What Are You Reading?

I'm now on Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs.

I have never read Flowers in the Attic and I have a lot of morbid curiosity about it.

I believe I might have warned you about Weber's info-dumps!  However, the first 6-8 books are still well worth reading.  

Oh, it's crap. It's not even, like, light popcorn reading; it's more like those terrible circus peanuts, if circus peanuts were really Gothically melodramatic and had sex with their sisters.  

My sisters and I have started a very informal book club as a means to keep in touch, since we are flung to the wind (it's open to all my siblings, but so far only 4 of 6 are participating). The whole point is to read genres and books that we normally wouldn't pick up on our own.

We're doing a round-robin of choices, starting with the eldest (me). The first round: the sibling up for book selection chooses something they've read before and think is worthy of everyone's time. The second round: the sibling up for book selection chooses a book they haven't read before, but is drawn to because of genre/description/etc.

We've already read two books - I chose Craig Thompson's Blankets, which was well-received, and the next sister in line chose Wool by Hugh Howey, which started clunky but picked up some serious skill/speed. I've added the series on my To Read list. The next sister has chosen A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams, which looks to be a fun, pulpy historical romance.

So far I'm having a ton of fun with this project, and it's a great way to read stuff outside my wheelhouse while also keeping in touch with my sisters.

Valley of the Dolls! Ha! I remember that book.

The rest of the books in the series are even more batshit and overwrought, and there's, like, four more (I think). You are totally set!

Just finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. That’s a damn good read, especially for such an awful title.

Rumours abide that the author Claire North is A Famous Writer - certainly it's a nym for a published writer of 'different' works than this. True or not, it’s a delight to read - all the elegant, can't put it down prose you could want in the service of a fascinating variant on time travel: Harry keeps being reborn at the same time and place after each death - and by the time he's 4, he remembers every detail of his previous lives. That's just the set-up...

I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, andI had loved Dune, I then proceeded to read the follow-ups in the series, the next one was definitely worth reading, I can't remember exactly when I stopped (I'm pretty sure I've read at least two more which were quite enjoyable as well), but maybe take them out from the library from volume three onwards so don't feel guilty if you want to give up?

I’m still on Decoded, by Mai Jia, which if anything I’m loving even more. In a lot of ways it’s written like a biography of the protagonist, a mathematician/cryptographer, than a novel proper, with the narrator (essentially his adoptive sister) trying to make sense of what happened in his life and reconstruct it afterwards. It’s really an excellent character study.

When traveling yesterday I breezed through Stephen Baxter’s Raft. I loved the really ingenious worldbuilding, but overall the book didn’t really capture me until the last thirty pages or so. A little googling reveals it was originally a short story, and it seems like Raft would work better as one.* I’ll probably go forward with other books in the Xeelee Sequence, but it’s not a priority.

*I really hope that changing media makes the science fiction short story a viable format for writers again—I think the current paperback and series of paperbacks-dominated science fiction literary market really penalizes a lot of the more conceptually-interesting writers who don’t necessarily benefit from the extra length.

The first four are required reading. I know that sounds like a lot, but the first three are basically one story. Although the ending of Dune seems pretty final, you'd really miss the big themes Frank Herbert is going for if you don't read the second and third as well. And the fourth is just so different form most other books that it too deserves to be read (and is my favorite of the series). And I should mention that he was writing two and three concurrently with one. So there were parts of two and three written before he finished the first one. The first three is really one story.

Thank you, I will add them to the list!

I read Jude the Obscure over the weekend and it was fuckin' awesome, dudes. Man, I love Hardy. Hardy is the shit.

Also depressing. He is the depressing shit.

Now I'm on to Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, which is nonfiction about Victorian ladies and gentlemen flogging each other. Whee! Post-Lupin, this might be your kind of thing, right? You're a filthy degenerate. I'll get back to y'all with a report when I'm done; halfway through it's very well written. I dig it. One has an image of Victorians as extremely straitlaced, y'know? But there were plenty of bohemians; Richard Burton and his Cannibal Club were into all kinds of shit.

My favorite book of his so far.  Really loved it.

I finished reading IT a month or two ago for the first time.  I didn't realize I'd never actually read the book, my memory of the TV miniseries was so good.