Current Reads

Yeah, her books are seriously addictive. She's really good at taking issues like typical suburban living and wrapping them in an air of mystery and suspense that makes you want to read them RIGHT AWAY.

emrie wrote:I loved Big Little Lies, her newest one which I read first. And I also really liked The Husband's Secret. But I've read all of them except the Three Wishes one, and liked them all. I also listen to them on audiobook, so I get to enjoy the Aussie accents too.

Oh, calamity.

I'm starting with The Husband's Secret, the only one I could find at my library. Very excited to get a new series of books that come highly recommended. :)

Just started "The Husband's Secret" and I really love the way she writes.  And gets the tone right.  That's hard to do from a multi-person viewpoint.

ETA because I originally used the absolute opposite word of what I meant to use!

My absolute favorite Liane Moriarty is What Alice Forgot.

I started Side Effects May Vary, a YA book, last week. It's another "teen with cancer" book, but it's not really as compelling as The Fault In Our Stars was. For one thing, I'm finding the main character, Alice (the teen with cancer) a little frustrating because she's so self-sabotaging. I'll keep reading because it's a fairly short book, but I'm hoping her behaviour gets less....irritating.

I started reading The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters, by Adam Nicolson. It analyses The Iliad and The Odyssey, tracing their development and themes. It's part history, part travelogue. Nicolson writes beautifully, but I feel a bit stuck, like he's writing a lot but not really saying anything. I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to keep slogging through. I hope there's more analyses of the texts.

And because it's a slog I needed a bit of a break, so I'm reading Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman. It's very enjoyable so far.

I finished The Martian this weekend. What a great book! I loved the characters, and the story just keep getting more exciting as it went.

I finished reading Wildalone by Krassi Zourkova. I gotta say, I'm so mad at the author. How dare she squander this interesting, well-written story on yet another heroine who is struck with indecisiveness und stupidity with regards to her love life. Why oh why would she stay with the manipulative douchecanoe who lied to her for months? I'm so sick of love triangles and supposedly romantic heroes who resemble Edward Cullen: beautiful, rich, complete failure at communicating, controlling. I mean the first two are wish fulfillment, but the other two? Is that really supposed to be attractive? And the ending leaves room for a sequel. So much promise marred by shoddy characterization.

I really enjoyed my most recent read, The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Adieh. It's a YA novel, loosely based on the 1,001 Arabian Nights story. Good characterization and chemistry between the characters. (I thought it was a bit reminiscent of The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, actually.) It ended on a slightly abrupt note so I was glad to see there is an upcoming sequel, hopefully soon.

Currently reading book #2 in The Testing trilogy. It's okay, definitely keeps my attention but it seems like such a rip-off of all the recent best selling dystopian novels. The writing is also a bit awkward and clunky.

In the midst of Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed and loving it. He raises good points, provides insightful criticism of modern society, and is damn funny too. The stuff on the Justine Sacco drama I found particularly compelling.

I finished The Girl on the Train as an audiobook yesterday. I loved it as an audiobook. There were three different narrators and the different voices really helped to distinguish the women and what was going through their minds.  I do love unreliable narrators.

Bunch of spoilers here:

SPOILER:

Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. While I recognize it's beautifully written with an intriguing story, it just wasn't 100% my cup of tea. I'm just not that big of a fan of allegory, I guess.

I love pretty much everything else Ishiguro's written, but The Buried Giant was so draggy and dull. It was like a completely humorless Waiting For Godot.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman.

You guys need to read this, I think it will become a Snarker favourite. I know I've said that before about...I can't remember the name of the book, but the ending fell flat, and I feel like I got a bit overexcited. But this book is taut, the author maintains a sense of dread through the whole story (or what I've read so far), and it's seriously creepy. I read half of it in one sitting. It's very good.

Time to make all the Happy Book Noises - I loved The Martian. I loved the technical details. I loved how back and forth Watney was. I loved the glimpses of people trying to save him. Everything. Luckily, my husband brought Wendy's home for dinner last night, because I wasn't going to stop reading for something as mundane as food. (Ironic, now that I think about it.)

Such a good book. Has anyone else read it? I need to gush with other people.

I pretty much loved it, too, although I had to skip over large swathes of the sciencing due to it all sounding like the flywheel's gone askew on treadle sketch from Monty Python to me. My husband, who is Mr Technical/Science Guy, loved it as well. It combined the sciencing with the human/emotional aspect so well. Many hard science fiction novels have such a hard time with that.

There's a few SFers who have responded to my Facebook posts gushing about it. It was absolutely amazing. Right from that first line: "I'm pretty much fucked."

I cannot wait for the movie. I had no idea Matt Damon was going to be in the movie but he's pretty much my perfect Mark Watney. And strangely enough, I had mentally cast Jessica Chastain in the movie, as well, though as the press flack on Earth, not the Ares 3 commander.

I'm going to have to learn to temper my expectations though, because I found that even a minor change - one trailer has Mark correctly saying "I'm going to science the shit out of this" but when I saw it in front of Jurassic World they changed "shit" to "hell" and I was like, "WHAT? WHAT?!?!?"

So. Yeah.

It is one of my vacation books - vacation starts in six days! - and I cannot WAIT.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. It's good so far, there are some sneaky hilarious moments in it, the concept is very interesting, and Fforde rolls out information about the world he's created through a good balance of exposition and action. It has a bit of a slow start, but it's worth continuing with.

I love Jasper Fforde and Shades of Grey is one of my favorites. I really want to see where he goes with it.

stargirl wrote:I really enjoyed my most recent read, The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Adieh. It's a YA novel, loosely based on the 1,001 Arabian Nights story. Good characterization and chemistry between the characters. (I thought it was a bit reminiscent of The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, actually.) It ended on a slightly abrupt note so I was glad to see there is an upcoming sequel, hopefully soon.

This was one of my recent stateside purchases - I had a list of books I was going to buy that aren't published here yet, I'm so WILD when I go on holiday - and I really liked it. Agreed on the slightly abrupt ending but I did like the characterisation - Shazi reminded me a bit of Nyx from Rosamund Hodge's Cruel Beauty with her attitude towards her new husband and to life in general.

I'm reading Death Comes to Pemberley now and really liking it. I think it captures the spirit of the original book very nicely.

stargirl wrote:I really enjoyed my most recent read, The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Adieh. It's a YA novel, loosely based on the 1,001 Arabian Nights story. Good characterization and chemistry between the characters. (I thought it was a bit reminiscent of The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, actually.) It ended on a slightly abrupt note so I was glad to see there is an upcoming sequel, hopefully soon..

oh, that sounds cool. might check that out then.

Speaking of Queen's Thief, is that still an ongoing thing or what? It's been 5 years since the last book came out.

You guys. Station Eleven. I'm only a quarter of the way through it, but the author has set this haunting tone so perfectly and so beautifully early on. For those who don't know, it's a post-apocalyptic novel that has three characters interact at the very beginning (an actor who dies onstage the evening a large pandemic breaks out, a paramedic who tries to save him, and a child actress who is present for the aforementioned events) and then it breaks off into their three different viewpoints - the actor seems to represent the world before the outbreak, the paramedic represents the present, and the little actress (who becomes a part of a travelling performance troupe) represents the world twenty years after the outbreak. I'm loving it so far.

Oh man, I loved Station Eleven. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I've just added Station Eleven to my to-read list. It sounds like my kind of book.

I'm doing a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. In my teens and 20s, I read it every year, but I haven't done so in a long, long time. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy reading it.