1- Sh*t My Dad Says (men will especially love this!)
2- Racing in the Rain
3- Factory Man (about “offshoring” and one man in the furniture business who fought it)
The Rosie Effect is out now! Came out several weeks ago.
I know we’ve discussed Olive Kitteridge here before. Did anyone see the HBO miniseries last week? It was so very good! An excellent cast, beautiful scenery, and it was clear that this was a labor of love by Frances McDormand. I highly recommend it.
I thought Life after Life was interesting and fun - and it managed to side-step most of the time travel issues that always make this type of story problematic. I had no problem believing in its world.
I just finished Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. It was a fictional story based on the ‘orphan trains’ that transported 200,000 orphaned/abandoned/homeless children from eastern cities to the Midwest for ‘adoption’ in the years between 1854 and 1929.
I don’t recall ever having heard of this disturbing bit of U.S. history before. The train would pull into the station in small towns in the Midwest and the townspeople would gather to inspect the children and determine if any of them were what they needed, e.g., someone to work in the fields, someone to cook and clean. After a brief trial period, the children became indentured to their host families. The ones who weren’t chosen got back on the train and repeated the viewing at the next stop. Some were warmly welcomed and eventually adopted but many were beaten and mistreated, losing any sense of their cultural identities and backgrounds.
The book was well-written and an intriguing story that followed a child who ended up on one of these trains, through the several homes she was placed in, the hardships she faced, and her eventual success in life. Her story was intertwined with a present day story of a teenaged foster child who she meets and the parallels in their lives. It was one of those books that you can’t put down.
Just finished All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I read 36 books so far this year, and this is definitely my favorite so far!!
I must be a boring person: I like to read a documentary-like book like: Hackers (by Steven Levy?)
@amarylandmom --Yes! One of the best books I’ve read in years!
Just finished reading Unbroken, the Louis Zamperini book which I had started once before but found hard to get into. This time I stuck with it and so glad I did, especially with the film opening later this year. What an incredible story and as the WWII generation and those collective memories pass on, a very important story to be told as well as the story of the 1936 Olympics.
Someone by Alice McDermott. I think its her best since Charming Billy.
@mcat2, that definitely doesn’t make you boring. I like non-fiction too . . .especially narrative non-fiction like you are mentioning.
@amarylanmom,
Thanks.
What interests me in that “Hackers” book is that it mentions something that I was sort of exposed to when I was 20 something - especially its second section in which it mentioned the early stage of home computer development: Altair 8800 home computer (I think the name Personal Computer was not used back then), early Intel and Motorola microprocessors, 4004, 8008/8080, 6800, Mostek 6502 (used on Apple II, I think), BASIC interpreters on these ~4K bytes early computers. Even though I was not living in Silicon Valley at that time, I could relate to many things mentioned there. I actually got some exposure to the Tiny BASIC from a Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club at one time (slightly modified and put that code into an EPROM of an experimental “entertainment (or edutainment?) system” for a company I worked for at that time.) In those days when we “played” with those low-end microprocessors, we almost always wrote the code in the lowest level code: assembler. This was the only programming environment we had. Most of us in that generation dealt with code of the size of a couple of kilobytes only and we often learned the functions of almost everything (every chip and circuit schematics) on the board. You can argue that it was actually much easier in those years because of very limited functionalities we needed to deal with.
There was an open letter that was written by Bill Gates (when he was a 19 yo) to the computer hobbyists around 1976 (I was still in college in that year. I think I was likely exposed to this kind of stuff about 5 years late after these things had been invented as I was still living in the other side of the world then. But when I started to be exposed to it, I was “very hungry” for the free source code published in, say, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, for the computer hobbyists in those years.
Bill Gate’s Open Letter:
<a href=“An Open Letter to Hobbyists - Wikipedia”>http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists</a>
It was in the infant stage of “free software movement.” - e.g., one version of Palo Alto Tiny BASIC source code included the “Copy Left” statement instead of the usual “Copyright” one.
Maybe only a tiny segment of the population are interested in this kind of historical events.
I just finished One Plus One by JoJo Moyes and enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook and the narrators are excellent.
From NYPL:
[Accessible</a> Classics](<a href=“http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/11/24/accessible-classics?hspace=280962]Accessible”>http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/11/24/accessible-classics?hspace=280962)
I just finished Counting by 7’s which may be either adult or YA. Essentially a 12 yo biracial genius loner fascinated by botany and medical issues, becomes the sole survivor of her family and goes to live with another family (Vietnamese) when no family or friends step up to take her. It was really good. Strangely uplifting. The Vietnamese angle really added something “new” to the mix.
Nora Webster -
@mcat2 Just saw your note now. I have read a few books about the founding of Apple and the Windows OS. Hackers might be too technical for me, but your description intrigues me more than turns me off.
Just finished The Interestings. Really enjoyed it. A good read for people who like the movie The Big Chill.
What? No love for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks? I’m not quite done with it yet, but so far it’s been really good. I love the way that Mitchell writes.
Currently reading The Burgess Boys and really enjoying it. Finally caught and read Unbroken in advance of the movie.
Haven’t read Cloud Atlas, but bought The Bone Clocks & a kindle for H for Christmas.
Also started reading Wild, but saw the movie Friday.
( it was very good)