What have you read lately?

[paultuttle]

I am currently in the last third of Spider Robinson's Lady Slings the Booze--an intriguing pastiche of Wild-West, sci-fi, NYC, and time-travel fiction.

Along with truly bad puns.

[statsgeek]

LOVE Jennifer Chiaverini, waiting for Resistance Women in paperback. 

I can't highly recommend anything I've found recently, but for those looking for a good read try Cameron's A Dog's Purpose/A Dog's Journey (yes, much better than the movies) and also Cameron's Dog Master. 

[Vkw10]

I am currently in the last third of Spider Robinson's Lady Slings the Booze--an intriguing pastiche of Wild-West, sci-fi, NYC, and time-travel fiction.

Along with truly bad puns.

Thanks, Paul. That one's a sure mood lifter for me when administrivia-induced depression strikes, as it has this week. Now where did I put my copy?

[Tenured_Feminist]

Just finished Chernobyl at Midnight. Superb.

[polly_mer]

It's summer so I'm on fluff.  The book sitting next to me is 61 Hours by Lee Child.  Will Reacher be able to save small town cops during a blizzard from themselves?  500 quatloos on yes.  Whether the retired-from-Oxford-University librarian lives long enough to testify against the bad guys is less certain.

[ergative]

Semiosis, by Sue Burke. It follows multiple generations of colonists on a planet with sentient plants. Really good meditation on sentience and domestication (who domesticates whom?) and social pressures and the challenges of planning a society.

[spork]

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Quick read, good writing, emotional content. Spoiler alert: the book was published posthumously with an afterword by his widow.

[hmaria1609]

Finished: Anna of Kleve: the Princess in the Portrait by Alison Weir
It's the 4th novel and newest installment in the "Six Tudor Queens" series.
Next up: What Jane Austen Knew and Charles Dickens Ate by Daniel Pool
Saw this non-fiction book around at one time or another and finally checked it out when it arrived in our library collection.

LOVE Jennifer Chiaverini, waiting for Resistance Women in paperback.

I checked out a copy of the novel from the library.  It's a good read!

[Juvenal]

Perhaps not a good idea to read a short story by Flannery O'Connor while having breakfast ("A View of the Woods").

[archaeo42]

I started Neal Stephenson's new book, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, this weekend. I'm only about 100 pages in (it's 800+) but I'm enjoying it. His last one, Seveneves, took me long time to get into and it was probably my least favorite of his.

[nescafe]

I recently finished Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State and it was just stunning (somewhat on-topic: it’s about a entry-level university administrator/new mother who skips town to stay in the Sierras, dodging emails from her superiors, smoking cigarettes in the woods, and facing off against Jefferson Staters along the way).   

[ergative]

I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time last night. That's the one with the giant sentient spiders. It was really neat; I found the spider-focused portions much more engaging than the human-focused bits, and indeed the book lagged around the 3/4 mark because of a human-focused conflict that was pretty dull. Characterization in general was a bit weak, but the imaginative world building was wonderful. I loved the theme of how progress is hampered by attempts to recover the accomplishments of the past (post-apocalyptic humans trying to scavenge from the Old Empire; Avrana Kern trying to direct the spiders' evolution to recapture human accomplishments), and the idea of using ant colonies to create computing reminds me of Cixin Liu's soldier computing system from The Three Body Problem, except much better integrated with the biochemical nature of the spiders' technology.

[downer]

I've been reading a right-wing polemic against the liberal universities:

THE DIVERSITY DELUSION: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture
Heather Mac Donald

No doubt it is full of inflammatory and dated language (who uses the word "co-ed" anymore?) and it exaggerates the sense of crisis. Very few places are actually fully practicing the liberal ideology that Mac Donald identifies. Most places give some lip service to diversity and sexual assault policies and then carry on as before. But Mac Donald does a great job of ridiculing the liberal rhetoric she finds and making arguments against it. Her easiest targets are the nonsense-statements put out by university administrations in defense of what they do. It's pretty funny.

[mamselle]

In my quest for long series of decent writers'  works by which to distract myself from working....

I just discovered Helen MacInness' "Cloak of Darkness" and see a list of many more to start looking for.

The followup writers for Robert Parker are annoying me, however. Ace Atkins put a well-known street in Cambridge (one away from the late Parker's cool Painted Lady Victorian) in Boston's Back Bay.

The fellow doing the Paradise series (I'm reading "Colorblind") talks about the black servant killed in the "Lexington Massacre." But, where in thunder did he get that from?

Crispus Attucks was killed in the BOSTON  Massacre....grrr!

And the jury's still out on what looks like a misidentified, or made-up site, also supposedly in Cambridge.

Parker would never have made any of those errors...he was the quintessential researcher.

So...humphf

M.

[0susanna]

The followup writers for Robert Parker are annoying me, however. Ace Atkins put a well-known street in Cambridge (one away from the late Parker's cool Painted Lady Victorian) in Boston's Back Bay.

The fellow doing the Paradise series (I'm reading "Colorblind") talks about the black servant killed in the "Lexington Massacre." But, where in thunder did he get that from?

Crispus Attucks was killed in the BOSTON  Massacre....grrr!

And the jury's still out on what looks like a misidentified, or made-up site, also supposedly in Cambridge.

Parker would never have made any of those errors...he was the quintessential researcher.

So...humphf

M.

I sadly abandoned Robert Parker some time before his demise (may he rest in peace). I loved his early novels--The Godwulf Manuscript was a joy--but for whatever reasons, the writing started to go downhill after Crimson Joy, so I'm not surprised that those writing under his name aren't much better. I found myself sitting behind him at the theater once, though, while he was still on his game, and wish I'd had the nerve to thank him.