What are you reading? April 2014

[April]

I finished Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life. Now on to Glitter and Glue. It's another selection from the NY Times non fiction best seller list.

[Bill]

I don't know much about the author Clive Barker other than his name, but showed up on several of my "Recommendations" shelves. Only about fifty pages in, but so far so good.

[Ronald]

I had another trip to the dentists today and so I grabbed Twelve Sharp because I needed a light book with a largish font. I don't know if I will rush to finish it or save for my next appointment in a few days.

[Melanie]

has about 100 pages left to read. It was recommended to me by our SWAT guy. It is okay, and is about the beginnning of the Templar Knights. There are times he goes into stuff that really doesn't hlep the story - like the promiscuity of Princess Alice.

[Melanie]

finished listening to this yesterday. Written in 1633 there is controversy about it being a novel or prose - if considered a novel it would be the first novel written in English. It was fairly short and is about a prince being tricked into slavery. Most interesting point was slavery is okay if captured in battle but wrong if bought and sold. It is on the 1,001 books to read before you die.

[Bill]

With the baseball season underway I'm reading

[April]

Well this month is a bit weird for my reading. I finished , then started . It is a shorter book and I wanted to get a "quickie" in. Well two disks in I see that I was missing disc 3, but I do have 4 & 5. So I re-requested it from the library and started . When I get Celeb back I will pause World to finish Celeb. I hope to get both finished this week.

[Mike]

Okay so I'm incredibly late getting around to reading this series but my fiance got me the full boxed set of the Harry Potter books. I've seen the entire movie series but never read any of the books. So on the plane back from Atlanta this afternoon, I started book one.

[April]

Your in for a treat if you enjoyed the movies. As always the books are so much better.

[Bill]

April is right, I thought the books were better too. Fortunately I read them before seeing the movies, so I had no preconceived ideas about what characters looked like or sounded like. There are subtle differences in between the books/movies, as is always the case. I expect to reread them again someday, as I've done with LOTR.

[Melanie]

Please remember the average movie script is 100 pages. The average book is 300 pages, so 200 pages are going disappear. I haven't read the last book or seen the last two movies. I think the movies did a good job of capturing the spirit of the Harry Potter series.

[Melanie]

I haven't been much into reading lately. This is what I'm currently reading. It is a short book and I'm close to half way through. I just need to sit down and read.

[Melanie]

Finished My Abandonment and really don't recommend it. I found it to be creepy. I did go though a wide range of emotions for the main character - sympathy, hope, cheering, and finally anger. I really hoped a hunter's bullet would hit her in the end.

[Bill]

I'm starting . Apparently an absolutist is someone who believes certain principles are absoulte, or is an uncompromising person. The plot description caught my eye, and it was recommended. Still this could be the first book in some time I haven't finished.

[April]

Got finished. It was a long one.

I just finished So good! highly recommended !

[Melanie]

I had read Brave New World in college, however, I read it quickly and enough to write a paper on Thursday after listening to the lectures on Monday and Wednesday. I was really against sci-fi/dystopian stuff back then. While reading this again I would not say that I'm a fan of it. However, it is easy to see how we could easily end up becoming a society like this. I will also read Brave New World revisted for the first time.

I do wonder how much of this was Huxley trying to be shocking - getting rid of the parent / child relationshp, baby's grown in bottles, and open sex among children and adults. I can see where we take this route or end up going the route of Idiocracy.

[Bill]

Melanie wrote: "

I had read Brave New World in college, however, I read it quickly and enough to write a paper on Thursday after listening to the lectures..."

Like you, Melanie, I read this back in school. I recall very little of it; but I don't think Huxley was trying to shock so much as writing the best things he could think of to prove the total dehumanization people had sunk to by that point.

For me, I think a far more likely future is the one in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 And another frightening possiblity is that in Frederic Rich's Christian Nation

[Melanie]

Fahrenheit 452 is on the book club list this summer.

[Melanie]

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Just started reading this for a book club. I will be on the road to Ulysses, KS today so I should get in some good reading time. It was an Edgar nominee.

[April]

Finished You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About and And the Mountains Echoed. On to Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and The Cardinal of the Kremlin.