What are you reading?

Chris P

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Everyone knows you go home by Natalia Sylvester.

Isabel meets her deceased father in law for the first time on her wedding day, which happens to be the Day of the Dead (not a paranormal story as such; Omar's recurring appearances are not the driver of the book). The book alternates between the modern day with Isabel and Martin's marriage and taking in of a recently arrived nephew Eduardo, and the 1980s, when Omar and his wife Elda, pregnant with Martin, sneak across the border into Texas. The opening with the ghost story is intriguing, but the modern day portion begins to lag while the flashbacks to the 1980s carry the book. The whole novel ties together toward the end. This is a 3 to 4 stars book. Lots of promise, heartfelt insight into the lives and trials of immigrants, but snoozy and sappy in parts and although the writing is mostly solid (some very confusing sequences) it's not particularly clever or outstanding.
 
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hjrey

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Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski and while I have a whole new appreciate for how complicated plotting out war is and all these different character's motivations/betrayals, this book is not my favourite in the series. Very logistical.
 

Chris P

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Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

Andy, narrating sometime in the early 2000s, relates a time his 9-year-old, town-dwelling self took a winter trip to his grandparents' tobacco farm in 1943. The changes in young Andy run parallel to the changes in his grandparents' world brought about by mechanization, the war, and expanding pop culture. As with all of Berry's fiction, this quite short book goes down easily, is sweet without being sappy.
 

Chris P

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Tobacco: A cultural history of how an exotic plant seduced civilization by Iain Gately.

Gately takes us back to prehistory, following what is known from archeology from tobacco's origins in the Andes, its discovery by Europe, spread around the world and eventual and continuing downfall in the 21st century. Accessible, fairly easy reading and interesting. Gately's UK-centrism might be forgivable, barring his lack of knowledge of tobacco use even in the United States let alone developing world, and some of his scholarship particularly of early facts is suspect (he seems to rely on a individual sources for some facts, and recounts certain dubious tales as fact--such as the puberty rites of South African Hottentots--that I've not been able to verify and are likely bogus). The writing and scholarship get better as the subject matter gets into more reliable history.
 

Chris P

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All That Is - James Salter

Quite good so far! This is the second Salter I've read, after the mind-blowing A Sport and a Pastime. Phillip Bowman, a WWII vet, returns home, gets a degree and enters the world of publishing as a reader for a small NYC publishing house. The rural/urban culture clash is highlighted in the form of his marriage to Vivian, a young professional hailing from the upscale horse country of Northern Virginia. Calling to mind the more gentle satire of Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the like, All That Is is at once sexy and more brutal and equally if not more gripping in its no-hold-barred character studies and recurring themes.
 

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Rereading Snowqueen by Joan Vinge b/c I recall loving it circa 1990, and her prose in general. It's a SF retelling of the HCA tale.

Still love the prose. Stunned by seeing new things in the story, that I didn't see as a younger person. e.g. themes I associate with certain other authors are blaring loud in this novel, too.
 

DeleyanLee

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Read Mary Trump's book Too Much is Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man in one day. I got it for the psychological discussion of a severely dysfunctional family. All kinds of good fodder for character development.

As for her topic: she's actually almost nice in her treatment of Donald, however if a large percentage of what she says about the family is true, yeah, it's a horror and our president is a product of it. It does make understanding what he says and how he views things make more sense.
 

Chris P

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David Copperfield- Charles Dickens

I bought the book at a thrift store as a prop for a demonstration (I just needed the largest book they had on the shelf, and they were fresh out of War and Peace). I figured I might as well read it. The style of storytelling is of course the product of its time, but I'm finding the voice engaging and the understatements clever.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Blood Meridian. Maybe a tad overrated, but I'm enjoying it for the Americana-laden death carnival that it is.
 

Brightdreamer

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Been a while since I posted here, but I've been kinda off my reading game; got started on some transcription on weekends to bring in a little more income and freshen up the resume, and just generally feeling discouraged about Everything.

Recent Reads:
Arabella the Traitor of Mars (Book 3 in the Adventures of Arabella Ashby, David D. Levine, paperback, adventure/SF): Returning to the retro-alt world that crosses the Age of Sail with Barsoom and other old-school adventures, Arabella and her husband Captain Singh return to England on Earth as heroes after defeating Napoleon in the Battle of Venus... only to get pulled into a plot by the greedy Prince Regent. With the French threat eliminated, England's decided to step up its empire-building game, starting with subjugating the planet Mars: where Arabella was born. And they want Singh to lead the invasion fleet that will break their peace treaty with the native Martians. Torn between the planet of her birth and her country, between home and husband, Arabella chooses Mars - but beating the fleet to the red planet will just be the first challenge awaiting her, and her legendary luck may finally have run out.

I actually liked it a little better than the second book, which had a little too much dithering in transit and sometimes reduced Arabella to helplessness. She's back on her game here, jumping into action without always looking before the leap and improvising wings on her way down. Plenty of action, if not a ton of surprises, and a reasonably satisfying wrap-up that makes it feel like a concluding volume. It also deals with colonialism and how, even as Arabella feels deeply loyal to Mars, as a human living on an English estate on the red planet she is, by her very nature, part of the problem that threatens the world.

How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi, hardcover, nonfiction): Using history and his personal journey, scholar and activist Kendi discusses the vital differences between racism, "not racist", and antiracism.

An important book on a subject everyone truly should try to understand better, especially given recent events and significant backslides on multiple fronts. Kendi pinpoints the birth of color-based racism (prejudice against other nations and classes has always been a thing, but the specific othering of an entire people based on color, turning them into sub-human commodities, has a definite starting point) and follows the logic-twists and rationalizations and efforts subtle and strong to reinforce racial inequity against critics through the centuries. He also points out the flaws with many well-meaning attempts to eliminate that inequity, many of which do at least as much harm as good, and calls out the strange unwillingness of progressives to change tactics that are clearly not working, mired in ideological purity tests and "moral" victories over actual tangible policy shifts, even as racists enjoy renewed vigor in recent years and gain back a lot of the ground they'd lost.

Currently reading:
The Glass Town Game (Catherynne M. Valente, paperback, MG fantasy): The four Bronte children grew closer after the deaths of their mother and two oldest sisters... but now Charlotte and Emily are due to head back to the very school where the eldest caught ill and died, dooming them to a future neither wants. On their way to the carriage, brother Branwell insists on a detour to view the new modern marvel of the steam train - where they find a strange man made entirely of books and magazines, and are whisked off on a most peculiar adventure. Suddenly they find themselves in Glass Town, a world they invented for their games, surrounded by living versions of their toys... only this game is much wilder and more dangerous than anything they imagined.

With strong shades of Edward Eager and other old-school stories of imagined worlds, not to mention a few dashes reminiscent of Valente's superb Fairyland books, The Glass Town game takes the real-world Brontes and gives them a fantastic twist, if one still rooted in elder-day England. Indeed, it reads rather English at times, as the girls meet fantastic versions of Wellington and Byron and even Jane Austen. Fun turns of phrase and imaginative imagery, with some decent characters. It does dither a bit more than her Fairyland books, though, and I'm sure I'm missing a little not being too familiar with the Brontes or the minutiae of their era beyond cultural osmosis. Still, I'm devouring it eagerly.

And on Kindle I'm reading a self-help book - Growing Gills by Jessica Abel, on adding more creativity to life, which is sort of a cross between Julia Cameron's Artist's Way and some time management/decluttering advice I've read elsewere - that I'm dawdling through because I keep putting off the exercises that go with it.
 

Chris P

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A World Lost - Wendell Berry

Andy Catlett was ten years old when his uncle Andrew was murdered in the middle of the day by the enraged father of a girl Uncle Andrew had made a pass at. Andy loved his uncle, but struggles to process the loss in his own way amid the grief of the rest of the family, and the murderer's light sentence. Most of this short book focuses on a now-adult Andy reconstructing the parts of Uncle Andrew's life he knew little about. Uncle Andrew was a troubled soul, wrestling with alcoholism and a marriage he really didn't want, while at the same time pursuing a desperate joy of life that drew all who knew him into his orbit. The mythologizing of a troubled soul is somewhat typical of similar memoirs (I think Berry's Andy Catlett stories are largely autobiographical, but I don't know enough about Berry's life to know if this particular incident is true or not), and Berry seems to be fleetingly aware of this but never really calls it out.

I was much confused by this story due to its similarity to Berry's (quite long) short story "Pray without Ceasing," which focuses on an adult main character named Andy learning of the daylight murder of his great-grandfather. I recall being much touched by the short story, although the novel too is very much heartfelt, insightful and beautifully written in Berry's signature style.
 

Chris P

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A Place on Earth - by Wendell Berry

As the Second World War grinds on into 1945, Mat Feltner receives a letter from the Army informing him that his son Virgil is missing in action. But those left behind in Port William, Kentucky must carry on through the trials of life: floods, crops, births and deaths. More of a series of character studies than a novel, this book holds to Berry's signature theme of World War II being the fulcrum upon which everything changed for the old timers and soldiers who wouldn't live to see the end of the war, those remaining to carry on in a changing world, and the youngsters who would not remember the world as it was. This is easily the best Berry novel I've read so far, full of heart, beautiful imagery and prose, and connection to the characters (even the ones I didn't like).
 

oneblindmouse

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Re-reading The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin, to which, since I last read it, she added about three or four more books.
 

Chris P

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Washington: A history of our national city - Tom Lewis

A fairly comprehensive yet readable history. A fast read too, despite the size. It fills in some of the blanks left by other books, such as Empire of Mud and Chocolate City (both are excellent books! Just not as comprehensive). There's enough detail to feel like I've learned something without getting bogged down (and thank God he didn't spend 150 pages describing the houses of rich people! That stuff's Snoozeville USA).
 

Lakey

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Somehow I have neglected to post to this thread since, like, April ... that's about twenty books or so. I won't try to list them all -- they're all in my Goodreads profile. Instead I'll just highlight a few that were really superb:

My Sister the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is such a great little book -- very brief but packed with interesting themes and an obviously gruesomely fascinating premise. A completely unique take on the bonds and rivalries between sisters! A wonderfully strong voice as well. It can be read in an afternoon, and I strongly recommend it to everyone.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark. Another brief one, and so nice I read it twice. Really this is the kind of writing I can gobble up all day -- wry, trenchant, satiric, incisive. A lot like my favorite writer Mary McCarthy in that respect. Just awesome stuff.

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson. Also quite a lot about sisterhood in here, and conventionality, and family, and just the general weirdness of people. There is a lot of poetic or philosophical meandering in the writing and I can't say I absorbed it all, but for rich characterization and an unusual setting you really can't beat this one.

An American Marriage, Tayari Jones. Quite a large fraction of my reading these past months has been Black writers, and this is probably the novel I enjoyed the most out of those. A young Black man is convicted of a rape he did not commit, and imprisoned for years; the book is not so much the story of that injustice but rather of its impact on his marriage. There are three first-person POVs -- people on AW often ask about this structure so I thought I would mention it -- the falsely convicted man, his wife, and another man, the wife's childhood friend. There is an obvious love triangle there, but there's also just a lot of depth and sympathy and challenge for someone like me in reading a book like this, trying to understand the actions of people whose experiences are so far from anything I am ever likely to endure.

Okay I'll stop there -- the rest is on Goodreads. Here's what I'm reading now:

Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward. A harrowing tale of a poor Black family in the Mississippi bayou, about to be struck by Hurricane Katrina. I would like to like this book more than I do. There is some very beautiful stuff in here about a boy's relationship with his dog and her puppies, and some very stressful stuff about a young girl (the narrator) who is in love with, and pregnant by, a young man who is absolutely horrible to her. It's definitely showing me lives and cultures I would not have had any exposure to, and I'm grateful for that. But the writing is just a little too self-consciously writerly, and the combination of first-person present-tense with this simile-laden dripping heavy writing is just clunky and distracting. The beautiful images would be more effective if they were used more sparingly; it's like too much buttercream.

I usually have multiple books going at once; at least one audio and one eyeball. I'm sort of rereading my beloved Mary McCarthy's first book, The Company She Keeps, but I haven't fully committed to it yet. I'll add something else in the next day or two, probably.

:e2coffee:
 
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Verboten

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Taking lots of these books on this thread and putting them in my TBR pile. :D

I'm currently reading In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi and listening to Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby.
 
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oneblindmouse

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The Notebook Trilogy (The Notebook, Proof, The Third Lie) by Agota Kristof.

A riveting but disturbing story about occupied Europe in WWII, told in simple unemotional language by two twin boys, indistinctly, in the first person. Just finished the first book, and they still haven't said what their names are! Are they merely childen learning to survive amidst wartime violence, or are they very gifted but on the autism spectrum, and with definite sociopathic tendencies?

Also: Midwinter by John Buchan. An adventure story of Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
 

Chris P

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The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Told from the POV of their dog Enzo, a family wrestles with the husband Denny's dream career of being a racecar driver amid the wife Eve's progressing and eventually fatal illness. It's an inspirational story of empowerment by responding to adversity through instinct as events happen, rather than trying to control them. Kind of like the skills required when driving a racecar in the rain. The message is uplifting, while the writing is good but not great.
 

DanielSTJ

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Here are my last five books read:

Greek Tragedy- H.D.F Kitto
The Tyrants of Syracuse: War in Ancient Sicily, 376-211 BC- Jeff Champion
Stardust- Neil Gaiman
Palmyra: An Irreplaceable Treasure- Paul Veyne
How to Win an Argument: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Persuasion- Cicero

And I'm working on Great Latin American Novel by Carlos Fuentes.

Hope to be more active in here! I'm posting first and then doubling back to read a page or few of back-posts.
 

Chris P

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After a couple false starts of starting new fiction, I'll indulge in non-fic for a bit.

Wicked Washington: Mysteries, Murder and Mayhem in the Nation's Capital - Troy Taylor

This popped up on my daily bargain ebooks email and looks like a fun, fast read. Plus, I love being able to go where the stuff happened.

ETA: Um, yeah, do your homework before quoting any of these fun facts at a party. The author is given to entertaining various conspiracy theories that would take more to pull off than the crimes they are trying to cover up, with no critical analysis. The research seems pretty superficial as well. For example, although the close proximity of Robert Lincoln to the assassinations of his father, Garfield and McKinley, and his well-known superstition about being near presidents, the author states that R Lincoln was never again near another president, despite it being well known that R Lincoln was at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1923 with President Harding. Anyone doing enough research to learn about the former would have run across the other, and R Lincoln's famous comments to Harding. For many reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if certain passages are largely paraphrasing of secondary sources.
 
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Brightdreamer

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Been over a month and I'm procrastinating again...

Recently Read:
The House in the Cerulean Sea (TJ Klune, fantasy, hardcover): 40-year-old Linus Barker is the perfect caseworker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, sent to monitor the "orphanages" where unusual children are sent to keep them safely locked away from goodly folk. For all that he always keeps the interests of the children in sight, he believes, blindly and wholeheartedly, in the system for which he works and the society it represents... and if doing so means he doesn't think to ask certain questions, well, he is a busy man and it is a bigger system than he could hope to navigate. When Extremely Upper Management selects him for a special assignment, it could make his career or be the end of it: he's to spend one month monitoring the orphanage run by one Arthur Parnassus, a classified and isolated place where only the strangest, most dangerous children go. Among their numbers are a young wyvern, an immature forest sprite so powerful she has transformed men into trees, a boy who changes into a Pomeranian when scared, a young lady gnome with an aggressive streak, a sea creature boy whose species nobody can decide, and a six-year old Antichrist... but the one with the greatest secret may be Arthur himself.

This has gotten pretty much universal praise, and I agree. A fairy tale for grown-ups, it makes for a fun and adventurous story of overcoming prejudice, learning to see the shadows in the world, and finding the courage to not only want more out of life, but to challenge an unjust system. There's a mild, sweet and clean love story between Linus and Arthur, complicated by Arthur's mistrust of DICOMY and Linus's determination to remain impartial (and willfully blind to his own loneliness.) The ending feels a touch stretched, and there are one or two points I thought could've used more focus or follow-through, but all in all it's a great read and a perfect antidote to anyone who thinks that the fantasy genre (and reality as a whole) has skewed a little too grim of late.

Die Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker (Kieron Gillen with illustrations by Stephanie Hans, fantasy/graphic novel, digital via hoopla): Long ago, six British teenagers decided to spend an evening on a new role-playing game one of them had devised using a peculiar set of dice... but they vanished. Two years later, five returned, scarred and traumatized and utterly incapable of explaining where they'd been... or what happened to their friend Solomon. Now 40, the discovery of Solomon's twelve-sided die brings the five back together again - pulling them into the fantasy world of Die, which they barely managed to escape once. This time it will be that much harder, not just because they're older and more jaded, but because their new enemy, the Gamemaster who seeks total dominion, is their former friend Solomon.

This is a decent graphic novel, if a trifle confusing at the outset (the art and layout make it a bit difficult to parse who is who for a while), but unrelentingly dark. Still, there are some nice ideas at play and the characters are interesting. I'm just getting a little tired of pitch-dark worlds without the faintest glimmer of hope.

Their Fractured Light (Book 3 of the Starbound trilogy, Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner, YA romance/SF, paperback): The famous "Avon Broadcast" revealed to the galaxy that tycoon Roderick LaRoux was using and abusing interdimensional aliens to not only build his hyperspace-drive empire, but to cruelly manipulate and control humans... but nobody seemed to be listening outside of fringe conspiracy theorists. Gideon, known online as the notorious hacker Knave of Hearts, has long has his own bone to pick with Roderick, and fully believes the broadcast. He intends to expose the company's lies once and for all, in a way that can't be ignored. Meanwhile, Avon native Sophie's drive to personally make Roderick pay for what she did to her world in general and her father specifically takes her across the galaxy, from con to con and false identity to false identity, until she can get close enough to put a bullet in the man. Gideon and Sophie meet at a LaRoux gala, thrown together when their covers are about to be blown - just as Roderick reveals a scheme that could make him the literal master of the entire galaxy.

I didn't expect the first book (These Broken Stars) to grab me, but it did. The second volume, too, had plenty of action and emotion. This one... this one falls down on the job after a promising start. Sophie and Gideon have decent chemistry, both broken people who have built lives entirely of lies to the point where true connections and emotions are all but impossible. It moves at a fair clip without too much recapping, too. Then, about halfway through, things start going wrong. The couples from the previous books turn up, and Gideon and Sophie become just two more gamepieces on a crowded board. And the finale devolves into a treacle-soaked Message and Lesson about faith. Not specifically religious faith, but just the general concept of faith as humanity's great gift to the universe. It totally knocked me out of what was left of my suspension of disbelief.

Currently Reading:
Middlegame (SeananMcGuire, fantasy, on Kindle): Literally just started it. It involves the twins Roger (language whiz) and Dodger (math genius), an alchemical formula to remake reality, and an alchemist determined that the world must be remade in her own image even if she dies trying... and a children's book that McGuire has written under a pseudonym that's coming out in October, which spurred me to finally clear this from the backlog. So far, it's grabbing me.
 

Roxxsmom

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Just finished a fantasy novel called Race the Sands by Sarah Beth Durst, and I enjoyed it. A good blend of action and intrigue with some interesting female protagonists.

Am currently reading Axis, which is the sequel to the SF novel Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I read Spin a few years back and liked it and finally got back to the sequel.
 

Chris P

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The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy

American Sebastian Dangerfield, his British wife Marion and their infant daughter Felicity take up residence in Ireland while Sebastian studies law. The marriage is not happy, Sebastian is openly abusive, selfish, drunk and philandering while he blows the family's meager savings. The book is billed as dark satire, and might be too dark for me. Donleavy's unconventional narrative style might be readable if Sebastian wasn't such a hateful and hateable character. I might not make it through this one.