In the past two weeks, I’ve read The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Call of the Wild, and Robinson Crusoe and have started 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea…all on my iPhone. Yay for technology!!!
Hahaha, I was going to ask if you had a Kindle, 'cause that sounds like a rundown of the kind of stuff you can pick up for free. (I’m in the middle of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes myself, after having finished some Wodehouse I also got for free.)
There’s supposed to be a Kindle app for the iPhone that allows you to buy the titles from Amazon, I’m going to look into it. I find it so handy to have a book on my phone, since I always have it on me. It beats carrying around a huge hardback.
Got lured into a bookstore by a frie^H^Henabler last Friday, and bought the following:
-
Piratical fiction anthology including: Naomi Novik, Garth Nix, Sarah Monette, etc. Some really nice stories in there.
-
The Night Train to Rigel. SF detective noir by Timothy Zahn. I liked his “Icarus Hunt”, so I picked this one up. It’s a fun read, but I admit I liked the first one a bit more.
-
Iron Angel, by Alan Campbell. Only halfway through it. Good stuff.
-
The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi. Only halfway through it. Good stuff.
Still poking along in ‘Academ’s Fury’ by Jim Butcher. For some reason I just am unable to get really stuck into it, unlike the Campbell and Scalzi books and unlike the first one. I suspect it might be because this one has – what, three plots going at once, and only one really has people I care about in it.
D’oh! For the first time ever, I ‘read’ an abridged audiobook and didn’t know it until the credits at the end when the narrator mentioned who did the abridgment. If it says ‘Abridged’ anywhere on the CD box, it’s obscured by library stickers. :mad:
The book was Dreamers of the Day, by Mary Doria Russell and, dammit, now I don’t know if I should be grateful to have been spared the rest of what was a fairly dull book or annoyed because it might’ve been improved by what was left out.
For me it was the first one that was slow. I enjoyed all of the others and can’t wait for the next.
Been bouncing back and forth between the fiction and the non. And around the centuries.
I got lucky getting to a yard sale late enough that they were doing “$5 per bag” so I stuffed mine with books.
So:
The Last Enchantment, by Mary Stewart. Mary Stewart seems like a guilty pleasure to me, like romance novels, but this one is different. Arthur’s court, from Merlin’s perspective. Fun to read.
Mary Todd Lincoln, by Jean H. Baker. For some reason I’ve always wanted to know more about her. The book seemed to give away its author’s “women’s” perspective, but I still enjoyed it. There was a lot more to her than the crazy shrew I’ve heard about.
Katherine, by Anya Seton. I almost missed this one at the sale and was thrilled when I found it. It’s one of the first historical fictions books I ever read and it started me through every book of hers that was in the high school library. It also fed my interest in the time period. It isn’t quite as exciting as the first time, but I’m not fifteen anymore, either. Still a good read, though.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, by Desmond Seward. Another of my history fascinations that I finally got around to learning about.
And I’m about to finish The Virgin’s Lover, by Phillippa Gregory. I also picked up The Other Boleyn Girl, but I’m not sure I’ll read it after I get it back from my daughter. I’m not that thrilled by Ms Gregory.
I guess the next one is due to be non-fiction again, so probably the memoirs of U.S. Grant.
Geesh, looking at this, it’s not wonder I’ve finished two knitting projects in the last few weeks. I’ve spent a lot of time with my head in a book and needles in my hands.
Holy crap! You do both at the same time?! You take multitasking seriously! I need all three of my hands just to hold a hardback, and they still get sore at that. I’d even have trouble keeping track of a knitting pattern while *listening *to a book!
Have you read the first three? IMO, The Last Enchantment was the weakest of the 4. I really enjoyed her original trilogy though, and count it as one of the better Arthur treatments.
I didn’t know she had a new one out. Shame if it sucks, since I greatly enjoyed her other novels.
Back to Drood. Put it down for a few days while on a short trip out of town; had to read some other stuff and also picked up *Bleeding Kansas *by Sara Paretsky, the first book I’ve read by her (no, I’ve never read any V I Warshawski, but I liked it enough that I might). I think I would like her standalone books – *Total Recall *and *Hard Time *sound great. Also going to wait-list Michael Connelly’s new *The Scarecrow *at the library.
ETA: I liked Dreamers of the Day!
A kind member at paperbackswap.com is sending me Drood next week… but after hearing about it in these threads for months, I’m worried I’m not going to like it.
Oh, I like it. I’m just busy and haven’t gotten far.
I was worried too but I loved it.
It’s taking awhile, but I’m trying a new approach to books – no expectations. I’m especially trying to resist reading blurbs – they’re just advertising, and they’re usually deceptive.
It’s hard though. We have to know something about a book before picking it up, and blurbs and reviews are all we’ve got.
I went back to Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis and I’m liking it, for what it is.
May’s almost done, but I have a couple new things I’m in the process of reading, and some that I’ve just finished.
I just finished:
Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons, which is typically Wolfe, in a good way. Great characters, a very intruiging puzzle, and the odd sense that it could easily have been three hundred pages shorter story wise, but didn’t feel all that wordy all the same. I recommend it – in fact, I bought it twice, losing my first copy around 350 pages in and really wanting to know how it goes on. By contrast, I also lost my copy of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and haven’t felt the need to get it again…
David Flint’s Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured Pop Culture. Non-fiction zombie-film, literature and game-reviewing and listing essay. Rather interesting, in that I don’t have a zombie film book yet and was able to use this book’s short summaries to find out what was watchable; and rather opinionated, but in a good way. Probably not a must buy.
I’m reading:
Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, which is so-so. Eighteen year-old accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson’s Homestead, killing two people, and goes to jail for a year; when he gets back out, writers’ homes start burning down all over the place, leading him to investigate. Sometimes really funny, and then moving again in a good way, but a lot will depend on whether Clarke can make me care for the overall arc of the story again. It’s had a lot of great set-pieces, and the premise is hilarious (especially if you detest writers with New England homes), but it almost lost me around page 100 and is struggling to get me back in.
John Joseph Abrams anthology The Living Dead. A brillant anthology of all kinds of different zombie stories, of which I especially recommend one modelled after Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.
Otherwise, lots of boring books about theory, and Maturana / Varela’s Tree of Knowledge, which I have a question on that you can find in GQ :).
Finished The Success System That Never Fails by W. Clement Stone. Usually I have at least 3 books going. 1 is a geek book and I rarely report on them. I mean C# or .Net or whatever I’m working on at the time. The other is usually in a “self help” category. This is a catch-all umbrella term I use for most of the non-fiction that I read. It can be business related, or like last month more philosophy or whatever. I usually plan to take away about 10% good stuff from it. The rest either I know or I think is drivel.
Anyway, I would say I got at least 10% goodness from this. IMO it is more geared towards sales and therefore wasn’t perfect for me, but there were things worth reading.
Mr. Stone was a very religious man and this fact slips into his writing often enough to be noticed, but not so often that a non-religious person need worry about it. (Unless you just can’t tolerate any mention of God, then totally skip this.)
I won’t say it changed my life, I won’t say it even is a “never fail” system, but I will say it has some good points and may be worth a read.
I finished The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, a book I had never even heard of before three weeks ago (even though, apparently, it’s Hugo’s most famous book after Hunchback and Les Mis. I was REALLY impressed-- terrific story and some great moments. Gilliat was a brilliant character, and it also made me want to learn more about the Channel Islands.
So I just finished reading Hamlet and I now picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls, which has sat in my room since I was in high school! Weird book, I loved Hemingway back then but was never able to get through the first chapter of this book. I’m already passed that point now though.
This is a really old post but I’ll respond anyway. I think the leg amputations thing was a reference to a really, really popular soviet book called “Story of a True Man” or “Tale of a Real Man”. It’s a novel based off a true-life a Russian fighter pilot named Alexey Maresyev. It’s basically about an amazing pilot who crashes or something and loses both of his legs. He drags himself to safety and instead of moaning about his loss, he trains extra hard with his new prosthetic legs and returns to fighting.
I haven’t read it, but of course the novel version is very dramatized and served to help rouse national pride and all that.
Here is the url to the author of “story of a real man”'s wikipedia page. There’s a bit more info there. Boris Polevoy - Wikipedia
Basically, it kind of just continues with the themes of soviet citizens needing to make stupid, needless, meaningless sacrifices if they want to become “real men”.