New now reading

[BARON CORNY DOG]

Just finished Trollope's Barchester Towers and The Warden. I was very excited to dig into Trollope as there were comparisons drawn to Balzac, and I did enjoy the books (it may help that I have some familiarity with church politics) but they were a little softer, less sharp, than what I remember from Balzac. Still, I'm glad I read them and look forward to lots more from him.

Before that I read Hard Times and Cranford, which were both rather strange books. Onward to North and South!

[Flower]

[Flower]

[Flower]

[Flower]

The Cellist by Daniel Silva .. just picked it up today. Daniel Silva is one of my favorite authors and I'm looking forward to reading "The Cellist" ...

[John_K]

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Shuggie is waiting til I have the current book finished. How is it so far?

Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Grimmer than Grimsby but well worth reading.

About halfway through this, it's bleak but an enjoyable read so far.

He's another due to be published next year I believe...

[Rorschach]

Not the first time I've read it but I find it very interesting and enjoyable and forgotten all the details.

A bit annoying the way they claim critical thinking and various branches of philosophy as subsets of economics, rather than the other way round but lots of interesting stuff.

[Minnie the Minx]

Finished these three:



I had never heard of Daniel Beer before but this book is a very well written and thoroughly researched glimpse into the stuff that used to get one dragged off to Siberia. I had no idea of the sheer extent of the land itself, and the book takes you into the life of the land and the suffering that happened in it. The sheer scale of the whims of the Tsars are appalling and extraordinary and you get a real sense of the enormity of the landscape that allowed such horrors to flourish. You also get a real sense of how easy it was to simply cover these things up - a tsar would be ROASTED on Twitter today I can tell ya! I really recommend this book - totally worth it.



I was wary of this -that's me being a snob - as it had been on Oprah's book club list. That'll teach me! This lovely work unfurls over a few months, charting the emotions of a community as it comes to terms with a pending execution. It's gentle, fierce, pitch -perfect. You'll be able to taste the cornbread and rage. Another one I recommend.



Even after finishing this book, I was not sure of the target audience. Anyone who didn't eat meat would read it and say, 'well, exactly - that's why I don't eat meat!" So in a way, there's little point in someone who doesn't eat meat reading it. Someone who DOES eat meat would more than likely read it and get irritated by the overly dramatic horror that is scattered about in barely disguised hectoring dressed up as philosophical debate. After reading this book, I read some things about the author that were less than flattering - absolutely loads of people wrote quite acerbic things about his other books and I thought oh aye, I can really believe those reviews if he carries on like this all the time. I did learn quite a bit, having said that. I thought I knew a lot about the meat industry but the US meat industry adds some extra horrors in the race it has to provide the most meat to America for the least amount of money. Appalling is an understatement. Did you know that euthanized animals go to make petfood? Snookipuss might one day be eating Fluffytail. I'm not saying that's wrong -in fact environmentally it's great, yes? But there is so much that consumers don't know about their food that I think would stop them dead in their tracks if they saw the killings. Anyway - it wouldn't be for everyone. But what the hell, give it a go!

[Robert]

Shuggie is waiting til I have the current book finished. How is it so far?

Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Grimmer than Grimsby but well worth reading.

About halfway through this, it's bleak but an enjoyable read so far.

He's another due to be published next year I believe...

The second half of the second half gets less bleak!

[The Prof]

Excited about

First Kindle e-book I've read all the way through. I usually get lost somewhere with the tablet format - I don't know why.

I read this in about 3 days - it's not exactly groundbreaking. He comes across as a fairly genial laid back character in the right place at the right time.

It only goes up to the first Futurama festival in Leeds in 1979 so I'm guessing there's a volume 2 and maybe 3 on the way.

[Brickyard Jack]

I am reading the Penguin classics translation of The Count of Monte Cristo.

It is brilliant! A really exciting page turner.

[Snarfyguy]

Shaping up to be a good history of NYC's fiscal crisis of the 1970s

[Tom Waits For No One]

[Minnie the Minx]

One of the books bought at one of my favourite bookshops in Saltaire. Read it over the course of an afternoon in a pub beer garden with a few pints.



From the same bookshop. The stark honesty in the section on animals made me particularly glum, but you can't ever leave one of Berger's books without having a bit of a spring in your step. I was totally unaware that he had written fiction too- that's next on the list.



Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This book is blowing my mind. The writing! I feel like I'm licking cream from a spoon with every page. Absolutely wonderful.

[yomptepi]

Just finished this. Less good than the previous four, but still pretty great.



Just started another Colin Dexter Morse book. The service of all the dead, which is also great. I am working my way through the Morse/ Zen/ Campion/ Maigret books alternately. Having a ball actually.

[Six String]

Just picked up Drunk - How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way To Civilization by Edward Slingerland at the library. Should be a fun read.

[Six String]

Just picked up Michael Pollan’s This Is Your Mind On Plants at the library. I had to wait a few months for my turn. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by him so looking forward to it.

[Tom Waits For No One]

A couple on the go



Really enjoying his take on things





Great way to explore the familiar.
The A-Z listing and non chronological approach works really well.
Tons of stuff I'd not seen before.

[BARON CORNY DOG]

Finally finished Little Dorrit after stalling out on it for a long time due to work and other life distractions. It's one of Dickens's epics, and he has a knack for them, to be sure. In it, we see several people in and out of imprisonment, literal and less so, with a dollop of contempt for good old English Bureaucracy. The trouble with stalling out on a really long book is that when you get back to it, there's so much that went on, and I have such a poor memory, so it's a little tricky to put all the pieces together. No matter, when I finished, I immediately wanted to re-read it, but that's highly impractical. So, onward to Trollope's Doctor Thorne!

In the meantime, when I didn't have the juice to be reading Dorrit, but I still wanted to be reading, I blew through McMurtry's "Books," which is sort of his memoir as a bookseller, or as a "bookman." Highly enjoyable and breezy with very short chapters. A peak into a (probably fading) world that I recognize but have no real knowledge of. I've never read any of his novels, but I'm sure they're very enjoyable, on the whole.

[Brickyard Jack]

Little Dorrit is a tremendous book, and the film of it from the 80s - 6 hours in 2 parts - is magnificent.

If you haven't read it already, Dickens's other really big book, Bleak House, is even better - in my view his greatest book. Not one word of it is superfluous, and everything that happens has further resonances.

This may sound ludicrous, but I often feel sad when I finish a really big book - I become so bound up in these people's lives, it is like losing friends.

Meanwhile I have just finished What Maisie Knew, by Henry James.