Kristin's Book Log

blog really on hiatus

2010-01-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted at months, and apologize for this. I just found out though that blogger is going to stop supporting the method I've been using to publish this blog in the next couple of months. Until I figure out if I'm going to migrate to the blog to blogspot, or convert it to WordPress, or if there's another option, the blog is going to sit here unloved and unchanged.

The City and the City

2009-09-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Last night I finished China Mieville's The City & the City, a murder mystery in two strange cities. Unlike his other books this isn't fantasy, though doesn't take place anywhere "real". One city is Beszel and the other is Ul Qoma and the story takes place in both, but I'll let you read the book to find out the relation between the two. Check out this video interview with Mieville discussing the book and the cities.

this blog and the archive

2009-01-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

Somewhere along the way something on blogger got confused and this blog is no longer creating archive files properly. I apologize. At some point I'll redesign the whole thing and then hopefully everything will work properly again.

I Don't Know Why...

2009-01-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

Actually I do know why I'm in a book group. Besides the free lunch every month, it gets me to read things I'd never have read otherwise. This month's book is a good example. I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson. The main character is a woman trying to judge a time-consuming career with motherhood of two small children. Definitely not my normal sort of book choice. Unusually for this sort of book I never wanted to through it across the room. I don't imagine, however, that the author's main goal had been to make me happy that I don't have children.

.1%

2008-11-20T18:24:00.000-08:00

I haven't done very well at remembering to read books for the 1% Well-Read Challenge in the last few months. So far I've read one, which I guess makes me .1% Well-Read. I just finished Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The book group at work is going to discuss it at lunch tomorrow. I'll be interested to see what other people think. I actually found it a chore to get through. I don't quite understand why people consider it a classic. If you've read it, and loved it, care to share why?

Camel Bookmobile

2008-11-03T07:35:00.001-08:00

I think I'm finally realizing why I never post anymore, or at least why my post frequency has dropped so much: I'm no longer working a job I dislike. Back when I was writing code I posted often from work. I needed the break. Now I don't. I'm not saying I'm not online at my new job, but it's usually for quicker things. Skimming through some blog posts and marking the ones to read later. A quick turn at scrabble. Checking email. Not sitting down and trying to write something. Fortunately I didn't have a large audience waiting for my next post.

Last night I finished Masha Hamilton's The Camel Bookmobile. A bored librarian from New York goes to Kenya to help start up library service to some of the rural population by transporting the books by camel. A boy in one of the villages doesn't return his books as promised and she arrives off-schedule to try to get them back and she begins to get a taste of what life is really like there.

The bookmobile really exists, but the story around it is fiction.

bad book group member

2008-08-26T20:18:00.001-07:00

I don't usually hit a point in a book and just decide I'm not finishing it, but I did tonight. Worse yet, it's a book for the book group meeting Thursday. What finally drove me over the edge was having the main character die a third of the way through the book. I see now that this plot twist is hinted at in reviews, but I'm not sure if I'd have picked up on it had I read them before starting the book.

Twain quote

2008-08-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been slowly working my way through Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi via dailylit. In today's chunk I came across the following quote I just needed to share:

"We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin."

I want a meal like that.

new books

2008-08-16T13:42:00.001-07:00

from the KPCC book club:
Scott McClellan's What Happened

from Powell's Indiespensable:
Aron Nels Steinke's The Super Crazy Cat Dance
Monica Drake's Clown Girl

from my weekend visit to Powell's:
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us
Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
Markus Zusak's The Book Thief
Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games
Robert Charles Wilson's Axis
Jonathan Safra Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

recent bookmooch arrivals:
Robert D. Kaplan's Warrior Politics
George Orwell's A Collection of Essays
Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey
Dana Sachs's The House on Dream Street
Isabel Allende's Paula
Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk

ALA haul

2008-07-01T21:46:00.001-07:00

ALA was good to me book-wise this year:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton (which it turns out I already had)
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
Isaac's Torah by Angel Wagenstein
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Ficciones (in Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges
Memory & Dream by Charles de Lint
Territory by Emma Bull
Widdershins by Charles de Lint
1001 Foods to Die For
and
the Complete Calvin and Hobbes

for the grand total of $23.

.1% well-read

2008-07-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

I finished my first book from the 1% Well-Read Challenge earlier today: We by Eugene Zamiatin. Sadly the paperback I was reading is now in multiple pieces. I'm not usually that hard on books, but this particular book is older than I am, so I don't feel so bad. Reading the book it was hard to believe it was written in the 1920's. It's held up well.

incoming books

2008-07-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

From bookmooch:
Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley
Intuition by Allegra Goodman
All of an Instant by Richard Garfinkle

From LibraryThing Early Reviewers:
This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities by Jim Rossignol

From my parents:
Bonk by Mary Roach
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester (this one I'd bought autographed at the Tattered Cover while I was visiting but had them ship to me with the others)

Entertainment Weekly

2008-06-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

In bold are the titles read from Entertainment Weekly's list of the New Classics

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996).
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, Jos� Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000) (hated it, btw)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990).
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998) (classic?)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot D�az (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998).
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000).
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998) (hated it)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carr� (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987).
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001).
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997).
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I�ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997).
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983). Some of the stories.
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984) .
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999).
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003) . (Not sure why I bothered.)
97. Jesus� Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

via Pages Turned

It's a bit like Christmas

2008-06-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

In the last few days a number of books have shown up in my mailbox.

My first shipment from Powell's indiespensable:
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (sampler) edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

From Bookmooch:
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

From Amazon:
The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman and Gris Grimly

From LibraryThing's Early Reviewers Program:
Spanish - Live it and Learn it!: The Complete Guide to Language Immersion Schools in Mexico by Martha Racine Taylor

2008-05-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

If you ever decide to read Moby-Dick, I'd recommend looking for an abridged version.

2008-05-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Recently I discovered that the Seattle Channel's TV show with Nancy Pearl, Book Lust, is available as an audio-only podcast in addition to the online video. I've found I'm much more likely to listen than I am to watch. Last night I was listening to her interview with Karen Joy Fowler and felt compelled to start one of Fowler's books, Sarah Canary, which I'd had sitting around for years.

1% Well-Read Challenge

2008-05-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try my first reading challenge in awhile: the 1% Well-Read Challenge. Between now and the end of next February I'm going to read 10 books from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

I may change my list later, but for now I'm planning on these ten:
1. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
3. The Double by Jose Saramago
4. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martell
6. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
7. Mao II by Don DeLillo
8. Contact by Carl Sagan
9. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
10. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

All are books I own and have been meaning to read for awhile.

(via Restless Reader)

2008-04-10T18:35:00.001-07:00

When I donated money to KPCC earlier this year, I chose to join their book club. Every two months they'll send me a book that has somehow been talked about on the station. The first book arrived today: Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

A Princess of Roumania

2008-02-03T19:21:00.001-08:00

How amazingly frustrating! I just finished Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania and while I liked it ok, I didn't like it enough to track down the sequels and it just STOPPED. I hate cliffhangers.

World Without End

2007-11-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

I haven't read any of Ken Follett's thrillers for years, but when I saw he'd written a semi-sequel to Pillars of the Earth I knew I should pick it up. I hadn't read Pillars in years but World Without End is such a loose sequel (same town and same cathedral a couple of hundred years later) that that wasn't a problem. This 1000 page book is about the town of Kingsbridge, its inhabitants and its architecture.

A Long Way Down

2007-11-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down was not nearly as depressing as a book about people who want to commit suicide could easily become. Worth a quick read if you like his style though I'm less likely to want to reread this one than I am with High Fidelity or About a Boy.

packing, moving, not much reading

2007-11-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

Posting here is almost like saying confession (at least as I imagine it, not being Catholic): "Bless me readers for I have sinned, it'd been a month since my last post." In my defense I'll say that in that month I received and accepted a job offer, packed all of my books, and moved from Seattle to Southern California.

Now I'm in Pasadena, all of my books are still in boxes, but I'm just starting to settle in otherwise. I went to my first author event at Vroman's last night (Shalom Auslander read from Foreskin's Lament). I'm currently reading Ken Follett's World Without End and am enjoying it so far.

Hopefully I won't need to apologize next time I post.

a book meme

2007-10-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

from greeniezona:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today whenever this was originally posted). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
~~A heartbreaking work of staggering genius~~ (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
~~The poisonwood Bible : a novel~~ (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les Mis�rables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

A Brief History of the Dead

2007-09-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

Kevin Brockmeier's Brief History of the Dead is the first book I've ever "read" by listening to the audiobook. I downloaded it from the library, put it on my mp3 player and listened to it here and there. Not a bad experience, but I don't think it will ever replace really reading a book for me. As for the book itself, it presents a fascinating idea of the afterlife.

Gifted

2007-08-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

I read Nikita Lalwani's Gifted a few weeks ago and was a bit at a loss right away for the right description of it. The main character is a gifted girl in Wales, the daughter of Indian immigrants. It reminded me a bit of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (given the whole Indian-immigrants-trying-to-adjust-to-a-new-society thing) though I didn't like it as well. Not bad, just not as compelling a read.