What BOOK are you reading right now?

I'm working my way through this Michael Pollan. One of the local CooksTalkers loaned it to me at our last get-together.



not sure I can go all the way along with his position, but it's an interesting read

I've seen that but not bought it. Hmmm, the library...

Borrowed "A Distant Mirror" from my mother to re-read.


This very neatly fits in with a work I recently read on Mediaval trade (I'll check the source). Absolutely brilliant! The modern view of the these times as inflexible and 'covered in ****' is so wrong. They acted and reacted more like citizens of the 20th Century than you can imagine.

As I just left work I was presented with a book of my own choosing:



My father (who actually lived through it) was not interested. I thought he would be...

I loved Distant Mirror. Read it in some kind of very fat paperback form, and by the time I finished it, it was a mess of sort of crunched pages... especially since I started with it somewhat that way.

I wouldn't mind reading that either.

Finally got to this one in the 'to read shelf':


And pulled this off the new books shelf at work:


A, so far, brilliant snapshot of what life was like in London in the 1850s for the hordes of human scavengers at the bottom of city dwellers who's ****-carrying, bone picking and riverscouring recycling work was probably the only thing that kept the city going - and how their story blends into a massive cholera outbreak.

Been doing quite a bit of reading lately, after a bit of a lapse ...
Read Tim Winton's (Oz author) Breath in a day, last week. It's about how the experiences of adolescence can have live-long consequences. In this case, an addiction to risk taking & dangerous situations, learned through a couple of charismatic adults who had a huge impact on the main character at this vulnerable stage of his life. A very compelling read.
Now I am about 2/3rds of my way through Lullabies For Little Criminals, by Canadian writer, Heather O'Neal. It's about 12 year old Baby (her actual name in the novel) & her life growing up in Montreal's red light district, as seen through her own eyes. Jules, her father, is a very unstable & unreliable heroin addict (even worse after he's reformed) who has provided a chaotic life for Baby, to say the least & she's left pretty much to her own devices much of the time ..... which leads her to meet all sorts of weird & wonderful people (though mainly weird) on the streets, in foster homes & other places you wouldn't wish a 12 year old to be. But it's not at all a maudlin or sensationalist approach that the author takes. It's actually very interesting & often entertaining.

Please excuse the errors in the post above. Found them too late to change them ....

BEFORE THE FALLOUT : From Marie Curie to Hiroshima

<The cover on my copy is rather tame...>

Holy crap! If you knew how close the Third Reich was to harnessing atomic energy, you'd freak! As I have always said, the best thing they ever did was force out all the best minds in Europe to either the UK or USA...

Goood read - did you know that Marie Curie had a series of affairs?

Well, she WAS hot.


I am reading this:

http://www.amazon.com/19th-Wife-Novel-David-Ebershoff/dp/1400063973/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226828054&sr=1-1


The Nineteenth Wife.

The debates about the polygamous sect that had its kids removed interested me greatly...and this novel deals with both a current fictional sect, and with Brigham Young's 19th wife, who left the Mormons and spoke out against them.

I am finding it fascinating.

I am reading Amy Tan - The Bonesetters Daughter. Lovely read.

Easy reading:

A biography of Johannes Kepler (The Watershed), the father of modern astronomy, by Arthur Koestler. Have never read anything by Koestler except, of course, Darkness at Noon.

Is that not a section of The Sleepwalkers?

I'm reading Phillipa Pullar's biography of Frank Harris for the second time. It's amazing how a book read many years ago is discovered to have been hardly read at all on a second look.

I've been working through some of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books. I had some trouble with it at first - not sure how to pronounce the names which made me fussy.

that's Precious ehbeth.

I just finished "The Pillars of the Earth". Follet can sure make a simple statement a real chore.

ha!

it's the Mma's that throw me off

I read lullabies for little criminals too msolga. I had to search for my post, buried back on page 166 to see that "Nicely done" was my final sentiment. I see that I noted it was Ms. O'Neal's first novel.

For the first time ever on this thread, I've found three titles on the same page that I've not only heard of, I've read. What does it mean? Nothing. But I swear sometimes there's ten pages of posts, and I haven't read a single selection.

Just finished a " medical thriller" (a collaborative effort by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston ) called Invasive Procedures.

Meh.

Funny this thread should show up in New Posts this morning - I was going to look for it. I'm all happy about a new writer, new to me.

I'm mid way through a book of short stories by the argentine writer, Luisa Valenzuela, titled "Symmetries". Just the kind of writing I like - dense with observation but not going on and on, so, short but dense; she creates a world in a few pages. I could be her protagonist in all of them so far, though they're all different. All I can say is "yowsa".

Small blurb on the cover - "The heiress of Latin American fiction" - Carlos Fuentes. Since I like Fuentes, I was glad to even open the book, which I got from Diane. I've some other latin american fiction books awaiting, one by Julio Cortazar. Fbaezer recommended some in a long-ago a2k thread.

An element of her writing that I pick up is the play of a writer writing about writing. In her case I'm enjoying that element, whereas I've often railed against that sort of thing, in literature or film. For example, this was a key reason I scorned the movie Day for Night by Francois Truffaut...
I've thought that gets carried to absurdity, writers writing about writers writing.. naval gazing annoyance.
But not this time.