A new book meme found via pages turned (via bloglines):

Authors I've read 10 or more books by:
Isaac Asimov
Nick Bantock
David Brin
Lois McMaster Bujold
Orson Scott Card
Jonathan Carroll
Ken Follett
Neil Gaiman
Peter F. Hamilton
Robert A. Heinlein
Tom Holt
Stephen King
Haruki Murakami
Daniel Pinkwater
Terry Pratchett
Kim Stanley Robinson
Rudy Rucker
Will Self
Bruce Sterling
Kurt Vonnegut
Robert Anton Wilson

I'm sure I'm missing some I read as a kid, and likely some since that because I didn't start keeping track of every book I read until 1997.
posted by kristin at 1:53 PM

Taking the train to Seattle for the weekend is a way to get a lot more reading done than a usual weekend away from home. On the way up Friday I read, in its entirety, Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground . While in Seattle, I bought and started Nancy Pearl's Book Lust . I finished it and Naguib Mahfouz's The Search on the way home. Before bed last night I finished Stephen King's Song of Susannah . I recommend all of them.

Dark Cities Underground was recommended on the Jonathan Carroll mailing list (rondua), though I think I'd already picked it up after reading The Red Magician. It fits in the sub-genre of fantasy that I quite like, but don't really know the name for, where the story takes place in the modern real world, yet strange things happen.

Nancy Pearl's Book Lust is a book full of book recommendations. I ended up taking a bunch of notes on other books I should check out.

The Search made me want to track down his longer Cairo Trilogy.

I was a bit disappointed by one aspect of Song of Susannah but I don't really want to mention it for fear of spoiling part of the story for those of you who haven't gotten that far in the series yet. King is still a fantastic storyteller, and this series is definitely his best work.
posted by kristin at 10:39 AM

Bought in Seattle this weekend:
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire volumes 1 to 3) by Edward Gibbon

And yes, since I've already been asked once, I do intend to read the Gibbon. Several things I've read recently have made me curious. I can't guarantee it'll be speedy or soon however.
posted by kristin at 6:35 PM

Michelle Tea's illustrated memoir Rent Girl is about her years as a drug using lesbian prostitute. Fortunately it's also well written, beautifully drawn and just plain interesting.

I wish I could say I found Scott Bradfield's The History of Luminous Motion interesting. It was a fairly painful read. One of the rare books I'm almost sorry I finished. I did have to keep reading for awhile to find out how old the main character was. Once I found that out I decided I might as well finish the thing. The book is written from the point of view of one really messed up kid. (He was 8).
posted by kristin at 6:28 PM

I didn't like James Blaylock's Lord Kelvin's Machine as well as his later The Rainy Season by it wasn't horrible either. It's science fiction as opposed to fantasy, however the science was just skimmed over and the time travel mentioned on the cover only happened at the very end of the book. Not horrible, but I wouldn't bother rereading it.

50 Simple Things You Can Do to Improve Your Personal Finances by Ilyce Glink had a few tips I'll try to put in place. Most of the stuff was pretty obvious though.

Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers was worth a read. Not as good (or as long) as Maus by a nice take on 9/11. My biggest problem though is that the format (huge sized cardboard) was really hard to read.
posted by kristin at 10:27 AM

I brought three books home from San Francisco. (Less than one per bookstore visited as a matter of fact.)

Bought at Borderlands:
The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany

"Borrowed" from Lorah:
Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
posted by kristin at 11:21 PM

Three new books bought this week:
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

I've been going to bed early instead of reading a lot this week, and didn't get much reading done over the weekend, so there's nothing new to report on having finished recently.
posted by kristin at 8:51 PM

I just created a spiffy little form to let me look for items in all of my local libraries based on google + worldcatlibraries.org.

4 books down since my last post. OM Yoga by Cyndi Lee hardly counts as a read. I bought it mostly for the pictures.

Dennis McBride's Killing the Mockingbird is another book I read over the span or a year or two. Poems and short essays lend themselves to that well.

Alan Lightman's Dance for Two (which oddly shows up in Powell's catalog as Dances for Two) is a nifty little book of essays on science. A quick but enjoyable read.

Tom Holt's Paint Your Dragon is typical Holt. Think Pratchett taking on modern England plus its mythology. I still am not quite sure where the "Paint" part of the title comes from, but the "Dragon" is self-explanatory.
posted by kristin at 1:40 PM