Current Reads

Wool by Hugh Howey has me quite captivated at the moment. It reminds me a lot of a Patrick Ness novel in terms of tone, theme, and diction. It's got great world-building where you no one is holding your hand. You just have to jump into it and go along for the ride.

I just started Landline by Rainbow Rowell.  I was underwhelmed with Fangirl and Attachments, but I loved Eleanor & Park, so I thought I would give her new one a shot.  I did like her other books, though, even if I was a little underwhelmed.  I think E&P just spoiled me because I read it first and it really resonated in a way most books don't.  I'm only about 50 pages into Landline, but so far so good.  Her characters are very real, and raw.

Oh, and while I'm here, I wanted to ask if anyone has read China Dolls by Lisa See.  I finished it in two days, but I felt it wasn't her best work;  IMO, it was all over the map.  Opinions?  Thoughts?

I'm reading 1939: The Last Season of Peace. It's a very detailed look at the 1939 London season (seriously, it tells you which parties were happening on which nights) written in the 1980s, so the author had interviewed a lot of the debutantes she talks about. If you read a ton of historical fiction (as I do), it's a neat book to really understand what having a Season meant.

Today I finished Sourcery by Terry Pratchett, and loved it, of course. I don't usually enjoy puns, but Pratchett makes me love them in spite of myself! It was really fun to see Rincewind again, and anytime the Librarian is featured, I'll love it. I am a bit concerned about the fate of the Luggage, though.

I just finished We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. I love her books but I have to say this may have been my least favorite. I thought it was an interesting change of pace and definitely engrossing, until the ending. I thought it was unearned and didn't resonate the way it should have. It kind of left turned the book to me in a way that took me out of it.

Has anyone else read it? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

I really, really, really enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It did have a kind of "stock" Nazi character, which was a bummer, but otherwise I found it beautifully written, tense, and compelling.

It's two alternating stories about a blind girl in France leading up to and then into the Occupation, and then a young German boy and how he attracts the attention of various Nazi officers, which puts him on a very specific path. It was sweet, horrifying, heartbreaking, hopeful, and resigned all at once. Really good book.

I just finished the new Pratchett, the Long Mars. Pretty much read the thing over two days. Wow, the worldbuilding. Seriously, my head almost feels like it's spinning from cramming in all that stuff. On the other hand, the plot was fine. If they trimmed out the worldbuilding, I'm pretty sure they could have done the series in two books. Still, the worldbuilding and philosophy was part of the series from the start.

Overall, I really liked it, and the questions they didn't answer will bug me for a while.

Just finished a post-apocalyptic zombie novel called The Reapers are the Angels. It was good. Short, tense, gory, thoughtful, GORY. I don't tend to go for the horror aspect of post-apocalyptic stuff, but this time I handled it okay. I think because I liked the protagonist so much.

I do think I need something light to read next, though.

Last night, I read The Girls at the Kingfisher Club which is basically a retelling of the fairy tale Twelve Dancing Princesses, but set in 1920's New York. Pretty good.

I've been working on reading more. I read some of the Ruby Oliver books by E. Lockhart, and really liked those. Then I tried reading I Married a Communist by Phillip Roth and just could not get through it. I gave up around Chapter 2, the prose was just too dense and I the characters felt like characters on a page. So, while I'm waiting on Written in My Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon, I'm reading The Scottish Prisoner by her.

I love British/Irish police procedures and have discovered a new series. Harry Bingham's protagonists is DC Fiona Griffiths and she has an extremely rare condition that is very, very fascinating.  I'm reading the first book, "Talking to the Dead" now and the second was just published in February. "Love Story, With Murders is now available on Amazon for $1.99 for Kindle.

The first book is a little slow going at first but it does pick up.  Fiona is the narrator.  Be careful reading the synopsis on the second books because it does have some spoilers for the first one, particularly about Fi's condition, which is really vital to the story.

MaddyCat wrote:And now I'm into Breakfast Served Anytime which I am utterly charmed by. I usually don't go in for overly smart teens, but Gloria is flawed enough to make it work and I just want to hug everyone in this book. It's really great.

Haha, just finished this book (got a notice from the library that my hold had come in and had zero recollection of ever placing this on hold!) so I had to dig back through to see if this where I heard about it. Should have known it was another MaddyCat recommendation. Still thinking you could compose my reading list for me and I'd like everything on it!

I loved this book, I tore through it in just a couple days. What a fun, light read and the whole camp atmosphere was so charming.

I also read Sheltering Rain by JoJo Moyes and that was great as well. I liked the time shifting between the grandmother's youth and the granddaughter's modern time.

How does Harlan Coben always manage to suck me into the vortex of his cheesy, terribad mysteries? Missing You is ridiculous and yet I can't stop reading it!

I've also been reading a lot of mysteries lately. I just finished Cockroaches by Jo Nesbø and I enjoyed it a lot. The Norwegian ambassador to Thailand is found murdered in a seedy motel and child pornography is found in his car. Harry Hole is sent from Oslo to sort out what the hell happened. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the Thailand setting and the Norwegian expat community there. Interesting mystery!

"The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington" by Jennant Conant. Dahl was a pilot in the RAF, and was injured in a plane crash only a few weeks after finishing his training. He was cleared to fly again, but actually had sustained some pretty serious injuries; probably something that would be considered a traumatic brain injury now. After a few more months he was too unwell to fly and was given a position at the British embassy in Washington, mainly working in propaganda and bringing America around to the British way of thinking. The US was already in the war by then, but isolationist groups were still pretty vocal. Dahl gradually became more involved in intelligence operations, particularly in regard to post-war civil air policy. In intelligence terms he was a fairly small player, but he became a bit of a local celebrity, falling in with an influential crowd and becoming friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, and apparently FDR figured out he was a British agent and would feed him tidbits of information in a way of maintaining a backdoor communications channel with Churchill. Dahl was a bit of a manwhore apparently, and was sometimes used as a honeypot; he had a ton of affairs, including one with (married) congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. After a tryst he was instructed to continue his affair with her, and he allegedly replied, "I am all fucked out. That goddam woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to another for three goddam nights" The ambassador told him to suck it up and do his duty for England.

It's a bit dry, and the author gets bogged down in detail in a couple of places, but otherwise it's a good read and I recommend it.

Raksha wrote:I've also been reading a lot of mysteries lately.  I just finished Cockroaches by Jo Nesbø and I enjoyed it a lot.  The Norwegian ambassador to Thailand is found murdered in a seedy motel and child pornography is found in his car.  Harry Hole is sent from Oslo to sort out what the hell happened.  I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the Thailand setting and the Norwegian expat community there.  Interesting mystery!

 Ooh, right up my alley.  I'm going to check this one out, thanks!

ETA: Done! And I bought the first in the series as well.

I read/finished the last Vorkosigan book/series by Lois McMaster Bujold, and is that

Spoiler:

seriously how she's leaving it? The hell? I had actually wanted Aral to pass on so we could see Miles as THE Vorkosigan, so that didn't bother me, but I wanted more about it than 500 words of epilogue!

That's Cryoburn, isn't it? Another book came out last year I think. Focusses on Ivan. I haven't read it, but there might be some more Miles in his new role.

Yup, but the that book chronologically takes place before Cryoburn. I really like it, more than "Diplomatic Immunity" or "Cryoburn", which I like fine but the Ivan book has more focus on mostly old characters that we know, while the other two books are mostly Miles plus some random characters.

mayram wrote:

MaddyCat wrote:And now I'm into Breakfast Served Anytime which I am utterly charmed by. I usually don't go in for overly smart teens, but Gloria is flawed enough to make it work and I just want to hug everyone in this book. It's really great.

Haha, just finished this book (got a notice from the library that my hold had come in and had zero recollection of ever placing this on hold!) so I had to dig back through to see if this where I heard about it. Should have known it was another MaddyCat recommendation. Still thinking you could compose my reading list for me and I'd like everything on it!  

I loved this book, I tore through it in just a couple days. What a fun, light read and the whole camp atmosphere was so charming.

I also read Sheltering Rain by JoJo Moyes and that was great as well. I liked the time shifting between the grandmother's youth and the granddaughter's modern time.

Aww...this is so nice to hear. Unfortunately I haven't been reading much that's set me on fire this summer, so my Rec list is pretty darn slim. Boo.

I finished Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell last week. I enjoyed it, but I felt like it took a while to get going. I think that she crammed way too much in to the last quarter of the book that should have been featured earlier:

Spoiler:

Specifically, Cath and Wren's issues, and Wren's drinking spiralling out of contol, as well as their mother reappearing and their father's breakdown. These are all things that I think should have featured more heavily from the beginning because at the end I felt like it was all wrapped up in a very unfinished bow.

I also skipped over pretty much all of the chapter opener fic - both Cath's and the 'real' Simon Snow author. But that's more because I don't really read fic and I didn't think it made a huge difference to the way I read the story.

Today I finished Don't Try to Find Me by Holly Brown. I don't know what it is with me and books about missing/dead teenage girls these days, but I'm apparently on a roll. Anyway, in this book, a woman finds a short message from her 14-year-old daughter on the fridge saying that she'd left and not to try to find her. The parents are devastated and start up a social media campaign to help get the word out that this girl is missing and to generate tips. This opens the family up to incredible public scrutiny and complicates the matter for them. The point of view switches between the mother as she's trying to deal with this whole situation and diary entries written by the (frankly dumb as a post) daughter as she sets out on her own.

I actually really liked this. It was interesting to see a seemingly normal family be pulled apart to reveal...actually, a completely normal family! But even though your problems are so normal they might even be considered utterly pedestrian doesn't mean they're not still real problems with real consequences. And it was also interesting and sadly believable to see how completely normal behaviors and problems get completely spun out into something new and lurid on the internet, and both the gleeful cruelty and the generosity and helpfulness of complete strangers when stuff like this pops up.

Lord help me...I am reading Fifty Shades of Grey. For the lulz, of course. It is so bad. So, so bad. I am keeping my Twitter updated with my journey. I have read bad fanfic. I have read crackfic. I read Mpreg!, people. But this is so so bad.

Amazon is offering 30 apps for Android (worth $100) for free.  There are some really useful ones like the All Recipes one and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (it's normally $30).

Raksha, that shit sounds riveting. It's going in my library queue immediately!