What Are You Reading Now?

[Pelado]

Reading Watership Down to my 9-year-old daughter. I bought it and its sequel on Amazon after seeing recommendations for it here after the author's passing.

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[BigPiney]

Reading Watership Down to my 9-year-old daughter. I bought it and its sequel on Amazon after seeing recommendations for it here after the author's passing.

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I really liked that book. Nice choice. I read it after reading The Stand. Stephen King has a way of discussing other books, mentioning them in his stories, that makes me want to read them. I am kind of like George Costanza that way.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Just finished Summit by Harry Farthing. Novel about a german (nazi) attempt to summit Everest. A good thriller with lots of actual Everest history. Read most of it while in Kathmandu, so it was fun to recognize so much of the places, culture, etc.

[Walter Sobchak]

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin - Fascinating treatment of the early history of the Mississippi primarily focusing on events in the 1800s, including the siege of Vicksburg.

Library hold on North Water finally fulfilled, read it rapidly... great page turner with a nice Empire Strikes Back homage.

[Clark Addison]

Just finished Summit by Harry Farthing. Novel about a german (nazi) attempt to summit Everest. A good thriller with lots of actual Everest history. Read most of it while in Kathmandu, so it was fun to recognize so much of the places, culture, etc.

I listened to this one a couple of months back. I enjoyed it, but thought it could have benefitted from a little more editing. Particularly, I thought that a few of the climbing sections could benefit by being about 20% shorter.

[bestellen]

I finished the Simon Scarrow book and am starting the new Harry Turtledove novel, Hitler's War.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Just finished The Underground Railroad, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for fiction. It was OK, but I don't get the hype at all. Can someone explain to me why this was so loved by the critics?

[BigPiney]

Just finished The Underground Railroad, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for fiction. It was OK, but I don't get the hype at all. Can someone explain to me why this was so loved by the critics?

I agree. I finished it a week ago and thought the first 1/4 was really good, but after that it kind of sucked.

[Northwestcoug]

I finished reading the first three books of the second installment of Sanderson's Mistborn series: The Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and the Bands of Mourning. They follow the Mistborn world, but ~300 years from the end of the first trilogy. It's sort of a Western/fantasy mashup, as some of the technology is straight out of the 1800's. If that doesn't get you excited, you can stop reading now

Anyways, Sanderson is a good writer. After six books of his, I've caught on to his style. There may be too many close calls and daring rescues that just barely succeed. It keeps me turning pages, though at times it does feel repetitive. Having said that, he delves into some really interesting religious and political ideas. I mentioned in my review of the first series, some of his writing made me wonder about what he believed personally. He spent a lot of time fleshing out struggles of faith. With this second series, I think he's returning to more of an LDS version of deity; a benevolent god who does little to alleviate suffering, but guides behind the scenes and tweaks here and there to guide mortals.

There is one final book of the series that is forthcoming, and yeah, I'm hooked enough to read it. As I said before, if you're a fantasy fan, this is good stuff, yo.

[Pelado]

My wife picked up some books the library had for sale. First one I read was Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer.

First Archer book I remember reading was A Twist in the Tale (a collection of short stories) in the summer of 1993. He hooked me with the first story in that collection - The Perfect Crime.

This was not a difficult book to read, but it was still enjoyable.

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[Joe Public]

Here are the Pulitzer winning books and finalists by category:

Fiction: Winner: The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Finalists: The Son, Philipp Meyer
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Bob Sacochis

History: Winner: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor

Finalists: A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America, by Jacqueline Jones
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser

Biography or Autobiography: Winner: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, by Megan Marshall

Finalists: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber

General Non-Fiction: Winner: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, by Dan Fagin

Finalists: The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide," by Gary J. Bass
The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, by Fred Kaplan

I saw an American Experience episode on PBS the other night that was based on Command and Control. It's available online for another week or so:

http://www.pbs.org/video/2365927736/

Sobering stuff. I am going to track down the book now.

[SteelBlue]

It seems official that Denis Johnson passed away yesterday. Think I'll reread Jesus' Son.
One of my favorite lines from that collection:


"She had nothing ... but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her."

[LiveCoug]

quarter way through The Nix. Good suggestion folks.

This is really a helpful thread.

[SteelBlue]

Just finished The Underground Railroad, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for fiction. It was OK, but I don't get the hype at all. Can someone explain to me why this was so loved by the critics?

I agree. I finished it a week ago and thought the first 1/4 was really good, but after that it kind of sucked.

I'll take a stab at this if you'll forgive me not having it in front of me AND for having read probably 20 novels since. First, you're not alone in your sentiments, even among respected critics. I don't believe it was the story or plot itself that drove the hype for UR as much as it was the relevance of and the shift in the message and perhaps the some of the events that were simultaneously occurring in 2016 as the book gained traction.

So often, such books have revered the white heroes who despite great danger to themselves reached out to help those in slavery, or if later, assisting the civil rights cause the best they knew how. These books usually leave a reader with the option to identify with those heroic people and perhaps to take comfort in the thought that you'd have acted as they did. I mean, don't we all love brave young Huck Finn? Don't we all revere Atticus Finch? The Underground Railroad takes away the hero option and instead has a great deal of blame to go around, even questioning the true motives of those who did help, no matter their personal cost. I can't recall a novel that lets almost nobody off the hook and essentially forces the reader to consider the possibility that our nation has long had (and still has) something dark in its heart even if it has presented a smiling face for decades.

[Jeff Lebowski]

After seeing people rave about it for years, I finally got around to reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and it met or exceeded the hype. It won the Pulitzer for fiction 31 years ago and was at least 31x better than this year's winner. Great story with complex and interesting characters.

If you ever decide to check it out, try the Audible version. Fantastic narration. 36 hrs and I enjoyed every minute.