I am a part of various book clubs, including one in Spanish. You can imagine my surprise when the New York Times released its annual “10 Best Books of 2012″ and I had not read a single one on the list. Yikes!
So what am I reading? Admittedly, I have not read the most intellectual stuff as of late. I just read this young adult novel for my trashy books book club — which is really an excuse for parents to drink and play board games. The novel, Every Day by David Levithan, is about a teenager “A” who wakes up every day in a different person’s body. It’s not the best written book, but totally intriguing!
I am also reading feminist writer Jessica Valenti’s tome Why Have Kids?. I am halfway through, and up to now, it largely focuses on personal parenting decisions that make parenting harder as opposed to the strident individualism of our social and economic policies that make having children in this country so dehumanizing and next-to-impossible.
My immediate thoughts? From visiting family in Central America, I can tell you that they are not nearly as frazzled — and dare I say unhappy? — as U.S. parents, who are much more isolated and the cost of childcare out of reach for parents to receive any respite. It’s an observation that my Honduran niece Eu made off the bat when she came to live with us and she has told me that her preference is never to raise children in the United States. Ouch.
I am not finished with the book so I will withhold judgement. But I am sure I will offer a review later on. Have any of you read it? What were your thoughts?
What is on your night tables?
I am reading “French Kids Eat Everything” very appropriate now that i am traveling to France and will have to deal with the way French people do it! haha
seriously i do highly recommend it, really great tips in there!
I’m reading this week’s Entertainment Weekly…
so, is Jessica Simpson knocked up again? It’s so hard to know!
wait, are we over being super mad at her for gaining weight with the first pregnancy? I didn’t know she’d already popped one out….
No, EW isn’t really a gossip mag. It is reviews of movies/TV/music and about the business of entertainment. For the gossip it is people or US weekly…not that there is anything wrong with that.
I subscribe to People *and* Entertainment Weekly. It’s my treadmill reading material
I get very excited on Friday when I get my mail and this week’s issue is in it.
I just finished “I, Zombie”. Totally disgusting, but a very interesting premise…
like I, Robot? You know, it’s been years since I read Asimov… I think I need to do some kindle-stocking.
I have been indulging my love of YA with The Hunger Games trilogy and my sister (damn her) hooked me on the Sookie Stackhouse series. I haven’t read anything serious in aaaaages, but you know what? I’m happy.
I do have a hefty LBJ biography to read at some point, but every time I open it up, my eyes glaze over and I just want to go to sleep.
I was so obsessed with the Hunger games.. read all three on our florida trip last spring
Me too! Read all three books in a trip to El Salvador. And got my MIL’s husband hooked to boot!
they. are. awesome. Jess wants to read them as well, but she’s waiting a few years!
Check out the Maze Runner series. If you like the Hunger Games, you’ll like them too.
cool! Thanks for the recommendation.
Also, I need to kindle the Outlander series… I’ve only read the first one.
Oh I love those books so much. I follow Diana Gabaldon on FaceBook just so I can see the Daily Lines she posts.
I was in a great indy bookshop in SF last week (always shop for books in the US, because they’re a lot cheaper there) and wondered about getting The Hunger Games. I’ve seen the movie (the first, not sure if there are more) and quite liked that but I wasn’t sure how the books compare to the movie. Better, worse, just different? Would love to hear what you and others think. Can always ask DH to get one or more when he goes to the US next.
I did buy parts 7 and 8 of Maupin’s Tales of the City series, we’re a bit hooked on those. I also got Maupin’s Nightlistener (we’ll see), a second Olen Steinhauer, and a couple of books that looked interesting enough and were marked down. You just don’t get books for 5$ here, and hardly for 15.
You should definitely read THG trilogy. It’s not “great classic fiction”, it IS impossible to put down and very engaging.
Excellent. Thanks Sue. I will put it on the list for the next trip then.
nightlistener is good but very different but to finish out the Tales of the City you MUST MUST MUST get Michael Tolliver Lives! And Maryann in Autumn… the books Maupin wrote in the past 5 years to follow up on the series.. so. good.
Those are the two I just brought back
Very much looking forward to them. I suspected Nightlistener is quite different, so I’ll be interested to see whether I like it.
I’m alternating between “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling and “Far from the Tree” (go ‘Top 10′!) by Andrew Sullivan. I like both of them, but it’s hard to make progress when I fall asleep after 5 pages! That’s not a comment on the content, but just at my level of “tired” by the time I get time to sit down and read.
How do you like The Casual Vacancy? The reviews have been pretty mixed.
I liked it, although the ending was pretty shocking. I felt like some acquaintance with a British small town helped.
My book club is reading that next and I’m sort of lukewarm on picking it up. My book club usually picks depressing books and I don’t want to hate JK Rowling.
My cousin just recommended The Round House, so I put that on my Kindle. I haven’t been reading much fiction lately. I have a ton of work right now, so I’ve been reading stuff that is less engaging but still interesting. (I’m afraid I’m prone to ignore imminent deadlines in order to power through a good novel.) Some Krakauer, Tim Cahill, some philosophical stuff.
Have you started The Round House yet? We did a book exchange at my Dec. book club — like white elephant — and I initially got it — but someone stole it and I ended up with Bastard out of Carolina. Would still like to read The Round House at some point.
I just finished it. I liked a lot about it, but I thought the ending was disappointing. The book just sort of crashed and burned, whereas I was expecting fireworks. It’s better than a lot of stuff I’ve read recently, but it isn’t another Animal Dreams. (yeah, I know, different author, different premise, different region, but my cousin recommended both books. I loved Animal Dreams, but felt dissatisfied with the Round House.) (Granted, I finished the Round House last night in the clinic, waiting to send my son off for heart surgery. That may or may not have something to do with my impressions.)
Oooh, I loved “Bastard out of Carolina.” Dorothy Allison is the real deal.
I worked my way through the Outlander series since July – that’s 7 bricks in 6.5 months…pretty good. I was a bit ticked to find that the 7th book was not the last book though…I had thought I was done but apparently not. I did enjoy them – they’re time traveling soap opera but I like the fact that the female leads are strong and smart even if everyone seems to be somewhat supernatural since half the things that happens to them would kill normal people. But…it’s fiction and fantasy and fun.
I’m looking at getting these books – http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/2012/11/meet-the-canada-reads-2013-contenders.html – there’s an annual CBC contest (?) to pick a book for all of Canada to read and they have ‘celebrities’ choose books and defend them and then the public votes on the book. It’s a really fun way to find good books.
I do need recs for guy books – books your husbands enjoyed…my husband likes the George RR Martin books if that helps with a genre. Any ideas?
There look like some interesting choices in that link. Thanks.
My DH is enjoying a couple books by Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace but it sounds like they probably have different taste so I don’t know. (As do I have different taste from my DH. Neither of those two is someone I would want to read.)
Did you download the new novella in the Outlander series? It’s only 1.99 (and only about 100 pages or so) but it’s good. It explores what happened to Roger’s father.
Read it last night – thanks for the heads up, I didn’t know it existed. It left me feeling worse though because now that the next book won’t be out for almost a year I’m left with all these freaking loose ends. I thought I was really bright for not starting the series until (I thought….) it was complete so I wouldn’t have to wait for books like my poor husband and his Game of Thrones situation. The joke was on me.
Ha. Game of Thrones. Don’t get me started. . .
I’m really worried that George RR Martin is going to kick the bucket before he finishes the series.
He will. Because I suspect he lost track of how to finish it, with he grand goal of getting that idiot Dany on the throne, and that to some extent he doesn’t really care all that much.
OBOBNO, no Dany on the throne. Hey, George? Me here. I really, really like Dany. She’s, like, my favorite character, with her misguided attempts to liberate entire kingdoms with no alternative form of grassroots governance in place.
Have you heard about the threatening letters he gets? “Finish the series or something very bad will happen to you” stuff. Yikes! Then other authors are like, “George RR Martin is not your bitch.” LOL
Wow. That’s intense. I like GRRM and all and want the series to end – I’m not going all axe-crazy about it, though!
He was on Wait wait don’t tell me and the host said that when they asked for questions on Twitter all they got was “when is he going to finish the next book?” and “why isn’t he writing he next book?”
I can tell you what happens.
Everybody dies.
In Game of Thrones, that is. Haven’t read Outlander.
Well, ultimately, that’s the end of every book ever, right? I mean, if you play the story out long enough…
no. Only the people you like die.
Yup. Even if you hate them in the beginning. As soon as they show a glimmer of being likeable, you know they’re dead within a page.
Good. At least that should mean that Theon Grayjoy dies in the next book.
If only he had died before the last book. Gag.
I know… Do you ever think, when reading any of the books, “I am a terrible, terrible human being for enjoying this series.”? Because that’s what I’m thinking.
Isn’t the subtitle for Game of Thrones “Don’t get too attached…” ?
I thought it was “keep a spew bucket handy.” Seriously, I wonder about myself that I can enjoy the series so thoroughly.
I’m rereading Anna Karenina, which I love. Also reading something much lighter that I got off the new book shelf at the library, “Gilded Age” by Claire McMillan – it is set in Cleveland so maybe some nearby MTers would be interested – but it is about a very upper class group of 30ish aged people and I am having a hard time with all the “she was from a very good family” stuff so I may have to drop it.
I love Anna Karenina, too. I probably reread it every couple years or so.
Have you seen the movie?
I wish they had picked somebody different to play Vronsky. He sort of wasn’t there.
Not yet. I’m going to try to go over break.
Maybe I need to read that. It was one of those books I was supposed to read as an English major in college, but I totally faked it and still got a B in the class. That happened enough times with enough different books that I finally wised up and realized that perhaps English wasn’t my love in the way I thought it was! I switched majors junior year and thank goodness I did, because English is a much tighter academic job market!!
Oh, it’s definitely worth a read.
I just finished Dyan Cannon’s memoir of her time with Cary Grant. Sorta trashy but I enjoyed it. I’m hooked on those cheapo Kindle daily/monthly deals.
Has anyone read Guest of Honor? It’s by the same woman who wrote Strapless, and it’s about when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T Washington to have dinner in the White House, which turned out to be quite scandalous to a whole lot of people. I really want to read it –
DD gave me Kingsolver’s new book for Hannukah, so I think I”m setting JKR aside for right now.
I just read it. Very good. I didn’t love it as much as Prodigal Summer, because it seemed a little on the preachy side. But I still really liked it.
I just started Sutton about a bank robber named Willie Sutton. He was a real guy but the book is fiction. I like it so far. I am also reading the Mark of Athena which is Rick Riordan’s latest. Pretty good. I also stared Bring up the Bodies by HIlary Mantel last summer. I like it but was distracted by other things so I need to get back to it.
Bring up the Bodies was really good. I read both of them earlier this year and really enjoyed both of them.
I love how this thread is staying alive
I’m thinking we all need books at the moment, for one reason or another!
I watched Silver Linings Playbook and enjoyed the movie so much, I decided to read the novel it was based on. Enjoying it so far. I feel like doing it in that order really helps to flesh out the characters for me and adds to my enjoyment of both the book and the movie. Also did this with The Descendants.
I just bought a bunch of books at the Nook bargain page: Mystic River (Dennis Lehane), The Strain (Guillermo del Toro), Sourland (anthology on loss by Joyce Carol Oates) and others – not a particularly cheery set of reading material for my trip. Merry Christmas.
Oh, and a Terry Pratchett and Jane Lynch’s memoir. Okay, not tooo awful.