Travels with Charley took awhile to finish because I put it aside for a few days to read The New Becoming Vegetarian by Vesanto Melina & Brenda Davis and then accidently dropped it in the bathtub and put it aside for a couple of days to let it dry.

I really enjoyed Travels with Charley, though think I tend to enjoy almost all well-written travel literature. I'm just glad he end up writing about highway travel in Wyoming at all, since that would have probably caused bad flashbacks.
It made me realize though that I should reread Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon sometime. (And probably Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
posted by kristin at 1:58 PM

I'd definitely recommend Snakes and Ladders. It's a series of short essays on various things about the modern history of India from the perspective of a woman who's lived both there and abroad. I should have posted right after finishing it since I'd have had examples in my mind. I've since ordered a copy of her novel The River Sutra since I'm guessing I'll quite like it.

Tom Holt's Faust Among Equals was approximately what I expected from a novel from him. This one is an amusing remake of the tale of Faust.

Richard Dawkin's River Out of Eden, like the rest of his books, deals with evolution. It was a pretty quick read, but I think I'd suggest reading his The Selfish Gene instead since this one didn't seem to cover much that was particularly new (and had a much more limited scope).

I'm currently in the middle of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and am wondering why I'd never gotten around to reading it before despite having moved it with me unread for probably close to a decade.
posted by kristin at 10:31 AM

I have an non-fancy list of the 100 books I plan to read this year finally available. 1 down. 1 in progress. 98 more after that.

The ending of Paul Auster's The Music of Chance surprised me greatly. I won't say more about it though. I'm now working on Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders, essays on India.
posted by kristin at 4:58 PM