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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 7:45 AM

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)
posted by Kristin Buxton at 6:29 PM

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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 6:35 PM

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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 7:21 PM

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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 10:51 AM

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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 10:31 PM

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.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 10:07 PM

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 Misérables (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)
posted by Kristin Buxton at 9:11 AM

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.

Labels: audiobook, books, Brockmeier, fiction, reviews

posted by Kristin Buxton at 4:07 PM

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.

Labels: books, fiction, immigrants, review

posted by Kristin Buxton at 1:56 PM