I knew. I must have been feeling playful this morning. (So unlike me…)
Seconded, really good. Depressing, though – who’d have thought it!
I read a couple of interesting books over the last few days:
Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Farming of Bones, and Krik? Krak!. Of those, I liked the last best – since I was reading them for certain aspects and by and large didn’t find them, I went through them rather quickly. Interesting novels all three, I have to say – I wasn’t enthusiastic about them, but I’d recommend them to people interested in the Caribbean or any kind of diasporic literature.
Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. I liked that one better than the Danticat novels, which may have to do with the story being on the whole more light-hearted. Danticat’s a bit dark sometimes.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. I am very ambivalent about this. It was an easy and fun read, but thinking about it, it really didn’t hold together well. I’ll give details if people are interested, but it lacked a certain sense of organic coming together, plus the characters by and large were unlikable. Gets you through a train ride or two, but you can easily find something better.
Soren Narnia’s Song of the Living Dead. Recommended by Zombie CSU. A self-published book, and surprisingly good. Tells the story of a rising of undead through interviews/comments from five to eight people, and builds a very convincing and unique zombie rising. I won’t give away too much, but I’ve not seen that particular kind anywhere, and it struck me as very realistic; the ending was a bit weak, I thought – but opinions will vary on that. This is a 2003 publication, I think if he tried to find a publisher for this now, he’d have no problem at all, considering the crap zombie novels that are out there.
Otherwise, I’m still at American Fantastic Tales (which I still recommend) and reading Foucault…I need something more interesting!
You were prescient, sir: I have, indeed, given up on Henry James, though I stuck it out for about 75 pages (approx. a quarter of the book). I realized I was understanding half, or less, or what was going on. (I did check Wiki the next day for a summary of the plot, though.)
Went to the library yesterday and took out a bunch of stuff from my Amazon wishlist, rather than just checking the new releases shelves (which have been pretty thin of late) – ironically, one of the books I took out was a novel about Henry James, The Master – not at all sure how that ended up on the Amazon list, but couldn’t resist the synchronicity.
This wasn’t the first book I started, though – that honor goes to The World Without Us, which three chapters in is pretty interesting.
I finished Ender’s Game a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it. Saw parts of the end coming but not the whole picture. Not sure whether or not I want to get involved with the rest of the Ender-verse, though.
Depending on my mood I’m reading both The Heartless Stone and Terry Pratchett’s Nation. I picked the latter up when I couldn’t find a copy of A Hat Full of Sky, which I’m quite looking forward to after having read The Wee Free Men in September.
Enright3’s post reminded me: I’ve never read any Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps this is a good time to remedy that.
Finished The Elegant Universe, and while I liked it, I have some questions that I don’t even know if they make sense (or if the questions are in the ‘that’s not even wrong’ category). Nevertheless, I really liked it, and I’m pretty comfortable with relativity, I follow quantum physics on an abstract-but-not-gut level, and I get what string theory is at least supposed to explain.
Now I’m reading Arctic Dream and it’s so relaxing.
Speaker for the Dead is pretty amazing.
Finished **In the Woods **so am now continuing with The Likeness. Noticed last night it’s Tana French, not Tara. :smack:
I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last night. It was bleak and harrowing and wonderfully written. I started Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed this morning for some brain candy, but right now it’s like eating pork rinds after having filet mignon. Normally I love “rinsing” my brain after a deep novel with some fluffy chick lit, but I don’t think my mind is ready to leave McCarthy’s post-Apocalyptic world just yet. I may need an adjustment period to get back into the world where every sassy 30-something female is a magazine editor with guy trouble.
What you’re looking for is called a tesseract. Here’s one version.
I picked up the Agassi book Monday afternoon and finished it Tuesday afternoon. The writing itself probably won’t go down in history. It’s as-told-to J.R. Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer for Feature Writing in 2000, and it’s also completely in the present tense. But for a biography by a famous person, it’s unusually revealing, and you very much get a sense of how far this guy has come.
I’m familiar with tesseracts. What you linked to is not a hypercube - that picture is a 3-d object. It shows that a hypercube has 4 more vertices than a cube, with one new edge extended out from each existing vertex in the cube, but it’s not really a tesseract. I think I’ve read that that thing can be the shadow a true hollow tesseract would project into 3-space if the lighting were right, but I’m not positive about that. Anyway, enough of a hijack. I started a thread about it in GQ a few days ago.
Finished The Masterpiece. It’ll be in my Zola Top Five. I don’t have an artistic or obsessive bone in my body, but Zola still made me feel for tortured geniuses everywhere. And he gave me a little bit of insight into Impressionism and a nice tour of Paris.
Started Nana. Couldn’t keep the characters straight but kept reading anyway. Then No Dominion arrived (one of the Already Dead novels praised by Eleanor of Aquitaine) so I started that. I loved Already Dead and Shotgun Rule. Eleanor speaks truth – the guy writes the best dialogue of anyone, except maybe Elmore Leonard.
So I skipped to the end of Nana so I could watch her die. God, I hated that woman. Her “friends” were assholes too.
Finished The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. It was enjoyable enough, but not something I’d reread. And the criticism is right on - the relationships of the characters are entirely too 20th century. Good enough for a light reading pile.
Now I’m reading Diana Gabaldon’s latest Claire and Jamie epic, An Echo in the Bone. It’s pure candy, and I’ll fly through it, then start looking around slaveringly, wanting more. I just can’t get enough of these books (tho’ some are definitely better than others, it must be said).
I finally finished The Godfather on audiobook. It was really, really good. I started Lady Susan by Jane Austen which I got from librivox.org. It’s short and fun. Up next will be The Girl With No Shadow, the sequel to Chocolat.
I have about 150 pages left to go in It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. After that I need to read Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, so I can return it to my mom, even though what I want to read is World War Z, which I just got last week.
I picked up some spare money from teaching a course, so I bought “Unseen Academicals” in hardcover, which I rarely do. About a quarter of the way through. I also got “Nudge” by Richard Thaler, which is on the subject I taught, and so is useful to read before I teach it again, maybe in February.
Finished the first three Amelia Peabody mysteries, and they were fun. Murder and Egyptian archaeology at the end of the 19th century. I’ll have to borrow more of these from my mom when I see her at Thanksgiving.
I’m reading Honor Harrington #10 now, War of Honor. It’s starting off just as slowly as I expected, but I think the writing is less repetitive than in the previous book. The only phrasing that is popping out at me now is too many people “smiling unpleasantly”. I deliberately waited several months between books to cleanse my palate of his overused expressions.
I read and loved Lady Susan - it’s light and fluffy by Austen standards, but still shows promise of the author’s wit and skewering of the upper classes. Also, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for The Girl with No Shadow in my local cheapo bookstore, since I really liked Chocolat. The movie was cute (drool, Johnny Depp), but the book had more depth.
Coincidentally, my audio book right now is Jane Austen’s Persuasion from librivox - the Karen Savage version.
I swear, if the reader is Andy Minter, Karen Savage, or Elizabeth Klett, librivox versions are just as good as professional.
twickster, glad we see eye to eye on Henry James, too, as on so many other things bibliophilic. 
I read The World Without Us about a year ago and really, really enjoyed it. A fascinating discussion of humanity’s impact upon nature, how nature pushes back, and what would happen if we all disappeared at once, everywhere. Hope you like it as much as I did.
A then-colleague of mine wrote a screenplay for Lady Susan a few years ago, and it was quite good. I could never persuade her to submit it to a Hollywood agent, though.
Just finished “The Piano Teacher” by Elfriede Jelinek. Satisfied the morbidity that I expected.
Getting ready to read “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz. Heard good things.
Last two before that were: “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner and “The Magus” by John Fowles. Thought Fowles bordered on brilliance in parts but the whole was slightly less so. Could have saved the time from reading Stegner for something better, imo.
Thanks for the tip … I wrote down those names and will search for them the next time I’m looking for an audio book. I’ve found the librivox recordings to be hit and miss so far, though I’ve only tried a few. On some, the sound quality is terrible and/or the readers are difficult to understand. Lady Susan is pretty good, though. There are different readers for each character’s letters (consistent readers for each character throughout), and the sound quality is decent.
I didn’t even know there was a sequel until I came across The Girl with No Shadow among the audio books at my local library. I didn’t read Chocolat but have seen the movie. I hope I’m okay trying to read the sequel when I didn’t read the first. Maybe I should try to read it quick.