#31: Reading

Wow, I've already read 13 books I haven't mentioned!


I've been keeping my list up to date on Goodreads, but for the sake of posterity, here's the list and a very very brief review of each:


1. Called Out of Darkness: Started sloooow. Ann Rice's interesting perspective as she goes from a strict Catholic to a non-believer then back to the Church.


2. Living Dead in Dallas: I like this Southern Vampire Series enough to check it out from the library when it's available, read it quickly, and check for the next one on my next library trip.


3. Death in a Strange Country: Commissario Guido Brunetti detective series. Some of this series I like more than others, but overall enjoyable.


4. The Last Queen: Book Club Selection. Interesting & well-written, though violent parts were unpleasant to read.


5. Dressed for Death: More Commissario Brunetti. I wonder if people who have been to Venice recognize the locales described?


6. The Ladies of Grace Adieu: Collection of fairy tales. Liked some more than others, but none enough to read again.


7. Outlander: The first book of the series has me hooked. Stayed up WAY past my bedtime reading this one.


8. The Grift: Book Club Selection. Liked, would read other books by this author.


9. Club Dead: Another Sookie Stackhouse book. Pretty good.


10. Up in Honey's Room: Elmore Leonard is one of my favorite authors. That man can really turn a phrase. This isn't my favorite book of his, but it was pretty good all the same.


11. Death and Judgment: Commissario Brunetti. Half of a 2 books for $1 score at Half Price Books.


12. Acqua Alta: Commissario Brunetti. Second half of aforementiond HPB score.


13. One Thousand White Women: Book Club Selection. Enjoyed, did not love.


And now I'm about 50 pages into Dragonfly In Amber. I'm going to try not to stay up into the wee hours reading it this weekend!

#31 Reading

Wowie, I've read SIX books since I last updated my # of books read on my poor little neglected blog. I've officially made it past my goal (36) with about 9 months to go until the end of my 730 days. Hooray for me!

And thank goodness for goodreads. It's been an easy way to keep track of what I'm reading as well as see what other people are enjoying (or not).

Here's the line-up:

Queen of the Road (fun, funny, exactly what I was in the mood to read at the time)
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Everything is Illuminated (read for book club, didn't really like)
Haroun & the Sea of Stories (another book club selection, enjoyable)
Already Dead
The Reincarnationist

A couple of nights ago, I started Lisey's Story. I've only read a chapter each night before I go to bed so far, though, so it might take me a while to get through this one.

#31 Reading

I finished reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down this weekend, almost in time for my book club meeting. I already left a brief review on goodreads, but I'll just add here that I am on a break from non-fiction for now. Luckily, my book club agrees and I think only one of our next six book choices is non-fiction. . .instead of five!

Good Things for. . .
Saturday: Book club meeting with girlfriends.
Sunday: K comes home, hooray!
Monday: Christmas at Caswell lunch with mom. The dessert was pumpkin creme brulee. I don't usually like pumpkin pie, but this was deeelicious. This is either the third or fourth year we've gone together--it's a fun tradition.

#31: Reading

I just realized I haven't updated for the past three books I've read! Well, I've updated goodreads, but I want to be sure and make a note for posterity here, too.

Just before/during/and after our early August vacation to Boston, I finished the Twilight series. The third book, Eclipse, was my favorite of the series, I think. Actually, it may have been my favorite book because I was looking for answers to a lot of questions the second book raised, and the book answered them in a satisfying way. Of course, all of the books are now kindof blending together in my head, so I might be wrong about which is which, but I liked learning all the werewolf lore and the rest of the background stories about characters that didn't seem fully developed previously. Of course, there's the cliffhanger of who Bella will choose, but luckily I didn't start the series until the last book was about to be released, so I didn't have long to wait to find out.

Coming home from Boston, I started Breaking Dawn. And that is one long book! Luckily (I guess) we ended up with a bunch of flight delays, so I had plenty of book to keep me from getting bored and annoying the bejeezus out of K. True confession: I got teary during more than one part of the book. That's at least as embarrasing as getting teary at the end of Harry Potter, right?? I'll blame stress from flight issues and ummm, lack of sleep due to vacation. Okay, okay, so the wedding was dreamy! And then the honeymoon was a little weird. The story took a direction I did not expect, or particularly enjoy, although I think the final outcome was good. Bella gets everything she wants, after all. I can appreciate a happy ending. I would like to read more about the Cullens, though, or even Jacob and his adventures with Nessie. Surely Stephanie Meyer isn't ready to let the Twilight characters (or the revenue they generate for her) go, yet?

I probably should've taken my book club book for August on vacation, but who wants to read about people dying from tuberculosis when teen vampire angst is available? ;o) I finally FINALLY finished Mountains Beyond Mountains, though not in time for my book club meeting. I was about half-way through for the discussion. I'm glad we read this book, although it was a bit much for our book club right after Three Cups of Tea. This book was definitely an eye-opener about global problems I didn't realize still existed. It was also interesting to compare and contrast Dr. Farmer and Greg Mortenson, both to see the similarities and differences between two men who have taken on such huge problems and their approach to solving them. Honestly, I like Dr. Farmer best. However, I realize that may be due to how each man was presented. Mortenson tells his co-author that he should ask people for the good, bad, and ugly about working with him, and I think that came out in the book. Kidder definitely presents Dr. Farmer in a glowing light, but I fell for it. My only complaint about this group is that the core people in the book have kindof a short hand with each other than includes a lot of abbreviations. I had trouble keeping track of those. Portions of the book were a little bit dry because of the medical or political aspects of the story, and I found those slow but necessary.

Our next book club book is Listening is an Act of Love, and I've just started it. So far, I'm enjoying reading a few stories each night. But I'll be back to fiction soon!

#31: More Reading

So I put two and a half days without television to good use: I also read When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris.

Sedaris is one of my favorite authors. I read his first book (Barrel Fever) in the late 90s, and immediately knew I'd be buying anything else he published. Sadly, I've never had a chance to see him read in person. His first (as far as I know) visit to Austin coincided with my wedding rehearsal dinner, and each of his subsequent visits have either conflicted with another big pre-planned event or I haven't bought a ticket before they sell out. (Which usually happens an hour or so after they go on sale, apparently.)

A Plague of Tics (from Naked) remains my favorite story of his, though any story about his brother Rooster would be a close second-favorite. Sadly, Rooster wasn't featured in the latest book, but I still really enjoyed the stories in When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I did laugh out loud several times, particularly when I stumbled across a literary gem like “Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires.” Awesome turn of phrase.

I was pleasantly surprised that several of the stories have a poignant ending I wasn't expecting. I think my favorite story of the collection was the last story, which described his battle to stop smoking in Japan. In particular, his descriptions of his struggle to learn the language and a memorable haircut experience were most entertaining.

From the Barnes&Noble website:

Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him once more. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. From armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds to the awkwardness of having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a sleeping fellow passenger on a plane, David Sedaris uses life's most bizarre moments to reach new heights in understanding love and fear, family and strangers. Culminating in a brilliantly funny account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection will be avidly anticipated.

#31: Reading

My book club's selection for June was Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Letham, which is a National Book Critic's Circle Award Winner.

I'm a little surprised my book club chose this novel--it turned out to be the type of book I'd normally read on my own: mystery? (check!), detective? (check!), quirky main character? (check!). Naturally, I really liked it. Of course, the only other gal at the meeting had only read about 100 pages in, and she was ready to throw it down. The third gal at the meeting hadn't even started it, and none of our other members were able to attend. I, on the other hand, used the meeting as an excuse for K and I to rush back into Austin from spending three days at the in-laws'. heh.

But, back to the book. The main character, Lionel, grew up as an orhpan with Tourette's Syndrome. When his mentor/father figure is killed, he decides he'll solve the case. I thought his character was very well-written without becoming a caricature. I would even read another book starring Lionel, and it would make a great movie. (Edward Norton supposedly acquired the movie rights and is working on a script for a movie he'll star in--I'd definitely watch that!)

From Kirkus Reviews:

A brilliantly imagined riff on the classic detective tale: the fifth high-energy novel in five years from the rapidly maturing prodigy whose bizarre black-comic fiction includes, most recently, Girl in Landscape (1998). Lethem's delirious yarn about crime, pursuit, and punishment, is narrated in a unique voice by its embattled protagonist, Brooklynite (and orphan) Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. "Freakshow." Lionel's moniker denotes the Tourette's syndrome that twists his speech into weird aslant approximations (his own name, for example, is apt to come out "Larval Pushbug" or "Unreliable Chessgrub") and induces a tendency to compulsive behavior ("reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges") that makes him useful putty in the hands of Frank Minna, an enterprising hood who recruits teenagers (like Lionel) from St. Vincent's Home for Boys, to move stolen goods and otherwise function as apprentice-criminal "Minna Men." The daft plot—which disappears for a while somewhere around the middle of the novel—concerns Minna's murder and Lionel's crazily courageous search for the killer, an odyssey that brings him into increasingly dangerous contact with two elderly Italian men ("The Clients") who have previously employed the Minna Men and now pointedly advise Lionel to abandon his quest; Frank's not-quite-bereaved widow Julia (a tough-talking dame who seems to have dropped in from a Raymond Chandler novel) at the Zendo, a dilapidated commune where meditation and other Buddhist techniques are taught; a menacing "Polish giant"; and, on Maine's Muscongus Island, a lobster pound and Japanese restaurant that front for a sinister Oriental conglomerate. The resulting complications arehilariously enhanced by Lionel's "verbal Tourette's flowering"—a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention that has tour de force written all over it; it's an amazing stunt, and, just when you think the well is running dry, Lethem keeps on topping himself. Another terrific entertainment from Lethem, one of contemporary fiction's most inspired risk-takers. Don't miss this one.

#31: Reading

I did a lot of reading over the holidays! I finished this book just a couple of days ago--and I really enjoyed it. "Interred with Their Bones" by Jennifer Lee Carrell is fast-paced, intriguing, and hard to put down. I can see a comparison to the Da Vinci Code since a lot of the book deals with clues that are history-based, but this book has a follow up at the end that reveals all the facts used in creating the story, which was fascinating to me. I knew a lot of the controversy surrounding Shakespeare's identity, but I thought this was a clever was of showing different sides of the debate--with action, adventure & romance thrown in.

From Publishers Weekly:

Plot twists worthy of The Da Vinci Code dominate this agile first novel from Carrell (The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox), a thriller involving a lost Shakespeare play, The History of Cardenio. On a June day in 2004, at London's rebuilt Globe theater, Rosalind Howard, flamboyantly eccentric Harvard Professor of Shakespeare, gives her friend Katharine Stanley, who's directing a production of Hamlet at the Globe, a small gold-wrapped box. That evening, a fire damages the Globe, where Roz is found murdered in the same manner as Hamlet's father. Roz's mysterious gift, which contains a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers associated with Ophelia, propels Kate on a wild and wide-ranging quest that takes her to Utah; Arizona; Washington, D.C.; and back to London. Every step of the way, as the bodies pile up, Kate narrowly escapes becoming the next murder victim. From Shakespeare conferences to desert mines, from the present to the past, this spirited and action-packed novel delivers constant excitement.