50. How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie DeBartolo (Another great modern love story by DeBartolo, God-Shaped Hole...Dream for An Insomniac... these are not romance novels in a genre sense, these are romantic in a gut-wrenching, gambling with your soul sense. It feels way more accurate to me.)
51. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories by Aimee Bender (Bender blows my mind. These stories are nothing like real life, they are so far beyond reality, past reality, twists of reality. Amazing, bend your mind, stretch it.)
52. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical & Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Some great quotables in this, not all agreeable but much to provoke thought & some laughter.)
53. Oh No She Didn't: The Top 100 Style Mistakes Women Make And How to Avoid Them by Clinton Kelly (Not high literature by any means, but a bit funny if you're in the mood for the very lightest of reading with a sprinkle of snark.)
54. Death: a User's Guide by Tom Hickman ( A fun survey of death culture in many nations and throughout history. The writing was humorous without being discourteous to any particular view. It was a book that didn't care how long I took a break from it, worked on it off and on without any loss of enjoyment or educational value.)
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Thursday, July 7, 2011
May Readings
46. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (re)
47. Love Comes First: Poems by Erica Jong
48. A Rare and Curious Gift by Pauline Holstock (This was another case of maybe I should have just let it go half way through. In trying to take pictures of a whole Renaissance art community attention got spread so thin I started merging similar old-guy painter characters. On the other hand she was pretty amazing at showing how very, very differently an action can be interpreted depending on which character is viewing it, the extreme tint our own point of view puts on the story we believe we're living in. This could be described as a tragic clash of points of view. I wish she'd just stuck to the names of the artists she was basing it on, or at least put the historical note at the beginning...I spent way too much time trying to figure out if she was referring to who I thought she was. She was.)
49. The Girl Who Played with Fire (re)
April readings
43. The Confessions of Catherine de Medici by C. W. Gortner (Quite good. Historical fiction lovers take note. A nice "bad guy" side of the story; I bet you'll feel for her by the end.)
44. Best New Poets 2008: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers. edited by Mark Strand. (Came up in a search for Mark Strand, just enough good one to make me wade through the dross.)
45. Green by Jay Lake (About half way through this I felt like the author got more interested in world-culture building than in his characters. By half way I wanted to know exactly how big an emotional time bomb, & how deadly a ninja, the main character would turn out to be. Maybe he felt a sudden need to really sell it as sci-fi fantasy rather than a novel set in an alternate history of the world... really enjoyed the first half, might have let it go if I'd had a long-awaited hold in.)
44. Best New Poets 2008: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers. edited by Mark Strand. (Came up in a search for Mark Strand, just enough good one to make me wade through the dross.)
45. Green by Jay Lake (About half way through this I felt like the author got more interested in world-culture building than in his characters. By half way I wanted to know exactly how big an emotional time bomb, & how deadly a ninja, the main character would turn out to be. Maybe he felt a sudden need to really sell it as sci-fi fantasy rather than a novel set in an alternate history of the world... really enjoyed the first half, might have let it go if I'd had a long-awaited hold in.)
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