Finally finished Flashman and the Redskins. A good book, but ugh! This reading-for-ten-minutes-a-day, but-only-on-workdays thing I’ve been doing just doesn’t cut it. I feel like I’ve been reading that book for eternity.
This morning I started on Ready Player One, which I’ve really been looking forward to, and it’s already off to a great start. Of course, I was a teenager in the eighties, so it feels like it was written just for me. 
I have this in my TBR pile.
I finished Tara French’s The Likeness last week. I liked it well enough, but the premise is so mindburstingly implausible, I can see why many people didn’t. The book is about a police detective who goes undercover impersonating a murder victim that looked exactly like her.
In an attempt to get to some of the classics I never had to read in school, I read Wuthering Heights. I really enjoyed it. WH was much different from the vague notion I had of the book that I cobbled together from cultural references. I cannot believe that anyone would consider Heathcliff a romantic figure… he’s one of the most dastardly villains I’ve encountered in literature!
I started Squirrel Seeks Chipmunks, a short story collection by David Sedaris, on the bus this morning and it’s so short that I’m almost halfway through. I am incredibly underwhelmed.
I liked this a lot, but yeah, the premise is insane if you think about it at all. I decided to treat it like the beginning of a fantasy novel – sort of like “it just IS, now let’s see what happens from here …” I really do think she is a terrific writer and it’s not so much the story, but how she tells it.
D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose. Still a great read for the 3rd time
I’m finishing Jo Nesbo’s ‘Redbreast’ at the moment. I got a call today from my local library letting me know there is a copy of John Connolly’s ‘The Burning Soul’ waiting for me on the reserve shelf. It’s the latest in his excellent Charlie Parker series. I’ll then be working my way through some good reccomendations I got in this thread
Most of my book club liked this dog book, although I have to admit I didn’t care for it: Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs: Clothier, Suzanne: 9780446696340: Amazon.com: Books
As was I, and I’m a HUGE Sedaris fan. The best two stories are the ones about the maternal mouse raising a snake, and the owl who talks to his prey. The rest were all of varying degrees of dyspeptic suckitude.
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker. The most disappointing book for me since The Historian. Absolutely awful, in every way it’s possible to be awful. If it wasn’t a library book, it’d be burned and the ashes spread to the winds.
Since I hated The Historian I will accept your review and be sure not to read this one.
Another hater of The Historian here. The City And The City was mentioned on the last page;I loved it. Reviews of this book usually compare China Mieville with various 20th century heavyweights. Let me just mention Avram Davidson; surely one of Doctor Esterhazy’s unpublished inquiries dealt with these most unusual cities.
Currently, Parade’s End is the book that has eaten my brain. Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy is a WWI story wrapped in an intense if restrained love story wrapped in a social history with a sardonic edge. It’s being filmed for BBC/HBO with a teleplay by Tom Stoppard–who can, no doubt, let the wit shine through & prevent it from being just another shmoopy costume drama. I read the 1-volume “900 page modernist masterpiece” on a few days off last August; now I’m working my way through the individual volumes recently published in critical editions. A very rich work.
(Oh, I just re-read* The Once & Future King* after very many years. Yes, T H White’s views were a bit old-fashioned even when I was young. And the ponderous bits of whimsy are even less readable than they were back then. But there’s still amazing beauty to be found in this book.)
Finished Vampires Not Invited the third in the Night Trackers series and the last I shall read (damn me for buying more than one in a series at once.)
My usual “mediocre” is too kind for this, it was just dull.
Inspired by this thread, Death Of Calvin And Hobbes - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board, I just raced through the 1996 Calvin and Hobbes collection It’s a Magical World. Good stuff, and still holds up very, very well. Damn close to timeless.
I finished Life, the Keith Richards autobiography not long ago. The music parts were good, the drug parts were eh. Interesting that he spent more time on Fresh Air talking about Satisfaction and sleeping with his guitar than he did on them in the book. Someone was very effective in picking a story.
And, going from the ridiculous to the sublime, I am now reading The Praise of Folly by Erasmus.
Finished “Ready, Player One” a little while ago. Is entertaining, book candy for nerds.
Finished the “of the Night” two-book series by Dan Simmons. I like Simmons, but this is one ponderous, fairly unimaginative horror/fantasy fiction there.
Got “Reamde” waiting. Mmmmmmmmm.
Finished it. And yes, it got better. But not enough for me to recommend it. I also have a hard time understanding how this falls into the sci-fi/fantasy genre, but whatever.
I’ve not read Simmons yet but I’ve got all 4 Hyperion books waiting on my shelf. I think I’ll read that next.
The book about the Mad Bomber was interesting but not brilliantly written. I learned a lot I didn’t know, so if you want to know about the Mad Bomber (everything I previously knew about him I had learned from Mad Magazine), go for it. Now starting Still Midnight by Denise Mina, about a Glaswegian police inspector investigating a home invasion that went wrong. Her new book End of the Wasp Season is getting great reviews but it was checked out at the library, so I figured I’d start with this one.
Finished Misquoting Jesus, which I found very interesting. I was put off a bit by his writing style, which I can only describe as slightly condescending (like he felt the need to dumb it way, way down), but I was fascinated by the history of the gospels and the attempt to tracks divergences in the texts.
I followed that up with A Princess of Mars, the first book in the John Carter series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was left thoroughly unimpressed. Despite the neat premise of a Civil War vet being mysteriously transported to Mars where he becomes a nigh-Superman (1938 version), there wasn’t much excitement in the book. Even the situations that had some potential for excitement generally got resolved in ways that were too convenient and contrived. It’s a small book, but was hard to finish because the interest just wasn’t there.
Anyway, I have now moved on to The Great Gatsby, which I started yesterday and will finish today. I read it in high school, but didn’t remember much at all about it before starting the re-read. I really like it.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach.
I’ve read Mary Roach’s other books, Stiff and Packing for Mars, and liked them a lot. This one is just as good as those.
Just finished Ready Player One, which was an absolute delight. Best book I’ve read in some time.
I read Wuthering Heights over the weekend. I found it readable, but I was not taken with the romance. I usually like a tortured hero, but Heathcliff did nothing for me. I prefer Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.
I’m reading Tim Dorsey’s Florida Roadkill ($1.99 now for Amazon Kindle). I’ve never read this author before. It’s pretty funny, in a very dark kind of way. I don’t remember Florida being quite this scary the last time I was there, but then I’m usually in the panhandle.