Whatcha readin' March (08) edition

Cafe Society
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Are we the same person Khadaji? Because your recent read list is very similar to mine. I also finished up the latest Kitty and the… book the other week. Not terrible, but as you said, mostly fluff.

I also just read Red Seas under Red Skies. Which I didn’t like as much as the first book, The Lies of Locke Lamora. What did you think about it? Like it more than the first?

I just started The Outlaw Demon Wails the latest in the Rachel Morgan series. This may be the last of this series I try unless the author does something different than the last book. If I want melodrama, I’ll pick up a Harliquen Romance or something.

While I can’t think of any thriller stuff on my shelves, I will recommend Orbit. I was surprised that I enjoyed that book quite a bit. Nothing earth shattering or very far out there as far as twists or sci-fi or anything, but an interesting story. Give it a try.

Dung Beetle I’m sorry to hear about your literary plight. So may I make a suggestion or two? First off is www.paperbackswap.com I list the books that I have on my shelf that I’m really not that interested in anymore, and if someone asks for one, I get a credit that I can use to ask for a book from someone else. It’s good for getting those “I sort of want it, but don’t want to spend the money on it” books. All it costs is the price of mailing a book to get another book. Usually around $2.50 or so.

I noticed you listed The Ruins as a book that you had read before. Is it this one? I have that on my shelf, but after I saw a movie about it coming out, I decided to wait to read it. I hate seeing a movie based upon a book that I’d read recently. I’d much rather wait and read the book afterwards.

If you like things in that sort of genre, have you looked at James Rollins? I like a few of his books, and they’re good action/mindless entertainment type reads. Along that same line is The Seven Deadly Wonders which was just fun to read. About the only thing I didn’t like was the author’s tendancy to put any action sequence in italics. I understand he wanted to emphasize certain lines, but it was happening a bit too often. Totally implausible, but a good read. I like the imagry that it was able to conjure up for what things looked like, and I liked even more that he included drawings so I didn’t just have to go on my mental map.
Voyager, may I ask why you’re reading the Tom Swift Jr. books? I read them as a child, and have collected almost all of them in the hopes that my kids will read and enjoy them also. But I have to say that I couldn’t even get halfway through one of them when I tried to re-read them as an adult. Also, are you going to read all the other Tom Swift series that were made? I think they’re up to Tom Swift V or something. Link to a page that has them all listed. I’m also slowly getting these, but I’m not as fanaticle about it.

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I am just about finished King Solomon’s Mines. It was hard for me to get into but the battle just sucked me in.

Also recently completed:

Book of the Dun Cow. An impulse purchase through paperbackswap.com that was ok. It was a bit too good vs evil for me.

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey which I truly enjoyed. I’d like to find more good books on Roosevelt.

Don Quixote is next, no matter how hard I try to resist!

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Yep, that’s the one. I never go to the movies, but if anyone goes to see it and posts about it, I’d be interested to read the thread.

Thanks for your suggestions; I’ll go follow up on that stuff!

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I’m reading Crash by J.G. Ballard right now and I’m really, really regretting it.

It’s on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and was also, for some unknown reason, on one of the bookshelves at home, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Every page goes on and on about bodily injuries and penis, penis, penis, penis, PENIS! I feel repulsed while I’m reading it, but now it’s become a contest between me and the book. I will persevere.

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I read that over Christmas. Really very interesting, I thought - just what would happen if all of humanity disappeared simultaneously? The answers are all in there. Entertaining in a morbid, fatalistic kind of way.

Eleanor, if you haven’t already started Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, I suggest you get the book on tape. His delivery is (more than) half the fun. I’ve heard Sedaris give three or four public readings, IIRC, and always find that I get a lot more out of his spoken version than just the words on the page.

Also, Eleanor, if you liked Joseph Ellis’s His Excellency, I suggest you read his Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers. (Much better than His Excellency, I thought). For a good one-volume book about George Washington, I’d strongly suggest James Flexner’s *Washington: The Indispensable Man * or Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington. The more I learn about the first President, the more impressed, even awed, I am. Ron Chernow is now at work on a Washington bio, and I can’t wait!

Gulo, I read *River of Doubt * with my book club a month or so ago and thought it was pretty good. If you want to read more about Theodore Roosevelt (also a fascinating man), I’d suggest Edmund Morris’s bio series, incl. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex. Really, really good books. David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback is also a terrific look at TR’s childhood.

So what am I reading now?

The Big Kerplop by Bertrand Brinley, about a group of brainy kids in a sleepy town who help the Air Force find a mislaid H-bomb. One of the first adventures of the Mad Scientists Club, which I really enjoyed when I was a kid; now I’m reading this one to my eight-year-old son, who’s also really into it.

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin. Just finished this pretty good book on the contemporary Supreme Court. A nice mix of law, politics, behind-the-scenes gossip and history.

The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien. The Professor’s take on the Oedipus myth, a tragic tale of Middle-earth refined and polished from its Simarillion form.

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I have not read Harrison, although am intrigued because of the Clint Eastwood theme going on. I have read and enjoyed some of Kelly Armstrong and I like some of Briggs. I really liked Huff’s Child of the Grove and thought her Keeper’s Chronicles were OK, but didn’t care for the *Quarter *books and stopped reading her after trying them. I confess though that I usually only read that genre when I don’t feel like investing a lot of effort into my reading. There is an added bonus in that I have a friend who likes those books and I can pass them off to her when I’m done.

I keep thinking that Lynch could be so much better. I love the premise and even like his writing, but the endings always let me down. The “sting” always seems anti-climatic.

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Yeah, he really irritated me in the second one with that 'This is how they did it". Oh come on…you really don’t have to talk like I’m an idiot. Sure you need to offer a little explination for how that scene came about, but there are better ways of doing it. I thought the sting in the first one was a lot better than the second one. Much better thought out and carried out.

Especially since even if the paintings had been real, the take was only going to be…what, 30,000 linders or whatever? That’s nothing compaired to the 300,000 to 400,000 they were talking about at the start of the book.

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Oh, I loved those books! Good on you for giving them to the next generation.

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They’re all out of print now, IIRC, but I’ve been getting them through interlibrary loan. A bit dated now, but just as much subversive fun as ever.

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Elendil’s Heir, I didn’t get around to the the Sedaris book yet, so I’ll look for the book on tape. Is Me Talk Pretty One Day the best one to start with?

And there is already a copy of Founding Brothers in the house - my husband raves about it also. Thanks for the rec for the Washington books, I’ll look for them. I did enjoy His Excellency but it left me wanting more personal details about the man. (You can’t really blame his wife for her desire for privacy, but wouldn’t it have been something to have access to their letters?)

Khadaji, I highly recommend Huff’s *Blood *series, starting with Blood Price. They’re reprinting them now due to the (pretty bad) TV show they made based on the series.

AuntiePam, I will give the Mina book a try.

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Because there were some in my in-laws house, and so they migrated to me. I never read them as a kid - I did Hardy Boys. The problem with owning a collection is that sometimes you have to read all the stuff in it. I’m working on the hardcovers I haven’t read, starting with A.

I have about 8 of the original series which my father-in-law (who is 91 now) got when he was a kid. Did you know that they were written by the author of Uncle Wiggly? I somehow got a boxed set of Tom Swift III. I read one to my daughter, pointing out the physical impossibilities.

The original series is better than the Jr. series, besides the racism, of course. And that was more stereotype rather than the nasty racism in the original Nancy Drew series. I found the growth of the business interesting - the first books were about motorcycles and speedboats, which developed into Tom subcontracting the construction of cannons to protect the just being built Panama Canal. The last one I have has Tom stirring up an insurrection in a South American country in order to get raw materials for this floating platform - great fun. In the Jr. series the inventions are just silly, and there is not nearly the logic as in the Howard Garis books.

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I’ve just started reading Stiglitz’s The Three Trillion Dollar War. It looks very readable and it rather interesting too.

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I set aside the Laxness (again) in favor of a birthday gift – Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, pseudonym of John Banville, who won a Booker with The Sea, which I loved.

The book reads like a 1950’s movie, and not one of the good ones. The critics loved it, but they also loved Down River by John Hart, which I thought read like a bad 1970’s movie.

I gotta stop listening to the critics. Back to the Laxness.

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I’ve been reading all kinds of Serious Stuff recently (I’m in the middle of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which I can only read 25 pages or so at a time), so needed something quick and fun.

Started and finished Elinor Lipman’s chick lit tidbit Isabel’s Bed in a single day (my commute involves two long train rides) – a lot of fun. Got home and was about 75 pages from the end, so I sat down and finished it then instead of waiting till bedtime. Mousy Harriet becomes the ghost-writer to scandalous-other-woman-in-a-tabloid-extravaganza Isabel – female empowerment (plus just desserts and happy endings) all around. For what it is, it’s very good.

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I finished Karen Essex’s Kleopatra yesterday. I really want to start on the sequel, Pharaoh but I forgot that the library’s closed until Monday. :smack: D’oh! So I’m starting on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #1 instead.

Also in the Current Pile are:
Chronicles of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery (which I expect I’ll finish today)
Desperate Remedies, Thomas Hardy (which got suddenly better when he burned up the anti-hero’s wife)
Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan (which is slow going)

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I’m partway through Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which details his search for information about his grandfather’s brother (and sister-in-law and four daughters) who died in WWII. When he begins he doesn’t even know more than the names of his great-uncle and -aunt and that they had four daughters, and that family lore says they were “killed by the Nazis.” It’s a great book – he layers biblical/judaic explanations of the story of Cain and Abel against stories of his fights with his siblings against the larger story of why, in a village of Jews and Poles and Ukraines who’d lived together relatively peaceably for hundreds of years, neighbors (metaphorical brothers) would betray neighbors.

I can’t read much of it at a time, because of course he reports the stories of survivors he talks to as he’s trying to learn more about his family, and some parts are really, really hard to think about. I’ve been working on the book for three weeks or so, and have read a number of other books in the meantime because this one is almost too difficult at times.

I think next up on my list is Backstage with Julia. I also have The Stranger Next Door and Ishi in Two Worlds but I think I may want something a bit lighter, and who’s better than Julia Child?

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I’ve liked about 90% of everything of Sedaris’s I’ve ever read (or, even better, heard). Me Talk Pretty One Day is as good a book to start with as any. Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice are also excellent. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim was a bit more uneven… some great short stories, but IMHO some meh.

Yes, Martha Washington was a great lady, by all accounts, but I also wish she hadn’t consigned so many of her and the General’s letters to the fire.

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I’d also like to recommend his sister Amy’s I Like You: Hospitality Under The Influence. It’s not a straight-read novel or anything like that…it’s a cookbook/entertaining guide/collection of funny stories/memoir. Or something. But it’s hilarious!

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Stopped reading the Laxness again (Bartjur is such an ass!) and read Snow Angels by Stewart O’Nan. It was his first novel, an expansion of a short story, and it’s quite good. A teenage boy is practicing with his high school marching band when gunshots are heard. His former babysitter is found dead in a nearby field. The book goes back and forth, focusing on the teenager (whose parents are divorcing) and the babysitter and her estranged husband.

Still not wanting to return to Iceland, I picked up Midnight Cowboy by James Herlihy. I saw the movie years ago and don’t remember much about it, except for the song, and Jon Voigt as a big dumb good-looking guy who leaves Texas for Manhattan, thinking he’ll find work making love to rich women. Did the movie give us his back story? He’s a very sympathetic character, and I don’t remember liking him in the movie.

Maybe after this I’ll go back to Iceland. I love Laxness’ writing, but Bartjur is such a jerk!

ETA: Something I got from Snow Angels (which I didn’t expect) is an understanding (sort of) about why someone can get to a point where killing the person they love is their only solution, or perceived solution. It’s kinda scary.

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I’m now most of the way through Anatomy of Deception.

Wow thanks! That will keep my Roosevelt curiosity sated for a bit.