<p>It’s been awhile since we’ve talked about books. I’m supposed to come up with several picks for our next book club meeting. Any suggestions? We just read A History of Love by Nicole Krauss which was really great. This month is Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle - I haven’t started that one yet. Thanks. :)</p>
<p>File System Forensic Analysis by Brian Carrier? :eek:</p>
<p>I’m reading The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen and it is pretty good. I really think some of those here who question our involvement in Iraq will appreciate the storyline. </p>
<p>From Publishers Weekly:
It is the autumn of 1918 and a world war and an influenza epidemic rage outside the isolated utopian logging community of Commonwealth, Wash. In an eerily familiar climate of fear, rumor and patriotic hysteria, the town enacts a strict quarantine, posting guards at the only road into town. A weary soldier approaches the gate on foot and refuses to stop. Shots ring out, setting into motion a sequence of events that will bring the town face-to-face with some of the 20th-century’s worst horrors. Mullen’s ambitious debut is set against a plausibly sketched background, including events such the Everett Massacre (between vigilantes and the IWW), the political repression that accompanied the U.S. entry into WWI and the rise of the Wobblies…</p>
<p>I have it from the library (the Mullen) but have not yet started. It reminded me of “Year of Wonders”, the premise of quarantining a community. That was a wonderful book. Have you read it?</p>
<p>Funniest book I’ve read this year: “Marley and Me: Adventures with the World’s Worst Dog” by John Grogin. </p>
<p>Even if you aren’t a dog fan, you will love this book.</p>
<p>I’ve only read a few chapters of the Mullen book, but it is very interesting. My problem is the only time I get to read uninterrupted is when I’m sitting in a car waiting for a kid…so it’s fits and starts which drives me crazy. I like to get really absorbed in a book and these days, that’s impossible.</p>
<p>And I have read Year of Wonders; it’s a book I bought for my daughter. My family are Vickers from Sheffield, so I found the whole storyline about George Vicars (Vickers), the tailor who unwittingly had The Plague delivered to Eyam in a fabric shipment, intriguing. Plus, my d’s NHD project was about The Plague. Year of Wonders is a great read.</p>
<p>Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger.</p>
<p>But then again, this may not appeal to everyone…</p>
<p>Oh, and Collapse by Jared Diamond was pretty good, if only a big depressing.</p>
<p>For the book club Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love might be interesting. It’s a bit literary in the way it is presented and starts with several Rashomon-like chapters where different characters gave their versions of what happened. I thought the book fizzled out a bit at the end, but I liked the beginning enough I’d recommend it anyway.</p>
<p>Anne Tyler: Digging to America</p>
<p>Sue Miller: The World Below (but dating to 2002 so perhaps it has already been read by the book club)</p>
<p>House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski. The storyline is very interesting, hard to put down, but at the same time hard to read - I am finding the format irritating. At first it wasn’t bad but as I get deeper into the book it’s less and less pleasant.</p>
<p>I’d love to know if anyone else has made it all the way through to the end, and if it was worth it…</p>
<p>^^^ I also liked Marley and Digging to America.</p>
<p>I’m so far behind…</p>
<p>But I just finished The Devil in the White City. It’s a true story about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer that was loose there. Fascinating stuff about the fair - really interesting. And the creepy side story of the murderer - well, it was just so engrossing.</p>
<p>Loved it!</p>
<p>^^ I have wanted to read that one. I heard about the story for the first time a few months ago. Hard to believe.</p>
<p>I just finished reading “The Ha-Ha” a first novel by David King. This is the best book I’ve read in a while. I laughed and I cried. Basic story is about a guy rendered mute by a brain injury suffered in Vietnam and what happens to his life when he agrees to take care of the nine year old son of a friend for a short while. Good book to refocus me on appreciating simple things in a world that seems pretty messed up overall. A good break from the political nonfiction and novels set in war torn areas that I seem to have been reading lately.</p>
<p>Just finished “Glass Castles”. Am starting “The Lost, A Seach for Six of the Six Million” by Daniel Mendelsohn.</p>
<p>Allmusic, I bought the Mendelsohn book, but haven’t started it yet.</p>
<p>I just finished [Prisoners</a>, by Jeffrey Goldberg](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0375412344/ref=s9_asin_title_1/002-8678529-3416803]Prisoners”>http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0375412344/ref=s9_asin_title_1/002-8678529-3416803). It is a personal account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. </p>
<p>Another one which could spark some interesting discussion is [Single</a> by Chance, Mothers by Choice, by Rosanna Hertz](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Single-Chance-Mothers-Choice-Parenthood/dp/0195179900/sr=1-1/qid=1162558547/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-8678529-3416803?ie=UTF8&s=books]Single”>http://www.amazon.com/Single-Chance-Mothers-Choice-Parenthood/dp/0195179900/sr=1-1/qid=1162558547/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-8678529-3416803?ie=UTF8&s=books). Although it is about women who decide to become single mothers (through adoption, anonymous donor, etc.), it raises alot of questions about the role of fathers.</p>
<p>The Amalgamation Polka,by Stephen Wright. </p>
<p>Washington Post:</p>
<p>"The Civil War, that most American of cataclysms, held an almost mystical fascination for writers even before Grant and Lee reached their gentlemen’s agreement at Appomattox. To judge from such recent entries as The Known World, Cold Mountain and The March, there is still no more effective way to signal that you have something weighty to say about this country than to locate your narrative in Civil War-era America.</p>
<p>Stephen Wright, the acclaimed author of Meditations in Green, has chosen to do exactly that in his new novel, The Amalgamation Polka. Essentially a coming-of-age story, the book follows the portentously named Liberty Fish, a kind of abolitionist Candide, from his boyhood as the child of Underground Railroad activists in upstate New York, through an extremely bloody tour of duty as a Union soldier in Georgia and the Carolinas and eventually to a Caribbean island, with all sorts of adventures, both expected and improbable, along the way.</p>
<p>Wright is nothing if not ambitious, and the energy with which he throws himself into this world – which bears only a passing resemblance to 19th-century America – is a wonder to behold. The novel overflows with charlatans, whores, preachers, soldiers-of-fortune, madmen and even a handful of pirates, all of them declaiming, at the tops of their lungs, in language that often borders on free verse." </p>
<p>Sort of a William Faulkner meets Neal Stephenson (whose Baroque Cycle is a masterpiece, if you have a few months to digest its 1000+ pages)</p>
<p>Usually a historical fiction fan, lately I’ve been screaming through lighter reading. I’ve really enjoyed everything by Tom Perrotta- “Joe College”, “The Election”, “Little Children”, I’m now reading “Wishbones”…I didn’t particularly care for Augusten Burrough’s “Running With Scissors”, but loved “Sellevision”- it’s hilarious (can’t watch home shopping networks now without chuckling).
Favorite historical fiction books- Follet’s “Pillars of the Earth” (wish I could find another just like it), Rutherfurd’s “London” and “Sarum”, Michener’s “Chesapeake” and “The Source”, Patrick Smith’s “Land Remembered”, Margaret George’s Henry VIII (has a longer name, but can’t remember).
I’m probably one of the few people here that enjoyed Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”</p>
<p>The second-to-last book I read was fascinating – Yasmina Khadra’s Les sirenes de Bagdad. It’s not out in English yet, but the two previous novels in the set of which this is the third are. I haven’t read them yet, but based on this last book I’m anxious to read them.</p>
<p>Khadra (a pseudonym) is a Franco-Algerian author known mainly for police procedurals (polars) until a few years ago. He is an adamant Arab secular humanist, very opposed to Islamism (as is true of many older Algerians who were effectively exiled to France in the '80s by the violent Islamist government in Algeria then). His last three books are all serious political/philosophical character studies of people caught in the three main current conflicts in the Islamic world: Afghanistan (The Swallows of Kabul), Palestine (The Attack), and now Iraq. The Attack won one of the top French literary prizes in 2005.</p>
<p>Sirens is a little heavy-handed, but really a pretty fascinating account of the radicalization of a young Bedouin man from Anbar province under the American occupation, his slow absorbtion into the jihadi underground (and an interesting description of how varied that is), and the moral and political dilemmas he faces as he becomes involved in global terrorism. Part of the interest, of course, is that it’s written from an Arab perspective, but one that’s also fully sympathetic with Western values.</p>
<p>JHS, an interesting aspect of one of the books I recommended (“Prisoners”) is the story of a Palestinian, Rafiq.</p>
<p>Rafiq is more interested in education than in radical Islam, and even spends time in the United States working on his Ph.D. Yet his experience in the US does not sell him on Western values.</p>
<p>Idmom,
I’ve found a good solution to car rides and books. I check out the audio book and the hardback versions at our library. Some of the audio books have wonderful readers and it’s a great way to pass the time in the car. </p>
<p>The author of Marley and Me, John Grogan, lives near me. His boys are in my son’s boy scout troop. Very nice family. </p>
<p>I’ve gotten myself into a strange book series. I didn’t mean to start reading it, but I noticed the whole series (6 books) of very fat books was always being checked out at my library both hardback and audio versions. I needed something to listen to when I drove down to Roanoke to visit my son so checked out another audio book and the first part of Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. It’s a historical/romance/fantasy sort of series involving time travel and an inordinate amount of sex. Actually, since it’s probably the first book I’ve ever read that is romance, maybe they all have that much stuff. It’s funny to feel slightly embarrassed about something I enjoy reading but the books are just fun and move along at a nice pace. </p>
<p>OTOH, I also have recently read, “The Burn Journals” a true story about a young man’s suicide attempt and recovery and The $100,000 Teacher - A Teacher’s Solution to America’s Declining Public School System. Both are very good.</p>
<p>doubleplay - I think you are right about “I am Charlotte Simmons”. I read it and throughly disliked it. I wanted to shake Charlotte several times throughout the book and tell her to look a little harder for normal people on campus and to start making smarter choices.</p>