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What are you reading?

 
 
 
I read "Really Important Stuff my Cat. has Taught me" yesterday to my peeps where I volunteer. This silly book was great as it taught us a lot of things. For example, Mark Twain was big fan of cats, as well as many other famous people. One of them had something like 30 cats in his house. The book also includes quotes from these famous cat lovers and two stories about cats who walked extremely long distances to get back to their homes. Plus, I learned that cats are also used as emotional support animals and one cat in a nursing home could detect when someone was close to death, so he'd snuggle up next to the person to comfort them, as well as alerting the staff that the time was near. If the person had no family, it was very nice to have the cuddly, loving cat next to them as they progressed through dying. Oh, the books was written by Cynthia L
Copeland and this time I purchased the paper back edition because it was on sale and has lots of beautiful photos in it to show the people who join my little volunteer activity. Cat lovers would love this book.
 
Finished two excellent books. First, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. The fictional tale of Willie Lincoln's death and internment is told via snippets from sourced accounts and from the ghosts in the graveyard. Abraham Lincoln's grief is devastatingly depicted. The ghosts (including Willie Lincoln) are also in the "bardo" - between heaven and hell. The novel slowly reveals parts of their lives while building up to the climax and resolutions. I recommend the book but it takes a little getting used to since it is composed of snippets from multiple sources and lots of dialogue that is also clearly sourced. For those who these things matter, it won the Man Booker Price for Best Novel in 2017.

Second, is History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt which recounts her trial for allegedly libeling the WWII historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. In Great Britain, defendant in such trials must prove they published the truth. It is a pretty detailed account of the trial. The book was made into a good movie (Denial with Rachel Wiesz). The movie is entertaining and more dramatic than the book, but the book goes into much more detail into the actual trial and facts. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, I'd recommend reading the book and then seeing the flick.
 
A new history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, This Vast Enterprise. Interesting so far, and doesn't stint on criticizing them where appropriate.


Rob
 
laughing dog said:
Finished two excellent books. First, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. The fictional tale of Willie Lincoln's death and internment is told via snippets from sourced accounts and from the ghosts in the graveyard. Abraham Lincoln's grief is devastatingly depicted. The ghosts (including Willie Lincoln) are also in the "bardo" - between heaven and hell. The novel slowly reveals parts of their lives while building up to the climax and resolutions. I recommend the book but it takes a little getting used to since it is composed of snippets from multiple sources and lots of dialogue that is also clearly sourced. For those who these things matter, it won the Man Booker Price for Best Novel in 2017.
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Got this from the library.

Took me a couple of pages to figure out what was going on, I clearly didn't retain all of your post when I read it.
 
spikepipsqueak said:
laughing dog said:
Finished two excellent books. First, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. The fictional tale of Willie Lincoln's death and internment is told via snippets from sourced accounts and from the ghosts in the graveyard. Abraham Lincoln's grief is devastatingly depicted. The ghosts (including Willie Lincoln) are also in the "bardo" - between heaven and hell. The novel slowly reveals parts of their lives while building up to the climax and resolutions. I recommend the book but it takes a little getting used to since it is composed of snippets from multiple sources and lots of dialogue that is also clearly sourced. For those who these things matter, it won the Man Booker Price for Best Novel in 2017.
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Got this from the library.

Took me a couple of pages to figure out what was going on, I clearly didn't retain all of your post when I read it.
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I took me about 20 pages to get into the swing of things. Fortunately, that wasn't a lot of text.


Just finished Hard Times by Charles Dickens. One of his shorter books (the Penguin edition is 288 pages of text). The style leant a little heavier on the caustic satire which reminded a bit of Mark Twain. It's the story of the Grangrinds, Josiah Bounderby, Sissy Jupe and Stephen Blackpool. It is social commentary on political economy, clash between the plight of the working class and capitalists. I guess because of the length, Dickens got into the story much more quickly than usual, which I find helpful.

BTW, I read the Penguin editions of Dickens because they include good footnotes on the idiom and (now) obscure references.
 
For years I only read the text of novels. Now I've grown up ( a bit) I read all the introductions and auxiliary bits. There's real interest there. Expands on my understanding. Wish I'd thought f that when I was younger.
 
About 1/3 of the way through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States . It focuses on the lives, actions and thoughts of those people (indigenous people, indentured servants, slaves, blacks, women) who were traditionally ignored, minimized or misrepresented in histories until recently.

Quite eye opening. I didn’t know Andrew Jackson was such a duplicitous SOB, or that there were so many uprisings in early days of the US or that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves in states still fighting the Union.
 
I'm about half way through a classic - Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927), a sort of love letter to New Mexico.
It's an odd novel, part historical, part fictional, partially set in real locations, partly completely fictional locations. The action, such as it is, is frequently interrupted by accounts of legends and extraneous stories. The semi-legendary frontiersman Kit Carson makes several appearances as a deus ex machina. Altogether I'm enjoying it.
 
Finished Mick Herron’s Slough House, the 6th in the Slow Horses series. Crisply written and highly entertaining. The plot is the Russia secret service is getting revenge for the murder in Russia of one of its operatives by killing British operatives in Britain. Much more of the best character in the series IMHO, Jackson Lamb, than most of the other books.
 
Three Men in a Raft. Ben Kozel.

Sounds like a joke. An Australian, a Canadian and a South African travel from the source of the Amazon, Mt Mismi, to the Atlantic. Surprisingly good.

What I wanted to talk about was Steven Baxter, who I normally love. Mammoths is like a cross between The Clan of the Cave bear and The Silver Brumby and just leaves me asking "WHY?"

A remnant population of mammoths survives to the modern day. Most of them are killed by people for reasons that more or less make sense, eventually. When they finally find sanctuary in what seems to be a Zoo the keepers set them up next to what seems to be a gigantic smart screen displaying African elephants. Are they trying to make them feel less alone? Then the book ends.

I bought another of his at the same time. Time. It's like the curates egg, good and bad in patches.
 
Just started Suze Rotolo's A Freewheelin' Time. She was the woman shown with Dylan on the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," who chose to have her story left out of the movie "A Complete Unknown." It's cotton Candy for us boomers.

Next up will be The Last American President,, by Thom Hartmann, a study of Trump that the missus recommended. She found it both enlightening and depressing.
 
I’m sbout halfway through Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s splendid history of the 1860 Republican race for the POTUS - the 4 candidates, how Lincoln out maneuvered them to get the nomination and then how he got each to be in hus cabinet and how they functioned to prosecute and end the war. So far, it is a fascinating read.
 
spikepipsqueak said:
What I wanted to talk about was Steven Baxter, who I normally love.
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spikepipsqueak said:
I bought another of his at the same time. Time. It's like the curates egg, good and bad in patches.
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I have almost finished Time, which I started reading two weeks ago, and I agree, it is very patchy. It's fairly rare for me to take so long to get through a novel, though to be fair I have had a lot of other calls on my time this week.

I am not entirely sure whether I have read it before, which is something of a condemnation of the book. When the squid appeared I was certain that I have read it; But now I am 95% of the way through it, I am wondering if the idea is one he has recycled from another book. Certainly it is the kind of book I would have read when it came out, but at that time I was mostly borrowing from the library rather than buying my own copy, so I don't have it on my shelf* to confirm my suspicion.

I am also unsure how interested I am in finishing it, despite having only a few pages left to go, and despite having been really entertained by parts of it. I just find that I don't care much how things turn out for the main characters, and the story seems to be petering out rather than building towards a climactic ending.

It has the tagline "The millennium's last great science fiction novel", and I wonder whether the deadline set by the publisher to allow for that bit of salesmanship led to the weak ending and general sense that chunks of the novel are just being phoned in - in parts it is very imaginative and seems well researched, while other parts are just missing that spark that keeps the reader engaged.






* Or rather, I didn't, until a friend kindly gave me her copy. Perhaps because she wasn't very impressed by it either :)
 
I had a similar experience with it.

But when I was just about to finish Project Hail Mary I put it down because I just didn't want it to finish. Go figure.
 
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