Over the weekend, I read The Inimitable Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse. It was really adorable and humorous and I liked it, but I don’t feel any urge to go round up the rest of the series.
Now I’ve started on Two for The Road: our love affair with American food, by Jane and Michael Stern. It’s about the journey of these two food writers through all fifty states, and they’re eating at downscale mom and pop type places. It’s pretty amusing, and at first the food descriptions were appetizing, but I felt nauseated as I read the part where they describe a typical day in which they eat twelve meals! (I flipped the book around looking for the authors’ picture after that, but none was to be found.)
I like Wodehouse best in small doses.
I just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and enjoyed it immensely. I’m going to breeze through another Georgette Heyer book to relax, and then I think I’m going to try Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. It’s the January read for one of the sci-fi groups on Goodreads. I’ve never read Vinge before.
What’s NOT on my list:
My eldest dd’s boyfriend brought me a bagful of ‘bodice rippers’ from his grandma. I have no idea what I’m going to do with them, but I doubt I’ll read them. He’s a good kid, but in his eyes, a book is a book…and since he knows I read incessantly, he was so happy that he was bringing me books! I thanked him, of course, but they’re really not up my alley.
Still reading (and enjoying) The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen
Also reading The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman. (Decided to give one of his novels a shot after reading about his death.) It’s ok, just not my style. I don’t think I’ll continue with the series.
I was going to avoid any book-related goals this year but I’m thinking more and more of taking on the Tolkein tomes. I’ve never read any of this other books than the usual Hobbit and LoTR so it may be time to try it.
My grandma has approximately one jabillion Harlequin romance novels. When I was a kid, it occurred to me that if I could learn to like them, I’d be set for life…sadly, it was not to be.
I finished blindness a couple of months ago. I loved the writing style but I’m still not quite sure what I was supposed to learn from the book. Perhaps you can post your thoughts on it when you are done.
I also read The Road - not much to say on that one except that I read that the end is supposedly a happy ending (for McCarthy, at least!).
Dies The Fire by S. M. Stirling. It’s about the aftermath of the day in 1998 when all high-power technologies stopped working. Electricity failed worldwide, gunpowder burns too slowly to fire a gun, internal combustion engines don’t work at all.
I just started it last night, so haven’t gotten too much into it. There are two theaters of action early on: a pilot and a wealthy family who were in the air over the Idaho Rockies when the plane engines quit, and a group of Wiccans with SCA experience in Corvalis, Oregon who’ve headed for the hills with a few horsedrawn wagons as the cities dissolve into chaos.
I was lead to it by a short story from that universe Stirling included in his anthology Ice, Iron and Gold, which I read last month. The story takes place years after the Change, and involves a low-tech Scotland Yard investigation of a murder.
throw us some titles, there maybe a gem or two in there.
i’m finally getting to my books to read boxes. i’m reading “survival of the sickest” by sharon moalem. it is an arc from when i worked in a bookstore. due to be published feb. 2007, better late than never, eh?
it is really interesting so far. the author got interested in his field due to his grandfather’s problems with iron, and how giving blood made him feel better.
The Guernsey Potato book was just fine. Like Delphica said, the sincerity saved it from tweeness. It’s the lightest book I’ve read in ages and I liked it, so I read a collection by Bailey White, Momma Makes Up Her Mind. Also light, and sincere, and I laughed out loud a few times.
Currently reading Echoes from the Dead by somebody Theorin. It’s Scandinavian, but it’s a bit warmer than other Scandinavian books I’ve read. From Amazon:
“Set predominantly on the Baltic island of Öland, Theorin’s deeply disturbing debut will remind many of Henning Mankell both in its thematic intensity and dark tone. Two decades after the unsolved disappearance of a young boy, Jens Davidsson, who vanished one foggy autumn afternoon in 1972 and was presumed to have drowned, Jens’s grandfather, Gerlof, a retired sea captain, receives one of Jens’s sandals in the mail. Gerlof enlists his alcoholic daughter, Julia, who’s still struggling to come to grips with the loss of her only child, to help solve the mystery. All leads point to infamous thug Nils Kant, who was rumored to have killed numerous people. But Kant allegedly died years before the fateful day that Jens disappeared, so who could’ve killed the boy? And why? Further investigation leads the unlikely sleuths to some startling revelations about their isolated island community and its much-storied history.”
I like Theorin’s style – not too flowery, just enough description, realistic-sounding dialogue.
I just ran in here to mention that. Are you me? checks mirror nervously (It’s really funny–almost P.G. Wodehouse-esque. And The Man Who Would Be Thursday takes a bit of mental re-adjustment to get into it, but it’s great.)
I just finished off Three Men in a Boat, as mentioned above. Before that I read Affinity and The Night Watch by Sarah Waters: both were kind of hard to follow–I couldn’t quite get the thread of Selina’s story in the former, which interweaves with the main plot, and the latter was written backwards à la Memento, which was tough. But they’ve got some really sad and really sweet moments in equal measure, and they’re definitely worth re-reading again.
And then there was Lindsey Davies’s The Accusers, and anybody who isn’t reading the Marcus Didius Falco series needs to stop reading this post, go out to the store, and buy all the books right now.
Just finished Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor. Enjoyed it very much, but had Duran Duran songs in a constant loop in my brain the whole time I read it (especially Rio).
I’m now reading Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid by Denis Leary. I started it today and I’m almost done. It’s pretty funny, and I’m reading it with Denis Leary’s voice in my brain.
I got C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra Trilogy for Christmas, so I’m reading those for the second time. The first was probably thirty years ago.
Then I’m not sure where I’ll go. I think likely back to Duel, by Thomas Fleming, about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. I started it a while back, but the holidays got in the way and I looked for some lighter things. Now I think I’m ready to stay with it.
I’ll put them on my list. I read part of Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence for an article I wrote, and have heard only good things about Goodwin’s book (plus seen her on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – if she writes like she chats, the book is bound to be enjoyable). But I confess I was, probably because of high expectations, slightly underwhelmed by Donald’s book. I think part of the reason is that, having read extensively in the Civil War, Donald can’t add much new to what many standard histories have already established. Most of the relevant quotes from Lincoln on the various things done during the war, for example, I already knew by heart. Donald added, for me, a lot of interesting detail on the machinations behind the actions, and on the ups and downs of Lincoln’s popularity, and of course I had not much of a clue of his pre-Presidential life, exceed for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I suppose I would still recommend it as a biography, but ask what the reader wanted to discover first: if he wanted to know more about Lincoln as a war president, I might caution him a little. But still, it was 15$ well spent.
Replacing Lincoln in my lineup is Lieutenant Hornblower. In my personal ranking of Napoleonic sea tales, Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin novels are still way up ahead of Forester’s Hornblower, and sadly, I find Alexander Kent’s Bolitho can’t steer a barge to the two others’ men-of-war…
