What are you reading?

[Wrang1er]

I am on the library waiting list for Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston.

Brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

I heard about it on NPR and I am excited to get it. I haven't read for pleasure (which I sorely miss) since starting school in January. I am hoping I can make time for it.

[Breathless]

Upcoming flight, so I have loaded up my reading material, mostly educational, however.. The Lord of the Rings.. is purely for pleasure. re-reading..

[homoe]

Originally Posted by Wrang1er

I am on the library waiting list for Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston.

Brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.

I heard about it on NPR and I am excited to get it. I haven't read for pleasure (which I sorely miss) since starting school in January. I am hoping I can make time for it.

There was an excerpt of this book in the April 30-May 13 issue of New York Magazine. It looks will worth the wait

[Wrang1er]

Originally Posted by homoe

There was an excerpt of this book in the April 30-May 13 issue of New York Magazine. It looks will worth the wait

It came in yesterday. Unfortunately, I can't't start it today because I have school work and yardwork.

[homoe]

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer because the movie is coming out soon and it looks so very good!

I've just started this, but so far so good.

In the past I have not been fond of books where the wife has given up her dreams so the husband can realize and pursue his.

[2qt]

Caleb's Crossing - Geraldine Brooks

Interesting read so far.. Was skeptical but happy I bought it...

[charley]

The BBC has published a list of 100 books that have shaped the world as follows:

Top 100

The list was determined via ranked ballots and first placed into descending order by number of critic votes, then into descending order by total critic points, then alphabetically (for 73 to 100, the titles listed are tied).

1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC)
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th Centuries)
7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC)
11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th Centuries BC)
15. Harry Potter Series (JK Rowling, 1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevksy, 1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)
25. Water Margin (attributed to Shi Nai'an, 1589)
26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
29. Aesop's Fables (Aesop, circa 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)
31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)
32. The Mahabharata (attributed to Vyasa, 4th Century BC)
33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)
34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)
36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921-1922)
44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th Century BC)
52. Cinderella (unknown author and date)
53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)
55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-1872)
56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk story, various versions)
58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)
59. The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)
63. Song of Lawino (Okot p'Bitek, 1966)
64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)
65. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)
66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)
67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)
69. The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki, 11th Century BC)
70. Antigone (Sophocles, c 441 BC)
71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin, 1969)
73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
74. América (Raúl Otero Reiche, 1980)
75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)
76. Children of Gebelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)
77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)
78. Kebra Nagast (various authors, 1322)
79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1869)
80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD)
81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian story cycle, date unknown)
85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)
90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)
91. The Eloquent Peasant (ancient Egyptian folk story, circa 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor's New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837)
93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
94. The Khamriyyat (Abu Nuwas, late 8th-early 9th Century)
95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)
96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)
97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)
98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955)

The BBC link is as follows:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201...aped-the-world

[Orema]

Just purchased the kindle edition of So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer because the movie is coming out soon and it looks so very good!

I've just started this, but so far so good.

In the past I have not been fond of books where the wife has given up her dreams so the husband can realize and pursue his.

This may be one of the few times a movie is a bit better than the book...I didn't hate it but the movie looks SO much better....

[dark_crystal]

I owe a commercial review for this book so i will proceed to gather my thoughts here



Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee

As the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for nearly four decades-from 1937 until his death in 1971-John W. Campbell, Jr. discovered such legendary writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and collaborated with L. Ron Hubbard on the development of dianetics, the philosophical foundation of the controversial Church of Scientology. In this extraordinary cultural biography, Alec Nevala-Lee tells the story of these four men, their relationships, and their collective vision of the future, revealing in unprecedented scope, drama, and detail how the literary genre of science fiction emerged to shape the imaginations of millions.

I was not excited when i opened the package, although i have done a ton of similar books so i did not question the assignment.

I described it to my officemates as a sausage-fest, i recall.

HOWEVER, i had to check the author's gender because i guess this is one of the first "cultural biographies" to come out in the eight months since the #metoo hashtag went viral and it really shows.

We all know Hubbard was a sociopath, but i did not know Asimov was a groper, and Heinlein reminds me of Charles Lindbergh a little bit, if Charles Lindbergh had been a literary genius. I had never heard of John Campbell (big racist apparently) or given any thought to early pulp sci-fi magazines, despite the fact that sci-fi is at least half of my pleasure reading, because early sci-fi looked to me like a sausage-fest.

It WAS. But the author is extremely frank about these "gentlemen's" terrible behavior and meticulous about crediting the contributions of the women in their lives and letting them be fully fleshed characters, empathizing with them where they are victimized and recognizing female pioneers in the magazine-- and that made the book readable for me.

Where i had resisted looking too much at the genre's development, i now understand the process that led us from John Carter to Star Wars, which is where my own history starts.

I feel like that understanding is worth having.



I guess that's what i will say in my review. I just have to completely depersonalize it somehow!

[homoe]

.


The Alice Network by Kate Quinn.

[RockOn]

Champion generator manual

Oh sure, I know how to start it but rarely use it so I forget the little details. Hoping I won't have to use it during the next few days. This subtropical storm named Alberto is reminding me we will all be happier if I am prepared. And it doesn't take long for Kevie Daniel to become over-heated ... must be extra cautious with dogs who have short noses!

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

.


The Alice Network by Kate Quinn.

In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women—a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.
.
This is a fantastic read. I couldn't put it down!

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

I owe a commercial review for this book so i will proceed to gather my thoughts here



Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, by Alec Nevala-Lee

As the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for nearly four decades-from 1937 until his death in 1971-John W. Campbell, Jr. discovered such legendary writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and collaborated with L. Ron Hubbard on the development of dianetics, the philosophical foundation of the controversial Church of Scientology. In this extraordinary cultural biography, Alec Nevala-Lee tells the story of these four men, their relationships, and their collective vision of the future, revealing in unprecedented scope, drama, and detail how the literary genre of science fiction emerged to shape the imaginations of millions.

I was not excited when i opened the package, although i have done a ton of similar books so i did not question the assignment.

I described it to my officemates as a sausage-fest, i recall.

HOWEVER, i had to check the author's gender because i guess this is one of the first "cultural biographies" to come out in the eight months since the #metoo hashtag went viral and it really shows.

We all know Hubbard was a sociopath, but i did not know Asimov was a groper, and Heinlein reminds me of Charles Lindbergh a little bit, if Charles Lindbergh had been a literary genius. I had never heard of John Campbell (big racist apparently) or given any thought to early pulp sci-fi magazines, despite the fact that sci-fi is at least half of my pleasure reading, because early sci-fi looked to me like a sausage-fest.

It WAS. But the author is extremely frank about these "gentlemen's" terrible behavior and meticulous about crediting the contributions of the women in their lives and letting them be fully fleshed characters, empathizing with them where they are victimized and recognizing female pioneers in the magazine-- and that made the book readable for me.

Where i had resisted looking too much at the genre's development, i now understand the process that led us from John Carter to Star Wars, which is where my own history starts.

I feel like that understanding is worth having.



I guess that's what i will say in my review. I just have to completely depersonalize it somehow!

Thanks so much dark_crystal for sharing about this book and how hard it can be at times, to evaluate books, as an librarian. I appreciate your thoughts on this particular subject (book). --K.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by Katniss

Like so many others that were shocked and sadden by the recent bombings in Paris I sought solace in the familiar. What better way to honor that lovely city than with a re-read of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast?" I went to order the book as I had long since given my copy away when I discovered there is now a "revised" edition. I have mixed feeling on "revisions" (go ahead, ask me how I feel about 'Anne Frank' revisions) and this one is getting some rather mixed reviews. Apparently a grandson was not thrilled with how his grandmother (Hemingway's second wife) was portrayed so he revised "A Moveable Feast" more to his liking. I have been teeter-tottering on which to read, the original or the revised. I suppose for the sake of nostalgia it will have to be the original. C'est la vie.......

Katniss~~

I found this post because i searched the thread for THE PARIS WIFE (McLain) because i want to re-read it because i just finished A MOVEABLE FEAST.

From the NYT review of THE PARIS WIFE:

The strikingly attractive cover of “The Paris Wife” depicts a glamorous, poised-looking woman perched in a Paris cafe. She wears a belted, tailored dress reminiscent of the late 1940s or early 1950s. Her face cannot be seen, but her posture radiates confidence and freedom. The picture is interesting because it has absolutely nothing to do with the book it is selling.

The heroine of “The Paris Wife” is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly.

I read THE PARIS WIFE years ago but i had never read A MOVEABLE FEAST until today.

I am wondering who else has read both and if they read them in succession...

[dark_crystal]

Yesterday I read O FALLEN ANGEL, By Kate Zambreno.

I agree with the Rumpus reviewer in all but conclusion (mine was "no")

It is undeniable that Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel is completely successful in its goals. It’s got the quirks, the puns, the joking asides, and the quickest pace of almost any book I’ve read. Zambreno’s characters are vivid—from Maggie the spoiled child turned bipolar wreck, to Mommy the quintessential Midwest housemom—and the setting seems somehow familiar, though actual description is rare. Paradoxically, these elements may begin to explain why I struggled with this book.

O Fallen Angel tells the story of Maggie and Mommy and their tumultuous relationship. In the present-day story, Maggie has moved to the “big bad” city—Chicago, I think—and slowly become a pill-addicted prostitute who has sex with strange men to kill the pain. Mommy makes egg salad with way too much mayonnaise and thinks things like, “Mommy can visit Europe when she goes to Epcot Center.” Both are, of course, archetypes of a Midwest Catholic household—or maybe the subject matter is just all too familiar for me, being a Midwest Catholic girl who moved to the “big bad” city.

Either way, it seems clear that Zambreno intended her characters to remain static as they move through the narrative. She keeps a very tight leash on this story, her voice never faltering from the on-guard judgment she casts upon her characters. Although they may deserve to be derided—they’re honestly very stupid and self-centered—the question arises whether it’s possible to write a good novel in which the characters are stereotypes who don’t change and whom readers are expected from the beginning to hate.

Semi-conclusion: I want to believe it’s possible.

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

[homoe]

The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe


Built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African-American woman who convinces the admissions board at Vassar College that she's Caucasian in order to attend school there.

Sidebar: I just read an most interesting article about Reese Witherspoon, her book club selections, and her production company Hello Sunshine. It mentioned that this is soon to be adapted for a film starring Zendaya who will also co-produce.

[girl_dee]

*The Cases that Haunt us*

John Douglas
Mark Olshaker

It’s about famous unsolved crimes

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

I went on a binge! Here is what i have read since i cleared the book club hurdles last week:

THE CIRCLE, by Dave Eggers

Mae Holland, a woman in her 20s, arrives for her first day of work at a company called the Circle. She marvels at the beautiful campus, the fountain, the tennis and volleyball courts, the squeals of children from the day care center “weaving like water.” The first line in the book is: “ ‘My God,’ Mae thought. ‘It’s heaven.’ ”

And so we know that the Circle in Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” will be a hell.

LEVIATHAN WAKES, by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes is James S. A. Corey's first novel in the epic, New York Times bestselling series the Expanse, a modern masterwork of science fiction where humanity has colonized the solar system.

Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship's captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history

AUTONOMOUS, by Annalee Newitz (2018 Lambda Award!)

Jack Chen is a pirate who's dedicated her life to the development and distribution of free drugs, reverse-engineering patented pharma cheaply and quickly and distributing it where it's needed. But when she drops a productivity-boosting drug called Zacuity on the black market and it starts unexpectedly killing people, she has to do two things very quickly: develop a drug therapy to fix her mistake, and make public Big Pharma's illegal development of a drug that deliberately makes work as addictive as heroin.

Unfortunately for Jack, two IPC agents are hot on her trail. Paladin is a brand-new military grade robot, partnered with a human man named Eliasz to track Jack down before anything can officially embarrass Zacuity's patent-holders. Paladin's job is to protect Eliasz while he gathers information – but the robot finds Eliasz himself more fascinating than their mission parameters, devoting time and processing power to understanding him and the nuances of their developing relationship

I had (justified) high hopes for AUTONOMOUS bc I happened to read Newitz's previous non-fiction book on surviving a mass extinction on the plane home from Shanghai last March:

SCATTER, ADAPT, AND REMEMBER, by Annalee Newitz

In “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember,” Annalee Newitz presents a sort of prophylaxis for the apocalypse. As the founding editor of io9, a Gawker Media blog about science and futurism, Newitz is a techno-optimist, convinced that we humans can outwit just about everything our solar system throws at us in the coming millennia. “How can I say that with so much certainty?” she asks. “Because the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been survivors.” She’s probably right.

Also, Annalee is eye candy



I have now started GNOMON, by Nick Harkaway

To call Gnomon a work of genius is not entirely a compliment. Nick Harkaway’s epic, unwieldy, unpredictable new novel is outwardly brainy and pridefully digressive, and the distance it projects from its reader feels excruciatingly deliberate. Harkaway (Tigerman) wears his deep, fabulous vocabulary on his sleeve, and he’s unafraid to ruminate on the seemingly irrelevant in great detail. The sheer intelligence of the book feels almost beside the point; it’s to be taken as something of a given.

If Gnomon is not exactly a departure from Harkaway’s previous work, it’s at least his rawest effort, a window into his writerly impulses and motivations — into what separates him from the pack. It’s why, at first glance, Gnomon nicely stands out as a dystopian novel that manages to approach the genre uniquely and push it forward. The book arrives stateside after a year in which 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale skyrocketed on best-seller lists and found popular adaptations in theater and television, respectively. More broadly, the genre has felt appropriately ubiquitous in a tumultuous and unsettling political era.

[Kätzchen]

Ooooh, I just read a good book review about Gnomon by Mark Harkaway, in The Guardian.

It looks like an good book to read and I hope to find it at Powell's.



LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ment-110011379