Well Memorial day is here and the hot sticky weather is soon upon us. Now is the time to gather your beach readers and take leisurely breaks along the ocean. Enjoy!
I am reading Simon Green’s The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny, part of his Nightside series. It is no better nor worse than the rest of the series.
I have just finished The Juice Fasting Bible: Discover the Power of an All-Juice Diet to Restore Good Health, Lose Weight and Increase Vitality. Just got a juicer, so I thought I would give it a read. I am not convinced that juice fasting will be the miracle cure-all that the book would have us believe. Which doesn’t really bother me - I was going to use the juicer anyway.
Juicing is a wonderful snack or quick meal replacement. I found if you go for All Meals all the time thing, you will end up having sharts in your pants. YMMV.
I just finished the first three stories from Stephen King’s Different Seasons and am about to start on the last one. I completed “The Body” last night before bed. I’d read the book before, but I’d forgotten how well-written that one was. I also liked “Apt Pupil” a lot better this time around than the last time (which was like 15 years ago or so, maybe 20).
Not sure what’s next. I picked up a few Chandler mysteries recently, as well as Neil Stephenson’s Anathem, but I may go with Kathyrn Stockett’s The Help, which has been on my reading pile for a long time.
If you like novels about dysfunctional families, you’ll love The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. Four wives, 28 children, living in three houses. Chaos. Udall focuses on the husband/father, and one wife (the newest one) and one child, 11-year-old Rusty, who we meet when he’s trying on a sister’s underwear.
I’m reading Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre. I’m not getting all the Scottish slang and there’s a bit too much vomiting and shitting going on, but I think I like it. The guy writes good dialogue.
I recently was gifted an iPad by my husband.
The Alchemist is my first book using iPad.
So far, I love the convenience and the portability.
Except, I cannot read in the bathtub.
Not a big deal, but nevertheless.
I cannot pass the book onto friends … Not a big deal, but still a mild loss.
Over the weekend I read Blindsight, a hard science fiction first-contact novel by Peter Watts. I picked it at random from the list of recent Hugo award nominees (trying to get caught up with newer science fiction). I really liked it. There’s a lot of stuff in there about how fragile our reality is - how easy it is to fool the brain into seeing/hearing/feeling what doesn’t exist, and ignoring what does. In his notes the author points to a websitewith videos of experiments demonstrating “change blindness”. I’m pretty sure I’d be one of those people who wouldn’t notice that the person with whom I *started *a conversation wasn’t the same person with whom I *finished *the conversation.
Right now I’m reading Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, selected because I liked the Hugh Grant movie. I know that the book came first, so it’s unfair to complain that the book is reading like a movie novelization, but I’m pretty bored with it.
I read Stephen King’s newest, Blockade Billy, which took about an hour. It includes the titular novella and another story, Morality. Neither was anything special. If you’re not a King fan or book collector, don’t bother.
I’m on to The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Ellen Datlow. Over halfway through, and I’m underwhelmed.
I’m just dropping in to plug a book I just finished on the plane, Doug Dorst’s Alive in Necropolis, which despite the stupid title and silly title graphic is a clever and engaging novel. It’s set in Colma, San Francisco’s cemetary city, and involves growing into adulthood (at thirty and at sixteen), ghosts, and ghostly murders. Great book.
I finished The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs. The premise is interesting – Jacobs reads the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica in a year and chronicles the experience – but the author’s personality is so heinous it made reading the book a chore.
I started listening to Street Gang by Michael Davis this morning, a history of Sesame Street. Carroll Spinney, the voice of Big Bird, narrates the audiobook.
Obabakoak, by Bernardo Atxaga. One of only a hundred or so books written in Basque in four centuries, and supposedly had some surreal elements, so I thought I had to give it a try (reading it in English, though :)).
I’m slogging my way through the Anita Blake series. I just finished book 5 at lunch. I’m not sure why I am reading them except I got them all for free, so it didn’t cost me anything (but time). I generally enjoy this genre, but Hamilton’s writing is not getting easier to read.
I swear if she took out everything that was obnoxiously repetitive the books would be a hundred pages each. Do we really need to know her exact outfit, down to shoes, every single time she changes clothes? Do we need to hear about her guns every other page (I don’t even think that’s hyperbole)? It’s starting to get more distracting the more I read. Yet, I keep reading, which says more about me than it does the author, I think.
I just finished The 42nd Parallel, the first book in John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. It was truly excellent, and I recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in the first couple of decades of 20th-century America. He uses a bit of an odd storytelling style though, experimental, in that he separates the story lines of the main characters with “Newsreels,” a couple of pages of headlines and other snippets taken from contemporary newspapers, plus bits of song lyrics; and “The Camera Eye,” sort of a stream-of-concience autobiography of the author’s own life, also a page or two each. The “Newsreels” are okay, but I’m not sure how much I enjoy “The Camera Eye” segments; at least they’re not long. And short biographies of famous and obscure people of the time, anyone from Thomas Edison and Robert La Follette to Jack Reed and Charles Steinmetz. The theme is capitalism versus socialism and how the tension between the two influenced the development of America in the first three decades of the 20th century, and the characters are fascinatingly drawn. When he follows his capitalist characters, you think the author must be a capitalist himself, he’s so sympathetic. Then he follows a socialist character, and you think Ah Ha! He reveals himself now to be a true socialist, he’s so sympathetic to this character. Then back again. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The trilogy was published in one complete volume in 1938 and designed to be read as a whole, but supposedly they can be obtained separately and stand on their own. I have the trilogy in one volume (although not an original). The entire work is 1240 pages, The 42nd Parallel about a third of that. I should have finished this first book ages ago, but the rioting in Bangkok has been a distraction.
I am now about 50 pages into the second book, 1919, and the same characters are continued. In fact, the focus has now shifted to seemingly minor characters in the first book. I know from reading about Dos Passos himself, one of the Lost Generation along with Hemingway, that his political views ran a wide gamut throughout his life, from far left to far right. A social revolutionary who went to Spain during the Civil War, he came to admire Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
I’m at the point in the trilogy now where the US enters World War I, and I’ve read that one character who volunteers and then lives in Paris after the war closely follows Dos Passos’ own career in the war and afterward.
Just finished <re>reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, am almost done with Carl Hiaasen’s SkinnyDip, and got a few more yesterday to last me the month. <They all aren’t as fast <or fun> to get through as Hiaasen’s work, which I just started last night, haha>. So in no particular order will be John Irving’s A Widow for One Year <I loved Garp, long ago; I hope I still like his writing!> ; Gregory Maguire’s Son of a Witch <never did get to phase two of the Wicked stories, seemed about time> ; Tony Hillerman’s Talking God <not a mystery fan, but Hiaasen and Hillerman are a couple of exceptions> ; and rounding it out is one I have read before, but am redoing the series, that being George Martin’s A Clash of Kings.
I also scored a box of random books that a neighbor tossed out, and they ARENT a bunch of romance novels, so I expect to round out the month with that.
I will have to check this out <in English>. My family’s in Boise, and one of my favorite neighbors had a son, who was teaching his two year old daughter 3 languages, being English, Basque and Spanish. Still blows me away that Idaho has the highest concentration of Basques outside the homeland, though I don’t know if that is REALLY true or just touted about. I figure it’s all the sheep.
Love the cover. Amazon wouldn’t give me a reading sample but they had a used copy for $1.95 so I bought it.