Just finished David Brin’s Earth. Had a little difficulty following the crazy antics of the gazers and that pesky singularity Beta, but otherwise a good read.
Decided to jump into another one of his books Heart of the Comet.
I think after that I’m gonna come back to terra firma and re-read either Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War or Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
And then heading back out into the cosmos, meeting some friends I have to visit at least every couple of years: C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur Series or John Varley’s Titan Series.
Probably end up reading both.
I just read a new book–Susan Wise Bauer’s The Art of the Public Grovel, an analysis of public (or not) confessions over the past 100 years–what works, what doesn’t, the elements of the ideal confession and where it comes from (the Evangelical tradition). It was a really interesting read; I’ve never seen anyone do quite this subject. She starts with how Grover Cleveland managed his scandal problem, goes through some other people, analyzes Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in detail, and then shows how Bill Clinton eventually gave a near-perfect confession (once he got around to it). Then Cardinal Law totally failed to fulfill the requirements. Pretty fascinating.
Re-read Huckleberry Finn 14 years after I barely skimmed through it for high school. Wow-will go down as one of my favourite books.
Currently reading Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers.
I have this book, Anubis Gates that everyone on Goodreads seemed to give high reviews, but I haven’t really gotten into it (yes, I’m into sci-fi/fantasy). It kind of reminds me of how I bought Little Big or whatever it’s called by Crowley on Goodreads recommendations and I didn’t even get 100 pages in. I’ll probably give it another shot when I’m beachside in Belize, though.
I’m about to start reading Tim Powers’ other stuff now, since I liked Anubis Gates so much. I have Last Call waiting at the library for me to pick it up.
Till then, I’ve been fiddling around with Pat Conroy’s Beach Music. It’s one of my least favorites of his, but I chose it because it’s been so long since I last read it, I don’t remember much. Pat has a distinct writing style that I find both enjoyable and a touch irritating, so I’m just sort of picking at it and sniffing it over, trying to identify his hallmarks. Fun.
I love this book, it is one of my comfort books – those books you return to when you are sick or sad or just want to escape.
I just finished Time Won’t Let Me, by Bill Scheft. He used to be the head writer for Letterman … it’s a comic novel about the now middle-aged members of an old high school band. It had its moments where it was both endearing and funny, but it most places it felt like it was trying too hard to be wry and clever. Like every other line was a one-liner, which gets really tiresome in a novel.
I also read A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, by Dana Reinhardt, which is YA fiction about a teenage girl who was adopted, and now meets her birth mother. I enjoyed this quite a bit – a good recommendation for middle school girls and up.
Currently reading Hit and Run, the new Keller book from Lawrence Block, and The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macauley, a 1950s novel about English folks traveling in Turkey.
Finished The Mysterious Benedict Society. Enjoyed it, but am not yet sure if I will read the next.
Finished C.E. Murphy’s The Queen’s Bastard. I enjoy her works and thought that this was well done. Her normal offering is urban fantasy and this was a historical fantasy. I thought that the writing was a little more mature than her other stuff and all-in-all, I enjoyed it. I will read the next.
Finished *Prey *by Melina Morel. A totally non-nondescript urban fantasy revolving around were-cats. Nothing new here, and Mr. Morel was a little too focused on the were-sex for my interests. I will not bother with her future stuff.
Put down *Boomeritis *about “a young MIT grad student’s journey to self-discovery.” Maybe it gets better but it bored the piss out of me. I have too many promising books in the queue to force my way through it.
Finished up Jim Crace’s Quarantine. The ending was a twist to rival the early work of M. Night Shyamalan. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ending, but the depiction of a complete quarantine (no food, no water, minimal human contact) was both disturbing and beauty. I’m going to have to check out more of Crace’s work.
I have literally just begun Are We having Fun Yet? American Indian Fantasy Stories by William Sanders. Sanders is always good, and I am looking forward to a good read.
I finished One Long Tune last night. It’s well written, remarkably thorough and sets a great standard for biography of a performing artist, especially considering the difficulty of following the trail of Lenny’s life.
I highly recommend it, but with one caveat - there’s nothing anyone can do about the subject matter. Lenny Breau was an incredible child prodigy who developed an astonishing mastery of the guitar and lived one of the most f***ed up lives you can imagine. Once he got into drugs and booze, he just lived this cyclic existence of kicking the habits, getting back on track, and screwing up again. It wasn’t for lack of help from his friends, he was just one of those geniuses who couldn’t shake his demons. It made me so sad that this man who revolutionized the art of guitar playing never found the happiness he so richly deserved, and his murder remains unsolved to this day.
Like I said, it’s probably my fantasy bias showing. I’m more of a hard SF fan for my fiction reading, and I know that I’ve probably missed out on some good stuff as a result. Any recommendations that are as good as Butcher’s stuff?
I think Butcher is the best in that genre, but if you like his Dresden Files, you might also like Simon Green’s Nightside Series. And - although this tends a little more to fantasy - you might like Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. Files.
Just finished H.R. Giger’s Film Design, by Giger himself, a very interesting, heavily-illustrated book about his work for movies such as Alien, Species, Future Kill, Poltergeist II, the never-made earlier version of Dune (in which Salvador Dali, of all people, was to have played Baron Harkonnen!), and some other never-made but very disturbing-looking movies like The Tourist. He was also hired to redesign the Batmobile for *Batman Forever * and drew a biomechanical, scissor-like proposal that the producers decided was a bit too “out there” for them.
Just finished *Sword in the Storm (The Rigante Series, Book 1) *by David Gemmell. Gemmell is (was) one of my favorite authors and almost always manages to touch me in his books. Beyond the plots, which I admit are recycled, he always writes about the human interaction - with others and with themselves.
I will likely read the rest of the Rigante Series.
I’m off to the hospital on Monday for some shoulder surgery and will be in for a few days. While there, I’ll finish Robert Harris’ Pompeii and then begin his Imperium.
Does anyone have any comments on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day? Should I keep that in the queue or ditch it?
I have an anti-recommendation for Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure. First of all, I had no clue what was going on for 99% of the book. Secondly, all the characters were, as one reviewer on GoodReads put it, “a collection of quirks”. Thirdly, they were also cardboard. And finally, it sucked too much to even throw across the room. I’m off to the library today to find something better.
Reading The Girl with No Shadow, the sequel to* Chocolat *by Joanne Harris. It started out kind of slow – granted, I was pretty distracted, but it is really reeling me in with Harris’ sneakly little clues. She’s really devious.
Example: we learn that Vianne Rocher (the Juliette Binoche character), now using the name Yanne Charbonneau, was
stolen from her parents as a three-month-old child and raised by the woman she knows as her mother.
