What are you reading?

[Genesis]

Currently reading a beautiful article on how Wolf dogs have shown to help
Veterans who suffer with PTSD cope with it better.
Here is the article: Healing with Wolves

[Katniss]

Like so many others that were shocked and sadden by the recent bombings in Paris I sought solace in the familiar. What better way to honor that lovely city than with a re-read of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast?" I went to order the book as I had long since given my copy away when I discovered there is now a "revised" edition. I have mixed feeling on "revisions" (go ahead, ask me how I feel about 'Anne Frank' revisions) and this one is getting some rather mixed reviews. Apparently a grandson was not thrilled with how his grandmother (Hemingway's second wife) was portrayed so he revised "A Moveable Feast" more to his liking. I have been teeter-tottering on which to read, the original or the revised. I suppose for the sake of nostalgia it will have to be the original. C'est la vie.......

Katniss~~

[randrum]

The Spectre Trilogy: Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service & You Only Live Twice
By Ian Fleming

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by Katniss

Like so many others that were shocked and sadden by the recent bombings in Paris I sought solace in the familiar. What better way to honor that lovely city than with a re-read of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast?" I went to order the book as I had long since given my copy away when I discovered there is now a "revised" edition. I have mixed feeling on "revisions" (go ahead, ask me how I feel about 'Anne Frank' revisions) and this one is getting some rather mixed reviews. Apparently a grandson was not thrilled with how his grandmother (Hemingway's second wife) was portrayed so he revised "A Moveable Feast" more to his liking. I have been teeter-tottering on which to read, the original or the revised. I suppose for the sake of nostalgia it will have to be the original. C'est la vie.......

Katniss~~

I found this post because i searched the thread for THE PARIS WIFE (McLain) because i want to re-read it because i just finished A MOVEABLE FEAST.

From the NYT review of THE PARIS WIFE:

The strikingly attractive cover of “The Paris Wife” depicts a glamorous, poised-looking woman perched in a Paris cafe. She wears a belted, tailored dress reminiscent of the late 1940s or early 1950s. Her face cannot be seen, but her posture radiates confidence and freedom. The picture is interesting because it has absolutely nothing to do with the book it is selling.

The heroine of “The Paris Wife” is Hadley Richardson, the athletic, sturdily built, admittedly unfashionable homebody who married Ernest Hemingway in 1921. They were divorced in 1927. Hadley was, by all accounts including this one, a very fine and decent person, but she was the starter wife of a man who wound up treating her terribly.

I read THE PARIS WIFE years ago but i had never read A MOVEABLE FEAST until today.

I am wondering who else has read both and if they read them in succession...

[dark_crystal]

Yesterday I read O FALLEN ANGEL, By Kate Zambreno.

I agree with the Rumpus reviewer in all but conclusion (mine was "no")

It is undeniable that Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel is completely successful in its goals. It’s got the quirks, the puns, the joking asides, and the quickest pace of almost any book I’ve read. Zambreno’s characters are vivid—from Maggie the spoiled child turned bipolar wreck, to Mommy the quintessential Midwest housemom—and the setting seems somehow familiar, though actual description is rare. Paradoxically, these elements may begin to explain why I struggled with this book.

O Fallen Angel tells the story of Maggie and Mommy and their tumultuous relationship. In the present-day story, Maggie has moved to the “big bad” city—Chicago, I think—and slowly become a pill-addicted prostitute who has sex with strange men to kill the pain. Mommy makes egg salad with way too much mayonnaise and thinks things like, “Mommy can visit Europe when she goes to Epcot Center.” Both are, of course, archetypes of a Midwest Catholic household—or maybe the subject matter is just all too familiar for me, being a Midwest Catholic girl who moved to the “big bad” city.

Either way, it seems clear that Zambreno intended her characters to remain static as they move through the narrative. She keeps a very tight leash on this story, her voice never faltering from the on-guard judgment she casts upon her characters. Although they may deserve to be derided—they’re honestly very stupid and self-centered—the question arises whether it’s possible to write a good novel in which the characters are stereotypes who don’t change and whom readers are expected from the beginning to hate.

Semi-conclusion: I want to believe it’s possible.

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

[homoe]

The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe


Built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African-American woman who convinces the admissions board at Vassar College that she's Caucasian in order to attend school there.

Sidebar: I just read an most interesting article about Reese Witherspoon, her book club selections, and her production company Hello Sunshine. It mentioned that this is soon to be adapted for a film starring Zendaya who will also co-produce.

[girl_dee]

*The Cases that Haunt us*

John Douglas
Mark Olshaker

It’s about famous unsolved crimes

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

I went on a binge! Here is what i have read since i cleared the book club hurdles last week:

THE CIRCLE, by Dave Eggers

Mae Holland, a woman in her 20s, arrives for her first day of work at a company called the Circle. She marvels at the beautiful campus, the fountain, the tennis and volleyball courts, the squeals of children from the day care center “weaving like water.” The first line in the book is: “ ‘My God,’ Mae thought. ‘It’s heaven.’ ”

And so we know that the Circle in Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” will be a hell.

LEVIATHAN WAKES, by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes is James S. A. Corey's first novel in the epic, New York Times bestselling series the Expanse, a modern masterwork of science fiction where humanity has colonized the solar system.

Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship's captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history

AUTONOMOUS, by Annalee Newitz (2018 Lambda Award!)

Jack Chen is a pirate who's dedicated her life to the development and distribution of free drugs, reverse-engineering patented pharma cheaply and quickly and distributing it where it's needed. But when she drops a productivity-boosting drug called Zacuity on the black market and it starts unexpectedly killing people, she has to do two things very quickly: develop a drug therapy to fix her mistake, and make public Big Pharma's illegal development of a drug that deliberately makes work as addictive as heroin.

Unfortunately for Jack, two IPC agents are hot on her trail. Paladin is a brand-new military grade robot, partnered with a human man named Eliasz to track Jack down before anything can officially embarrass Zacuity's patent-holders. Paladin's job is to protect Eliasz while he gathers information – but the robot finds Eliasz himself more fascinating than their mission parameters, devoting time and processing power to understanding him and the nuances of their developing relationship

I had (justified) high hopes for AUTONOMOUS bc I happened to read Newitz's previous non-fiction book on surviving a mass extinction on the plane home from Shanghai last March:

SCATTER, ADAPT, AND REMEMBER, by Annalee Newitz

In “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember,” Annalee Newitz presents a sort of prophylaxis for the apocalypse. As the founding editor of io9, a Gawker Media blog about science and futurism, Newitz is a techno-optimist, convinced that we humans can outwit just about everything our solar system throws at us in the coming millennia. “How can I say that with so much certainty?” she asks. “Because the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been survivors.” She’s probably right.

Also, Annalee is eye candy



I have now started GNOMON, by Nick Harkaway

To call Gnomon a work of genius is not entirely a compliment. Nick Harkaway’s epic, unwieldy, unpredictable new novel is outwardly brainy and pridefully digressive, and the distance it projects from its reader feels excruciatingly deliberate. Harkaway (Tigerman) wears his deep, fabulous vocabulary on his sleeve, and he’s unafraid to ruminate on the seemingly irrelevant in great detail. The sheer intelligence of the book feels almost beside the point; it’s to be taken as something of a given.

If Gnomon is not exactly a departure from Harkaway’s previous work, it’s at least his rawest effort, a window into his writerly impulses and motivations — into what separates him from the pack. It’s why, at first glance, Gnomon nicely stands out as a dystopian novel that manages to approach the genre uniquely and push it forward. The book arrives stateside after a year in which 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale skyrocketed on best-seller lists and found popular adaptations in theater and television, respectively. More broadly, the genre has felt appropriately ubiquitous in a tumultuous and unsettling political era.

[Kätzchen]

Ooooh, I just read a good book review about Gnomon by Mark Harkaway, in The Guardian.

It looks like an good book to read and I hope to find it at Powell's.



LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ment-110011379

[homoe]

This was released earlier this month on paperback so I just picked it up and just started it.

It's another book on Reese Witherspoon's book club selections and it too is soon to be made into a movie by her production company.