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What Are We Currently Reading?


Rick Kitchen
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1 minute ago, katha said:

Just read "Slightly Dangerous" by Mary Balogh. It's the last in a series of historical romances focused on the Bedwyn family, a wild and fierce aristocratic family clan (of course, what else? 😉). The last part focuses on the imperious oldest brother Wulfric (I know...), the head of the family....

Wulfric was a super interesting character throughout the other novels and I was kinda dreading his installment, because oftentimes this happens in Romancelandia: Once interesting characters are the focus, they get flattened to make them more palatable as heroes. So I feared he'd either turn into a secret big ole softie with a heart of gold, or there'd be some reveal about his Tragic!Past! that would turn him into a misunderstood woobie.

Miraculously, nothing of the sort happened. He stayed the imperious, rather chilly character he'd always been. He fell in love and opened up somewhat,

Well said.  And absolutely true.  I was feeling the same way.  I anticipated his book so much and was Slightly (ha!  No pun intended) nervous that it would not live up.  But it does and exactly as you say, Wulfric did not change... exactly, just expanded a little.

When I just can't find anything or am in a slump, I'll go to a list of comfort reads to get me over the hump and this is one on my list of books that I just like.   I bypass all the other 'Slightly' books now and go straight to this one.

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I finished The Starless Sea last night and am completely in awe of it.  I remember enjoying The Night Circus but not being as impacted by it as I was by this.  It's definitely more complicated, and I am already planning to listen to audiobook to get more out of it, but I definitely recommend it!

As a bit of a palate cleanser, I started Park Avenue Summer, which I'm enjoying so far, but it is definitely fluffier.

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On 12/3/2019 at 11:29 AM, Hanahope said:

So I recently finished Educated by Tara Westover.  I read it because others on this forum mentioned it and it sounded interesting.  

Well, I found it disturbing that there are people living like that, who completely believe that the government is evil, that medicine is evil, that education is evil.  yet they find a way to tap into enough people with similar mindset that they end up making millions off of "essential oils" and telling people to ignore conventional medicine, "they'll be fine."

I did have to wonder how Tara actually got the bulk of her education.  Sure at first she's struggling to make money to go to BYU, and gets a $4,000 grant and half tuition, and still finds a way to somehow make enough money for the rest with jobs, but can study enough to earn A's and totally blow her professors away with apparently her genius.  But somehow she manages enough money for all her traveling, graduate and phd school (did she get full scholarships, huge grants?) 

And is her "genius" simply because she grew up with a completely different outlook on life given her lack of formal education and her professors were enamoured with her different point of view on various subjects?  Idk, I guess I'm just a little skeptical that someone with no real education is somehow able to so "wow" her college professors that she gets essentially a free education all the way up through phd from Cambridge.

This was so much my reaction to this book too.  I thought it did a terrific job of acknowledging the sheer giddiness that comes with finally knowing when you cross that divide into the educated world, as well as the divide itself that you find yourself on the other side of as you cross over into that world when you come from poor working class or worse.  

But I come from a much less extreme version of small town poverty and I know how hard I had to work to make up for my own educational deficiencies.  And what it cost, even in the days before college costs ballooned so astronomically.  So beyond the brief discussion of getting the initial grant and assistance, I found myself getting more and more frustrated wondering "How exactly are you paying for multiple prestigious schools and all this back and forth to Europe?  You didn't even know what the Holocaust was, but you're so naturally brilliant you're able to sail all the way through Cambridge?  Or are they treating you like some kind of novelty backwoods savant?" 

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18 hours ago, OtterMommy said:

I finished The Starless Sea last night and am completely in awe of it.  I remember enjoying The Night Circus but not being as impacted by it as I was by this.  It's definitely more complicated, and I am already planning to listen to audiobook to get more out of it, but I definitely recommend it!

Isn't it wonderful?  My fav of the year.  I'm going to reread it after the holidays to look for the clues that I missed the first time.

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20 hours ago, OtterMommy said:

I finished The Starless Sea last night and am completely in awe of it.  I remember enjoying The Night Circus but not being as impacted by it as I was by this.  It's definitely more complicated, and I am already planning to listen to audiobook to get more out of it, but I definitely recommend it!

My copy was delivered yesterday and I plan to start it today. I keep reading good things about it. So excited!

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I'm reeeeaally late to the party with this one, but I just started reading Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell.  Never seen the movie with Meryl Streep, but intend to, after I finish the book.

It's a mixed bag, at least for me.  I'm about halfway through, and I still don't know why Julie Powell decided to cook every recipe in Child's book...something about turning 30 and working as a temp, I guess?  Her motivation isn't clear, and I don't get the sense that she has a love for cooking, the way Julia Child did.  She seems more focused on finishing the project/blog, than in actually learning anything from the experience.  Also, I don't care who her quirky, NYC friends are sleeping with.  Why is this even in the book?

I'm sticking with it, because I have DNF'd too many books lately, and I am enjoying parts of it, but meh.  I am getting tired of female authors acting like they should have a medal for being self-deprecating.  Julie Powell writes that way, and I'm just not entertained by it.  Ultimately, I just want to read a good book on Julia Child. *shrugs*

Edited by Billina
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50 minutes ago, Billina said:

I'm reeeeaally late to the party with this one, but I just started reading Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell.  Never seen the movie with Meryl Streep, but intend to, after I finish the book.

It's a mixed bag, at least for me.  I'm about halfway through, and I still don't know why Julie Powell decided to cook every recipe in Child's book...something about turning 30 and working as a temp, I guess?  Her motivation isn't clear, and I don't get the sense that she has a love for cooking, the way Julia Child did.  She seems more focused on finishing the project/blog, than in actually learning anything from the experience.  Also, I don't care who her quirky, NYC friends are sleeping with.  Why is this even in the book?

I'm sticking with it, because I have DNF'd too many books lately, and I am enjoying parts of it, but meh.  I am getting tired of female authors acting like they should have a medal for being self-deprecating.  Julie Powell writes that way, and I'm just not entertained by it.  Ultimately, I just want to read a good book on Julia Child. *shrugs*

I will say that this was a case where the movie was better than the book.  I liked the book fine, but it wasn't anything spectacular.  However, the movie is pretty much half this book and half My Life in France by Julia Child and that part is excellent.

Powell is actually a pretty insufferable person.  I followed her blog, starting when she was doing the Julie/Julia project, and she was always pretty annoying.  Then I read her second book, Cleaving, and I realized she's just a really awful human being (although the goodreads reviews of that book are fun to read...).

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8 minutes ago, OtterMommy said:

Powell is actually a pretty insufferable person.  I followed her blog, starting when she was doing the Julie/Julia project, and she was always pretty annoying.  Then I read her second book, Cleaving, and I realized she's just a really awful human being (although the goodreads reviews of that book are fun to read...).

Oh, I've already read the reviews on Cleaving, lol.  I can't decide if I should hate-read that one, after I'm done with J&J.  Probably not.

The sense I get from Powell is that she is a typical, oversharing, navel-gazer,  who thinks the things she does are revolutionary, because she does them.  She would have been the queen of the confessional essay, if she had been writing on the internet a decade later.  We would have read all about her extramarital affair in HelloGiggles, or XOJane, or something.

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Just completed The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. Honestly, maybe all the hype hurt it but I thought it was mostly just okay. Admittedly the twist at the end was good and one I did not see coming but that was like the last 10 percent of the book.

The other 90 percent, I was mostly just mildly curious about what happened the night the husband was killed. I found Alicia's backstory only mildly interesting he and diary entries sort of dull. Theo was himself also not that compelling either. 

Spoiler

Although maybe that was the writer's intent, so the reader would not see the twist of his being the mysterious stranger that stalked Alicia, coming. 

Edited by truthaboutluv
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I read The Testaments, the long awaited sequel to A Handmaid's Tale.  I really liked it, found it a satisfying conclusion to the story.  I don't watch the show so I have no idea where it went after they ran out of source material, but I don't think it matches up with The Testaments.  What I found to be of the most interest was Aunt Lydia's background and how men seized control in the first months of Gilead, and then

Spoiler

how she bided her time, collecting information and setting up her pawns allies to take down the state.

The end was a bit rushed, I would have liked to have read in more detail what happened while one of the POV characters was unconscious and more about the blink or you'll miss it reveal in the denouement.  But mostly it was very good.  I liked it better than Handmaid.

Next up is The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Edited by Haleth
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There's a thread devoted to discussing The Testaments in The Handmaid's Tale forum, but a lot of it naturally revolves around comparing and contrasting to where the show went when it ran out of source material.  As with Game of Thrones, a lot of show choices beyond that have been unpopular with book aficionados, but what many of us came to realize in reading this one is that Margaret Atwood like George R.R. Martin clearly gave the showrunners a working outline of where the story was going and the problem has been less with the showrunners just making stuff up and more with the execution of what they were given.

As far as the book itself, I liked the continued world building after such a long hiatus even if some of it and the whole plot about smuggling sisters back and forth seems a ridiculous amount more work than what was probably needed to accomplish the same ends.  It doesn't have the same starkness or shock to the system of the original, but a lot of it feels like the logical conclusion of a society built around the complete subjugation of women while allowing men free rein and it's interesting on its own merits nonetheless.

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I'm reading Where Winter Finds You: A Caldwell Christmas by J.R. Ward the latest in The Black Dagger Brotherhood series. I'm still early in the book, but I think Ward may be running out of ideas. The main guy is someone who has had a story before, & I'm not that interested in him. A problem I may have is I've read some blurbs, & there seems to be a big plot point that makes no sense, so I'll have to wait & see.

Well, after asking if I needed to reread Handmaid's Tale because I'd watched the show, and going ahead and reading The Testaments, I saw a nice deluxe edition of the former in CostCo the other day and couldn't resist buying it. So now I'm rereading it after all! I'm not too far in, so what strikes me most at this point is that June's voice is very different from the voices of the three narrators of Testaments.

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I am getting ready to start Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep.  I had not heard of this book or the story before.  A rural preacher was acquitted of murdering five relatives for insurance.  When he was shot dead at the funeral for the last victim, the vigilante hired the same defense lawyer for his trial.  Harper Lee attended, apparently thinking of writing her own In Cold Blood.  Casey researched the case and Harper’s part in it for this book.  I can’t wait!

I just finished Little Voices, a First choice from months ago.  It was okay, one of those books with an interesting premise that could have been handled better by a better writer.  Still interesting enough to make me finish it, but I certainly wasn’t riveted and didn’t care enough to double back if I couldn’t remember who a character was.

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Just finished The Andromeda Evolution, the sequel to Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, The Andromeda Strain — obviously not written by him. It was a good read, kind of written in his style. I’ve always been a sucker for sciency books like that.

Spoiler

I guessed the twist that the main character was the baby from the first book who had survived the strain that had wiped out the town, though. But I’m pretty good at figuring out twists.

On 12/9/2019 at 1:38 AM, dubbel zout said:

I finished Joseph Kanon's The Accomplice, and was underwhelmed. He's not a flashy writer to begin with, but this was a disappointment. No surprises or twists at all.

I find that Kanon's books have been a case of diminishing returns. His earlier stuff is really good - Los Alamos, The Prodigal Spy and The Good German are amongst my favourite spy/thriller novels. But everything after that hasn't been as good, and from Istanbul Passage onwards, I've really not enjoyed his work.

The repeated tropes of untrustworthy, duplicitous women, unhappy and insecure men and a weirdly dispassionate frankness about sex and love ("shall we become lovers, do you think?") started to irritate me.

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On 12/4/2019 at 12:40 PM, OtterMommy said:

I finished The Starless Sea last night and am completely in awe of it.  I remember enjoying The Night Circus but not being as impacted by it as I was by this.  It's definitely more complicated, and I am already planning to listen to audiobook to get more out of it, but I definitely recommend it!

The Night Circus was my first audiobook ever, and thanks to Jim Dale as the narrator, I was hooked!  Sadly, he's not the narrator for The Starless Sea, but I will probably still give it a whirl.

Currently I'm reading Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson.  It's a thriller, which begins when a mysterious stranger shows up at neighborhood book club and almost immediately gets the members to start spilling secrets.  The protagonist, a woman with a dark hidden secret indeed, soon learns that she is the stranger's ultimate target.  I'm liking it so far; it's a pretty quick read, well-written, and it's keeping my attention.  Overall good reviews on Goodreads, so I'm optimistic that I won't be disappointed at the end!

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Reading Replay. It’s a Groundhog Day-esque timeloop story, though written in 1986. A man dies at age 43 of a massive heart attack in 1988 and wakes up at age 18 in 1963 with full knowledge of his lived life. And then lives his life in different ways several times, each time dying the same way at the same age. I’m seriously loving this story and can’t believe nobody ever made a movie out of it.

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Just finished reading A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh.  It is her first foray into mystery-suspense.  She normally writes romance, urban fantasy or paranormal romances.

I liked it.  It takes place in a small town in New Zealand and is very atmospheric.  I  think she does a good job of giving a sense of place and making the small town feel real.  Her descriptions of the landscape and environment is almost another character in the book.  I think she also did a good job of creating suspense.  She made almost every character a plausible suspect or at least worthy of suspicion.

3 hours ago, kariyaki said:

Reading Replay. It’s a Groundhog Day-esque timeloop story, though written in 1986. A man dies at age 43 of a massive heart attack in 1988 and wakes up at age 18 in 1963 with full knowledge of his lived life. And then lives his life in different ways several times, each time dying the same way at the same age. I’m seriously loving this story and can’t believe nobody ever made a movie out of it.

I've read it a couple of times. Yeah, it's really good!

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Last week I read The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  It's an excellent story about a young man growing up a slave in Virginia and his will to survive.  Coates is a fantastic writer, the story drew me in immediately.  I saw lots of comparison to The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, although from the beginning this one had a greater feeling of optimism. 

Spoiler

I never for a minute doubted that Hiram escape his bondage, even though this happened in a way much different than expected. 

There is also a bit of the fantastical as there is in UR.  There was one character that seemed unrealistic, more of a device to get Hiram to where he ended up, but other than I'd give this one 5 stars.  Very enjoyable.

Edited by Haleth
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My plane read for Monday is My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. I'm sure this will raise some eyebrows, heh! But seeing as I'll also be the person wearing a mask over my nose and mouth and wiping down everything within arm's length with sanitizer, it probably won't make me any weirder than I'll already be.

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14 hours ago, DearEvette said:

Just finished reading A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh.  It is her first foray into mystery-suspense.  She normally writes romance, urban fantasy or paranormal romances.

I liked it.  It takes place in a small town in New Zealand and is very atmospheric.  I  think she does a good job of giving a sense of place and making the small town feel real.  Her descriptions of the landscape and environment is almost another character in the book.  I think she also did a good job of creating suspense.  She made almost every character a plausible suspect or at least worthy of suspicion.

Ooh, this looks interesting. Adding it to my list. Next up for me is Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, it finally came in for me at the library after a loooong wait.

I'm reading Inspector Hobbes and the Blood, the first book in the Unhuman series by Wilkie Martin. When I come across a new series that's been around a while & sounds like it might be interesting, I normally buy the first 3 books because I think it can take that long for an author to settle in with the story & characters. In this case, there was  a collection of the first 5 books in one book that was a lot cheaper than buying them separately, so I got that instead, & now I'm having a hard time getting through the first story. The biggest problem IMO is that the main character, Andy, is a useless loser. It's really hard to root for someone who can't seem to do anything. Another problem is there are just too many "hints" & not enough "facts". For example, there's a small mention of something happening to Andy's sister, but I'm close to the end of the book, & the fact that he even had a sister, never mind what happened to her never came up again. I'm hoping that I'm right about the 3 book thing, & the stories get better. Also, I didn't think how big & heavy this friggin' book was going to be, it's a real pain to lug around LOL

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1 minute ago, GaT said:

I normally buy the first 3 books because I think it can take that long for an author to settle in with the story & characters.

Oh man, I am the same way.  Now some series get me right at the very first book.  But overall my experience, especially in series that become ones that I really like, I look back and it is usually Book #3 that hooks me into the series.  It is where I think they hit their stride, where they figure out their characters and their arc.  If a series hadn't clicked for me by book #3 then it usually won't. 

And funny enough, even for series that I like right off the bat, it is book #3 that I've inevitably rated as my favorite. 

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On 12/22/2019 at 1:41 PM, GaT said:

When I come across a new series that's been around a while & sounds like it might be interesting, I normally buy the first 3 books because I think it can take that long for an author to settle in with the story & characters.

 

On 12/22/2019 at 1:49 PM, DearEvette said:

Oh man, I am the same way.  Now some series get me right at the very first book.  But overall my experience, especially in series that become ones that I really like, I look back and it is usually Book #3 that hooks me into the series.  It is where I think they hit their stride, where they figure out their characters and their arc.  If a series hadn't clicked for me by book #3 then it usually won't. 

And funny enough, even for series that I like right off the bat, it is book #3 that I've inevitably rated as my favorite. 

Interesting observations! I don't know why I've never thought of this, given that with TV shows I know very well that the quality of the pilot often doesn't correlate with the quality of the series, and that it takes a few episodes for a lot of series to really hit their stride.

I am torn on whether to feel appreciative or not of you pointing this out, though - it's already hard enough for me to decide not to finish a book, now I have to read three books before I can quit?? LOL

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1 minute ago, Black Knight said:

I am torn on whether to feel appreciative or not of you pointing this out, though - it's already hard enough for me to decide not to finish a book, now I have to read three books before I can quit?? LOL

Yeah, that's the big flaw with this, if you really don't like the first book (and I never don't finish books, if I have them, I read them), then you've got two more to muddle through. Sometimes reading Amazon reviews for the 2nd & 3rd book is helpful in helping me decide.

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10 minutes ago, Black Knight said:

I am torn on whether to feel appreciative or not of you pointing this out, though - it's already hard enough for me to decide not to finish a book, now I have to read three books before I can quit?? LOL

LOL.  I know I am a bit of a completionist too.  I look back on my life and realize I could have stopped reading the Anita Blake books at least three books before I did. I would have saved myself some rage wrinkles.

An addendum to the rule of three:  Only soldier through if you are generally ok with book 1 and are kinda on the fence with trying the next book.  And I agree with @GaT, if you are on the fence get some review consensus.  Reviews will let you know real quick if a series gets better (or worse).  If you absolutely hated the first book, tho, life is too short to forge through a couple more you might not like.

Edited by DearEvette
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I'm not normally a fan of book series, I usually like my books to be stand-alones. However, I am plowing through The Expanse series right now (yes, I know they made it into a tv show, but I have not tried that yet). I really like it, though. The writing and world building reminds me of Charles Sheffield, an author who I sorely miss.

10 hours ago, kariyaki said:

I'm not normally a fan of book series, I usually like my books to be stand-alones. However, I am plowing through The Expanse series right now (yes, I know they made it into a tv show, but I have not tried that yet). I really like it, though. The writing and world building reminds me of Charles Sheffield, an author who I sorely miss.

I read the first 5 Expanse books and kind of lost interest, however I really, really recommend the show.  It keeps getting better and better and now with Jeff Bezos's open checkbook the visuals are even more amazing.  It's a rare case (IMO) of the show being better than the books.  The cast is wonderful.

10 hours ago, kariyaki said:

I'm not normally a fan of book series, I usually like my books to be stand-alones. However, I am plowing through The Expanse series right now (yes, I know they made it into a tv show, but I have not tried that yet). I really like it, though. The writing and world building reminds me of Charles Sheffield, an author who I sorely miss.

It took me three tries to get through book three. I just hated the villain so much I couldn't continue. But I couldn't get into book four, the villain managed to be even more hateable.

2 hours ago, kariyaki said:

Took a break from The Expanse and read All Our Wrong Todays. A guy from a perfect utopia in 2016 goes back in time and screws something up, ending up in an alternate reality where the world is like how it is now. It’s excellent.

Ooooh, I love that concept. So our world is the "ruined" one? Yep, that sounds about right. I'll have to look that up. I'd never heard of the book before so thank you for mentioning it. 

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4 minutes ago, Mabinogia said:

Ooooh, I love that concept. So our world is the "ruined" one? Yep, that sounds about right. I'll have to look that up. I'd never heard of the book before so thank you for mentioning it. 

Usually, a dystopia story will have the world worse off than it is now, this was the first one I read where we were the dystopia.

I found an article titled “50 Best Time Travel Books” and this was on it. I’ll be working my way through any of them that sound interesting — which is most of the list.

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19 hours ago, LucindaWalsh said:

She authored Mr. Pumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, which I started and didn't finish (need to revisit it). 

I loved that!  It's quirky and fun.

Recently I finished The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alyx Harrow and found it to be a charming, pretty original story. I don’t think it’s billed as YA but it certainly could be. The protagonist is a feisty teenaged girl who learns she is not who she thinks she is. The plot involves the search for hidden doors (er, Doors) to other worlds while being followed by an unknown force destroying those Doors.  There is a story within the story of a boy and a girl from different worlds who meet then are parted, but continue to search for the Door leading to each other.  The author leaves the door open (no pun intended) for sequels.  It was a fun read during the busy holidays.

 

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