What are you reading the week of December 17, 2016?

No bio this week. I'm visiting family in my hometown. I'm trying to post this via my phone since I have no internet access. Pine Bluff, Arkansas may as well be on another planet. At least at my parent's house. :-)

I finished up Selling Hitler, which was excellent. I've started Haunted Media, which sounded really interesting. It's basically an examination of the myths and superstitions that grew up around electronic forms of communications from the telegraph to the internet.

Unfortunately, I ran off to the airport this morning without my book.

Have a nice weekend!

Began This One is Mine a few days ago. Only a few pgs in, but it's not gripping me yet.

I have started watching the Amazon show The Man in the High Castle, which is really good. I never heard of it or the book before yesterday and the book is now on my TBR list.

Best intentions to read at treatment shattered, as I went soundly asleep as soon as they infused the Benadryl. Lovely! No regrets!

Think of it as a "spa day"!

Wish I had a CD book for the car as long haul to swim meet tomorrow. Alas, just discovered my library card expired 4 days ago. GAK! Can a book lover survive w/o a library card?

you will not have my hate An amazing book that cries out for a second read. The photo on the last page brought me to tears.

>1 fredbacon: Thanks for getting us started anyway, and sorry about your book!

I'm reading The Door to December by Dean Koontz. It's the last book I need to wrap up my What's In a Name Challenge, a book with a month in the title. So far it's been intense!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the absorbing biography, Madame Curie by Marie Curie's daughter, Eve Curie.

Still reading The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters and Babylon's Ashes.

I don't know what took me so long but I've finally read a book by Mary Stewart. The Moonspinners is a rollicking good yarn and I got to spend time (in my head) on the beautiful island of Crete on this frosty day.

Reading Maeve Binchy's final novel, A Week in Winter.

>2 fredbacon: Im always interested in reading about the relationship between media and truth, and this one looks just my thing!

Starting The Tusk that did the Damage, early present from a friend who highly recommends it.

Finished This One is Mine by Maria Semple, author of the amazing Where'd You Go, Bernadette. So obviously I had high hopes for this one. But unfortunately I was let down. Sure, it was easy to read, but I didn't see any of the humor and none of the characters was likeable. Still looking forward to reading her latest. I'll chalk it up to it being her debut.

Next up, The Interpreter by Suki Kim.

Had a quiet Sunday morning and early afternoon, which allowed me to finish up the final third of Madame Curie. Even 79 years after its original publication in 1937, Eve Curie's biography of her famous mother, Marie Curie, remains a vital and engrossing work.

Next I am going to read the final two chapters of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam.

After that, I'll be reading Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years by Jack Le Vien and John Lord. If I can get through this book by the end of December, I'll be at 40 books for the year.

I'm back home finally. I three hours or more in the Detroit airport waiting for a new plane since there was a problem with the lavatory on the originally scheduled plane. G'ah!

I picked up Michael Lewis' new book The Undoing Project about the work of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who uncovered a lot hidden biases in the way that people think and judge situations. An interesting book, even though the first chapter (about professional basketball) was one of the most boring things I've ever read. Once it began telling the story of Daniel Kahneman's childhood hiding from the Nazis in occupied France, it became much more interesting.

I finished the tiny Brokeback Mountain and loved it.

Now a bit into The Border of Paradise and wow, hooked me well and early.

Finished Babylon's Ashes by James S. A. Corey. Really liked it.

Next up is A Hiss-tory of Magic by Harper Lin.

I finished Everything is Teeth, a graphic memoir written by Evie Wyld and illustrated by Joe Sumner. She's such a good writer -- I loved her two novels, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and All the Birds, Singing. This book is about the author's childhood fear of sharks, about her family, about the even deeper fear that lurks behind her fear of sharks. I liked Sumner's illustrations -- the perfect complement to Wyld's spare, precise prose.

I also finished Eric Beck Rubin's School of Velocity, a book about a pianist who suffers from auditory attacks or hallucinations, which of course wreaks havoc with his career. There is much in this book about pianists and pianos and practice and performance, and so much about music -- I thought the author did a wonderful job of bringing the reader into that world. Rubin takes you back to the pianist's early years and to a powerful, intense relationship he had with another boy in high school. The other boy was an actor, studying drama in their school for the arts. The mood the author creates -- the sounds, the velocity, the intensity -- gives the book the feel of a thriller. It's a small book - about 200 pages -- but it is powerful. Another of those I'll be thinking about for a long time.

Next up: Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark by Volker Weidermann

>13 framboise: I felt the same way, had high expectations - what a let down

Finished A Hiss-tory of Magic. Quick cosy mystery with a touch of urban fantasy. Next up is Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie.

Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory
Margaret Tudor tells her story in the 1st person with Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor as secondary characters.

I've been to Edinburgh so I had a tactile feel of the old city.

I am still reading A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement by Anthony Powell, and I am listening to Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich.

I finished the LTER The Clancys of Queens, a fun book chock full of intriguing characters and scenes described in raucous clear language. It's not a deep book but a very entertaining one.

Thanks for getting us going, Fred.

Create Dangerously and Talking to the Dead were both excellent. Now I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow and Darktown.

Just started The Sisters Brothers which I remember hearing a lot of buzz about a while back but can't remember what the buzz was about! I guess I'm about to find out.

Just started The Velvet Hours this morning. I brought it with me to work with high hopes to read while eating lunch. lol lol What was I thinking? : )

Finished The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey 4/5 stars
Books about zombies are not my idea of a good read but I could not put this book down. Exciting and heart warming.

Finished, finally, Maeve Binchy's final book, A Week in Winter. Maeve Binchy has always been my go-to guilty pleasure author - I even named a child after a character in one of her books - but this novel was a let down. I just didn't care about any of the people in it. I do not know if that's a reflection on me or on the book.

Next up is Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift, about which I have heard many good things.

Oh, I hope you like Mothering Sunday. I've never read Binchy but I'm sorry she let you down. I keep you in my thoughts, friend.

I am exactly 50% of the way into The Border of Paradise and while it started in such a promising way (fascinating and real look at the protagonist's depression/mental health in the 1950s-1960s - and a curious look at a marriage between a Taiwanese/Chinese woman and a Polish-American man), it is just plummeting into "ripped from headlines" type yuck (incest, violence, abuse), so prevalent in fiction these days. There is no way I can keep reading ... it made a few "best of" lists, so thought I'd give it a whirl. Sorry I purchased it.

Think I will meander into Brain Pickings' 2016 top science books list. I had the spottiest fiction /novel year in memory. Hoping 2017 is better!

I found The All of It in our apartment building's little library and noted that only one other person of Library Thing owned the book. I was thrilled to discover it was is a stunning short novel about a moral dilemma and its resolution, a beautiful story, beautifully told. An Irish priest deals with a "confessed" sin and his own desires while fishing for salmon.

Started The Lady And Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo.

Finished Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie and decided to read something completely different: Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming.

I finished Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark by Volker Weidermann, a lovely little book (164 pages) that enlightens and unsettles and subtly conjures the spirit of life among emigres living on the coast of Belgium in the summer of 1936, their last season of hope that the Europe they loved, that had nurtured their gifts, would survive One of the reviewers called it "a season of farewells." I appreciated the opportunity to know more about Zweig and Roth, and to be introduced to other writers and artists of that time. Their world was on the precipice of such enormous change, such devastating tragedy -- Weidermann brings you so close to them, to their vulnerabilities, that you long to reach out and protect them, soften the blow somehow. I do not compare now to then, but I believe that the state of our own world -- change, denial, anticipation, danger, hope, fear - contributed to my feeling for this book. That phrase -- summer before the dark -- is haunting.

Next up: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
..

Finished Veronica Roth's Insurgient and now started Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham. Also been rereading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, it's one of those that go back to every few years.

Forgot to mention that I also just started As Good As Gone by Larry Watson.

I'm reading Reacher Said Nothing by Lee Child, which is fascinating but it has been interrupted by Behind the Throne by K.B. Wager which is also good but has to go back to the library soon.

This is a situation that makes me feel rich!

Just finished Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, #6 in the Chief Inspector Gamache series and started re-reading (after several decades) The Burning House short stories by Ann Beattie

I finished listening to Lean mean Thirteen, and I have started listening to The Arsonist by Sue Miller.

The new thread is up over here.