I’m listening to Nueromancer by William Gibson (the guy who invented the word cyberspace). The person narrating is very monotone and puts me to sleep (Insomniacs should have this book on CD).
And I have misplaced my unread copy of How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson (Ph.D. Robotics candidate at Carnegie Mellon), which makes me very sad – and as I type this I find the book not 2 feet from where I sit. :o
I’ll have to pick **The Onion Girl ** up. I have fallen behind on De Lint.
Still on the Ballantine’s WWII books. (Currently reading about the Luftwaffe.) I’ve just received Adolf Galland’s The First And The Last, which I’ve heard may be the best book on the Luftwaffe as told by the other side.
Recently finished The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell. Fun, interesting read, definitely will pick up the sequel The Pale Horseman when it makes paperback.
Nearly finished with The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of The Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry which despite its grandiose title almost hits that mark. Fascinating. The author goes well beyond the disease itself and delves into the mindset of America - the state of medical science, the politics of the war, etc. - and how it shaped the spread of the flu.
Next up The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Good reviews, we’ll see.
By the way, any fans of poetry (and I most definitely am not) might want to try Billy Collins Live by…well, duh. When I went out to visit my Dad (who’s a huge poetry buff) in Michigan, he picked me up at the airport, slipped this CD in, and then took a very long detour back to his house so I could listen to most of it. Tremendous stuff, laugh-out-loud funny in places, very easy to listen to, nothing obscure. Just picked up the CD myself.
Twenty pages in, and I already feel like I’ve come home!
Monty Roberts: The Horses in my Life If you love horses; ever owned a horse or wish you did, you will not be able to put this down without crying at least a couple of times. Monty has an amazing ability to talk to you the reader so you feel like you are right next to him. I only started this today at the library while the kidlets were in an after school program and I was sniffing up a storm.
Nick Hornby: Long Way Down about four strangers who meet accidently and comically on New Year’s Eve atop a famous spot in Picadilly area to jump off the roof to kill themselves. Very entertaining. Hornby is masterful at getting the right line, making you, the reader go, 'Oh, that’s so true". Brilliant writer especially with how dark, self absorbed and twisted our minds are and how we pretend otherwise.
I am really enjoying The Worst Had Time, Timothy Egan’s new book about the Dust Bowl.
I never thought dirt could be so interesting. The book is a history of the region and the people who settled there. He focuses on several families, including whole villages of Germans from Volga area of Russia who came over when the Czar reneged on promises made to them by Catherine the Great. (I didn’t know Catherine brought Germans to Russia, but apparently she did.)
It’s simply fascinating, very readable and informative, and heartbreaking.
Damn. That’s supposed to be The Worst Hard time.
The Worst Had Time is a whole different thing. 
I’m most of the way through Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach. It’s splendid and weird and soothing and…just weird.
I’ve been dancing with the idea of doing the last two Gunslinger books, but I am aware that it will require the entire spring for me to read them both. So, I dunno.
Cartooniverse
I loved Stiff. A nice trilogy would be Dr. Nuland’s book “How We Die”, Stiff, and one of the books about body farms.
Consider doing what I did with the last couple of Dark Tower books – read the summaries in Bev Vincent’s “Road to the Dark Tower.”
I was catching up on old magazines and stuff, but I went to the library today and got a biography of the Marx Brothers, a book of George S. Kauffman plays from Library of America (linked - it includes Animal Crackers,) the history of Mad Magazine, a book of Mad Magazine art, and what I’m reading first, A Field Guide to the Apocalypse by Meghann Marco, a kind of Worst Case Scenario on what to do after the end of the world based on sf movies. It is hilarious, she starts one chapter with a quote from Lewis Black.
It is hilarious.
Finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the other night. (You still reading, Queuing?) Not sure what I’ll read next. I’ll either find something else laying around, or I’ll go back to the library to work on that Modern Library list.
In progress: The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder. Two dogged and intrepid 18th century French astronomers spend 7 years measuring the earth – all right, as much of it as lies within France – amidst revolution, war and all sorts of physical and personal upheaval. Their goal: to provide a rational foundation for what we know today as the metric system. Boring? Au contraire.
I recently obtained some Jules Verne books via the Internet. I’ve been collecting the odd Verne books for years, and now I’m buying them in lots.
I finally got and read The Demon of Cawnpore, which is forcing me to re-read Tigers and Traitors (the two form, one connected story). I’m annoyed that the translator left out the part about the Sepoy “Mutiny”. Now I’ve gotta find the missing part. I’d love to see them film this book, with CGI effects.
Next in line is Kereban the Inflexible, an attempt by Verne to recapture some of the glory of Michael Strogoff, but which wasn’t as successful. TYhink of it as “Around the Black Sea in less than 80 Days”
I also have a book called A Plunge into Space for which Verne wrote the preface. It’s about a scientist qwho builds a sphere coated with antigravity stuff to enable him to go to the moon. Ten years before Wells wrote First Men in the Moon. Verne wrote a glowing preface for this, but later denigrated Wells for using the same mechanism. Writers can be inconsistent.
I’ve picked up Johann Wyss’ Swiss Family Robinson because I’ve never read it, and because I want to before reading the two sequels that Verne wrote, and which have been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years.
I’ve got a few non-Verne books, too. My wife is after me to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince so we can talk about it.
I just finished Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, which was the only Elijah/Daneel novel I (or rather my fiancé) was missing. Now not only do I know how to pronounce Gladia’s name, I know what her backstory is. That confused me when I read The Robots of Dawn last year.
I’m currently reading Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card and Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. So far I’m only a couple of pages into the Allende book, so I don’t have a real opinion on it. The Card book, though I love wholeheartedly, especially since I’m getting my masters in multicultural lit.
A friend shoved Player of Games by Iain Banks into my grubby little hands, and I’ll finish it today.
I just read that a few weeks ago. I didn’t like it all that much. I found the characters mostly unsympathetic. I did like **About a Boy ** and How to be Good, by Hornby.
I just finished The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (), Kornwolf, by Tristan Egolf (), and I’m currently in the middle of The Loop Group, by Larry McMurtry (probably ***).
I guess this counts in a tangental way: I am listening to Wicked on tape while I’m working out.
So far, I’m not loving it. I have no sympathy for any one of the characters so far.