What are you reading the week of July 11, 2015?

Finished Chicks and Balances and started Queen of the Trailer Park by Alice Quinn.

I am still reading The Tsar of Love and Techno and the writing is fantastic. I am also listening to Dead Wake and really enjoying it as well. I have learned so much from this book. I'm off to the cottage this week and I have carefully chosen two books to take with me that I am quite sure I will love. The Remains of the Day and The Winter King. These are by two authors that I can safely say will not disappoint me.

Iris Murdoch, Irish-English philosopher and author, born July 15, 1919



Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Full Wikipedia bio here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch

I am reading The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery and loving it!

Thank you for keeping us going seitherin and Meredy! I love visiting this thread throughout the week!

I'm reading Must Love Dogs by Claire Cook for the "contemporary romance" portion of the Eclectic Reader Challenge I'm participating in this year. I always forget how fast I can read these.

>1 seitherin: >3 Meredy: Thank you for the new thread and the author bio. I'll take care of it next Saturday.

I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry yesterday. There was a lot I liked about it, but I wasn't thoroughly satisfied with it. There was too much overwrought tugging on the heart-strings for my taste.

I don't know what I'll be reading next.

We Made a Garden by Margery Fish. Very pleased I bought this used. Gardening books are a big favorite with me these days, despite living in an apartment.

#6 ahef1963--You must read the sequel which tells of Queenie's side of the story.

Reading a new kids' book, Moonpenny Island which is proving to be about girls, science and friendship...so far, so good.

Finished my Early Reviewer edition of The First Honeymoon: New and Selected Stories, and it was outstanding in range and depth.

Next up to read is Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado.

Wow, hemlockgang, that is quite a review! Short, but packs a wallop! I shall check out that collection, as I've been hankering for some REALLY GOOD short stories. Super hard to find a solid collection these days.

Soul of the Octopus is shaping up to be my best read of the year, thus far. Truly amazing ... worth a gander if you have any desire in our natural world. It's sad too, because it shines a very bright light on the fact that we, as humans, know less than zero, about the emotional and intellectual reality of the beings we share this planet with. Every page was a discovery. I stayed up into the wee hours with this wonderful book, but yet want to ration myself. But I can't. I'm half-way through already :(

>10 hemlokgang:

I've read several Jorge Amado novels over the years. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is one of my favorites by him. He's colorful and bawdy but an excellent storyteller. Hope you enjoy it.

>6 ahef1963: You're very welcome. I'm glad you're coming back to us.

Finished Queen of the Trailer Park by Alice Quinn. It was an odd read.

Started The River is Dark by Joe Hart.

I edited my review of The First Honeymoon: New and Selected Stories, to include a quote from the book which summarizes my reading experience.

Due to the heat I spent the weekend indoors reading so finished three books. A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer was part of my tag team books (the first being Orphan Master's Son) and it was a very good example of the narrative non-fiction type of book.

I also finished reading an Alex Award winner from the past House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni. This book involves heart transplants and Buckminster Fuller and was well worth the time it took to listen to. The third book was the first in a YA trilogy called Throne of Glass. This one was so good I went to the library yesterday afternoon and checked out book two in this series.

Listening to Thirteen Moons on CD when driving. It's by Charles Frazier and sounds a lot less self-conscious than Cold Mountain did, except his ecstasy tends to overwhelm when he gets descriptive about natural surroundings. Still, I'm enjoying the interplay between the young white boy/storekeeper and elder Cherokee/adoptive father.

Began my LTER selection. Chitra Viraraghavan's The Americans non-sequentially follows the stories of various Indian immigrants in America, exploring themes of marginalization when people are uprooted or uproot themselves from the scene of their cultural identity.

Had to put down Massie's very lively biography, Catherine: Portrait of a Woman, until I finish the above. And just when I got to the good part! Empress Elizabeth just died. Ineffectual Peter, Catherine's husband, is about to ascend to the throne. And it won't be for long because Catherine will depose him and begin her rule. I feel a real draw to this book and want to get back to reading it ASAP because I'm afraid she'll start something behind my back if I don't keep track of her.

Finished The Eye of the Leopard by Henning Mankell. Not quite my cup of tea.

Started an old ARC I found stuffed in a drawer = Summoned by Anne M. Pillsworth. Bad me.

Thanks for keeping the thread going each week!!

I'm read Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage, my first Murakami, and also started The Shore by Sara Taylor.

Here is my review of A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer which I found very good reading. This work of narrative non-fiction is part of the very small body of knowledge that people in the west have of that most reclusive nation of North Korea. Using the lens of the film industry in North and South Korea the author uses what little information is available to tell the story of Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun Hee and North Korea's leader in the later part of the Twentieth Century Kim Jong-Il. The fact that North Korea used political kidnapping for reasons known only to them is well known and documented by the Japanese government among others. These kidnappings appeared to be random except for the kidnapping of the South Korean movie director Shin Sang-Ok and his estranged wife Choi Eun Hee. These two were specifically targeted because of what they could do for the North Korean propaganda machine. For eight years they produced movies for the Kim Jong-Il government before they were able to escape back to the West and tell their story. This very readable book tells about their lives and along the way sheds some light on the functioning of the North Korean regime.

I read this book after reading the Pulitzer Prize winning "Orphan Master's Son" by Adam Johnson. That work of fiction might lead readers to believe that kidnapping as a political means was also fiction. It wasn't and "A Kim Jong-Il Production" does much to clarify points made in the earlier book. I rated this book as average because there was nothing outstanding about the writing. It is a fairly standard work of narrative non-fiction, but in interest level and subject matter I would give this a five star rating and recommend it to non-fiction readers everywhere.

Finished The River is Dark by Joe Hart. Wound up being a very quick read.

Started Half a King by Joe Aberbrombie.

I finished reading Jane Hirshfield's The Beauty: Poems -- I love the clarity, the intelligence, and the tenderness of her poems, the way she leads you to see even the most commonplace things from a new perspective, a new vision.

Haven't posted here in quite awhile...nice to be back!

Over the weekend, I finished my 5th (maybe 6th?) reread of To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm now reading selections from Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Next up will be Go Set a Watchman. Can you tell my book club decided to do a Southern summer theme?! :)

I'm anxious about reading Go Set a Watchman, especially on the heels of my Mockingbird reread. But, if the stories of provenance are true, then Harper Lee wrote Watchman first, so her storylines and character development in Mockingbird were shaped by Watchman. Assuming that is the case, while Watchman may be less polished than Mockingbird, I hope it adds insights and complexity to my reading and understanding of Mockingbird.

I finished Being Mortal by Atul Gawande which addresses the inadequate way the elderly who are close to death, are handled and the limits of their options. Scary stuff!!

Now I'm reading Elena Ferrante's second book in her Neapolitan Books Series The Story of a New Name.

I started on book two of the Throne of Glass trilogy. Crown of Midnight. I got this one from the public library because our library copy is missing. Somebody stole it! However, there is a waiting list at the public library for this book, so I have one week to read it. That means that I will be reading far into the night to get this one finished. It is a chunkster. I wonder why this series is so popular right now? The books aren't new, so I was surprised that there is a waiting list for book 2 and that our copy is gone. That indicates a level of real popularity and perhaps longevity as well. of course, I shouldn't question readers, as I am reading book two, and think the series is great.

My current, active tracks:

Death Masks (Dresden Files, Book 5), by Jim Butcher
Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry, by Taigen Dan Leighton
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow

Several others are on slower tracks, one at a glacial pace, but still in some manner current.

I finished a book Sunday and realized (horrors!) that I had nothing new to start... Our library did not open until 2 in the afternoon, I was waiting out front! lol.. Ridiculous, I know but there was a momentary panic. Picked up 6 books starting - The Perfect Witness by Iris Johansen as soon as I got home. :)

>26 sebago: Scary story! But remember that there is always literature available online, such as at Project Gutenberg. I've read some grand old stuff there, including some Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Shakespeare. It'll at least keep you going until the library opens.

Finished Half a King and started the second book, Half the World. Really enjoyed the first one.

Limelight ~ I too just read and reviewed ER book "The Americans" by Chitra Viraraghavan. Curious to read what you think!

I also just finished the wonderful The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery and just started a little novel I picked up on the new fiction shelves called "The Book of Colors" by child oncologist and debut writer Raymond Barfield. So far it's amazing ... especially consider he is writing from the perspective of a young pregnant woman!

I finished James Runcie's Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death. It was all right, just not my cup of tea. I kept finding other things to do (even housecleaning, for goodness' sake) rather than go back to that book. There was too much of Sidney obsessing over whether a vicar should be involved in criminal cases and about the women in his life and not enough about the mysteries, which for the most part weren't very interesting anyway -- they almost seemed beside the point. I wanted to like Sidney. I liked his dog. Maybe I'm just too old to appreciate this series. I'm more the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin, Guido Brunetti, Adam Dalgliesh, Brother Cadfael, Inspector Morse, Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee type.

I finished up Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which I really enjoyed, plus Murderers' Row, a fun collection of baseball related murder-mystery short stories.

Because I sell so many Clive Cussler books in my used bookstore, I decided to try a few, so now I'm reading The Chase, the first in Cussler's Isaac Bell series. There's some stilted dialogue and some other awkward writing, but overall the prose is fairly clean and the story is fun, if formulaic (what was I expecting, right?). So, overall, I'm enjoying it.

I finished Americanah by chimamanda ngozi adichie about the lives of two nigerians youngsters and about how their lives change after one of them moves out of the country. It's essentially a love story, but also talks about immigrants, race, identity and so on. A fairly good read.

I am now reading love in the time of cholera simply to confirm that one hundred years of solitude is the best of gabriel garcia marquez

Thanks Meredy... I have my kindle but there is just something about having a "paper" book... :)

>33 sebago: Absolutely. 90% of my reading is still on paper even though I've had a Kindle for a year now too. There've been times when I've been reduced to reading dictionaries...

Continuing to read the Liaden books for the group read, now at #7, I Dare. Also enjoying H is for Hawk and Lumberjanes.

Finished book two in the Throne of Glass series. This one was Crown of Midnight. I went home from work last night, turned the AC on, put my feet up, and started reading. Finished it. Started the next in the series Heir of Fire this morning. This is a great fantasy series and perfect for a hot summer time read.

Finished Half the World by Joe Abercrombie and started Mila18 by Leon Uris,

Finished A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner. It reminded me of Henry James or Virginia Wolfe in that it's 10% action and 90% the thoughts, dreams, fears, and anxieties of the characters. Part way through I wasn't sure about it but it grew on me as I finished it and then afterwards.

>grkmwk: I'm also back after an absence, nice to know I'm not the only one! (So easy to assume everyone else was consistent when I don't know otherwise.)

I recently read The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey, sequel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. (Meh to both.). & just now finished Life From Scratch, which was beautiful! There isn't enough of that in my reading schedule: my reading pile has become a to-do list, an endless collection of intellectual vitamins. No wonder I'm reading so much less than I used to!

>39 Heduanna: I can't believe how fast you got me with Life From Scratch, both here and in your review. Usually it takes me at least ten minutes to go from piqued interest to completed order. I believe this was a record.

I've taken it upon myself to start the new thread over here.

Thank you Carolyn. Ray