Antisocial weekends are good for reading.
Peter Carey's
Wrong about Japan is a slight memoir about him and his son learning about Japanese culture via anime. Not as good as his novels, but cute.
Alan Weisman's history of
Gaviotas made me want to visit. Gaviotas is a town built in the middle of Columbia where they've developed technologies for the third world. I'm not sure entirely of its current status, but it's been a bit of a utopia for a lot of people throughout the years.
George R. Stewart's
Earth Abides is one of the classics of post-apocalyptic literature. In this case it was a flu that wiped out most of humanity. Not bad, but I probably would have enjoyed it more earlier in my life (and before I read so many of the more recent takes on the end of humanity).
Sarah Vowell's
The Partly Cloudy Patriot was a quick read. It's a bunch of essays about, mostly, American History. Probably wouldn't have been worth buying, but it was a fun read from the library.
T.C. Boyle's
After the Plague was another one of those books of short stories that I didn't read straight through, so I honestly don't remember much about the early stories in the book. A few were memorable though, like the one about the black and white sisters who tried to make everything in their world black or white. The last story in the book is the title story. It provided a mildly amusing contrast with
Earth Abides since it accomplished much of the same thing as the novel but in a much shorter form.
posted by kristin at 10:47 AM
I finally finished Norman Rush's
Mortals after working on it off and on for weeks. Parts of it I liked quite a bit, but the middle of it really dragged, and there were a few things that disappointed me at the end. Read his earlier novel,
Mating, instead.
I detoured briefly and read Jacqueline Carey's
Kushiel's Dart last week. It's long but a fast read. Fantasy meets BDSM.
posted by kristin at 10:45 AM
I'm still working on Zinn's
A People's History of the United States so I have no new completed reads to comment on. I did want to mention a book I picked up at Powells yesterday though. I was in the coffee shop waiting for my tea to steep so I could go back to wandering the store and stuck my head over in the comics section. I picked up Joe Sacco's
Notes from a Defeatist and started flipping through. I hit the section about working in a library and realized I had to buy it.
posted by kristin at 10:52 AM
Three books down in the last week. Paul McAuley's
Secret Harmonies was readable but not fantastic. I'm actually a bit at a loss of words to say about it.
Robert Shea's two Shike volumes,
Shike: Time of the Dragons and
Shike: Last of the Zinja, were much more impressive. Set in medieval Japan, China and Mongolia these books featured fighting monks, samurai, Kublai Khan, battles, a sad love story, and more. I should never have waited this long to read them.
posted by kristin at 10:35 AM 
