I mentioned that I was reading **In the Woods **and my co-worker said, “I listened to that! It was hilarious.”
Yep, a lighthearted romp through child murder! Turns out she was thinking of A Walk in the Woods.
I just finished Ann the Word by Richard Francis, a bio of the Shaker prophet Ann Lee. Fascinating stuff about early Shaker (and American) history. She essentially founded the American Shakers in the middle of the American Revolution, and not all that far from where the British forces passed. Being British herself (along with her closest companions), they were thought to be spies when they weren’t seen as weird cultists. I still find it hard to imagine what their bunch must have been like – they had none of the characteristic features we’ve come to associate with Shakers – Ann believed the end of the world was coming soon, and so wasn’t trying to found a long-lived self-sustaining community, let alone foster “form follows function” engineering and architecture. Shaker services and dance were more spontaneous and hadn’t acquired the formalized patterns later associated with it.
I’m halfway through Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, the latest writer to cover James Bond. Like the Daniel Craig movies, this is a re-boot, tossing out all the Bond novels except Fleming’s, and set in the 1960s, just after the events of The Man with the Golden Gun. Faulks evokes both the period (with its Cold War tensions) and Fleming’s style well. He’s clearly copying the outline from Fleming, and he makes allusions to the various books, but pushed things forward into new territory, both literally and figuratively.
I just started reading “Lamb” by Christopher Moore.
I like Moore’s narrative style, and on the surface I think the premise is pretty interesting (regarding the lost gospel of Biff, Christ’s best friend), but I tend to think I might be enjoying it more if I were actually a Christian. I’m trying to read it through the same prism with which I watched Kevin Smith’s Dogma, but so far it isn’t working.
It’s an enjoyable enough read so far though.
My hatred of Thomas the Tank Engine knows no rational bounds, drummed in by continuous repetition - the toys, the books, the TV series. I even wrote a highly cathartic version of Thomas as a Nazi Death Train. Didn’t read it to the kid though. 
Ditto with Dora Conquistadora (a/k/a Dora the Explorer).
My wife and I still exclaim “Cinders and ashes!” and “Oh, my rods and couplings!” from time to time. And when we’re really mad about something, we threaten to call an Indignation Meeting. 
I’ve posted this elsewhere on the Dope: My sister once lent her copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to a friend who’d noticed it on her bookshelf. My sister slipped a bookmark into the book without looking too closely at it. Her friend later called her, laughing, because of what she’d earlier written on the bookmark when lending it and another book to someone else: “I think you’ll like this. The characters are little wacky, but the plot is pretty interesting.”
Extra marks if said with a Ringo Star accent.
That … works.
Interrupting this thread to let fans of Barbara Kingsolver know that her first novel in nine years is now out! The Lacuna.
Great book, though the parts where he starts talking about Calabi–Yau manifolds I had to skim pretty heavily. I can’t get my head around crazy-ass multidimensional n-folds, go figure :rolleyes:
Recently, I’ve finished:
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams. A collection of short stories about life after the end of the world. This is a good anthology with carefully selected stores… a lot of famous names (Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Jonathan Lethem) but a good smattering of new and up-and-comers.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. My first experience with Stephenson and for the most part, he lived up to all his hype. An action-packed plot interspersed with some pretty esoteric theories. Many parts of this book read like the most badass 1970’s kung-fu film ever… but some parts are like a bad graduate textbook. This was my “toe in the water” before thinking about maybe attempting the Baroque Cycle.
The Frog Princess, E. D. Baker. A cute young adult story, but a little too precious for my tastes. There are better “strong female protagonist” stories out there for young girls.
The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown. I got this from the library because I was morbidly curious, but didn’t actually want to personally give this guy any more money. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t guess how bad. And oh, the preaching! The heavy-handed moralistic blather in this book puts The Da Vinci Code to shame.
Also, I think it’s pretty bombastic of Dan Brown to mention that he’s the author of one of the best selling novels of all time in his back-cover blurb. I love to be annoyed by Dan Brown.
Right now, I’m halfway through Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (picked up due to a SDMB recommendation!) and I’m really, really enjoying it. I KNOW I’m going to get this for someone for Christmas.
On a whim: The Ambassadors, by Henry James. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read anything by him before. I’m used to having to slow down my reading speed and adjust my frame of mind to read 19th-century novels, but my god, it’s like trying to read a foreign language.
Actually, though, I read a couple of pages in the middle of the night (my standard “didn’t fall back to sleep right away after getting up to pee” practice), and it all actually made sense, on the first read-through. Maybe rereading the last paragraph of the previously read stuff gave me a running start?
Not sure I’m going to stick with it, but I’m intrigued by the sheer baroqueness of his prose.
That’s where I am. It’s possible to pretty clearly draw a 3-d image in 2 dimensions, so I was sitting there wondering if it would be possible to create a 3-d hologram that would give people a sense of a 4th dimension. Can anyone actually envision a 4th physical dimension? If I could, that’d help a lot. Even though the book claims you need ten to make all the formulae work, just being able to ‘see’ the 4th would get my neurons firing on a whole. nother. lev-el.
My book club is a pretty smart, literate bunch of cutthroats, and just read James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle. We all hated it, to one degree or another. The man was clearly paid by the word! I’d read The Turn of the Screw in college and was underwhelmed by it, too.
Finished The Lightening Thief a YA book comparable in quality and scope (IMO) to the Harry Potter books. (Not to imply in plot.)
Young Percy Jackson finds out he is the son of a Greek God in the modern-day world and must go on a quest to prevent a war between the Gods. He takes with him Annabelle (the daughter of the goddess of wisdom) and a young satyr.
It was a quick enjoyable read, but rather predictable for the most part.
I will read the sequels. Fans of Greek Mythology will enjoy it.
My 13-year-old has been enjoying that series, too.
:eek: Is that a subtle insult?
Not all that subtle. :rolleyes:
Heh. No, not an insult. You refer to it as a YA book, after all. I like reading kids’ books from time to time, too.