I’d be curious to hear what you think of City of Golden Shadow. I read it once for book club and found it rather dull. Then, a few years later, I picked it up again (I think I was trapped in a vacation home with nothing to read) and ended up going on to rip through the rest of the series, I was so caught up in the story.
I just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, which I enjoyed very much although I think I would wanted to know ahead of time that it’s intended to be a little unrealistic and over the top – I couldn’t tell at first if I was supposed to be enjoying that aspect. And also Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins, which was also very good and not what I was expecting based on the reviews. It’s a very sweet love story set against a backdrop of scientific inquiry, leading up to the atomic age.
twickster, I think your genius with language and words is very well known on the Dope. It’s only natural one would think of you while reading a book that’s all word ‘trickery’
I’d be interested in seeing what **Left Hand of Dorkness ** thinks of this new book as well. He’s into this stuff, too.
That’s actually a surprisingly readable book. Everyone I know who’s read it was surprised how involving it could be. Myself, I read most of it while riding around on Bangkok buses; Tolstoy would have been proud of me.
I’ll bring up my question above again: Does anyone know why a great author like Cormac McCarthy would make such a bad mistake like detailing gas-chamber executions in Texas in **No Country for Old Men ** when that state has never used the gas chamber and indeed used the electric chair at the time he was describing the executions? I cannot believe he would make such a mistake, so I figure he did this on purpose for some reason. I detected similar mistakes in James Michener’s Hawaii; that author was so familiar with the place that he must have done it on purpose.
I’ve just bought a whole bunch of books…co-incidentally my husband bought an X-Box 360 elite and Halo 3.
So far:
I’ve re-read American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and read a collection of his short stories (Fragile Things) and a graphic novel (Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes). I enjoyed all of them immensely.
I’ve just finished the new Terry Pratchett (Making Money), which was great fun to read too.
I’m now 100 pages into Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and I have Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and The Ladies of Grace Adieu: And Other Stories by Susanna Clarke still to go.
Bookshops are bad places, what with their “3 for 2” deals and “Specials of the Month”. I always come out with more than I planned to buy.
I don’t think I can really count the stuff I read for work. If you’re interested: whatever interests me from JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, BJOG and AJOG each month and I’m trying to work through Management of Common Problems in Obstetrics and Gynecology by Mishell, Goodwin and Brenner. Nothing thrilling.
This is one of my favorite 19th-century novels, and I’m a big fan of 19th-century novels.
Khadaji – Omnivore’s Dilemma is good – Pollan is one of my favorite writers. I regularly recommend his Botany of Desire, which is an interesting look at the coevolution of humans and four plants (apples, tulips, potatoes, and marijuana).
I recently decided to do a re-reading of the entirety of Tad Williams’ Otherland series and go straight through all four volumes for the first time. Currently in the middle of the second volume, River of Blue Fire. I’m recalling the first time I read the series there were some stretches that tended to drag, but I am finding this time almost none of it to be so; instead finding it all very engrossing.
I’ve never read Williams’ fantasy novels though; any recommendations on where to start?
No kidding. It may be a wonderful book [Water for Elephants], but after the horse killings and elephant punishment part I read last night, I’m not sure I’m going to keep going.
So far I like it. I’m only about 100 pages in, but it has to be finished by next week. I just finished Jane Eyre for the same class, and I found it kind of slow. By the middle it was good, but meh, I could take it or leave it. Luckily, Lady Audley’s Secret has been a bit more interesting.
Okay, I’m done with The Map that Changed the World by Winchester. I preferred his OED-related books, perhaps because I’m actually interested in the picky details of dictionary development, and because with a focus on words his Byzantine sentences don’t seem out of line. Winchester is somewhat repetitive, which helped to relate events to each other but also diminished any dramatic tension to be found in the story.
While I liked The Map that Changed the World well enough, it was a slow read (about 25 pages a night). I didn’t mind the intrusion of the author’s story at mid-book; I understood it as an outcropping from a different era than the surrounding narrative, if I may use a geological metaphor. Perhaps the problem was that I gained little sense of William Smith’s psychology, which made this more a book about the history of an idea and less about the progenitor of the idea. That’s fine, but a less-rich narrative.
Winchester’s richness seems typically to reside in his descriptions of the historical context in which the events of his books occurred. At this he is quite masterful. I enjoy Winchester’s compulsive need to share amusing tangential or coincidental information in footnotres. He also turns one particularly fine phrase , which may help explain why there is so little of Smith’s emotional stratum in this book. Regarding Smith: : “He was no great diarist; but once in a while his entries make one wish he had been a better one” (p. 56).
I’m probably the most squeamish about this sort of thing, but I was able to read through it. I promise you, keep reading, it really is an excellent book.
Okay, at the end of this month I have some coast-to-coast flights. I already have one book picked out. Of the following, which should I read on the plane, and why?
Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle
Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants
Chuck Palahniuk: Survivor
Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love
Greg Mortenson & David Relin: Three Cups of Tea
We can play this game again in November and December if you like.
Stephen Colbert’s new book I Am America (And So Can You!) is being released on October 9 - I’ll be reading that asap. I got a blad of it and it is quite hilarious.
Non-fiction: Almost a Miracle by John Ferling – a highly readable telling of how the United States somehow mannaged to defeat Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. I highly recommend it.
Fiction: The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke – tells the story of post-Katrina New Orleans and the craziness that ensues.
Just finished Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale” (which IIRC was originally recommended somewhere here on the SDMB). It was breathtakingly good.
Another great read was “Witch Cradle” by Kathleen Hills. A mystery set in the early 1950’s in a small Scandinavian community of Upper Peninsula Michigan, involving members of the Finnish community who have accepted Stalin’s invitation to relocate to the USSR. It’s good enough that I’m going to search out her earlier books.
I loved Kate Atkinson’s “Case Histories,” so I have picked up her “Emotionally Weird.” Haven’t started it yet.
I’ve been trying to read “The Name of the Wind,” but I can’t seem to get into it. Will keep trying, I guess.
I dumped Acacia by David Durham. Either my standards are getting higher, or I’m just old and impatient. One of Durham’s characters did something that I thought was implausible, and he changed direction with another character. After he did that, I started nitpicking his word choices and sentence structure. Once that happens, there’s no going back.
Feeling guilty, I went back to a previously dumped book, Our American King by David Lozell Martin, one of my favorite writers. It’s a post-apocalypse story about a charismatic figure (the king in the title) who gathers survivors and challenges what’s left of the government. What I like best about it (this time) is the narrator, Mary. She’s what we used to call “lippy”, and her attitude cracks me up.
I also like how Martin describes the way the apocalypse happens. It started with an oil/economic crisis, and the collapse doesn’t happen gradually, with fewer and fewer people being able to buy gas, or keep their jobs. Things are “bad” for awhile, but suddenly there’s what Martin calls the “tipping point”, and everything crumbles suddenly. Riots, anarchy, food shortages, government crackdowns, etc. One day things were “normal” for millions of people, the next day their lives were changed forever.
I’m reading Greenspan’s book, In the Age of Turbulence. I’m not much of a biography reader (or auto) but I knew I’d dig his take on the major economic decisions of the last 50 years. It really picked up after he got away from his youth, and into him doing real work.
But, I’m going on a trip in a week, and I’m leaving that behind and bringing the final Harry Potter book with me.
