Purchased in Seattle over the weekend: Dreamside by Graham Joyce
posted by kristin at 3:58 PM

This time my backlog is due to blogger difficulties instead of laziness :)

Midweek I finished off Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man. I believe it was one of my favorite Discworld books to date. The Death ones are always good and the mall eggs cracked me up.

Friday night I stayed up finishing Uncle Boris in the Yukon by Daniel Pinkwater. It's a book of memoirs of dogs he's known. I hate dogs but liked the book.

I did have two books show up from amazon this week. Programming Interviews Exposed and The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski (which I believe brings me to the point of owning all of his books that have been translated into English.
posted by kristin at 11:13 AM

I keep getting lazy about writing anything.

I'm still working (sort of) on KSR's The Years of Rice and Salt but I can't seem to get back into it after I put it aside to read Set This House in Order so I've been working more on Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and have read (or finished) a few other things in the meantime.

After finishing off CodeNotes for Web-Based UI I basically just had a wish that all technical books were that concise and easy to read (and cheap).

I read Bridget Jones Diary by Helen Fielding over the weekend. Parts of it were funny but I just do NOT get what all the fuss was about.

I like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. A Far Rockaway of the Heart was no exception.

Bento: Story Art Box is very short, but had new stories by several authors I really like (including Jonathan Carroll and Neil Gaiman) so it's not really a surprise that I bought it, read it and liked it.

posted by kristin at 10:45 AM

I'm a bit behind on posting again. A few days ago I polished off the last bit of Stephen Dobyns' Velocities, a book of poetry I'd been working on off and on for a couple of years. Poetry's one of those things I can't just sit down and whip through poem after poem after poem in rapid succession. Unfortunatley the long read time for the book leaves me without anything particularly intelligent to say about it.

Saturday night I picked up this month's book group book (my pick), Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order. I accidently stayed up until I finished it. In some senses it's not nearly as weird as his first two, Sewer, Gas & Electric and Fool on the Hill (both of which I'd highly recommend), yet in other ways it's just as weird, though closer to reality. The main character has multiple personality disorder and all of the weirdness stems from that.
posted by kristin at 2:48 PM

Monday night I polished off two books. The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod and Weight Training for Dummies by Liz Neporent and Suzanne Schlosberg. I'd picked up several MacLeod books over the last couple of years based on friends' recommendations but hadn't gotten around to reading any of them. I liked The Star Fraction. It's a political-cyber-future-thriller sort of thing. I'll have to read the rest of them now.

I normally avoid "for Dummies" books, but after reading a review of Weight Training for Dummies I decided to check it out of the library. It seems very straightforward and not someone's hyped view of exercise. There's a huge section in the middle that has exercises for each part of the body with pictures, descriptions and possible options.

Last night I started Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt.

posted by kristin at 2:32 PM

When I was wondering through the library last week I stumbled across a book of poetry and photographs about Portland so checked it out. I finally got around to looking at it the other night. I'm not sure how much it would mean to people who don't live here, but it might be just as interesting because it's all about one street. And how both the photographer and poet learned to look at it differently just by paying attention. The book is Blue Moon Over Thurman Street by Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Dorband.

I finished The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk the night before last. I'm really not sure where I stand on it. I recall feeling similarly ambiguous after finishing The New Life as well. As near as I can figure out I'm left feeling like I should have liked it more than I did, yet found it somehow interesting. (As an amusing side note on the amazon page for The White Castle the auction and zShops links are all about White Castle the restaurant).

posted by kristin at 4:08 PM

I was in LA for the weekend and amazingly only bought two books. Alien Candor by Andrei Codrescu and Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. I had to buy Dance Dance Dance because I'd read the first half on the airplane and then accidently left it there. I finished it that night and quite liked it. Surprising in places, but good as his always are. Later in the weekend I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The story takes place in an African village as the village becomes exposed to white missionaries. The one thing I want to know is when it's supposed to have taken place.
posted by kristin at 3:32 PM