I’ve begun on Affinity, by Sarah Waters. A hundred pages in, so far so good.
I just finished Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. I’m glad I read it but I’m also glad I’m finished. It was beautifully written but so dark! I thought Flanders was dark, but I was able to keep some distance with Flanders.
Not sure what to read next. I might just shut my eyes and grab something from the floor of the closet. The new Iain Pears (and an Ellen Glasgow) is coming, but they probably won’t be here until Tuesday.
I really need something light, but I’m not sure I have anything light.
No Christopher Moore laying around? Fool, maybe?
No Moore, darn it. I stopped reading him after Island of the Sequined Love Nun. That book was just way too silly, even for Moore. 
I grabbed A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons. Bought it years ago and it’s just been sitting there. It’s sort of a sequel to Summer of Night, that one about the haunted school which has been compared to Stephen King’s It in its theme about kids and horrors, etc.
The thing is, I read a post at Dan Simmons’ board suggesting that Summer of Night isn’t how I read and remember it from 20 years ago – that things didn’t happen the way I interpreted, that we may have unreliable narrators in both books. :dubious:
Anyway, I’m liking A Winter Haunting and depending on where it goes, I might end up re-reading Summer of Night.
ETA: I guess I liked when I said I need something light.
Finished [URL=“http://www.amazon.com/Last-Wish-Andrzej-Sapkowski/dp/0316029181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243161468&sr=1-1”]The Last Wish. A very mediocre read. I have a business partner in from the UK to help guide software development so I must make hay whilst the sun shines and have been working 14 hour days. So haven’t had much time to read lately.
The Last Wish is the tale of Geralt de Rivia - a witcher. It is not made clear to me exactly what a witcher is and why they are reviled. He seems to be a monster-killer-for-hire. He seems to have some skill at magic, but it also seems that he is not on par with a sorcerer.
The larger tale is told interspersed with lesser tales - I suppose to help give the back story. But the weaving seems clumsy to me and in the end I found it annoying.
Also in the end - at the very end - although I understood what happened, I wondered what the point of the telling was. It was not very satisfying in the end.
The book inspired a game. I may try the game, but I won’t read more if there is a series.
Not sure what I want to read next, so I’m taking a break with a book of short essays (The Flight of the Iguana) by David Quammen, my favorite nature writer.
Finished and I liked it very much. About halfway through, I stopped to wonder if I was reading a mystery or if I was supposed to take the supernatural stuff at face value, but either way it was interesting and I was pleased with how it all wound up. I have more Sarah Waters in my TBR pile.
Next up: We Never Talk About My Brother, short stories by Peter S. Beagle.
The only Beagle I’ve read was The Last Unicorn, which I thought was just OK, and a very good Sherlock Holmes short story, the title of which escapes me.
I read Beagle’s Tamsin and liked it, though I don’t remember much about why. I’ve heard The Last Unicorn is his best, but I haven’t read it because the title is just embarrassing.
Just finished Turn Coat, the latest in the Dresden Files series. I really liked this book; there were quite a few plot turns and character reversals I was not expecting. I really think Butcher has vastly improved as a writer over the course of this series.
Now I’m reading The Road. I feel like the last person in the world to pick up this book.
Dung Beetle, hide it behind a Guns and Ammo magazine then, because The Last Unicorn is wonderful! A Fine and Private Place is also great.
I guess I’ll have to, because I’m sure the cover art is going to be all pink and sparkly, isn’t it? 
Hmm, let me just pull it out of my plastic Dora the Explorer backpack and check…
I’m so glad you enjoyed Affinity! I loved that book. And Beagle is an often-overlooked treasure; I really need to read his stories.
Tamsin is a favorite, but I’m a sucker for any story based on Tam Lin.
No, I am. As much as I enjoy post-apoc, I just can’t face reading relentless misery
Are you laughing at me? runs after Biffy waving a rusted Scooby Doo lunchbox
Seconded, although I’ll probably see the movie, 'cause I’m a Viggo fan.
I finished A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons and was pleasantly surprised. In my experience, sequels are often self-indulgent, meandering pieces of crap written to cash in on the popularity of the first book. This was a whole different book, and something that could be read and enjoyed if you hadn’t read Summer of Night. Nice creepy psychological/ghost story, with some very scary bits.
I’d ordered Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton from Amazon months ago, and they were unable to deliver. I ordered it again and they had it! But when it got here, I realized that I’d already read it. :smack:
Next up for me is Stone’s Fall, the new one by Ian Pears. I loved Instance of the Fingerpost.
I finished *The Road *yesterday. It was very bleak, but it was also very inspiring. The Man in the story isn’t just out to survive, he’s also trying so hard to give his son hope and remain a “good guy” in spite of the horror surrounding them. The book seemed much bigger than its 280 pages.
I just started Triangle, by Katharine Weber. About a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City and the story she tells of that day. The first few pages almost made me give up… not because they were bad, but because the description of the fire was almost too graphic for me.
Just finished Romeo and Juliet and I’m now reading a copy of Hamlet that I’ve had sitting in my room for a few years collecting dust.
Oooh, Hamlet is one of my favoritey favorites. I must have… at least five different copies of it.
I finished Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and I loved it. I wasn’t sure I would at first–from the blurb it seemed like another one of those midlife crisis novels where the husband (in this case) cheated on his wife and his family had to rebuild trust and along the way they all Learned Something About Themselves. It is that, but it’s not just that. It skewers the liberal arts professors while treating them respectfully, it skewers the wanna-g mentality prevalent among young black males without any respect at all, it offers up many different views of what beauty is, and it introduced me to a lot of Rembrandt. A lot of it. I had to run to The Internets after I finished the book to look up all the Rembrandt pictures she was talking about. (The cheatin’ husband is a Rembrandt scholar and Art History professor.)
She mentioned she got a lot of her art intepretation of them from a book by Simon Schama, who I’ve admired ever since I saw the documentary The History of Britain. I decided to see if the library had it as I was in the mood for history. I didn’t see it listed in the catalog, but I did see A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, so I checked that out instead.