I just completed* Unbroken* by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit) and man, is that a compelling story. Talk about going through Hell and coming out the other side…I had never heard of Louis Zamperini until I read this book. It is an excellent book, I urge you all to pick up a copy.
NYT review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/books/review/Margolick-t.html
Now I am reading Neptune’s Inferno about the naval aspect of the battle of Guadalcanal. It is also an excellent read so far.
I’m reading The Druggist of Auschwitz by Dieter Schlesak, which I heard reviewed on NPR on Friday. I went to the library and it was there, so I got it. It’s subtitled “a documentary novel” and was in the fiction section, but is an odd construct. The author used transcripts of interviews with concentration camp survivors to form a narrative with a fictional man who describes his experiences and the atrocities. It’s difficult to read, as you might imagine, but aside from having tremendous sympathy and grief for these people, as a book it doesn’t seem to have a plot and I’m not finding the “novel” aspect of it.
I also checked this one out; I hope I like it better than you did. I like Connelly and I need something to read after a book set at Auschwitz!
Hope I get this one to review! Glad to hear he has another book.
I just started The Terror, by Dan Simmons. It’s historical fiction, with an element of supernatural horror, about the doomed Franklin expedition: two British ships (*Erebus *and HMS Terror, fitted with newfangled steam engines) that set out to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1845.
The book starts with two alternating narratives, and in one of them the ships have been ice-locked for over a year and the descriptions of the extreme cold are already freaking me out.
Based on Dung Beetle’s enthusiastic endorsement, I just bought The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. I love it so far. I’ve been reading a lot of YA fantasy lately, and I’m really enjoying an adult novel set in the real world.
I recently finished Rick Riordan’s Throne of Fire. It’s a very readable piece of fluff, if you like that sort of thing.
I just saw Jon Ronson (Them, The Men Who Stare art Goats) on The Daily Show yesterday and ran right out and bought The Pscychopath Test.I’m about half way through, and it’s really good. A very elightening read, with one of the oddest mysteries to start a book I’ve read in years.
I just started Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome Jerome. A slender little British comedy classic, published in 1889 and a free download from Guterberg – I’m only about 35 pages in, but so far it’s delightful.
This was a really well-researched book and a compelling enough read, but it left me unsatisfied. I thought the author was a little bit gullible, she seemed to “buy” much of Bernies story and didn’t offer any alternative insights into the parts she didn’t buy. And she was disgustingly apologetic about the rest of his family - buying their innocence hook ,line and sinker- and she seemed genuinely puzzled as to the public “hate” for them.
I got much more out of a Madoff book I read a few years ago, it may have been “Madoff with the Money”…I can’t remember the name and Amazon was no help, there are a lot of Madoff books and they all sound alike. Even though this book had less factual information I felt I had a better understanding of the fraud after reading it…it made a good case for Madoff being one of the stupidest men ever to walk the earth …he wore two watches because that was the only way he could figure out what time it was in London and if you told him there was a spot on the back of his jacket you could get him to spin around in circles like a cat chasing its tail.
I am finally reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 that Pepper Mill got me for my birthday, many months ago. I haven’t read it before, because it’s more than something to prop up the leg of a wiggly table – it can serve as the table itself. The book is huge, and it was inconvenient to carry around. I’ve been in places where I could read it thuis month, though.
I love Twain, and I’ve read one of the previous editions of the Autobiography (even have parts of it on audio), but this is the unexpurgated edition, with stuff he didn’t want printed until he’d been dead 100 years. I can identify some of the parts that have been left out, being familiar with the earlier editions.
On the other hand, I’m really annoyed by this version. In the earlier editions, the editors re-arranged the material into chronological order. In this one, they’ve separated it by when it was recorded and why. The book is clearly intended for scholars and researchers, and not the general reading public, because it jumps back and forth around his life, with no regard for its internal chronology at all. If I hadn’t read the earlier editions, I’d be lost.
I waded through 80 pages of introduction and notes, followed by 120 pages of “false starts”, and have finally gotten to the “Real” autobiography. Why they separated out the “false starts”, I don’t know – why are these any more false than the “real” autobiography? Certainly the earlier versions of Twain’s autobiography included several of them – they’re as legitimate as anything else. If they wanted to identify which portion came from where, there was no need to dissect the autobiography like a frog and leave its viscera in one place, with the tongue somewhere else and the liver still elsewhere – they could’ve given us the entire jumping frog as an organic whole and simply labeled where each part came from, and where it was written. Let the damned experts have to shuffle back and forth between the fragments, and give the General reader a connected chronological autobiography.
I read the first novel by Neal Boyd, The Bricklayer. It’s kind of a Jack Reacher wannabe. The character is a bit opaque (I think that’s supposed to make him appealingly mysterious) but he has potential. The author is an ex-FBI agent, and his hero likewise is a defrocked “mavericky” one. Since this is Boyd’s first non-fiction book, I’m hoping that in the future, the occasional spot of very lame dialogue improves, and he makes his slightly cartoonish characters a little more fleshed out. The action and suspense were done well.
I also wanted to thank those who previously recommended Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness. Very, very good. The post-WWI setting was so well done. Not just one of those detective books where you realize they don’t have cell phones yet, but most people didn’t have a telephone at all, and most of the police are on foot or bicycle. You see some of the creaky development of the use of forensic science and psychological profiling. And the effects of PTSD (not called that yet, of course) incorporated into the story masterfully.
I’ve put down Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy for the moment and have gotten sucked into Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, which I’ve long heard praised as the greatest baseball book evah. It’s good, but it’s not all that. Kahn grew up a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan and then as a young reporter covered the team in the early 1950s; just over a decade later, he went back and found out “where are they now.” I’m just past the halfway mark.
Light reading this week. Just finished Tina Fey’s Bossypants and now I’m rereading S.M. Stirling’s A Taint in the Blood (I just picked up the sequel and decided to reread the first book). I’m also about halfway through John Barnes’ Daybreak but I’m not really into the direction it seems to be heading.
I liked that book too. The follow-up was disappointing. It’s been awhile since I read it and I don’t remember what I didn’t like. It felt like “Ooh, people liked the first one, guess I’ll do it again, and in a hurry.”
The Devil All the Time was excellent, and with a bit more heart than Knockemstiff. It wasn’t smarmy though – far from it!
Re-reading a couple of old favorites, The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by Tom Spanbauer and Heart of the Country, a very over-the-top western by Greg Matthews, full of psychopaths and incest and lots of violence.
Oh, and I’d like to recommend Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson. It’s a novelization of a crime that happened in 1885, and it’s quite good for a first novel.
I’m glad you like it!
So… whadjathink?
Finished Neptune’s Inferno (great historical recounting of the naval conflicts surrounding Guadalcanal) and am now reading W.E.B. Griffin and William Butterworth’s The Outlaws.
I lurves me some W.E.B. Griffin and Charley Castillo.
Finished The Fifth Witness and found it much as koeeoaddi describes; though I do find courtroom procedurals interesting, this seemed to be like a contractural obligation book. Now reading John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things. Can’t wait for his new Charlie Parker book The Burning Soul, out in September.
Did I ever tell you how I found John Connolly? I was at a bookstore looking for something to read while my husband had an extremely long band practice, and saw a paperback Michael Connelly I hadn’t read. I picked it up, looked at it, put it back, shopped around a little more, decided to buy the book and went back and accidentally picked up the book next to it. Never noticed even after I’d paid for it that I’d bought John Connolly’s The Black Angel. Started reading and *what the hell? *
I love John Connolly.
I recently finished The Worst Hard Times about farmers living in the No Man’s Land between Oaklahoma and Texas during the Depression. Honestly, I had no interest in the subject matter but it was recommended so strongly here on The Dope and elsewhere that I picked it up when I found it cheap. It turned out to be an enthralling read!
I also finished I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, my second experience with Harlan Ellison. What a brilliant, misogynistic, creative, terrible angry man.
Now I’m reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and am neither enjoying it or disliking it. I picked it up because I had the vague idea that this was Something That Should Be Read.
I read that not long ago, and I loved it. Connie Willis told me to read it years ago, in her author’s notes in To Say Nothing of the Dog, and I should have listened to her.
That’s a great story.
The only book I have ever picked up at random in a bookstore was Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, which turned out to be fantastic. That was such a great find that you’d think I would do it more often.
I hope you like it, as I did, once you get deeper into it. I also really enjoyed his novel In the Lake of the Woods, which has an important Vietnam War subplot.
Totally agree. The Things They Carried is an Important Book, but more importantly, it is a good book and a great read as well, IMHO; same with In the Lake of the Woods…