Whatcha Readin'?

Cafe Society
81

I enjoyed up until about Blue Moon. Beyond that - library all the way. And I am totally sick of the Merry Gentry series, and I think she’s only on the third book there? Oh, but a series that you might enjoy along the same veins (no pun intended) are the books Rachel Morgan books by Kim Harrison - Dead Witch Walking , The Good, the Bad, and the Undead , and Every Which Way But Dead . Cheesy, but I like them.

I just came back from a trip to Italy. While there, I re-read a couple by Laurie Notaro, specifically The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club : True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life and I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) : True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl
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The day that I was flying out, I had gone to a bunch of tag sales, and bought Playing with Boys . Definitely worth at least a quarter. I quietly enjoyed it, then let my cousin take it home in her carryon.

For some depth and meaning, I got 75% through The Smartest Guys in the Room : The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron , but when the bookmark fell out of the book on the way off the plane, I didn’t bother trying to replace it. Not that it’s a bad book, it’s just that trying to follow some of the accounting concepts [southern belle] made my poor little head spin. [/southern belle]

Last night I finished Innocence by Kathleen Tessaro. I had read and vaguely enjoyed her first book, and it was the same way with this one. Yay for the library!

Tonight I start on Cocktails for Three . After that, it’s probably on to books on Roman history. I was entirely fascinated by what little I was told on the touring I did, that I just had to come back and get books on it out of the library!

Susan

82

I’m near the end of The Devil in the White City. Very well-written and very informative. I learned quite a bit from it.

I need to get back to Guns, Germs & Steel. I took a break from it because I was on a writing deadline and needed something lighter.

I just finished the graphic novel Superman: Birthright. If it’s representative of where the graphic novel genre is going, I’m impressed.

Before that, I read Ivan Doig’s The Whistling Season. It’s an absolutely fantastic novel about one-room schools in Montana a century ago.

A few others I’ve read lately: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was a wonderful novel; The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, which was informative, but I read an uncorrected proof and it had some nasty errors I hope they fixed in the final edition; and The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, which was okay but not great.

83

Embarassing to admit, but I bought that book solely because it was about Dr. Holmes (the quite prolific 19th century serial killer/mass murderer) and never would have bought it to read about the Chicago’s World Fair. After I started reading it though I found myself skipping ahead to get past the uninteresting parts about the serial killer and read more about the Fair! I know others who did the same thing. Very clever “bait’n’switch” marketing ploy on Larson’s part to beef the true crime element in order to get readers interested in a story that on the surface sounds ho-hum but isn’t.

84

Yesterday I finished the book I was started when I began this thread- it was okay but not great. Now I’m starting “Breaking Her Fall” by Stephen Goodwin. It’s fiction about a single dad whose life is turned upside down when he gets a call about his 14-year-old daughter’s behavior at a party. Looks good.

After this one, I’m going to work my way through some interesting-sounding books in this thread.

So many books in the world, so little time.

85

Anita Blake – I really enjoyed the books right through Obsidian Butterfly. You’ll be safe buying them up to there – especially if you are an Edward fan. Narcissus in Chains was iffy – there was still an actual story, but it was badly overwhelmed by the increasingly turgid relationship stuff. The last three books (Cerulean Sins, Incubus Dreams, and, the latest, Danse Macabre) are just crap. Each of them features a miniscule story (easily summarized in one short paragraph), padded with pages and pages and pages of sex and talk. Incubus Dreams had a sex scene that ran something like 50 pages and added perhaps a half-a-page worth of actual material to the story. Danse Macabre is even worse – it had a couple of those long, long sex scenes and, even worse, it had pages and pages of tiresome, tedious, repetitive whining about relationships.

If you enjoyed the earlier Anita books, you’ll really like Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series. The latest of those is Definately Dead.

86

Oh, and to get this back to the OP – I’m reading Victoria Thompson’s Murder in Little Italy right now.

87

I just finished Danse Macabre. I am still enjoying the Anita Blake books, but I know what I’m going to get when I start the book, and have adjusted my expectations. I did stop recommending them to other people after Obsidian Butterfly.
I like the Sookie Stackhouse books too, although the newest one is my least favorite. I’ll also second the Kim Harrison books. The newest one, A Fistful of Charms, was just published this week.

88

Ohh, is the new Kim Harrison out? I like that series, too. I’ll try to get to the bookstore this weekend.

I actually thought the latest Sookie was better than the last one.

And I’m definately still reading Anita – there was some good stuff even in this last one. it’s just frustrating that it’s buried in so much crap! When I recommend them to people I use the same caveat you do – making it clear that I’m only really recommending them up to Obsidian Butterful…

What do you think of the Merry Gentry books? I like them – lately better than the Anita books. But they haven’t changed in the way the Anita books have. The Merry books were heavy on sex and light on plot from the beginning. I think if the sex parts were cut back, you could cull the whole series down to one book without leaving out any story! They still hold my interest, though.

89

Battlestar Galactica. I’m not proud of this…

90

The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer

Its excellent so far.

91

Ooh, my friend at work recommended this to me, and I haven’t read it yet, even though I currently have it out from the library. But if a Doper says it’s good, then I’m gonna start reading it right now!

Off to read!
ZJ

92

Dammit! The cat just walked across the keyboard and erased a nice long post I was writing.

I finished Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind rather quickly, thanks to getting stuck at Dulles all day Wednesday. Liked it, didn’t love it; A.S. Byatt’s Possession is better on the “writers seeking the truth about writers” theme, and I prefer the ouevre of Robert Goddard, who writes usually on the theme of “figuring out what happened in the past that is causing things to happen in the present.”

Shadow of the Wind was well written, for the most part (a few times there were clunky or anachronistic turns of phrase that had me wondering whose choices they were, the author’s or the translator’s [Robert Graves’s daughter, BTW]), and definitely well plotted. It was evocative of the early Franco era in Spain, as the backdrop of a lot of the story; it’s a period I know nothing about and found interesting, and relevant to the plot. I enjoyed reading it, but definitely finished it feeling a trifle “meh.”

From there I proceeded directly to Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (a proper Englishwoman sets off, alone, to travel in Africa in the 1890s), which is shaping up to be a delightful read.

93

I just started Quartet by George R. R. Martin. It’s a collection of four novellas. The first one is called Black and White and Red All Over, and it’s the first 200 pages of a novel that Martin planned as an epic story of yellow journalism and Jack the Ripper. He wrote it 20 years ago and didn’t find a publisher, so he went on to other things and never finished it.

I’ll read anything Martin writes. He’s always entertaining and sometimes brilliant.

94

I’m progressing slowly through my “modern American authors” reading list. I’ve finished John Irving’s Until I Find You, which I thought was brillant. I’ve never read anything else by Irving, so I can’t really say whether it’s a good work by HIS standards, too. In any event, knowing nothing about tattoing or acting or, as far as I recall, juvenile attraction to elder women, I was hooked by the level of detail Irving provides. I thought the end (strangely enough after 700 pages) came too quickly, but it was nice enough.

Also finished David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day, which I didn’t think as funny as most reviewers, but still worthwhile. For those who don’t know it, it’s a collection of Sedaris’s essays in what, the New Yorker? Maybe, anyway.

Reading right now: Stephen Graubard’s The Presidents, which is a review, basically, of the changes in the Presidency since TR. Bought it to fill gaps in my knowledge of some of the 60s and 70s presidencies. It’s a good read, alas, it doesn’t yet hold its promise of really bringing out the changes. You just have to sort-of find them in the text.

And finally, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, one of the most unique books I’ve ever read. Was hooked from the foreword, which, at least in my edition, tells you what you should read (the first 110 pages or so), what you shouldn’t probably read (the middle chapters), and that the book thereafter becomes kind of uneven. It comes with an explanation of its imagery! Just great. Sad, unfortunately.

On my to-read list are Confederacy of Dunces, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and finally Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by the unforgotten Douglas Adams.

95

My favorite Sookie book was the one where Eric lost his memory.

I’ve read the first three Merry Gentry books. I like them okay, but not as well as the Anita Blake series. I’m really attached to Jean-Claude and the rest of Anita’s men, but none of Merry’s bunch have grabbed me the same way. Hamilton has a habit of introducing new characters (more men) when I’d really rather hear more about the ones that are already there.

Have you read Tanya Huff’s Henry Fitzroy vampire series? I enjoyed those.

I just finished Robin McKinley’s **Sunshine **this afternoon (been reading all day out on the screened-in-porch in the Alabama heat) and I thought it was very good.

We leave for a family vacation tomorrow, and as I really shouldn’t take any of my “witchy books” (as my mother-in-law calls them behind my back) with me, I’m taking the new Stephanie Plum book and a couple of Karen Marie Moning’s Highlander books. I don’t think time-travelling Highland warriors count as “witchy”, do they?

96

I just read The Life of Pi. It’s a lovely read.

97

See, taste is a funny thing – that one was my least favorite!

Hamilton is a total Mary Sue (is that right? Someone who writes herself into her own books?) – I think she’s writing a version of every guy she’s ever been attracted to ever and sticking them into her books for one of her alter-egos to have her way with. And you can tell when a real life guy goes wrong – I’d bet anything that poor old Richard was her first husband. Richard turned into an idiot right around the time they got divorced. I think Micah is her current husband – who knows what will happen to that character when they split up!

Excellent books.

Taste again – it was my least favorite of Mckinley’s books.

You’ll enjoy the Stephanie Plum – it was pretty good. A bit better than the last two, I think.

98

I’m supposed to be reading To the Lighthouse (Woolf) - maybe I can finish it before it’s due back at the library - but yesterday I found a copy of Pale Fire (Nabokov) on the train, and I couldn’t pass that up. Since the universe seems to want me to read it, that’s what I’m doing.

99

This thread is wonderful - I have added several books to my “need to read” list.

I’m on the third book of Robin Hobb’s “The Tawny Man” trilogy. Then it’s on to Stephen King’s “Cell”.

100

I’m finishing Poisons : From Hemlock to Botox and the Killer Bean of Calabar and am about halfway through Small Things Considered : Why There Is No Perfect Design. Both are kinda fluffy but entertaining. I’m waiting for The Blood Knight : Book Three of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone–though perhaps a better title for the series would be A Song of Ice and Fire (Greg Keyes Remix)–to be released.