What are you reading?

mbw1024 · Post by **mbw1024** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 7:49 pm

Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts.
It's not new but somehow I never read it. It's pretty good. Fast.

bubblybrenda · Post by **bubblybrenda** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:08 pm

"Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want".

I used that "power of negotiation" in a job interview yesterday. Don't know if it worked yet but time will tell.

StJohnRuth · Post by **StJohnRuth** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 9:17 pm

Has anyone read Dan Brown's new book yet?

flip-flop · Post by **flip-flop** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 9:27 pm

StJohnRuth wrote:Has anyone read Dan Brown's new book yet?

Yep, that is the one I finished right before this one. Super fast read. I thought it was good. Very interesting to me because its set in DC & Alexandria, VA where I live and work. Made me want to explore more landmarks.

Some people really don't like it but as a good, quick read, I liked it.

vi lover · Post by **vi lover** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 9:56 pm

Just finished "Matchstick Men". It's a 2003 book that became a movie. Pretty quick read and very engaging.

soxfan22 · Post by **soxfan22** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 10:45 pm

I am reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island"...Gina, SJ, Dave, Cypress...You guys should read...

sherban · Post by **sherban** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:12 pm

I just finished Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty, "Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign"...which sums the story up pretty well.
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Blue-Water ... 376&sr=8-1

I'm really glad to have learned more about Caribbean & American history by reading this...the history of the Caribbean and Pirates is poorly documented and confounded with numerous legends, lies, and ramblings of various drunkards and dreamers across the world (Hollywood included...).

This book roughly covers the period from 1635 ~ 1700 and primarily focuses on the Spanish+English "pirate conflicts" in the Caribbean although it does bring in aspects related to French, Africans, Natives, etc...
This books reads more like history than a novel, it is not a light/fluffy/quick read. I enjoyed it and have learned some cool facts....I will also add that the book basically ends with an interesting account of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Port Royal (Jamaica) in 1692.
Now I want to go to Jamaica...
Peace-

Connie · Post by **Connie** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 6:33 pm

I'm reading "The Art of Racing in the Rain".

It's from a dogs poing of view and it's really sweet. Although I'm a cat person, I'm starting to understand what our pets think..

Highly recommend it. Quick read.

Carolyn · Post by **Carolyn** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 7:17 pm

Connie, I loved 'The Art of Racing in the Rain". I don't think in the end it matters a bit whether you are a dog or cat person. It's all about being a champion! Great read!

Post by **Anthony** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 5:54 am

<h3>Fiction</h3> <h3>BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT</h3> <iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 159448869X" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Maile Meloy<br> Riverhead Books, $25.95.</em><br><br> In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy's concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters - ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters - rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them. <h3>CHRONIC CITY</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 0385518633" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Jonathan Lethem<br> Doubleday, $27.95.</em><br><br> Lethem's eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a "war free" edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana. <h3>A GATE AT THE STAIRS</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 0375409289" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Lorrie Moore<br> Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.</em><br><br> Moore's captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11. <h3>HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 1416586288" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Jeannette Walls<br> Scribner, $26.</em><br><br> In her luminous memoir, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/books ... html">"The Glass Castle,"</a> Walls told of being raised by eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a novel based on family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith - mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The result reanimates a chapter of America's frontier past. <h3>A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 1416594981" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Kate Walbert<br> Scribner, $24.</em><br><br> The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations and the impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert's prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning. <h3 class="sectionHeader">Nonfiction</h3> <h3>THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... B002RXUP5S" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Richard Holmes<br> Pantheon Books, $40.</em><br><br> Holmes harnesses the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention in this superb intellectual history, which recreates a glorious period, some 200 years ago, when figures like William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Joseph Banks brought "a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work," and literary giants like Coleridge and Keats responded giddily to these breakthroughs, finding in them an empirical basis for their own faith in human betterment. <h3>THE GOOD SOLDIERS</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 0374165734" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By David Finkel<br> Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.</em><br><br> Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor at The Washington Post, gives full voice to his subjects, infantry soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan. (average age 19), posted in the lethal reaches of Baghdad at the height of the "surge." Finkel's own perspective emerges through spare descriptions - of a roadside bombing or the tortured memories of a single soldier - that capture the harrowing realities of war. <h3>LIT: A Memoir</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 0060596988" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Mary Karr<br> Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99.</em><br><br> This sequel to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/b ... html">"The Liars' Club"</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/r ... Cherry"</a> is also a master class on the art of the memoir. Mordantly funny, free of both self-pity and sentimentality, Karr describes her attempts to untether herself from her troubled family in rural Texas, her development as a poet and writer, and her struggles to navigate marriage and young motherhood even as she descends into alcoholism. <h3><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002WT ... 8UC">Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=cari ... B002WTC8UC" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt=""> </h3><em>By Liaquat Ahamed<br> The Penguin Press, $32.95.</em><br><br> The parallels with our own moment are impossible to miss in Ahamed's narrative about four members of "the most exclusive club in the world," central bankers who dominated global finance in the post-World War I era. Ahamed, a longtime investment manager, evokes in glittering detail a volatile time of financial bubbles followed by busts, all of it guided by players wedded to economic orthodoxy. <h3>RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer's Life</h3><iframe align="right" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&b ... 074326245X" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><em>By Carol Sklenicka<br> Scribner, $35.</em><br><br> Ten years in the making, this prodigiously researched and meticulous biography sympathetically and adroitly integrates its subject's work with the turbulent life - marred by alcoholism, financial turmoil and family discord - that brought it into being. Sklenicka shrewdly deconstructs Carver's fraught relationship with Gordon Lish, the editor who played an outsize role in the creation of Carver's stories, the most influential of a generation.

djmom · Post by **djmom** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:44 am

Ruth, good to know about the books. I left 4 or 5 at the villa and it would have been so easy to drop by on the way to the ferry.

Our library sells used books for 25 cents. Most of course are way old- but almost every time I stop by there are several newer ones.

It is great because before every trip I can buy a bunch and then if they happen to get sandy or a bit wet I don't feel guilty. And it is easy to leave them behind because they didn't cost much.

But I will definitely remember you next time!

flip-flop · Post by **flip-flop** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:36 pm

Another good one: In the Woods by Tana French. Almost done, can't wait to start the 2nd book in the series.

The synopsis: As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children, gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled shoes, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.

Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox – his partner and closest friend – find themselves investigating a case with chilling links to that long-ago disappearance. Now, with only snippets of buried memories to guide him, Rob has the chance to unravel both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

ifloat · Post by **ifloat** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 9:58 pm

China Mieville, "Perdido Street Station" and "The Scar"
Pretty good if you like steampunk, but they gave me nightmares.

Also just read the Robert Jordan ("A Gathering Storm") book that was written after his death. I liked it better than most of the recent books in the series. Finally we can end this thing in a dignified manner. Two more books to go.

LysaC · Post by **LysaC** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 9:27 am

Reading "Under the Dome"- new Stepehn King. Very good. Epic- like "The Stand". Big. You could use it as a weapon if someone was to sneek in your bedroom late at night while you were reading it... oooooooooo.

Tried getting into the Dan Brown- "Lost Symbol". Not good. Didn't even want to continue it which is weird.

mindehankins · Post by **mindehankins** » Mon Dec 07, 2009 10:09 am

Flip Flop: In the Woods is a series? Duh! I didn't get that. I've got to go look. I liked that read.
I just finished Testimony by Anita Shreve. Powerful and sad....

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