Whatcha readin' May (08) edition

Cafe Society
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Finish Cruel Zinc Melodies (Garrett P.I.) Not too bad. If you are no familiar, Garrett is a private detective in a world of elves, dwarves and magic. It is a light-hearted homage to Chandler. When I think of these books, I put them in the same category as Butcher’s Dresden. They’re not quite the same, but that is how I lump them together. If you are going to try it though, start at the beginning.

I liked it well enough, but felt that there were a few too many sub-plots that made it needlessly hard to follow. None-the-less, I’ll read the next one. As an aside, does any Garrett fan remember if we are ever told his first name?

Started Magic Burns.

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I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon. I found somebody on half.com who was selling all three Baroque Cycle books in hardback for pretty cheap, so those are on their way. I’ll wait a while before starting them, though. Don’t want to get burned out on Stephenson.

On to lighter fare: I read the new Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire book, From Dead to Worse, and it wasn’t bad. I’m about to start the new Dresden Files book, Small Favor.

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Just polished off Royal Harlot by Susan Holloway Scott and The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell, trying to work my way through The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie right now. I really haven’t been reading as much as I used to be this month or so.

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[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
The Anubis Gates was one of my June 2007 books – my best reading month ever. Every book had me going “Wow, this’ll be hard to beat”.

The other books that month were Cloud Atlas, The Book Thief, The Book of Lost Things, Francine Prose’s reading/writing book, Softspoken, The Pesthouse, and What the Dead Know.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve read - and loved - both The Anubis Gates and Cloud Atlas (the latter a work of real genius I thought).

I haven’t read the others on your list - but if they are of comparable quality, I probably should.

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[QUOTE=Sigmagirl]
Just finished The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Don Robertson’s 1965 cult classic that has just been republished in paperback by HarperCollins (original publisher Putnam). I’d never read it before and I am rocked by its greatness. I will be seeking out more by this author, who died in 1999.
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Woo hoo!! I’m tickled pink to hear that at least one of his books is back in print. I haven’t read Bread yet though. My favorites are Paradise Falls – the Great American Novel IMHO, The River and the Wilderness, The Ideal Genuine Man, Praise the Human Season, and his Civil War trilogy. I wasn’t nuts about Victoria at Nine but I think that’s because I read it right after Ideal Genuine Man and it was just too different.

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I’ll follow your recommendations, AuntiePam. *Paradise Falls * comin’ up. If my library has it; if not, off to Amazon, I guess.

ETA: Online card catalog says no. :frowning: Well, we’ll have to do this the hard way!

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It was published in two volumes – make sure you get both. It’s likely that all Amazon will have is the book club edition. It’s a shame that this book is OOP.

The story follows some of the characters from his Civil War novels. It’s an epic on a small scale, about adjustment and reconstruction, and the rise of the cutthroat businessman as an American hero.

I love Robertson’s style. He’ll do long sentences and paragraphs, repetition that becomes poetic, dialogue without attributes (but you know who’s talking because his characters are so well-defined). It took some getting used to. His writing is just fearless.

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Just cracked War and Peace - the Briggs translation. So I should be good for the June thread as well! :cool:

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The library in the next city over has it. So I’ll get it there.
Maybe if *The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread * sells well, some of Robertson’s other OOP work will be republished. Book club is better than nothing.

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Well, I finished Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby. It was not at all what I expected. I had previously enjoyed his High Fidelity, which was set in London but made into a movie set in Chicago. And I knew this book was made into a movie set in Boston. But it’s not even fiction. Just an autobiographical account of the author’s love/hate relationship with soccer (football) over about 24 years. Hornby co-wrote the screenplay for the film; I’ve not seen it, but it’s a work of fiction along the lines of his *High Fidelity * and About a Boy. I hear the film is very good, but it’s surely not this book.

It was okay. I do not like sports but often enjoy books and films about sports, mainly because they do not make me sit through a game, which I invariably find boring as all get out. This one I could have done without, but it was a pleasant read. English-football fans will get more out of it.

Today, I begin Outer Dark, by Cormac McCarthy.

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Just finishing up the Book Thief - set in Germany, 1939 and told from deaths point of view. Rather good.

Starting The Road - post apocalyptic tale of a man and son trecking across the US.

And yet to start Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland…

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Currently reading:

Cold Mountain–I like what I’ve read so far, but I’ve been too busy to dive into it like I wanna. Right now Inman is looking for Salisbury, which freaks me out because I’m not used to seeing towns I lived near showing up in books.

The Barbed Coil–I loved J.V. Jones’s first trilogy. This is a separate book that I’ve been looking for for several years. I’m only in the first few chapters, but already a naked man has been crowned king, a woman suffering from tinninitus has put on a magic ring that took her from San Diego to a fantasy world, and a lord has been abandoned by his ship.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn–I don’t think I was supposed to laugh at the first sentence that says serene is a good word to describe Brooklyn.

And I’m still going through To Green Angel Tower, Part One. I got bogged down in a battle.

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Recently finished:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ~ loved

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow ~ loved

Ghost Map:The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson ~ enjoyed but could have done without the last chapter of doom-n-gloom.

Currently Reading (other than Don Quixote which is still torturing me):

In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff

And I just received a copy of The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff that will probably make it next on the list.

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Finished Magic Burns. Enjoyed it.

Next up: Melusine.

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Reading The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette. Starts in 1492; I’m up to 1725, “The Senegambian Period.”

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Finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A shocking Murder and the Undoing of A Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale.

I was disappointed. The case was notorious and there was a huge amount of reporting at the time. The author didn’t include anything that wasn’t in a newspaper report, official record, letter, journal, etc. That’s fine if you’re trying to prove your case, but the result was quite lifeless. None of the people came to life for me.

There was lots of interesting stuff about the beginnings of the detective profession though, and how people felt about plainclothes policemen poking around in their business. :smiley:

Back to the Baroque Cycle.

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[QUOTE=Khadaji]
Finished Magic Burns. Enjoyed it.

Next up: Melusine.
[/QUOTE]

I have put down *Mulusine *already. The author has one of the most annoying writing styles I’ve read in a long time. From the opening paragraph where she calls wizards hocuses, to calling weeks septads, I was annoyed. It isn’t uncommon to make up words in fantasy and I usually ignore it, but see it as needless. A week is a week and unless you have a good reason to measure time differently in your world, I do not see it as lending authenticity to the text by renaming common concepts.

She uses words in ways that I found odd, breaking the flow of the text.

I am not at all familiar with the use of the word flat in the context. I assumed it meant stupid and moved on - until about two paragraphs later the author says:

The fact that I now had to try to figure out what *flat *meant pulled me right out of the story.

The author also had an annoying habit of switching between character’s perspectives every half page, again keeping me from becoming immersed. I usually give a book 1/3 of the book or so before I set it down, but I’m done already at page 41. I’m annoyed enough with it that I almost want my money back.

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[QUOTE=Khadaji]
she calls wizards hocuses, to calling weeks septads
[/QUOTE]

Sounds like the author’s bedtime book is a Latin dictionary.

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Sigmagirl inspired me to get back to Don Robertson, so I read The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread and really liked it. I didn’t know that there really was a gas tank explosion in Cleveland.

It’s amazing how some writers can tap into childhood. I’d forgotten about all the silly things kids worry about. Well, some silly and some not so silly.

Now reading another Robertson, Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe. When the book starts, Margaret’s relatives are talking about her, about whether or not she was brave. Margaret has died, and it sounds like she took some people with her. Intriguing.

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[QUOTE=Khadaji]
I have put down *Mulusine *already. The author has one of the most annoying writing styles I’ve read in a long time. From the opening paragraph where she calls wizards hocuses, to calling weeks septads, I was annoyed.
[/QUOTE]

Yep, that’s why I never really became a big sci-fi or fantasy fan. No way I could have gotten 41 pages in.

I finished Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates. Loved it! I’ll probably pick up a copy to keep for my very own.

Then I read The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, by Mikita Brottman. First off, the title is deliberately misleading. The book challenges some commonly held ideas about reading, that’s all. I liked it fine, but every time I ran across the word “everyday” when it should have been “every day”, I seriously considered throwing it across the room. Also, the name of The Shining character Jack Torrance was misspelled Jack Torrence, but I’m not one to hold a grudge against a poorly proofread book, no, not me…

I tried to read Cesar’s Way: the natural, everyday guide to understanding and correcting common dog problems, by Cesar Millan. I knew it wasn’t the book for me just by seeing the table of contents. It had a foreword, a prologue, and chapter titles like Growing Up With Dogs. I opened it at random and found an anecdote about how Oprah solved a problem with her dog. I mean, I’m sure it’s a very nice book if you’ve got the time, but I’m having problems with a dog.

Then I read The Cheap Book: The official guide to embracing your inner cheapskate, by Robin Herbst. I always like reading about ways to save money but this was a joke. I picked it sight unseen from the library website, but if I’d actually had it in my hands I’d never have taken it home. There was one tip per page and each one was illustrated. Some of the tips were apparently meant to be funny, such as “Take medication even though it expired last year” and some were painfully obvious, such as “Reuse plastic grocery bags”. Despite the title, I don’t think it was meant to do anything more than waste a few moments of the reader’s time.

After that, I just disregarded the order of my TBR pile and dove into Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach, and oh, it is wonderful. This is one of those books that has me stopping every couple of minutes to read part of it out loud to someone else.