^^Lois Bujold McMasters 
I’m pretty sure Jane Austen was the chick lit queen of her day.
@MotherOfDragons, I’m with you. Agree with @alh Lois McMasters Bujold (correct order!) is the best. I also like Elizabeth Moon.
I have seven books on my nightstand, and I’m reading all of them. My habit is to read a couple of pages of each one, and cycle through the pile several times in one evening. It drives my wife crazy. Right now they include a book of poems by Denise Levertov, a (pretty boring) novel by Joan Didion, the second volume of Shelby Foote’s giant Civil War history, “The Wrecker” by Robert Louis Stevenson (part of a long-term project to read through Stevenson’s complete works), and a couple of other things. Just finished Robertson Davies Deptford Trilogy, which is one of the best things I’ve read recently. (There are lots of books stacked elsewhere, but they feed the nightstand pile.) I also always have one or another of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers for more private reading.
Robertson Davies is fabulous, I’ve always meant to go back and figure out which books of his I never got around to reading.
On my nightstand I have the last two volumes of Proust, upon which I will focus my attention seriously once I’m done with Lolita and Reading Lolita in Tehran. (Meanwhile, I’m peeping at a paragraph or two at a time of the beginning of Proust’s The Prisoner online at odd moments. The guy becomes addictive!)
I appreciate all the good book ideas in this thread. Putting The Custom of the Country, Between the World and Me, and Robertson Davies on my to-be-read list.
Love Robertson Davies! My favorite is “A Mixture of Frailties,” the last of the Salterton Trilogy.
@Sue22, I used to read a lot of YA fiction, haven’t been doing so lately. K.M. Peyton is one of my favorite authors. Maybe we should start a YA/Children’s Lit thread!
Proust is my favorite author. Of all time. I’ve been reading him 40 years… Once, with an uninterrupted period of time, I read the whole work straight through, beginning to end, at least 8 hours a day till I was done and that was a beautiful experience. I felt like I was on the edge of unlocking the all the secrets of life.
Currently, I have six or seven books on the night table, most of which I have read recently but haven’t found a good place to put them:
Mo Yan, Red Sorghum. I am supposedly reading this now, but not very successfully, because I haven’t been liking it much.
Robert Aronowitz, Risky Medicine. Medical policy/sociology/history – the development of the current practice by physicians of managing symptoms and risk factors vs. treating disease. Excellent, as his other books have been. Halfway through.
Riad Sattouf, L’arabe du future, tomes I & II. French graphic memoir, like Persepolis except the protagonist is a half-French, half-Syrian little boy growing up bouncing around among Libya early in Qaddafi’s reign, Syria under Hafez al-Assad, and Brittany.
Brian K. Vaughn, Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente, The Private Eye. Another graphic novel, dystopian Los Angeles of the future where privacy in the essential right, the internet has been outlawed, and the police and the press merged. Brilliant and beautiful.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II, No Habra Final Feliz. A one-volume compilation of a series of hard-boiled detective novels featuring Hector Belascoaran Shayne, Mexico City, and New Left-Marxism. A friend recommended it highly. I’ve read 1-1/2 of them. OK.
Alejandro Zambra, Formas de volver a casa. I think I wrote about this in the Best Books thread.
Robertson Davies: I have never read a single thing he’s written. People like me seem to like his stuff a lot, but somehow it has never called to me.
Chick-lit and YA: I love chick-lit and YA, but only in somewhat small doses. Someone has to tell me this is worth reading. My wife reads volumes and volumes of chick-lit that she takes out of the local library branch (along with other, somewhat heftier books). My daughter, who’s now 29, was a dedicated YA reader from the time she was 10 or 11 until she stopped teaching high school English a few years ago. I just saw this weekend that there’s a new musical of Tuck Everlasting!
Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts
E.B. White: The Essays of E.B. White
Norman Corwin: One World Flight - The Lost Journal of Radio’s Greatest Writer
Robert Aickman: Cold Hand In Mine
Tove Jansson: The Summer Book
Aickman is the weirdest.
Can someone describe what Robertson Davies books are like? I just looked it up, and can see he is a fiction writer, but what sort within the fiction genre?
Post #40- love her books. Anyone else like fantasy and science fiction? I still remember when my mom would not let me read some because they were too adult in nature many decades ago. I even took a college lit course in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I keep a list of series and wait for the next one. Likewise for mysteries a friend got me into a few years ago- mostly cozies but more serious ones as well.
A book a day is ambitious, even for light reading and for a fast reader.
I have mixed feelings about Kindle versus real book. I love the features of my Kindle including font size, lighting and page turning but sometimes having the book in hand seems more satisfying- and easier to go back to check on a missed detail.
Does anyone else browse their public library nonfiction section to be exposed to topics one never thought of? So many fascinating areas. Information in print needs to be more complete and less jumbled than accessing it online.
Any other readers who read while watching TV shows? Much of TV is not worth one’s complete attention and I can read and capture bits of shows while indulging in a book. Reading and eating another sin. Can’t read in a moving car, however.
Sometimes I am reading while streaming a tv show/movie and checking this website, and changing loads of laundry. And I have a window open to check comments on various blogs I follow.
However, I still talk on the phone. If someone calls me to chat, I turn everything off.
adding: I grew up in a household where we sat on the coach watching tv with books in our laps.
Three: Gravity’s Rainbow (which I’ve attempted 3 times), Melville’s Typee (having recently re-read Moby-Dick), and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.
@wis75, I always check out the new non-fiction section at the library.
I guess I’d call it literary fiction. He does have a good sense of humor, although the novels aren’t all that funny (his Samuel Marchbanks book is very funny, as is some of his non-fiction).
I used to read tons of children’s lit and YA fiction. When my kids were in elementary school I was in charge of the Reading is Fundamental program and ordering books was the best part of the job.
Love K.M. Peyton (I think @Consolation and I have agreed on that before.) Haven’t read much since* The Hunger Games* and the * Knife of Never Letting Go* trilogies. At least nothing that made me want to read more.
I have so many books that storage can kind of be an issue. Two bookcases in a San Francisco apartment with roommates.
Currently, I want to read:
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
Southern California: An Island on the Land
Subways and Light Rail in the USA: The West
How the States Got Their Shapes
Daily Public Transit Ridership: The Inside Scoop
Don’t really have any time with school and work simultaneously getting crazy, though.
@intparent, I think of Robertson Davies as a good old-fashioned novelist, with a particular interest in theatre, music, and Jungian ideas, a gift for social observation, and a sly sense of humor. He really is quite unique.
I do not think f him as a writer of “literary fiction” in the contemporary sense. His major goal seemed to be to tell great stories, with depth and wit, not to navel-gaze regarding his literary technique.
And, thank doG, he did NOT write in the present tense. B-)
@JHS just read Fifth Business! You won’t regret it.
I think Davies unquestionably writes literary fiction, but yes of the old-fashioned readable kind. But there’s more going on than just fast moving plots.
I read the above Robertson Davies thanks to one of my best friends from high school. She and I have almost opposite tastes (One Hundred Years of Solitude is her favorite book, but she has recommended a handful books that I just love, Dune and The Master and Margarita being the other two I can think of.
Speaking of chick lit, my husband’s favorite book is Anna Karenina. One of his co-workers heard that and gave him the Outlander book by, um Diana Gabaldon, I think.
About five minutes in to that book he puts it down, looks at me and says “this is not like Anna Karenina!” lol.