Finished The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner. Decent book for a plane trip or the beach. The plot hinges on an otherwise intelligent woman behaving like a 12-year-old when she runs into an old boyfriend. There’s lots wrong with the book but it was a compulsive read.
Started The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Amazing.
Cracking open *Fingersmith *by Sara Waters tonight.
Love that book.
Finished The Things They Carried. Started Turning Angel by Greg Iles – from the library book sale. I’d read one of his and couldn’t remember if I liked him or not, but for a quarter, what the hell. Got about three pages in and remembered that I didn’t like him and why. The man can’t write dialogue. His characters talk like they’re on L&O or CSI – info dumps and exposition. When you’ve got 300 pages to tell the story, you’ve got time to build characters.
Started Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. Liking it so far.
I agree. Read his Vietnam-influenced mystery/drama In the Lake of the Woods if you want to keep going with him. Spooky and very, very interesting.
Just finished this book, about the 1942 naval Battle of Midway and the 1998 Dr. Robert Ballard-led search for the sunken aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. Good text and even better pictures: Return to Midway: Ballard, Robert D., Archbold, Rick, Marschall, Ken: 9780792275008: Amazon.com: Books
I’m now about 150 pages into Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, and I’m diggin’ it.
Reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. Liking it so far, only on the first chapter though. Anyone else read it?
Not me, sorry.
Picked Jack Higgins’s kidnap-Churchill WW2 yarn The Eagle Has Landed off the shelf last night and am enjoying it all over again. Farfetched but fun. Hadn’t read it in years.
I read it over the summer, and really liked it. Picked it up on a whim, and read the whole thing in a weekend. Really good read.
Finished Spider’s Revenge (Elemental Assassin) the latest in the Elemental Assassin series. It was typical stuff, but I was a *little *surprised at the end. Not a *great *series, but an easy read and I like it enough to keep reading.
Moby-Duck: The true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea and of the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists, and fools, including the author, who went in search of them.
I’m about halfway through. There’s a bit of a disconnect between the quest for plastic bath toys and the fact that pollution and environmental damage are just not funny subjects.
Wouldn’t ya know it, there’s a Wiki page!: Friendly Floatees spill - Wikipedia
Now I am reading Sorry, a thriller by Croatian-born Zoran Drvenkar, who uses the second-person POV in a very strange and effective way: “You” are a character in the book, a murderer. Most of the book is third person, and “you” come in once in a while. The reader learns about you and your motivation. You are really sorry, and really terrible things have happened to you. The person you killed probably deserved it, but you feel really bad. You are sorry.
We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Probably y’all have already read it, but in case not, it’s quick reading, and creepy and funny.
Harrumph. Speak for yourself!
Finished Woody Allen: A Biography, by Eric Lax. A worthwhile read for me since I’m such a big fan. I found the first part of the book more interesting, detailing Woody’s childhood and early career as a joke writer and stand-up comic. The latter part got a little too bogged down in the technical details of how Woody makes his movies. The technology probably isn’t even used anymore. Ironic how he and Mia Farrow are portrayed as the perfect couple and the book was published shortly before their explosice break-up.
Felt like trying another John Grisham, but our library is a little light on him. Grabbed at random his The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. Turns out this is non-fiction. Did not know that, and I suspect the library doesn’t either since it was just lumped in with all of his fiction. Sounds interesting though, and I’ll start that today. The true case of an innocent man wrongfully convicted of a 1982 murder in Oklahoma and sent to death row.
Sorry is one twisted book. Unusually depraved. Not to say that can’t be a good thing, but it really is kind of sick.
Now starting In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault.
I really liked The Runaway Jury and The Firm. His recent short story collection Ford County is uneven, but there’s some good stuff in it.
Just finished the YA graphic (art?) novel, Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick. The text narrative is about a newly deaf boy trying to find his father after losing his mother. The book also has a pictorial counter-narrative that goes in a different direction, but eventually converges with the boy’s story. 640 pages, but you can easily read it in a few hours. It’s really a love letter to museums and to New York City and it’s simply gorgeous.
Oooh - I just read Sleepless as well & really enjoyed it. IMHO, there’s a Bladerunner/William Gibson/Cory Doctorow vibe to the story - which is not a bad thing. Although Huston brings his own sense of style to the table, and I think I may be reading more of his work. I got thrown a bit by the third person vs 1st person modes at first, but it came together a bit more clearly as I continued the story.
The idea behind the Sleepless is damn creepy - both the biological origin and the societal effects. Huston definitely did his research for this story, but it felt very organic and intrinsic to the story flow & not a “look at all the cool stuff I found out!”.
The characters are solid - I really felt like was getting to know Park, as well as the unnamed narrator & couldn’t wait to see how their stories intersected.
A few quotes I jotted down:
“It wasn’t that human nature was base, obscene and brutal, it was only fear, and confusion and despair that made them look and act that way.”
*“He liked the idea of a world where mental acuity and the ability to play well with others were valued more highly than blood-lust or greed.” *
My new audiobook is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I’m just over an hour in and I’m really liking it.
I did a Halloween-inspired reread of Stephen King’s It last weekend. I hadn’t read it since my teens, but it still holds the power to creep me the hell out.
This morning I finished The Bridge to Never Land, by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Meh. Even when I was a kid I’d have rolled my eyes at all the lucky coincidences in this story. I just wanted to complete the Starcatchers series. Of course, at the end they left it all set up to go further.
Next up: God, no! signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales, by Penn Jillette.