internet is going to make us all stupid.
His data, thus far, seems to be mostly anecdotal - “My middle-aged friends and I find ourselves sometimes unable to remember things we read a week ago! Damn you internets!” - and he hilariously avoids even contemplating that maybe he’s just going through normal memory aging.
Oh well, I’ve got about a third of the book left. Maybe he can salvage it with some good reasoning. Like I said, the first third of the book was very interesting, the middle third has been annoying to me.
Anyways, this one is getting a lot of good press but I disagree with it.
By the time you get to the final third, will you even be able to remember what the author wrote in the first third? Y’know, what with teh Internets and all… 
What? Was I reading that?
Thanks to watching most of the History Channel’s marathon of the Revolution, I’ve developed something of a crush on George Washington and am itching to read more about him. I thought I’d start with James Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man, but I’ll see if I can find Washington’s Writings to learn more about the man from his own pen. ISTR he wrote (or someone compiled his writings into) a little book on etiquette for gentlemen – I want to find that, too. That grim courtly stoicism of his: soooo dreamy. 
On a very different note, I recently finished Loren Estleman’s Book of Murdock, which is a western mystery about a sheriff’s deputy with a shady past who has to disguise himself as a minister to gather information about a string of robberies in west Texas. I really enjoyed it – the voice of the narrator is very colorful and seemed authentic to the time and place of the story, and I’m always up for a good fake preacher story (this is a surprisingly not-uncommon trope, I’ve found). I’ve just started another Estleman western, The Branch and the Scaffold, a fictional take on real-life “Hanging Judge”, Isaac Parker, and his heavy hand doling out executions, which should be good.
Side note: Judge Parker’s courtroom and gallows have been preserved in Fort Smith, Arkansas as a historic site. Well worth a look if you’re ever in the neighborhood. That’s Judge Parker whom John Wayne is testifying to in a trial early in the film True Grit (1969), and I believe he’s also depicted in the book. A fictionalized version of him and Fort Smith, both renamed, appear in the Clint Eastwood film Hang 'Em High (1968).
I’ve long been an admirer of Washington, and was very pleased when he won the greatest U.S. President game we had here awhile back. The Flexner book is excellent. Writings begins with the very rules of civility you mentioned - he didn’t make them up himself, but copied them as a writing exercise when he was a schoolboy. The last of them is still deservedly the best-known: George Washington's Rules of Civility : NPR. I’d be glad to recommend other books on Washington, if you like.
And, on a very un-Washington note, I just raced through Joe David Brown’s 1971 novel Addie Pray, which inspired the movie Paper Moon. Much as I love the movie, the novel is even better, and longer, as it includes three other scams that are just as deliciously clever.
Wasn’t it four? two Tories and two Labour?
I’m just beginning Elizabeth and Mary, a dual biography of Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Fascinating.
Zipped through Sh*t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern. Cute. His dad seems a lot like Red Foreman from That Seventies Show, but with more shit and less foot in your ass.
Now I’m reading Blue Denim, a play about abortion. Also started on a YA audiobook, The Red Pyramid.
Did you like it enough to try the TV show based on it?
Yeah, I’d be willing to check out the show, but I don’t know if there’s really enough material to support it. The book was very short.
I’ll likely give it a go too, although I haven’t read the source yet.
Yes, please! I’m up for reading anything except the six(?)-volume bio by Richard Brookhiser.