So, uh, it’s been a while.
I can’t remember all the books I’ve read since the last Book Pub, so here’s a list of some of the more recent ones in no particular order:
Read:
- A Discovery of Witches (Amazon
| 3.98 Goodreads) and Shadow of Night (Amazon
| 4.02 Goodreads) (All Souls Trilogy), by Deborah Harkness: These are the first two books in the All Souls Trilogy. The books center around a bookish historian and a mysterious vampire’s quest to recover a mysterious manuscript. It’s a fun, fast (though long) read but (1) the prose is terrible and (2) critics’ description of the series as “Twilight for adults” is very apt. I didn’t bother with the third book.
- Dissident Gardens (Amazon
| 3.27 Goodreads) by Jonathan Lethem: A family drama about three generations of American idealists/radicals. Unfortunately, it’s yet another book about supposedly “complex” people bitching about their upbringings and their lives.
- The Known World (Amazon
| 3.81 Goodreads) by Edward P. Jones: A Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a former slave who owns slaves in 1830s Virginia. It takes a while to get into, but it’s an engaging and complex (though not light) read.
- The Blind Assassin (Amazon
| 3.93 Goodreads) by Margaret Atwood: A Booker Prize novel about two sisters, one of which dies under mysterious circumstances. It takes a bit to get into for most of the book, but Atwood brings things together near the end.
- Flaubert’s Parrot (Amazon
| 3.68 Goodreads) by Julian Barnes: On the surface, the book is about a doctor’s obsession with Gustave Flaubert. Let’s just say that I didn’t find it as interesting as others have. I may be too much of a philistine to appreciate this book, though. Highly recommend that you at least know the plot to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary before reading this.
Other notes:
- I am currently reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (Amazon
| 3.97 Goodreads) by Bill Bryson. If you like American history and/or Bryson, you’ll like this book. However, it feels very very long.
- People have highly recommended A Little Life (Amazon
| 4.27 Goodreads) by Hanya Yanagihara, but have warned that it’s devastating as all hell. I plan to read it at some point, but need to figure out when.
So:
- What books have you read?
- What books do you recommend?
- What books are you planning to read?
- What books are you looking forward to in 2016?
