Reading and Language 26 Jan 2008 08:20 pm
Reading recommendations wanted
I’ve got jury duty coming up in a week and a half. Alas, nobody timed this to coincide with a new Terry Pratchett release, or I’d be set. Anybody read anything great lately?
Bonus points for great biographies — I’m just finishing up Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography, which has given me some food for thought. But really, anything would do, as long as it isn’t a Moody Sock Novel. (”Linda folded another pair of socks and sighed. Would her sister ever find true love? And why had Richard become so distant? What was love, after all? Could it be like matching socks? She came to her senses suddenly, holding a pair of socks in her hand as she stared into the distance.” Pbbbbbt, yawn.) I prefer books in which something happens once in a while.
on 26 Jan 2008 at 8:41 pm 1.cissa said …
I’m really liking Katherine Rusch these days, for sf.
And Laurel Henderson for floofy Brit chick lit, and chick lit murder mysteries.
I also just read “The Skull Mantra” which was a good murder mystery set in Tibet. (For sillier but fabulous Tibet stuff, there’s “Escape from Kathmandu” by Kim Stanley Robinson, which totally ROCKS.)
on 26 Jan 2008 at 9:03 pm 2.Mia said …
I’ve recently rediscovered Reginald Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries, which are very witty police procedural-type mysteries set in Yorkshire.
Have you read Vernor Vinge’s rainbows End yet?
on 26 Jan 2008 at 9:40 pm 3.Aim said …
I just read both of the most recent Sherman Alexie books. Flight was amazing. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is semi-autobiographical, and simply incredible.
We’ve got two rooms lined with bookcases - nonfiction (mostly socioloy/feminist/queer theory/other sociologist/social worker/psychologist type stuff) and quite a few biographies, auto ad otherwise. If you are interested in borrowing something we may have, let me know.
on 26 Jan 2008 at 9:48 pm 4.alex wetmore said …
I don’t like SF, so I might not be the right guy to give recommendations.
Currently I’m really enjoying the books that Ivan Doig has written. They are generally about Montana or the Pacific Northwest. His most recent is “The Whistling Season” which is about a Montana range family during the depression after losing their mother. Sounds like a downer, but it was really good.
Mountain Time is another book by him which is about a writer in Seattle (seems to be writing for Seattle Weekly) spending time reconciling his family/background in Montana.
You can borrow them if you want.
http://www.amazon.com/Whistling-Season-Ivan-Doig/dp/0156031647
http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Time-Novel-Ivan-Doig/dp/0684865696
I’m currently reading a trilogy that he wrote with one book per generation starting in the 30s. I’ve read the first and last book, have to read the middle one now.
Sherman Alexie is always a favorite and I need to pick up his most recent novels.
alex
on 27 Jan 2008 at 12:00 am 5.Karen said …
My best recent fiction recommendation would still be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which I read nigh on two years ago now, but to which nothing since has come close.
I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s apparently nameless eco-political-thriller trilogy about global warming in Washington DC — Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting. It’s very thought-provoking and I’d recommend it, especially if you liked the Mars trilogy … but it’s also very slow-moving in books 2 and 3 (so maybe not the best choice for jury duty), nor is it as wonderful as The Years of Rice and Salt.
Biography-wise, I’m still grooving (v-e-r-y slowly, but that’s my fault, not the book’s) on Robert K. Massie’s 1980 Peter the Great.
on 27 Jan 2008 at 1:07 am 6.Joy said …
If you haven’t read it, Emma Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life (in two volumes!) is well worth reading. You’re welcome to borrow my copies if you are interested…
on 27 Jan 2008 at 6:39 am 7.Terri W said …
Hetty by Charles Slack — The biography of Hetty Green, America’s first female tycoon
Our School by Joanne Jacobs — Very interesting story of the foundation of a charter school in San Jose by a blogger I like. Better than it sounds.
How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman — One of the few books I’ve read to the last page since my kids were born.
And there must be a good biography of Julia Child around, though I haven’t read one.
on 27 Jan 2008 at 7:41 am 8.Sarah said …
If you want a Julia Child book filtered through a Buffy-watching blogger, there’s Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, a New York-dwelling temp worker who decides to cook everything in one of Ms. Child’s books in a year. Her blog became so popular that she got a book deal, and the book transcends the blog, and is funny and good and true.
Augusten Burroughs’ Dry is my favorite biography of/by him, Running with Scissors notwithstanding.
David Sedaris is probably too funny for jury duty. I’d've gotten removed from the court.
I love Sarah Vowell’s essays, which have a lot of autobiography in them. The Partly Cloudy Patriot is very good, with Assassination Vacation running close second. Also Take the Cannoli and Radio On, very good as well.
Meghan Daum has a collection of essays called My Misspent Youth - very good. I also enjoyed her novel The Quality of Life Report.
Cripes. Well, I guess you did ask, but I’ll stop there.
Oh wait, have you read Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford? It’s a truly amazing biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s captivating. And Things I Like About America, a collection of essays by Poe Ballantine, and Monster: Adventures in American Machismo by Brian Bouldrey, and Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwarz.
Sorry. You hit my MFA concentration roundly on the head. !!
on 28 Jan 2008 at 1:15 am 9.sphinx_n_herhat said …
…a Moody Sock novel. LOL!
Sarah’s recommendations look great. What she said. I can also second Karen’s recommendation for The Cloud Atlas.
on 28 Jan 2008 at 1:40 pm 10.Ian J said …
A book I read a while ago which has stuck with me was Robert Rankin’s _Witches of Chiswick_, which is a very odd but very interesting scifi read. He’s got a linguistic style that’s quite different from most, and the story of the book, although far from plausible, is enjoyable and thought-provoking. It involves a lot of tongue-in-cheek-ness, time travel, and advanced Victorian tech.
I’ve been on a classics kick in the last few years, and the last good one I read was _Pride and Prejudice_ over Xmas. It took me a while to reconcile myself to reading what at first appeared to be the fiddly eligible-bachelor concerns of the landed gentry, but once I got over that, it was a good story. I also highly recommend something like _David Copperfield_ if you want a book that’ll last you a good long while, but isn’t as dense as lead.
And, of course, if you want a schlocky NaNoWriMo scifi story, I wrote one in 2006 called _Troublesome Cargo_ that’s thoroughly plot-driven, and mostly edited.
on 29 Jan 2008 at 3:01 pm 11.jesse said …
good autobiographies i’ve read recently include willie sutton, yellow kid weil, and bret ‘the hitman’ hart.
have you read any china mieville? howzabout jasper fforde?