June, 2011--time to winnow that TBR pile

Just finished Richard S. Wheeler's fictional treatment of the ill-fated Fremont expedition to California in 1848. SNOWBOUND is a good read, and I liked the multiple points of view. Give it *** (three stars out of five).

Still working on Wretched of the Earth, the Walking essay by Thoreau, and about to start Porius by J.C. Powys.

About halfway through I, Claudius, which is a surprisingly breezy read. Then again, it could just be my interest in Roman politics... though keeping track of the family tree is nigh-impossible.

Starting Dr Zhivago soon!

I'm reading all "backlist" books starting with Election by Tom Perrotta, as soon as I'm finished with my current read, Quiet Chaos.

3: Don't forget to read the sequel, Cladius the God

Read Ron Hansen's ATTICUS. Something of a disappointment--felt the story became quite contrived and unbelievable. And usually I'm a big fan of Mr. Hansen's work.

Reading Bonk by Mary Roach. On the bus, which means I'm quite hunched over, hoping no one's attempting to read over my shoulder.

Usually when I'm reading and there's a sex scene, I know it's going to be over in a few pages and I can stop being embarrassed at the thought of a fellow commuter reading over my shoulder. Harder to do with a book that's ALL about sex. (Just read about the 20" High Club, I think it was. That was eye opening! Good on all these researchers doing all this stuff, it's definitely something we need to know about. But I'm finding the historical stuff most interesting so far.)

I'm just about to finish Never Let Me Go. Quite a disturbing read, but I'm not sure that it's lived up to its hype.

@7: I read Bonk on public transit and laughed out loud most of the time. The other times I was wincing. Or maybe it was the other way around....

Inside Gilligan's Island remains a fun read.

#9> I definitely had a lot of wincing this morning! Far too much detail about operations on male genitalia. Hard to deal with before my morning cup of tea!

I fell off the reading wagon for the first half of this year, but I've got the ball rolling again. Recently started 100 Years of Solitude, which has been a long time coming.

I finished The Decameron, and am currently reading Silas Marner. I've been putting off reading Silas Marner because of the perceived stigma of being a required reading text in many school systems (not mine though, sadly), but I've really enjoyed the two thirds I've read so far.

11: You won't come across those descriptive problems in the works of Henry James

Nearly done with Inside Gilligan's Island by Sherwood Schwartz.

Read Blood Meridian - not a very nice book. Then read China Mountain Zhang, which I'm going to write about on my blog. Then The Styx Complex, an eye-stabbingly bad airport bestseller from the 1970s. Then read The Fifth Child, which was good. Now reading Heat of Fusion.

15: Not a nice book? In what way? Isn't about the scalping industry in the Old West? I'd think violence and atrocity would be de rigeur with a premise like that. At least until Cormac McCarthy starts ghostwriting Hello Kitty or American Girl

Inside Gilligan's Island is great fun. Not as much scalping, unless you count the times Sherwood Schwartz got bilked out of his profits from the network execs.

I'm still on Island by Aldous Huxley and enjoying it immensely. On a less snobbish note, I started Drought by Pam Bachorz yesterday. It's odd - The Village + Tuck Everlasting + dystopia.

I'm about a third of the way through The Children's Book by AS Byatt, which I can't get touchstones to recognise, oddly. Byatt's done a marvellous job of creating a world one can believe in, one that plausibly has an existence outside of the novel; I cannot help but have the (possibly unworthy) fear however that she has achieved this through the simple expedient of having too many characters. I'm also reading Second Harvest and still struggling to really get Giono - I'm having trouble connecting with his work in any meaningful way. Maybe I'm too cynical.
I finished off The White Goddess and have moved on to The Histories, because I like to tackle books that I find daunting. Too early to have formed an opinion as of yet.

15: no, "nice" is definitely not the word that comes to mind when I think about Blood Meridian :-p

I'm busy with lots of things at the moment and when I do read (on the train), it's usually guidebooks to prepare my Scottish holiday. The Lonely Planet guide has a reading list that sounds interesting. I already bought Journey to the Hebrides and more or less started reading it, and I also downloaded Waverley to my reader.

The last item on the Lonely Planet's list is Lanark. The description is intriguing. Anybody here read it?

Seeking great Scot writers? You should pick up a volume of Ewan McTeagle's poetry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc_iWPnjtCI

I'm ashamed to say that despite having had it on my shelf for a couple of years and having met the author twice in that time, I've yet to read Lanark. I have however read Old Men in Love and Fleck, both of which were excellent. If you're coming to Scotland may I humbly recommend The House With The Green Shutters which is wonderful, if grim, and doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

Got My Business is to Create: Blake's infinite writing by Eric G. Wilson via Early Reviewers. Looks pretty cool. Part analysis of Blake's writing, part creative writing book. This should go fast, since it is a brisk 85 pages.

I'm reading A Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a collection of Fitzgerald's short stories.

21: thanks, I followed the touchstone link to The House With The Green Shuttersand it sounds like a rather depressing read... but it's available for free on Project Gutenberg, so I'll download it and have a look.

Finished Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun, which didn't quite live up to Rivka Galchen's hype.

About 80 pages into Swann's Way and reading Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking on the side.

Finished Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation by Charles Grass, which focuses on a small group of individuals who exemplify the variety of ways that Americans, like the French, navigated the "moral maze" of occupation.

Started The Master by Colm Toibin.

Read a good chunk of THE TIGER by John Vaillant. True tale of the hunt for a Siberian tiger that decided it had had enough of human interlopers and decided it was time to eat a few of 'em. I like the writing, Vaillant has a nice, economical way with words...

Nearly done with My Business is to create If you want to be a writer and not some hack extruding commercial-friendly inoffensive tripe, this is the book to read. Highly recommended. And at 85 pages, it's a breeze to read through.

27: i guess the tiger will ultimately lose...a pity.

I got Swamplandia! and The House with a Clock in its Walls from the library, so I'll be reading those soon. (the Bellairs was a favorite from elementary school... hopefully it still sends a chill up the spine!)

Anna: Valliant (the author) really evokes the remoteness of the region; this part of Russia is closer to Australia than Moscow (I believe that's the quote). A tough, hardy people. A unique ecosystem, mixture of tropical and boreal (if you can believe it). And the tigers get really, really big...

30: Please keep me updated on Swamplandia!. I've been considering it, but haven't added it to the wishlist. I'm really making an effort to keep the wishlist proportional to my pace in reading.

I just started The Savage Detectives last night after finishing The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. I'm still picking at Bird by Bird and Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion.

With my kids I've started reading Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of The Iliad, A Wrinkle in Time and Pan and the Mad Man. My partner in reading A Wrinkle in Time has been reluctant, but I'm thinking he'll be enjoying more as we get into the story. I guess I should add these YA and children's books to my library, after all they're mine!

I'm starting The Turn of the Screw today before I read the YA novel based on it that's just come out, Tighter.

I'm taking a break from the more serious stuff with the children's book, The Serial Garden (by Joan Aiken), which is absolutely delightful. I wish I had a childhood like the Armitage children in the story, with their "interesting" Mondays and pet unicorn. :D Not Snob-worthy stuff, but very amusing.

I also have William Morris's The Well at the World's End on my TBR pile for this month, if I don't get distracted by other titles.

Haven't been reading as much since I've been kind of obsessed with baseball and tennis lately, but I did manage to finish Foreign Bodies by Ozick. It was ok, I guess, not up to her usual. She seemed to be trying too hard, perhaps because it was a retelling of James? I dunno.

I need a palate cleanser. my favorite of which is fantasy so I'm now reading Daggerspell by Katharine Kerr. Just give me a simple narrative with no style to speak of, thanks.

Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass
30 Under 30 ed. by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang

Finished up Bonk - there were some very funny moments, but I think the discomfort value made it less entertaining overall than Stiff. But it was fascinating how much more there still is to learn about the physiological (and psychological, etc) aspects of sex.

Am now a fair amount of the way through The Lost Books of the Odyssey and am loving it. I wish I could clear out the library books long enough to make some time to read The Odyssey. But every time I turn around, there's another stack of library books looking plaintively at me.

Finished I, Claudius and moved on to Claudius the God. Kinda sad to see Caligula go, he was a hoot.

38: I think Caligula got a bad rap. He was the George W. Bush of the Roman Empire. History will set the record straight .... (stifled giggle)

I'm enjoying Digging Deeper The multiracial Post Office scenes play like a comical version of "The Wire." The entrenched bureaucratic Post Office contrasts with the aspiring artists and writers he commiserates with in his free time. The travails of an aspiring artist doing a job he doesn't want to pay the bills should be a familiar to many people. It's like the 70s version of the TV show "Party Down":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKOBwQHOo_Q&feature=related

Bouncing around Piece Work by Pete Hamill A generalist ... gotta love it! He writes about Gotti, New York, Miami, Mexico, Bob Fosse, Madonna, Mike Tyson, baseball, history, and much more in this collection. Good stuff. Like Anthony Burgess minus the ego and not as hyperprolific, since he's a journalist but has also written fiction.

Finished The Lost Books of the Odyssey and it was simply marvelous.

Moving on to Every Man Dies Alone. Which has to be one of the most depressing titles of a book anywhere.

About halfway through The Book of Knowledge by Chad Faries -- deceptively simple poems combined with visionary and epic forays into history and knowledge.

Right now I'm reading 2666. I like it but it's a slow read. I'm also reading Demons in the Spring on my NOOK. It's a much faster read but I'm not sure that I like Meno's writing. I'm seven stories in out of twenty though. He still has time to WOW me.

42: I'm reading The Savage Detectives in preparation for 2666

42 and 43: I'm also reading The Savage Detectives and considering 2666 in the near future.

8 TineOliver just finished Never Let Me Go and isn't sure it lived up to its hype.

That book really is great. The trouble with books getting a lot of hype is that your expectations when you read it are way way out there and few books could ever live up to it.

I read that book with no expectations. I had never read that author. I was impressed enough to read several other of his books. Most are equally as strange.

25GeoffWyss is reading The Year of Magical Thinking.

That book sure did disappoint me.

44: There is a Savage Detectives thread buried here somewhere on Lit Snobs. It would be cool if someone started a Roberto Bolano Wiki like the Pynchon Wiki:

http://pynchonwiki.com/

Digging Deeper by Peter Weissman continues to be great.

Also, I'm half done with The Book of Knowledge by Chad Faries

47: Looks like your nominated to create a Bolano Wiki

About 2/3 of the way through W.G. Sebald's ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION.

Stunning.

I'm about the same way with Savage Detectives It comes across like a New Wave movie collided with a David Lynch film.

About halfway through The Unconsoled and it's really annoyingly bloated.

I'm reading State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.

46: Yep, I'm halfway through and trying not to hate it. And I feel kind of bad since it's about her husband's death, but there you have it.

About 150 pages into Swann's Way and really, really liking it.

Approaching the end of Digging Deeper by Peter Weissman

Finished The Book of Knowledge by Chad Faries -- a wonderful new poetic voice. Good stuff.

Finished the Sebald book. Even after a long day of editing, I felt compelled to sit down and blog about my reaction to ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION. It was truly magnificent.

I really like Dr. Zhivago a lot so far, and one day into reading Swamplandia! has me intrigued as well. Good readin' right now.

Finally finished the Thoreau! Porius is really intriguing so far.

Finished Little,Big. Great book. I thought it had a perfect ending.

I'm reading The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise.

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD, a bizarre, funny memoir by Sebastian Horsley. I heard Stephen Fry being interviewed recently and he indicated that he had optioned this book for development into a movie. We shall see...

Finished Digging Deeper by Peter Weissman

I've started The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma; it's really good so far, but I'm hoping I won't get bored by the end. My ARC's over 600 pages.

Finished Years of Renewal by Kissinger. My 5000 page, 3-volume sojourn through his memoirs is finally complete. Oy!

Finished Just Kids and loved it, but there were enough cringe-making sexual practices mentioned briefly that I'm thinking Bonk could be a bit mind blowing.

I'm reading Blindness now and enjoying it, but here's a question for you. How come when a Nobel Prize winner writes science fiction, it is called "literary" fiction?

Have started Grace Williams Says It Loud.

#65 I was going to pick that one up later this year as a Christmas present for a friend. Make sure you drop a note, letting us know what you thought of it.

I finished the 600+ page The Map of Time in three days; it was amazing. Now I'm wondering what to follow it with...

Still chugging away on The Savage Detectives Yes, the hype is annoying, but it is a novel to be read. A kind of hyperliterate David Lynch road movie combined with the stark austerity of an Antonioni flick ... with jokes.

I'm reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon which is sprawling in a way few books I've read actually are. Wouldn't want to cut it at all, though. It doesn't fit in my bag though, so I'm also reading A Houseboat on The Styx, which, although slight, is great fun and has beautiful uncredited illustrations

Decided on Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty by John William de Forest and Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott for my next reads.

Finished two non-fiction books today:

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD and Deborah Cadbury's account of the Soviet-American attempts to beat each other to the moon, SPACE RACE.

...and I just started THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB by Don Lattin. So far an enthralling look at some of the personalities that congregated around Harvard in the late 1950's and, y'know, basically launched an evolution in consciousness. Folks like Tim Leary and Huston Smith, Andrew Weil (yeah, him) and Richard Alpert (otherwise known as "Ram Dass" which, apparently, freely translates into "he who humps anything with a pulse, male or female").

#65> Cliff, I've finished Grace Williams Says It Loud and I did enjoy it. I thought Henderson captured Grace's voice very well, and the central story was compelling and different enough to keep me reading happily.

At the moment, I'm mostly comparing it to Room, another shortlisted Orange Prize book with an unusual narrator, but I think Grace was a much better written narrator than Jack and the story was much more satisfying.

Over the weekend, I read Odd and the Frost Giants which was an okay Gaiman story (but quite suitable for reading to my kids, so a win on that score, but not quite as much fun for me as his more adult stories); and Britten and Brulightly, a noir crime graphic novel that I really enjoyed.

I'm now currently well into A Visit from the Goon Squad which I'm finding quite fascinating.

Thanks for the plug re: GRACE WILLIAMS--it stays on my Christmas list.

Reading Redmond O'Hanlon's IN TROUBLE AGAIN. The book documents a nightmarish (and hilarious) four month trip the author made through the Amazon. I'm only a third of the way through and I've already got the heeby-jeebies from the various creepy crawlies that populate that region of the world.

This is my favorite way of traveling--by reading books other people write of their journeys and adventures (while safely ensconced in the comfort of my favorite armchair or rocker).

Finished the O'Hanlon book.

(Shudder: jungle bugs!)

But fine travel writing. A bit more about O'Hanlon here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview13

>76 CliffBurns:

Great book, Cliff,

'And full of such pleasant observations too! Such as, when you go over to dispatch a howler (monkey) after shooting it out of a tree, it...covers...its...head...with..its...hands.

I don't miss too many meals meself, but, I can't imagine being that hungry.

I too am seeking some escapism. I just finished Troost's sophomoric, kava and cannibal obsessed, Getting Stoned with Savages.

GETTING STONED looks like a fun one too.

Best travel/adventure book I've read this year is still Thesiger's ARABIAN SANDS. A remarkable effort...

When Presidents Lie by Eric Alterman is riveting. I've only just started. Almost done with the section on the Yalta Accords and how FDR's deceptions on US concessions to the Soviets gets turned into the apocalyptic rhetoric and paranoid fantasies of the crackpot-turned-mainstream Right. (Sound familiar?) Its echoes within the alleged "dialogue" for US health care reform ("We're #15! We're #15! USA! USA! USA!") is haunting and tragic. Even after WW 2, foreign policy remained a largely esoteric concern of the US population. Today, only a microscopic percentage of Americans -- even among the self-declared smart, well-informed ones -- can tell the difference between radically different non-American cultures like Iraq and Iran. The book presses home that American understanding of world affairs is no better than a Larry the Cable Guy routine. Oh yeah, and we have the bomb and many of these "Cable Guys" vote in droves.

http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/n/U/moran.jpg

79:

Take heart! Perhaps the star-clad gentleman is a student of East African cultures, and is exhorting the Masai to greater academic achievement. Maybe he is evidence of a ground swell of private and amateur scholarship in the heartland.

Finished Swann's Way--amazing and/but a brain bender. Those sentences. . . .

Started Flight Maps.

Enjoying Infinite Jest and a sojourn to Birth of Tragedy.

In the latter it's interesting that the conflict is between Socrates and Dionysus, not Apollo and Dionysus. I wonder why so many people talk about the book as though it were the latter. Apollo and Dionysus are intertwined with each other; Socrates (through Euripides) is the end of Dionysian tragedy.

Finished The Savage Detectives

The Tiger's Wife. Not sure where it's going.

Started The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann. Reviewers have tended to call the book "Nabokovian" and I can see why: the mixture of tragedy and farce, the finely crafted sentences, the satire of culture high and low, and a melancholy eroticism. It seems like an elegant riff on Lolita, but I'll see if Schmahmann can get out from under Nabokov's massive shadow of influence (to wax Harold Bloom-ish for a second there).

Currently reading Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. I'm on Book 3 for tonight (trying to read one Book a night), and the first two parts have gotten me curious about what subsequently happens to the title character. I've been thinking about continuing my reading the whole day while I was out.

84> Stick with it, it's an excellent novel.

Alistair McLeod's complete stories.

Alistair MACLeod, that is. What a difference one little letter makes....

I am reading his novel, No Great Mischief.

83: I haven't finished Savage Detectives. I've lost steam about 1/3 thru. I'm not feeling it for the book right now. I may need some motivation to pick it up again.

Just finished reading Miss peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It's a fun monster cozy, if I can coin a new subgenre. Ending was rushed, and spent more time setting up for a sequel than creating that satisfied finished feeling.

Now I'm starting Gandhi: A Pictorial Biography and I'm sticking it into my 11 11 Nobel Prize category, even though it isn't literature and he never received one. I just felt like being contrary.

Infinite Jest is fucking amazing so far.

I read The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives yesterday. It was interesting and hard to put down, but it was missing something.

A.J.: oops, sorry. Have you read the short stories? I'm five stories in and disappointed so far. The book was recommended by a friend, and I was really hoping to like it.

Reading Charles Yu's HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSE.

Very Phil Dicki-ian, UBIK-like.

A bit of a head scratcher at times, but I'm enjoying it...

Rereading Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard.

The Double Life of Alfred Buber is an excellent read. Finely crafted prose and very Nabokovian, especially since it involves a protagonist rebelling against the banality of life by pursuing the perverse.

I really enjoyed A Visit from the Goon Squad and am now reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Still in scene-setting mode at the moment, but I believe the story picks up soon.

#96 Would LOVE to lay my mitts on that one, Harry.

#98 I enjoyed A Visit From the Goon Squad as well - I particularly like the sense that there's a whole world here of which we're only getting glimpses.

I've just started on a couple I've been meaning to read for a while - News From Nowhere, which has made me leap up and walk around vigorously for a while like I do when I read Sharpe novels. As a lefty it's rather rousing. I'm also flirting with The Golden Age, The Ajvaz, not Kenneth Graham, which I really want to like.

I'm spinning out the last couple of stories of The Lost Books of The Odyssey because I don't want it to finish.

I'm still slogging through Miss Ravenel's Conversion and American Socialisms, but I've added Babbitt for a summer American lit paper and, in less snobbish reading, Welcome to Bordertown for review and The Hunger Games for a teen book club. I'm sure this is the most books I've ever read at the same time...

Finished the first part of Mythologies by Barthes. Started the extended essay on mythology and semiotics. Not exactly exciting, but revelatory about how we turn things into mythological objects.

Getting close to the end of June and this thread is still mighty short. Let's hear from EVERYBODY in the group: what book do you currently have your nose in, what think you of what you've read so far?

I'm still reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - getting most of my reading done sitting on the front step of work waiting for someone with an alarm code to turn up and open the door. (Just give ME the freaking alarm code already.) It's not as captivating as Cloud Atlas, and some days I find my attention straying...

I'm also reading Treasure Island to the kids - I got an iPad the other day (oh so terribly shiny) and the kids love it when I read to them from that. Apparently it's "better" than if I went and found one of the dead tree editions on my shelves. Yeesh.

I have to say, I took to the eReaders much better than I thought I would (I'm running both iBooks and Kindle and swap between the two; the only issue is remembering which books are with which program, *sigh*). Mostly just reading trashy stuff as I get used to it, and downloading lots of classics which are FREE because I'm a cheapskate now I have to pay off the iPad...

I'm trying my best to read At Swim-Two-Birds, but more easily enjoyable escapist fluff is distracting my attention away from the book that's an effort to read.

This month has been pretty good, though - read both of Robert Graves's Claudius books (which were great) and some Russkie novels - Dr Zhivago was great, We was ok. (Subsequent dystopian novels have outdone it, but I did like the math aspect.) I did read a recent book - Karen Russell's Swamplandia! - which rocked. Looking forward to George RR Martin's fifth Song of Ice and Fire book, but spoilers are already spreading across the internet, so I may have to lay low for a few weeks.

Aren't some of Martin's "fans" completely nuts? That NEW YORKER article I read about what he has endured, the level of vitriol some of these idjits spout because he isn't pumping out books like sausage links (y'know, like the vast majority of his colleagues in the fantasy genre)...

(Starts humming the Doors' "People Are Strange")

I'm rereading Teju Cole's Open City--I think the first book since grad school that I've felt compelled to read again right after I finished it.

Just got The Book of Right and Wrong and Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic in the mail. Had the second one before, but it went underwater during Katrina. . . .

Have wasted too much of my brain on Metal Gear Solid (a video game) the last two days.

Yes, many of Martin's fans are crazy. I can understand the sentiment, though - it's been ten years since I read anything about any of my favorite characters from the series. (I was still in high school then!) Still, only two weeks to go... I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited.

Oh, and Stevie King may not get too much love around here, but I'm rereading my favorite of his - that old doorstopper The Stand.

Which one (re: THE STAND): the overlong original version, the really overlong version released a number of years afterward, or the definitive really, REALLY overlong version that weighs more than a Thanksgiving turkey?

Obviously the third. That's how I first encountered the book in sixth grade, anyway; anything else would be wimping out.

108: Despite the content of Martin's books, I think his fans know nothing about how books are actually written. He's not Philip K. Dick churning out books like Zappa spit out albums, except that Dick's prolific nature made him susceptible to charges of being a mediocre hack. Dick wrote a lot of average books, a lot of duds, and a couple literary gems (A Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle). On the other hand, Martin writes books on the scale of Victor Hugo or the aforementioned King. King seems to churn them out faster, but he also writes in the style of Tom Clancy, aka "phoning it in." Reviews for Under the Dome make it sound like a lazy, half-assed attempt at the epic. (Before I go on, don't assume that: "literary master = slow writer" and "mediocre hack = churns out multiple novels a year." That's a false dichotomy. In the end, the discussion is about overall quality, not writing speed.) Prolific not-hacks: Emile Zola and Honore de Balzac; more contemporary examples: Dan Abnett -- not a literary master, but he's prolific without sounding like he's writing outlines and then giving them to a small army of ghostwriters, aka James Patterson; also Simenon, although I've never read his stuff.

Heading to Convergence this weekend in Bloomington, MN, to get my annual binge of all things geeky in the sci fi and fantasy realm. If I finish the Double Life of Alfred Buber in my downtime, I'll start Excession, which would be appropriate reading at a sci fi convention.

@105 chamberk, I loved We. It's more like Orwell than a Russian novel though.

Right now I'm reading For the Love of a Dog and enjoying it immensely, but I'm also afraid that I now know so much about dogs that I'll never hit a dog book with the same excitement I did when I first read McConnell's The Other End of the Leash which is not a training book, but it's essential background information for anyone who wants to be a trainer.

#105 & 112 I also loved We :)

# 111 'Despite the content of Martin's books, I think his fans know nothing about how books are actually written.'
Can I just point out that most fans of Martin's books have not been online moaning about his publishing hiatus but patiently getting on with their lives whilst he took the time he needed to write the next book. Don't tar everyone with the same brush just because of a vocal minority.

Am working my way through Montaigne's Essays (translated by M.A. Screech). I love the way he writes, packed full of classical quotations, anecdotes and assides. He is most enjoyable when he goes off on a tangent. He really does seem to deal with everything here, from great important philosophical questions, to military strategem, to chapters on cheese. Brilliant. Trying to read three chapters before bed every night (most of them are only a few pages long).

Recent reads:

- Metropolis, Thea von Harbou: my review on SF Mistressworks here.
- The Noise Within and The Noise Revealed, Ian Whates: for review for Vector, the BSFA's critical journal; disappointingly old-fashioned and slapdash space opera.
- God's War, Kameron Hurley: excellent world-building, good strong characters, would be very very good indeed except it's a little too brutal for my tastes; I'll be getting the sequel when it's published next year, though.
- The Third Eagle, RA MacAvoy: disappointingly plot-less space opera from the writer of the excellent Lens of the World fantasy trilogy; a review will be going up on SF Mistressworks next week.
- Robopocalypse, Daniel H Wilson: read for review for Interzone; this year's mega-hyped genre novel, and it's all a bit meh - the vignette structure is mildly interesting but it does mean some sections are more successful than others; despite the author's credentials, I remain unconvinced about some of the robotics described in the book (how, for example, would a robot car be able to seek out and run over pedestrians?).

I'm jealous of anyone with copies of Metropolis, Robocalypse, or We. Just saying.

I was thinking about getting ROBOPOCALYPSE for my oldest son (17).

>102 kswolff:

And I just finished A Short History of Myth, some nice light, brief, Karen Armstrong fare.

I'm a fan of Karen Armstrong's. She's not Huston Smith, but in a pinch, she'll do just fine...

Is her bio of Muhammad any good?

Yes, I enjoyed that short one also, although I don't recall too much.

At the risk of sounding like the guy in Fargo talking to the hooker "You can't go wrong with Jose Feliciano" I agree with Cliff, what's not to like?

Towards the end of A Short History of Myth, Armstrong discusses mythology in early 20th century art forms including the novel. There are several interesting comments about mythological journeys and symbolism in The Heart of Darkness, The Magic Mountain, Under the Volcano, etc.

She also makes some interesting points about past and current mythological beings, such as Gilgamesh, Heracles (a true skin-wearing, club wielding, underworld-visiting shaman), Jesus, Elvis and Princess Diana.

Of course, one of the negative prerequisites to being turned into a mythological celebrity, is that you have to first, expire.

No one ever wrote about Jesus when he was alive. If I was at an all day unlimited seafood and panini buffet, with hundreds of my closest friends, listening to a truly beautiful and amazing oratory; or, at a wedding with an unlimited all-you-can-drink, Wine Spectator 95 wine-bar, I'd have immediately high-tailed it to a scribe (I would presume I'd be illiterate) and get it documented. "Hey Moshe, you'll never believe what I just saw, the loaves and fishes, just kept coming and coming! And man, that mensch sure could spit! What an unbelievable afternoon! I'm gonna devote the rest of my life to peace-making. I'll be blessed, dammit! You really, really need to grab some papyrus or a clay tablet and get this on your blog!"

...Or something like that.

I know some Muslim commentators thought her (Armstrong's) treatment of Islam rather superficial. But I imagine it would serve as a darn good introduction, at the very least...

I enjoyed the Armstrong book. Very readable. And short of reading 1400 years of commentary, a reasonable introduction.

117-122: I'm Muslim, and I enjoyed it too. True, it's not a super in-depth book, but it is written for a general audience and is quite good and she treats the various religions with respect, which is kind of refreshing. I also loved her book on monotheism that was a quick run down of theology from Judaism through Christianity to Islam (forgot the title).

My favorite works about Islam are Frithjof Schuon's Understanding Islam and Martin Lings' bio of the Prophet Muhammad. As you will be able to tell from those two titles, I am all about the Sufism. Don't like reading books about fundamentalism and stuff, because it's depressing.