I also finished On Canaan’s Side, which was pretty good - a novel (a short novel, which was nice coming off of two Game of Thrones books), about an elderly woman, who immigrated to the US from Ireland, looking back over the events of her life. It’s sad (well you know, she’s old so she’s reflecting on former loves and traumatic events) but the writing is just lovely. Author is Sebastian Barry.
I’m currently reading Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science, which is great reading and I’m enjoying it, but I just got a notice that Reamde is available for download from the library, so it’s going to be hard not to jump on that.
So, I finished Snuff, which was enjoyable, though not my favorite Discworld title. Started back in on Reamde when 1Q84 by Murakami fell into the kindle on Tuesday.
Sorry Mr. Stephenson, but I am otherwise occupied for the time being.
I finished The Night Circus. The narrator of the audiobook, Jim Dale, does such an excellent job that it completely smooths over some problems I might otherwise have had with the story. Performances like his are why I happily have an Audible account, despite having a living room filled with overflowing bookshelves.
I must ask. How deeply are clowns involved with the story? Because the book looked intriguing to me when it was first being talked about this summer, but … ugh, clowns are a deal-breaker for me. It doesn’t matter if they’re good, bad, serial killers or whatever. IMHO, books should come with a “Clown Warning” label.
Okay, I just requested the audiobook for The Night Circus at the library, but I am #41 on the waiting list. Will let you know in about 2013 how it was.
And wonderlust, the circus in the book is definitely not a traditional circus. I too find some circus elements distasteful, so I’m happy to report that along with no clowns, there’s no freak tents, no menageries and no ego-maniacal ring masters.
I finished The Ask and The Answer, the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. It continues being generally pretty excellent. This time our heroes are separated into the two warring factions, the leaders of which neither is exactly what he or she appears to be. Each is pretty ruthless.
I’ve started the third book in the series, Monsters of Men. In this one, the war continues, along with “new” enemies and challenges. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but it seems as good as the other two.
It’s odd, though - in book 2, Todd and Viola spend much of their time separated. I’m hoping that this book will end in peace and happiness for the two, but I doubt that it really will. Never know, I guess.
These books really draw you in - they’re really enjoyable page turners.
Almost finished with Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. Wanted to share this paragraph (Pisit is the host of a Thai radio show):
On a whim, Pisit calls the monk back to ask what he thinks of all this, and Western culture in general. After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic: “Actually, the West is a Culture of Emergency: twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, drugs, wars on everything–watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? Of course, if you didn’t believe you could control everything, there wouldn’t be an emergency, would there?”
And ain’t that the truth?
The book is a thriller/mystery about the murder of a US Marine (by snakes). The protagonist is a rarity – an honest Thai cop, son of a Thai prostitute and a US serviceman. It’s full of humor, with asides about Buddhism and prostitution and cultural differences that don’t detract from the story.
Well, other than Andrew Johnson’s inadvertent inebriation, I’ll bet it does. March 4, 1865 was a very good day for Lincoln. It wasn’t for another month and a half that things got, um, considerably worse.
Is he romanticizing prostitution though? Maybe romanticize isn’t the right word, but the way he describes it, there’s no downside, for anyone. Or at least no more downside than there is in any other profession.
I’ve mentioned his books in these threads before myself, and he’s very accurate regarding prostitution. Very, very accurate. (The dart blowing is spot on too.) The first book in the series is the best, but the others are worthwhile too.
P.S.: Also as I mentioned before, Burdett oddly names real bars in the Patpong and Nana Plaza red-light areas and gives accurate descriptions of them, but the bars he names in Soi Cowboy are all fictional. No one’s really sure why he did that, but I happen to know that Soi Cowboy is where Burdett tends to hang out, so maybe he just didn’t want to piss in his pool, so to speak. There was some sort of magazine or newspaper interview with him a couple of years ago, and they met at Cowboy for it. The interviewer said the girls sure seemed to know him, as shouts of “John! John!” followed them down the street, a little to his embarrassment, heh.
Just finished The Magician King by Lev Grossman. Like the first book, it was okay. I’m underwhelmed overall, though. I wanted the books to be much darker and much less twee. They’re marketed as being “Narnia for grown ups” but the books are not very grown up at all. The stories would be easier to swallow if the characters were 16/17, not college graduates.
