If that's how you feel about the first one, wait until you spend 400 pages in the same tent on the same day. It's when both my wife and I gave up on the series, which is pretty compelling much of the time but the editing issue just worsens.
Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, a highly revealing autobiography by economist and podcaster Glenn Loury, who came really close to ********ing up his career and his life after working his ass off to graduate from Northwestern (working 40 hours a week at a major printing factory in Chicago and supporting a wife and two kids , plus a third from a work-related hookup), and MIT with his Ph. D. before attaining tenure at Harvard (while managing a full scale crack habit). The man can write, I’ll give him that. In terms of style, this is one of the best autobiographies/memoir by an American professor that I can think of.
I listened to his recent interview on the Freakonomics podcast and it made me think, "I absolutely do not want to read his book."
An English libertarian reviewer thought it was good, but suggested the subtitle should have been “Confessions of a Black Douchebag.”
World Without End by Ken Follett. This is the second published book in the Kingsbridge series. This happens two centuries after the first novel. Four children are bonded by a murder, which binds them together.Should be interesting.
I think it's great that the major German philosopher* of his time was born in South Korea and switched his undergraduate major from metallurgy to philosophy was because he really liked the German language. *Whenever Jurgen Habermas gets around to dying, at any rate.
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen I thought about a more detailed review of this drizzling anus of a book, but I think I'll just offer $1000 to anyone who can provide video evidence that they kicked Jonathan Franzen in the nuts. No cooperation, no half-hearted kick, but a video of you rearing back and kicking an unsuspecting Franzen right between the goalposts as hard as you can.
Private Diary of a Suspended MLA - Garbhan Downey Amusing Northern Ireland political novel, but author breaks the mood by getting serious towards the end.
Poetry Night at the Ballpark, a collection of essays covering literature, culture, and politics by a guy whose opinions are pretty much everywhere (radically left on some issues, conservative on a handful, and occasionally sanely Libertarian), by Bill Kauffman. This review from Reason.com explains the title Here jeremiads against empire and the corporate state mix with tributes to the many faces of a flourishing regional culture: poets, painters, amateur scientists, irregular old holidays, minor-league baseball squads. The title alludes to the evening the author persuaded his town's team, the Batavia Muckdogs, to fill the gaps between innings with sandlot-themed stanzas by Charles Bukowski, Grantland Rice, and other litterateurs. "It went over as disastrously as you'd expect," Kauffman concedes. But the flop didn't dent his fondness for either lively, local ballgames or lively, local verse
Something Rotten - Jasper Fforde Fourth in the Thursday Next series, for the keen eyed, this one involves Hamlet. Not just the play, but the Danish Prince, himself. Having read the first three, all many years ago, there are call backs to each of the books, all of them absurd and hilarious, and this is just the same (though I'm not totally sure which callback came from which book). Absurd and hilarious. Though, unlike the others, the call backs and current plot make this novel overly complicated, and some of the subplots (or side plots) conclude in a rather haphazard way. And I mean that in the Fford manner, not a less absurd and comedic author. Speaking of which, Hamlet is Danish, and he must hide is Danishness, though because he is Shakespearean, he doesn't have a Danish accent. And that sword he carries about is normal, apparently. And neanderthals are quite good at croquet. And some big game hunter has married a gorilla. Yeah, absurd. The first three quarters, and perhaps more, of this book I found entertaining. But wrapping it up seemed forced, as if he had a page limit. Though if you get to the credits, you'll recognize them from somewhere else absurd. It made me laugh out loud, which doesn't often happen when reading a book.
I've read several books by Jack McDevitt recently, mostly in series but this one as a standalone: Ancient Shores. A North Dakota farmer finds a buried sailboat in his fields; it's very old but in great shape, made out of an unknown element; a second structure is soon found (there's an ancient lake bed in the area that plays a role here). What ensures is an interesting combination of political economy in the backdrop of native-federal relations, with things devolving to a point the feds stage a clandestine raid to destroy it. But some of the Sioux are entrenched on the ridge in front of the second building and a nasty encounter is poised to begin. Then a plane lands out front, during the early stages of the encounter - and out from the plane jumps Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler (or rolls?) Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Arthur Schelssinger, Ursula LeGuinn, Stephen Jay Gould, Wally Shirra, and some others, about fifteen in all, with a camera crew in tow. And they join the Siouxian chairman and stop the crisis. It builds better than what I just did of course, and you don't know who is on the plane until that moment. It's a good and very unique reveal. And I just spoiled it for you. Okay, I'll use tags.
Dead I May Well Be The Dead Yard The Bloomsday Dead - Adrian McKinty Trilogy about a young fella who flees Belfast and the Troubles in 1992, then gets involved in various criminal adventures, mostly in New York, then Boston, and back to Ireland in the third novel. Entertaining, but dark.
Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionalte Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive, a book about a writer's return to his hometown after close to two decades working in politics (aide to Danial Patrick Moynihan) and Hollywood (screenwriter) to find that it has been urban-renewed almost to the point of oblivion. The town, Batavia, NY, is still there, and it has a pretty decent sense of community in spite of the encroachments of Walmart, etc. In all, the book is as much a memoir as it is a sociological/economic study, and as with most of Bill Kauffman's books, it's pretty damn funny.
Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers an academic memoir by paleo-conservative writer and professor Paul Gottfried. Not bad: I picked this up based on the subtitle, and he has good things to say about Marcuse and other lefties, and Nixon . . . well, alas, it wasn't Mojo that he was talking about.
I haven't made it to the library yet since the term ended, so I am just working through my collection of assorted fiction books. Hopefully I'll get to broaden out in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I just finished this: Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty in China, and the main plotlines follow the life of the Hongwu Emperor. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but the first half especially (the back half is more about the battles that led the Red Trubans to victory rather than how the protagonist got there). In this version, the emperor-to-be is female, having assumed her brother's identity when the family is attacked by bandits.
I think every singer probably gets people who say to them, "When I was at my lowest, your music saved me." Well, that was the Chameleons for me.
The Tatami Time Machine Blues ~ Tomihiko Morimi A short novel about college kids in a run-down apartment complex taking a time machine back a day to secure the broken remote to their only AC unit. A little slow in the beginning, but the time travel portion starting half-way through is really fun.