About done with Survival of the Sickest, and I’m going to move on to one of the books listed in post 115, so tell me which one not to read on the plane.
Thank you, WomanofScorn! I finished it last night and you are absolutely right – it’s a marvelous book. I’m so glad I finished it too, because the terrible images that were giving me nightmares have now been replaced with …er, other ones. 
I may even read this book again, some day.
Inside the Mind of BTK The true story behind the thirty-year hunt for the notorious Wichita Serial Killer by legendary FBI profiler John Douglas
I’m confooosed. Are you saying Wally Lamb’s book reads as if John Irving had written Prince of Tides?
Yes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Are you aware that the recurring theme throughout this book is the lead character hijacking and crashing a plane? Or was that intentional?
If intentional, I say go with this one, it’s a very engaging and well-written book, if a little grim (NOTHING compared to Chuck’s more recent works though, I can’t even read those! :eek: ).
Shoshana, *Glass Castle *is really good and provided one of our best book group discussions. I’ve also read and very much liked Like Water for Elephants. I think they might be interesting to read together. Don’t know the others you mentioned.
I just finished Ann Pratchett’s Bel Canto, which I liked very much. She writes beautifully and takes topics and motifs that could be mawkish and makes them beautiful and authentic.
Just started Diane Mott Davidson’s Sweet Revenge, then it’s back to Ann Pratchett with Run, then on to Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, then Freedom and Necessity, then The Time Traveler’s Wife, then English Passengers. There may be a few fluffy books in between these.
goodreads has really gotten me planning in advance…
GT
I picked it for the entertainment value of the juxtaposition (also, I just picked it up, not knowing that it even existed until this summer). I’m not planning to read Rant *anytime * soon because his last two seemed gross for the sake of gross.
**gardentraveler, ** thanks. Have your read Truth and Beauty? First read Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, then read Ann’s narrative. I sometimes have my students read these as a pair in order to really understand how a person’s account and a collateral account might be very different. Speaking of which, I saw that Temple Grandin’s mother has published a book, which I hope will serve the same function of illuminating a life story from a different perspective.
No, Bel Canto is the first of her books that I’ve read. I’m planning to make it through all of them shortly, though. Thanks for the tip on reading Lucy Grealy’s work before reading Truth and Beauty.
GT
I am very excited…Ken Follett’s World Without End, which is his sequel to Pillars of the Earth, was released yesterday. I did something I virtually never do…went out and bought a brand-new just-released hardback (I usually check them out from the library, and if it’s a book I want to keep, will buy the paperback when it comes out. I love books, but I’m cheap.) Thank goodness for Borders putting new books on 30% discount, because the thing is 1000 pages and $35! I don’t care, though…I am really going to dig reading it.
Oh, my library only seems to have ordered the book on CD. No way am I going to listen to it instead of read it!
I am reading the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries by Alexander McCall Smith. I’m in a contemplative mood, so they suit me.
I also want to read The Stuff of Thought.
I’ve read The Professor and the Madman and enjoyed it, but couldn’t get into his other book about the map.
I was impressed by Time Traveller’s Wife, but hated the ending-not his ending, but the bit about his daughter.
I also want to read the Colbert book, ditto Eat, Love, Pray.
I just started* Eat, Love, Pray.*
Today, I’m starting Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen.
This month I’ve read:
Something Borrowed
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Fragile Things
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and I’m currently reading Moonheart, by Charles de Lint.
I really loved TTTW, and I admit it made me teary-eyed at times. I also loved the fact it was set in Chicago - most of the locations were all familiar to me.
Fragile Things had its ups and downs. I felt like some of the stories left me going WTF? but others sent chills down my back. Gaiman is somewhat hit and miss for me, but when he hits, he’s brilliant.
I picked up de Lint because I loved Trader, but I’m ambivalent about Moonheart. It is one of his earliest works, so his writing style is not as polished as it is now, but the storyline is still semi-intriguing, so I’ll definitely finish it. I don’t know if I’ll give his other books a try right away, though.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is an excellent read, btw. I just made my roommate read it and she refused to talk to me until she finished.
Finished Our American King, a post-apocalypse novel by David Lozell Martin. I think post-apocalypse fans would like it. The best thing about the book is Mary, the narrator. She’s in her 90’s when she tells the story of how she and her husband, starving in the suburbs of D.C. after “the calamity”, find the charismatic Tazza and encourage (enable?) him to declare himself King of America, gather followers, do some good and wreak a lot of havoc. Mary is flawed, funny, and fabulous.
I’m about finished with Captains Outrageous, a Hap and Leonard novel by Joe Lansdale. Hap and Leonard are a couple of Texas boys. They have good hearts, good friends, and they’re always in trouble. Joe’s Hap & Leonard stories can be over the top, but even while you’re going “Nobody’d do that!”, you’re having fun. Joe writes great dialogue too. All the Hap & Leonard books are great, and I’m shocked that nobody’s filmed any of them.
Right now:
At MilliCal’s Request, I’m reading the first novel of ** A Series of Unfortunate Events**, The Bad Beginning, and will probably be reading others, Quick read.
I’m reading Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica under the translator’s title The Trojan War: What Homer Didn’t Tell.
I’m satisfying my early Mark Twain jones with Mark Twain’s San Francisco, a collection of his newspaper pieces from before he published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
I’ve also picked up Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, from the same era.
And to round out the Twain, I’ve got The Annotated Huckleberry Finn.
I’m still working through Earthborn. I put it down for too long and forgot who was who and what they were doing. Pit-worthy SWEAR, Card can write bratty children way too well! I want to slap Akma across the room!
I’m also working on:
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Poole (which is explaining a lot of the little things I didn’t know about British Victorian culture.)
Svaha by Charles de Lint (really enjoying this. I love de Lint’s urban fantasy.)
Story-Wallah, an anthology of stories by South Asian writers (which has the ugliest cover in the world.)
Necessities of Life by Adrienne Rich (I’m on a feminist poetry kick right now.)
Just started The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. It’s like Dilbert meets Cthulhu. I’d probably enjoy it even more if I were a computer geek, but Stross’s breezy style makes up for that. I thought “cow-orker” was a Doper term, but I guess not. (Unless Stross is a Doper.) 
It reminds me a little bit of Resume With Monsters by William Browning Spencer, where office drones encounter Lovecraft’s Old Ones.
AFAIK Scott Adams coined the atrocity that is cow-orker. At least, that was the earliest reference that I have seen.
To be honest, I really wouldn’t. There’s some good bits in Memory, Sorrow & Thorn (I think that’s the name of the series. Starts with The Dragonbone Chair) but overall, it’s nothing impressive. And I haven’t read Shadowmarch but a friend of mine took it camping, and had nothing but bad to say about it.
It’s been a long time sice I read Otherland but I remember being utterly enthralled by it. I was thirteen the first time I read City of Golden Shadow and the internet was totally foreign to me. I should go back and reread them, and see how they stand up, both ten years after the fact, and also with me having read a lot more widely in the genre - I read Otherland before I read any William Gibson, or really any scifi that wasn’t about spaceships.
As for myself, I’ve just moved to London, and I can count my friends on one hand, and still be able to wiggle a finger or two. So I’ve been hitting up the Oxfam bookshops, (oh, Oxfam bookshops, I am so in love), and have read, over the past couple of weeks, Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters, which I found very dull. I read Fingersmith last year, and impressed me a lot, so this was a comedown. But it was fun to read about London and be able to recognise bits of it, and in a similar vein I read Neverwhere, which I know backwards anyway, but now I know what the Underground actually is, it was even more fun to read, and Last Orders, which was very good, but I couldn’t shake the movie out of my head. I read Cryptonomicon, which I loved, and was funnier and clever that I expected, and Snow Crash, which I didn’t like at all. I was all set to plunge headlong into the Baroque Cycle on the strength of Cryptonomicon but I think I might wait a while.
On a non-London kick, I finally read some Australian authors who weren’t Peter Carey: Dirt Music, by Tim Winton, and The Secret River by Kate Grenville. Both books, though very different, were fascinating. The Secret River in particular was amazing - the amount of research she did for the book was massive, and she’s collected it into another book, which I don’t think has been published yet. He description of how she came to write it is no less interesting - her main character is based on an ancestor of his, who was a convict exported to Australia, whereupon he took up unoccupied land. It was, of course, occupied, and the inability of the settlers to see the local aboriginal tribes as occupiers or stake holders is what drives a lot of the narrative, and leads to the inevitable and depressing final act. I hadn’t read her before this, so she’s going to have to go on my ‘to read’ pile.
That was more than I meant to write - to conclude, I’m in the middle of Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, but it’s on hold at the moment while I finish Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik. It’s wonderfully light historical fantasy, and I love the dialogue.
I’m trying not to buy many books, because I don’t have anywhere to live, and so I have to lug them around with me, so I’ve been distributing them across hostels. Lucky hostels, poor me.