While volunteering at the library today I finished Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. Read this book. I mean it. It's a memoir (and discussion of books) of her time spent living under the Islamic Republic of Iran. Wonderfully written and both sad and hopeful at the same time.
posted by kristin at 12:00 AM

It's quite simple really. I went to Powells to escape the heat and got books instead of just hanging out.









posted by kristin at 11:58 PM

I got behind again.

I want to start off by saying that Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I'm currently in the middle of, is fantastic.

Other than that I'm 8 books behind on reporting here, so you're not likely to get very detailed comments on most of them.

Seek by Rudy Rucker is a collection of his nonfiction. A lot of them are reports on various aspects of computing, but there's also memoirs, etc. Interesting but not a sit down and read straight through sort of book.

The Last Harbor by George Foy was ok, but not great. It was the first book of his I've read, and I'm not sure I'll bother again. It took me a good half the book to get at all into it and I still didn't care about the main character all that much, which makes it a bit hard.

Gridlinked by Neal Asher took probably 30 pages to get the swing of, but once I got there, I devoured the rest of the book. I liked this one better than The Skinner partially because it felt less like a movie plot and more like a novel.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (available online, btw) was a fun, light read. Set in a future where no one really has to work and everyone's always online, and the currency is your approval rating.

The U.N. for Beginners was somewhat interesting, but not as much so as most of the other "for beginners" comic history lessons.

Little Doors by Paul Di Filippo was a good book of odd short stories. I always feel like I'm taking too long to read short stories though and I start getting impatient by the end of the book.

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski was my first Iranian book for the week. Well, Iranian history as written by someone Polish. It made the rise of an Islamic state there make a lot more sense. Very well written as well.

Timbuktu by Paul Auster was narrated by a dog. Good nonetheless :)
posted by kristin at 4:52 PM

Purchased yesterday at Powells:
Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Middlemarch by George Eliot

The other night I read Fforde's first The Eyre Affair and loved it. The main character is a sort of literary detective who has to hop into the manuscript of Jane Eyre (which I've never read) to save the heroine. It's set in a slightly altered England and there's time travel, etc going on as well. Trust me, it's better than that description makes it sound.
posted by kristin at 11:33 AM

Ok, here's the list of what I've read recently:
6-26 Conjunctions:39 : This is a great collection of short stories by people like Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, etc. I believe only one wasn't new to me.
6-30 Pyramids by Terry Pratchett : Great of course, since it was Pratchett. I've obviously not been reading them in any particular order. This is one of the earliest ones, but I'd never found it used so hadn't read it yet.
6-30 Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold : I've been spacing out my reading of Bujold's books so that I don't run out and have to await impatiently the next one. Unfortunately every once and awhile I accidently read them out of order so don't catch all the references. (In this case I accidently skipped Brothers in Arms). Ah well. I've now gotten my dad started (at the beginning) of the Vorkosigan novels.
7-1 Falling Sideways by Tom Holt : Tom Holt's books are good for surgery-recovery semi-drugged reading. They're light enough and weird enough to be fun but not terribly mentally taxing. Why is it all of the humorous fantasy authors are British?
7-4 A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin : Book 2 of a great fantasy series. They're too big to want to read back to back, but it did take me awhile to remember what all had happened in the first novel and who all of the characters are. Book 3 is on my shelf waiting for me to tackle it, but book 4 hasn't been published yet so I should probably wait awhile.
7-5 Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson : Bryson does Europe.
7-6 The Complete Maus by Art Siegelman : Wow. A personal story of the Holocaust done as a comic book. Apparently it won the Pulitzer prize. I can see why.
7-7 Tourists by Lisa Goldstein : This was my first Lisa Goldstein novel. It's a fantasy not quite like any I'd ever read. It would fall in the category of "urban fantasy" since it takes place in a modern (if fictional) city . The fantastic elements come in with the weird things happening in that city, not any sort of explicit "magic". I've since picked up a few more of her books.
7-7 Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson : My first Steve Erickson novel. I'm not quite sure I got it. Pieces of it I really liked, but taken overall I think I'd need to reread to see quite what he was getting at.
7-9 Fugitives and Refugees by Chuck Palahniuk : After disliking Survivor, I found myself a bit surprised to want to buy another Palahniuk book, but this one is all about Portland so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. It's part autobiography, part alternative traveler's guide to the city. Our outdoor lindy dance on Sundays was actually mentioned. There's a few things I'm going to need to go check out around town now.
7-9 Underground by Haruki Murakami : I didn't like this as well as his novels, but it's an interesting read. He interviewed a lot of the survivors (and families of victims) of Aum's sarin gas attack on the tokyo subway and then some Aum members.
7-10 Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick : time travel meets dinosaurs meets aliens. A fun read.

posted by kristin at 12:04 PM

For some reason blogger doesn't seem to want to regenerate my archive page properly.

I'm behind on writing about what I've read while laid up, but that's going to wait at least another day.

Bought today at Powells:
The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein
The Red Magician by Lisa Goldstein
Fugitives and Refugees by Chuc Palahniuk
Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter
posted by kristin at 5:26 PM