have you read any china mieville? howzabout jasper fforde?

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.

Sarah’s recommendations look great. What she said. I can also second Karen’s recommendation for The Cloud Atlas.

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. !!

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.

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.

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

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.

Have you read Vernor Vinge’s rainbows End yet?