What Are You Reading the Week of 15 February 2014?

Jonathan Lethem (born 19 February 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family that originated in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer. The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."

His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song Like a Rolling Stone in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing center—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."

Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.

After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor....at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege." This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year. He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado, to Berkeley, California, in 1984, across "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done." He lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.

Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd pictured my first novels being published as paperback originals," he recalled, "and instead a prestigious house was doing the book in cloth....I was in heaven." The novel was released to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel," catapulted the book to wider commercial success. Gun, with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine reader's poll. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.

He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country, this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.

In 1996, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders. Girl in Landscape's plot and characters, including the figures of a young girl and a violently protective father figure, were "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."

The first novel Lethem began after returning to New York City was Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme, this time maintaining objective realism while exploring subjective alterity through Lionel Essrog. His protagonist has Tourette syndrome and is obsessed with language. Lethem later said that Essrog "obviously {is} the character I've written with whom I most identify," and explained that the novel "stands outside myself...It's the only one which doesn't need me, never did. It would have found someone to write it, by necessity."

Upon its publication in 1999, Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire. In 1999, Edward Norton announced that he was planning to write, direct and star in a film adaptation of the novel.

According to The New York Times, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster celebrity," and he was referred to several times as a "genre bender." Critics cited the variety of Lethem's novels, which were alternately hard-boiled detective fiction, science fiction, and autobiographical. (Lethem credited his comfort in genre-mixing to his father's art, which "always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously.") In Time magazine, Lev Grossman classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon (with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood, and Susanna Clarke.

In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000). This Shape We're In was one of the first offerings from McSweeney's Books, the publishing imprint that developed from Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003, as The Fortress of Solitude. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman features dozens of characters in a variety of milieus, but features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill. It was named one of nine "Editor's Choice" books of the year by The New York Times and has been published in fifteen languages.

Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In March 2005, The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was released. On September 20, 2005, Lethem received a MacArthur Fellowship.

After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided that "it was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway... I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." In 2007, he returned as a novelist to California, where some of his earlier fiction had been set, with You Don't Love Me Yet, a novel about an upstart rock band. According to Lethem, the book was inspired by the years he spent as the lead singer in an upstart California band in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during what he called "the unformed posturing phase of life." The novel received mixed reviews.

In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City, which was published on October 13, 2009. In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange."

His essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (2007) is a passionate defense of plagiarism and a call for a return to a gift economy in the arts. He writes, "The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism," and "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you." The essay was included in his 2011 collection, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

In 2011, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Lethem, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Among other projects, Lethem published short books about John Carpenter's film They Live (published in October, 2010 as They Live) and the Talking Heads album Fear of Music. Starting in 2011, he served as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, the position formerly held by David Foster Wallace.

Lethem's next novel, entitled Dissident Gardens, was released on September 10, 2013. According to Lethem in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the novel concerns "American leftists," very specifically "a red-diaper baby generation trying to figure out what it all means, this legacy of American Communism." Regarding the novel's setting, Lethem revealed in the same interview that it is "set in Queens and Greenwich Village, another New York neighborhood book, very much about the life of the city... writing about Greenwich Village in 1958 was really a jump for me, it was as much of an imaginative leap as any of the more fantastical things I've done. But really exciting, too."

Novels
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
Amnesia Moon (1995)
As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
Girl in Landscape (1998)
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
You Don't Love Me Yet (2007)
Chronic City (2009)
Dissident Gardens (2013)

Novellas
This Shape We're In (2000)

Short story collections
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996)
Kafka Americana (1999) (with Carter Scholz)
Men and Cartoons (2004)
How We Got Insipid (2006)

Non-fiction
The Disappointment Artist (2005)
Believeniks!: 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets with Christopher Sorrentino, as "Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin" (2006)
They Live (2010)
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (2011)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2011, co-editor with Pamela Jackson)
Talking Heads' Fear Of Music (2012)

Comics
Omega the Unknown (2007)

thank you Richard as always for the great start!!

I'm currently reading The Husbands Secret; The Wednesday Sisters; and still working on the second Flavia de Luce

Thanks, Richard. I admire Jonathan Lethem, so it was great to read this bio. I didn't know about the Philip K. Dick influence, although it makes sense with some of his early books. I started with the bizarre Gun, with Occasional Music, and went from there.

The Goldfinch is addictive reading, although cringeworthy at times.

>2 cdyankeefan: My pleasure! I like him a lot. Well, okay, I haven't read anything he's published since Men and Cartoons, but that's because I joined LT in 2006 and haven't had a night's rest since, what with all the TBR additions.

>3 jnwelch: Unrelenting, ain't it.

Just finished reading Men and Cartoons, how serendipitous. I've also read Guns, with Occasional Music. Need to read more of his stuff.

My thoughts on Men and Cartoons - I'm finding that he has an odd sensibility that I like. This is a collection of short stories that hover on the edge of science fiction and Twilight Zone.

From "Access Fantasy", where the have nots are stuck in a world of the perpetual traffic jam and one of the only ways to get out is to be advertising for the "haves", to "The Glasses", a customer comes to a standoff with his optician over his new glasses, to "Interview with the Crab", a send up of TV and fame culture where Lethem goes to interview a giant crab who was the star of a sitcom and reality tv show.

Out of the 11 stories, only a couple were a miss for me. Would recommend, if you enjoy odd, slightly bent tales.

Noticed you had This Shape We're In, listed as a Novella. It was in the version of Men that I had. That was a really interesting one, that I wasn't sure of as I was going thru, but it definitely paid off at the end. When it ended, you are exposed to a world that you want to learn more about. Very Twilight Zonish

It's really only a novella because that's how McSweeny's marketed it, and there are copies of the standalone out there. To me it always felt like a longish short story.

I'm about to start These is my words and listening to Sarah's key on audio.

Richard, thanks for putting yet another author on my radar. I've heard of him, but didn't know anything about his books. This sounds like a kind of sci-fi I could get behind. Your weekly bios are always so intrigueing!

I am reading Hope Leslie: or Early Times in the Massachusetts by Catherine Matia Sedgwick, and am enjoying it. In some ways, Sedgwick seems a bit ahead of her time.

I'm forging on with Hild as bedtime reading and have yet to reach the halfway mark. For a different sort of pace I've added The Lace Reader on top of a very slow-track selection (The Films of Akira Kurosawa) on the coffee table.

Fascinating Bio - someone new to me.

This week I'm continuing with Thud! by Terry Pratchett (I've only managed about 30 pages of this one since last week but did manage to finish the doorstop that I was also reading). It's also hindered in progress by the fact that it's essentially my 'handbag' book, so only really gets read when I'm out of the house unless I remember to take it out of my bag and take it to wherever I'm sitting. I'm also reading Robert's Rules of Writing by Robert Masello which is interesting although not necessarily groundbreaking. He certainly seems to make some good points. I started The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson yesterday and am about halfway through it. I also have Brethren by Robyn Young and am about a third of the way through that one.

Finished 2 teen novels:
The Queen's Choice by Cayla Kluver, 1st installment in her new series "Heirs of Chrior"

Maid of Secrets by Jennifer McGowan

I finished reading Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton by Kathryn Hughes. This one is for the LT biography group reads. It wasn't the best biography I have ever read, but I did learn from it, so it wasn't a total wash-out. The last one third of the book was much better than the first two thirds. I also thought the book was much too long. There wasn't much of a historical record to follow so the author had to really stretch this one out, and I think it was stretched too far. Instead of 400 pages it should have been 300 - tops.

I will now start devoting most of my reading time to Cutting for Stone. This one is for my real life book discussion group.

I'd not heard of Jonathan Lethem before, so thank you, Richard. Two of his books are now in my library wish list.

I just finished Tilt a Whirl and immediately bought the next two in Chris Grabenstein's John Ceepak series. It's now another mystery series I want to continue. The first three books of the series are only $0.99 each for Kindle.

13: Did you mean "I will now..."?

listening to rosemary's baby by ira Levin just beginning to get really creepy, just at the end of How the Light Gets In by louise penny absolutely fabulous!!

Thanks for another interesting start, Richard. Another author I've yet to read, but I have heard of him, so that's a start. :)

>14 TooBusyReading:, Addictive, aren't they?

I finished listening to my LTER audio edition of The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon and immediately started on another, earlier book in the series. I'd only read the first book in the series years ago and found it a little slow going and I hated stumbling over the names. The audio versions, read by Lisette Lecat, are delightful!

Another ER book I'm enjoying is Anna Quindlen's latest, Still Life with Bread Crumbs. It will probably be my new favorite of hers.

And I started The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell. It has two alternating stories and one of them is a little slow going.

My reading plans have changed - again! I made a quick trip to BN last night and bought Hollow City by Ransom Riggs, a sequel to Miss Peregrin's Home for Peculiar Children, which I'd won as an ER book, and throughly enjoyed for it's uniqueness. See? The ER program does work to sell books!

I also found Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived by Ralph Helfer on the bargain table, and since I love animals, and elephants are one of several of my favorite creatures, I snatched it right up. Besides, I found the cover irresistable. It's just too sweet!



So, I've already started Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived. I'm not yet far in, but I am deinitely enjoying it.

still working on Seven Up by Janet Evanovich

Still reading The Great Influenza; it’s informative, with stretches of story but also stretches too pebbled with names and numbers. Still reading A Natural History of Dragons; it’s fun and going quickly. Started Pigs in Heaven, sequel to The Bean Trees; it’s present tense, an intrusive affectation IMO, but I want to know what happens. Haven’t made much progress with magazines this month, and I’m behind on reviews, so I expect the next two weeks to be finishing up so I can start fresh in March.

Jonathan Lethem
Tempting. Though I’ve had it with horizon expanding this month, plan to spend March plucking my own existing books off the shelves.

Thanks again for a wonderful bio and start to the reading week!

I am about a quarter way into (large print edition - which is a doorstopper) of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I am enjoying immensely. Reminds me a bit of Freedom, so if you loved and/or hated that one, that might be a bit of a guide there.

Reading Pioneer Girl basd on a rec I read somewhere. Had to put aside the other 3 books I am in the middle of because I got a notice from the library that it is due on Tuesday.

I finally finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer this morning. Can I have my time and money back please?

Next up is Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson. It was Darwin's birthday on Wednesday so I think now's a good time to read it.

Thanks,, Richard for another great bio of a well known author I'd never heard of. Before joining Librarything I thought I was well read.
My car and dog park audiobook this week is The Finkler Question, interesting so far.
My iPad audio is Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of all Things which is another of the 100 Notable Books of 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2013.html?re...
and this time I'm agreeing with the assessment. Alma is a botanist in 19th century US (the book explains there was botany and polite botany, polite botany was done by women and not respected) though Alma, in spite of her sex, does become a respected scientist. One of the tags for the book is Darwin, so I'm waiting.
On paper I'm reading The Poetry of Stevie Smith: Little Girl Lost. Alas, literary criticism is not my thing, but it is interesting.
And on Kindle I'm reading a YA dystopian novel Anathema about slavery and magic - interesting, but every once in a while she slaps you in the face with an obvious revelation.

I've just cracked the cover on Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, my LT ER book from the January batch. The premise is certainly clever, so here's hoping for great execution as well!

I'm reading a bunch of different things

My occasional bedside book is The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen
eBook - Make Room, Make Room - basis for Soylent Green. Very scary, over population, lack of resources. No cannibalism (oops spoiler :)) so far
Reading with my son - Brisingr
Current Doorstop (to steal someone else's phrase) 11/22/63
Coffee Table Book - The Math Book - pretty cool, one page "anecdotes" from the history of math
Commuting Audio Book - Abandon
Book to read when I don't want to lug the doorstop around Will Grayson Will Grayson

Reading The Misfortunates in English despite the touchstone's suggestion. LT says I probably won't like it but I do. Somehow despite it being about a down and out alcoholic family, it's so well written and empathetic. I've also just started reading my LTER of The Thing with Feathers which bodes to be very enjoyable and enlightening.

Hello there, everyone! :) I just finished Time is a River by Mary Alice Monroe this afternoon! :) It was a very good book, and I liked the story. it was perhaps a little slow for me at times, but overall I still enjoyed it very much! :)

27: The Thing with Feathers
I got that one too, but I doubt I'll read it before March. Glad it looks good.

I finished Hartmann von Aue's Iwein today, as well as The Borrowers Afloat by Mary Norton, the second of which was really bedtime reading, but I finished it this afternoon. I wrote a review: http://www.librarything.com/work/38463/reviews/106531796
I'm still in the middle of Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Does anyone else find books of short stories harder to get through than a novel? All that stopping and starting...

>26 mahsdad: Have you seen the film version of Baron Munchausen?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036191/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

>30 Coffeehag: Most definitely. I love Terry Gilliam

I'm about 70 pages into The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. So far, I'm not that impressed. Too many not particularly profound insights offered as profundity.

I'm starting The War that Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan's new book on the start of the First World War.

Finishing up The Zookeeper's Wife about a couple who owned a zoo in Poland in the 1930's and how they and the zoo were devastated by the Nazi invasion.

I finshed Modoc: The True Story of the Greatest Elephant That Ever Lived by Ralph Helfer and liked it very much. I would have loved it, but there seemed to be a lot less true than story, and it was marketed as non-fiction. It was a great story, though, about the love between a man and his elephant, with lots of breath-taking adventure.

Now I'll be starting Hollow City by Ransom Riggs. I really enjoyed Miss Peregrin's Home for Peculiar Children, and this is a sequel, so I expect I'll enjoy this one as well.

#35
I was amused by your comment on ER copies selling books. To which I reply, that is why publishers do the ER thing. It is good for business.

>36 benitastrnad:: Awww. I thought they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. ;-)

I just finished Alice McDermott's luminescent Someone: A Novel. A beautiful book.

38: Please check your touchstone.

Thanks, Richard. I can't stand it. Another author, more books! Finished The Gardner Heist about the art theft there. Never solved. Quite dry. But a fair read for lovers of the museum. Also finished Dark Waters by Robin Blake, a mystery surrounding political activity in mid 18th century England. Good ending. Reading Crooked Numbers by Tim O'Mara. A quick moving mystery set in Brooklyn New York and Manhattan. Gave up but may go back to Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen. Seems to be turning into a Romance novel.

>40 Travis1259: I'm "sorry."

I finished and REVIEWED Rabih Alameddine's haunting novel, An Unnecessary Woman.

Now I'm reading Faulkner's Light In August and just over 100 pages in, I'm hooked.

>39 Meredy:: Thanks Meredy. Corrected. Full title is Someone: A Novel.

43: Thank you. Sounds like one I'd like. I've just added it to my library list.

For all of the crime fiction readers out there, of which I am not one, this article is making me rethink my aversion:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-reasons-why-committed-activists-shou...

By the way, after liking The Chaperone so much, I'm finally going to start on Louise Brooks' Lulu in Hollywood.

I finished up The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. I didn't find it particularly gripping or insightful, I'm afraid. The thief in question, whom Bartlett became fascinated by, to me was just a narcissistic ass, and so his story didn't really interest me much. My review is to found on the book's work page and on my own 50-Book Challenge thread.

Finished Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke. Coma inducingly saccharine.

Started Mad Mouse by Chris Grabenstein.

And I love Jonathan Lethem. I've read his first four books. I picked up his first, Gun, With Occasional Music, simply because of the title.

>46 rocketjk: Thumbs-upped your cogent review, Jerry.

>47 seitherin: I hope you enjoy the Grabensteins, since I did so much. That's the best title going, isn't it.

I have finished reading Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, and for me a well deserved Booker Prize Winner for 1999.

My next is from one of my favorite authors Rose Tremain this one is The Cupboard.

Thanks, Richard!

Tonight I'm starting The Fool's Run, the first in John Sanford's "Kidd Novel" series. I don't know why I'm starting another series, as I seem to be in the midst of about five right now, but I am.

Finished Crooked Numbers by Tim O' Mara, a satisfying New York city mystery. Will begin my new ER book, City of the Sun, by Juliana Maio. I hope this book lives up to my expectations. It takes place in Cairo during World War Two. Eygypt's mystique and fascination is amplified by my close a friendship with someone whose father came from there. Not to mention, this novel based on true events may foreshadow the present situation in The Middle East.

Going to start the third Flavia de Luce Red Herring with Mustard at some point during this snowy afternoon and continue to work on The Wednesday Sisters and The Husbands Secret

Completely hooked on A Game of Thrones George R R Martin.
A cast of thousands with loads of well drawn characters, some thoroughly nasty, and lots of plotting and scheming but surprisingly easy to follow - provided you're paying attention.
Only minor gripe is it's one of those fantasy societies that advances as far as making steel and hitting each other with it and then abruptly stops for centuries or even millenia. That aside it's gripping stuff.

richardderus: I liked the first Grabenstein well enough to snatch the second two. If they continues to hold up, I'll probably snatch the rest. As for Lethem, I actually bought and read As She Climbed Across the Table first because of the blurb on the back of the book. Seriously, who can resist a love story between a girl and a spatial anomaly?

>54 seitherin: re Lethem: Precisely!

re Grabenstein: If you liked #1, you'll most likely enjoy 2 & 3...and four...but my advice is to space them out, or they get a bit same-y.

>45 Citizenjoyce: Citizenjoyce: I did the same thing! And after reading Lulu in Hollywood I realized how annoyed she would be to find she was not the central character in The Chaperone! Louise was quite the gal!

>55 richardderus:
I'm reading the second one now, but will wait awhile before I read the third, for exactly the reason you mentioned. But I'm enjoying the 2nd one as much as I enjoyed the first.

I'm also still reading Unbroken, didn't realize until a couple of days ago that it's being made into a movie. But I can't read too much of it at a time because it is too emotionally hard. With all the horrid things that happened, the one that gave me nightmares last night was Gaga (? - don't have the book in front on me) the duck.

People can so easily be taught to be barbarians. Sad.

Oh boy! Two books are on sale today, all ereader formats, that I very very much enjoyed.

Black Boy is Richard Wright's wrenching and frightening tale of growing up in a world that hates more than it loves a child whose one besetting sin is his skin color. Worth your eyeblinks even after a half-century of progress. $2.99

And on a completely different plane of cultural existence comes Miss Timmins' School for Girls, a murder mystery-ish magical mystery tour of India forty years ago. It's a fun-house mirror world in many ways, British missionaries and small-town India and sex-drugs-rock'n'roll and fish out of water coming of age tale...and it's just as easy to read and savor as anyone could want. Unchallenging pleasure reading for $1.99, all formats.

AAACK!! And I got smacked by another book bullet (exclusive to Kindle, though): Light of the World by James Lee Burke for $2.99

I like Dave Robicheaux novels.

Richard, you book pusher, you! LOL!

As for what I'm reading, it looks like I'll finally be settling on The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson. I know lots of readers have raved about it, and I'm delighted to have now settled in.

I finished the wonderful The Signature of All Things , it's about time I found one of the notable books of 2013 notable.. Aside from the fact that Alma's sexual fantasies are portrayed from a male pornographers perspective, it's a fascinating look at a whole, intellectual life.
Now I've started The Zookeeper's Wife. I hadn't realized that before WWII 1/3 of Poland's population was Jewish. That gives me even more perspective on the holocaust.

Having just finished Hild, to which I awarded 4½ stars, I'm taking a break with something short and cozy--the twelfth Brother Cadfael title. On deck is William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise.

I couldn't get into Hild . Wow, 4.5 stars, maybe I should try again.

>61 Citizenjoyce:: I have The Signature of All Things on request at the library. I'm 6th or 7th in line, but they have 4 copies, so I hope it will be coming in soon. Glad to hear that you liked it!

63: As I noted in my review, I nearly let it go after about a hundred pages. But then I got a second wind, and soon I knew I was in for the full stretch. Despite some criticisms, I found much to enjoy and admire--and I am very tight with my stars. For me, 3½ is a good book.

Wow, great reviews and reads popping up here this week!

I am about halfway into large-print The Marriage Plot and enjoying it, but it is lagging just a tad (not a deal-breaker, just needs to start moving again). I am also interspersing stories from The Progress of Love by Alice Munro. I just got my ER book too, so that has to be next.

I took on a couple of wee pups for my humane association to foster and life as I know it is well, kind of over, so reading time is taking a big hit. Forgot how much WORK pups are!

Just finished "Outlaws of Nashville: Waylon, Willie and Kris." Am in the middle of a Sherrilyn Kenyon book called "Unleash the Night,"

Finished Mad Mouse by Chris Grabenstein. Really enjoyed it. Next up is Blood of Requiem by Daniel Arenson.

I am trying, for the second time, to get through (always a bad sign to put it that way) Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The back of the book raves about his "short, declarative sentences" that were so innovative for English prose. I'm experiencing the disappointment one feels when the doctor says you have to go on a diet of applesauce and dry toast.

I'm experiencing the disappointment one feels when the doctor says you have to go on a diet of applesauce and dry toast.

LOL! I love the way you put that!

>69 Coffeehag: For me it was like a choppy sea on a small boat: Seasick, miserable, wet, and smelly.

<71 Good job Richard!

I didn't get it either. It's years since I read it but I know I went from cover to cover without my interest being at any point engaged and was just left wondering what all the fuss was about.

But to do it justice and give it serious critical consideration I'd observe that it's quite short.

I'm reading a collection of short stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Women and Other Animals. With the very first story, Circus Matinee I remembered that this is why I have a hard time with short stories. I wanted to know more about Big Joanie. I really wanted this to be a novel. But some of the stories, particularly Eating Aunt Victoria and the powerful Gorilla Girl are absolutely perfect the way they are. I've had this collection sitting on my bookshelf for at least a year. I'm glad I'm finally getting around to reading it.

I finished The Misfortunates. Compassion and humor save the book from being a disgusting account of an alcoholic family. It seems a hopeless situation except that the narrator escapes. Although the exploits often made me uncomfortable, I found myself enjoying the book.

I finished listening to the delightful and unexpectedly gripping Daughter of Smoke and Bone while driving back to Kansas. The book as slow to take off but once it did it wouldn't let go. This is the first in a trilogy, so I stopped at the public library and picked up the second in this series Days of Blood and Starlight because I didn't want the story to end. Now I will have to wait for this fall before the last book in the trilogy is published.

If you like fantasy try this series. Good stuff.

I finished and REVIEWED William Faulkner's Light in August. Wonderful!

Now I'm reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts.

I'm getting a kick out of people's comments about The Old Man and the Sea. I happen to be one of the handful of people that loved that book. It is actually one of my favourites although I haven't been able to choke down any other Hemingway since that title. I found it tender and poignant and I was glued to every word. Isn't it crazy how different things have such different effects on people?

I've finished The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in audio and paperback, Brethren and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo so far this week. I'm still working on Thud! and Robert's Rules of Writing, but expect to finish the latter tomorrow with luck. I've also started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

I finished The Goldfinch -- although there were times when I wanted to set it aside, I stayed with it and I'm glad I did. Another book I'll be thinking about for awhile -- not (for me at least) a great book, but a very good one.

Now I'm reading Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste.

I'm reading Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Graham Greene's Collected Stories, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

As I mentioned before, I began reading Time is a River by Mary Alice Monroe on Friday, February 14th and finished it a day later on Saturday afternoon, February 15th! :) While it was a little slow in some areas, overall I enjoyed it very much.

On Saturday evening, February 15th I started reading Lost Souls by Michael Collins - and finished it on Monday, February 17th! :) And while I certainly enjoyed the story, it did leave me somewhat perplexed by unanswered questions.

On Monday afternoon - February 17th - I started reading The Affair: A Novel by Alicia Clifford. This may have taken me a few pages to get into, but once I got all the characters straightened out in my mind, the story became easier to follow. In my opinion, it was a beautifully written story - filled with characters that I really came to care for. This book took me two days to read and I finished it on Wednesday, February 19th! :)

On Wednesday evening - February 19th - I started Love Kills: The Stalking of Diane Newton King by Andy Hoffman - which I am currently reading.