I went to the Seattle Public Library spring book sale Friday night and showed remarkable restraint. 6 books and 3 LPs. Two of the books are one I already owned though (one on accident, the other because it was a $.75 paperback and saved me figuring out where my old copy was to read for bookgroup tonight).
The books I didn't already have are:
David Lodge - Souls and Bodies
Alfred Bester - The Deceivers
Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!
Elizabeth Diefendorf, ed - The New York Public Library's Books of the Century
posted by kristin at 11:43 AM
It's been a slow reading month so far. (At least for reading books, rather than websites, articles for class, chapters from textbooks...)
I haven't posted in two weeks yet I'm only two books behind: Lisa Goldstein's
Walking the Labyrinth and Tom Holt's
In Your Dreams.
Walking the Labyrinth tells the story of a woman who'd been working a dead-end job when a PI enters her life trying to find information about her family. She learns along with him as the story goes along. As is typical for Goldstein magical elements intrude upon ordinary reality.
Tom Holt's
In Your Dreams appears to be a sequel to his book
The Portable Door but I haven't read
The Portable Door and still enjoyed
In Your Dreams. This one is less a retelling of a fairy tale and more of using mythological conceits to tell a corporate drama. There's fairies and goblins and dragons and a Hero (yes, with a capital "H") and hell and a love story.
posted by kristin at 3:53 PM
Name books you liked, one for as many letters of the alphabet as you can come up with. (via
pages turned)
Axiomatic by Greg Egan
Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow
Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights by Daniel Pinkwater
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The Gold Bug Varaitions by Richard Powers
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Jazz: America's Classical Music by Grover Sales
Karma Cola by Gita Mehta
Libra by Don DeLillo
Mating by Norman Rush
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Pedro and Me by Judd Winick
A Quantum Murder by Peter F. Hamilton
Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo
Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
Vurt by Jeff Noon
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
A Year in the Linear City by Paul Di Filippo
Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
posted by kristin at 3:52 PM
Tuesday night I finished David Callahan's
The Cheating Culture: Why more Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. He addresses the rise of cheating in our culture in many contexts: schools, parents, business, government. I wish he'd had a bit more about suggestions for how to reverse the trend, but I realize it's a hard problem and it seems like one would have to be a miracle worker these days to fix it.
posted by kristin at 6:57 PM
Saturday night I finished Liam Callanan's
The Cloud Atlas (which is very different from David Mitchell's
Cloud Atlas which I haven't read yet). It was my pick for book group based on the recommendations of someone I work with. Book group met Monday night, and unfortunately only a few of us had finished reading it so we didn't discuss that much. The weirdest part for me was that I completely blanked on the last chapter when we started talking about it. "A snowmobile, huh?" The story is that of a soldier/priest in Alaska during World War II and then after. It made me really wish I could have talked to my grandfather as an adult. He went to Alaska sometime around the end of World War II and stayed. I only saw him a few times in my life though and the last time I was in high school. He's dead now.
posted by kristin at 6:48 PM 
