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What are you currently reading?
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Christine
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Dec 18, 2017 12:18PM
Charly, I couldn't agree more! If only we had more people in today's media jobs, who were committed to being "journalists first."
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I've now moved on to the next review book in my current queue, a collection of tales of the supernatural and uncanny,
What Darkness Remains by Andrew M. Seddon.
Charly wrote: "Claire if you finish it after January 1 you will be able to put it into the 2018 Classic Count."Allready finished, but I want to do the 2018 classic count anyway. Do I need to make a thread for that?
Charly wrote: "No we will be putting one up on the first. you can also do a personal classic challenge if you wish."Do I need a personal thread if I want to do that. I like the idea of 18 classics:-)
Just finished The Birds - excellent and I highly recommend. Who knew birds could be so devastatingly frightening. Now reading The Year of the Flood
It's unusual for me to start on two different books in one day. That happened yesterday, though! :-)Barb and I read the third book of Susan Page Davis' Ladies Shooting Club trilogy, The Blacksmith's Bravery, together out of order last year, because I believed the first two books were out of print and unobtainable. Subsequently, though, I discovered that, while they ARE out of print, there are dealers who still have copies and can be contacted through Amazon. So I gave Barb the first book,
The Sheriff's Surrender, for Christmas, and we've started it as our next "car book." (As she said, "It'll be like visiting old friends!")As I work through the review copies in my current queue, the one presently up is the opener for a projected series about a 21-year-old female target-shooting champion who becomes a rookie sheriff's deputy,
Ro's Handle (published by World Castle Publishing, which also publishes my novel, though that's just a coincidence!) by Goodreads author Dave Lager, who's a member of another of my Goodreads groups. It's particularly interesting to me, because it's set in the part of Iowa where I grew up.
I've just started Half a King, by Joe Abercrombie, which has been recommended to me countless times. It was finally available at the library, so I snatched it up! I'm hoping to finish it before the end of the year.I'm considering re-reading Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, after many years. Tonight I watched a great PBS miniseries, "To Walk Invisible," about the Bronte sisters, which has inspired me to re-read some of their novels, read those that I have not already tried, and read Emily's poetry.
Finally, I've reached the last paper book in my current queue of review copies, which I've just started on this morning. It's a nonfiction title,
Who's Got Dibs on Your Kids? by Betty Pfeiffer, whom I "met" electronically in another of my Goodreads groups.
I finished Half a King, which I really liked, and I plan to continue reading the series. I also finished several other books that had been on my currently-reading list for awhile. I've gotten through most of Dan Brown's newest, Origin, which I'm finding rather slow; the clues and art symbology are also scarce, and I'm not that enthused.
I'm also re-reading Fellowship of the Ring (for approximately the 19th time). My son & I re-watched all six movies from The Hobbit series and the LOTR series over the holidays, and I was in the mood for the books again. This 1986 library reprint edition has some features that my 1970s boxed paperback set does not. Tolkien's corrections are supposed to be the most up-to-date here, there's a big fold-out map of Middle Earth attached in the back, and a nice small map of the Shire by Christopher Tolkien.
I've just begun Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard.
LOL... I was going to add, "and I new a fiction read to balance things out."
I still have Les Mis to complete... but something a bit lighter may be a better choice for now.
Finally, I've gotten around, starting this weekend, to reading the stand-alone action thriller (yes, at the age of 65, I'm at last starting to use that term in something besides a derogatory sense! :-) )
South by my Goodreads friend Lance Charnes, which has sat around in one of my mountainous TBR piles for far too long. (It's a book I purchased, not a review copy.) Both the novels by this author that I previously read earned five stars from me, so I've really been looking forward to this one and have high expectations for it!
I'm reading my first Bill O'Reilly book, Killing the Rising Sun. Perfect for listening to during my ride to work.
When I took advantage of a Goodreads credit, earmarked for e-books, last year to download
The Hitwoman and the Family Jewels, the fourth installment of J. B. Lynn's Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman series, I'd planned to read the first two novels before that one. (I've already read the third installment, which is a short e-story.) But my Internet connection temporarily went down at lunchtime today; and having gotten into the habit of eating in front of the computer, I resorted to bringing up my Kindle app, and starting this book. I'm actually familiar enough with the main character and the premise of the series that reading it out of order shouldn't be a prohibitive problem; and I expect it to be a pretty quick read.Tomorrow, in paper format, my Goodreads friend Urs and I plan to start a two-person buddy read of Lois Lowry's
Number the Stars, which I expect to be an even quicker read. An "Around the World in Books" challenge in another group prompted me to add this to my to-read shelf in the first place (I wanted a book set in Denmark --forgetting, at the time, that I've already read Hamlet!), but my interest in it had been piqued for a long time before that.
Charly wrote: "Werner have you read Lowry's Giver series? I enjoyed it.."No, Charly, I haven't, but it's been recommended to me before (by Urs, the lady I'm doing my buddy read with). I have The Giver on my to-read shelf, and we have the whole series at the BC library.
Charly wrote: "Its really a fairly quick read."Judging from the prose in Number the Stars (which flows very quickly), I figured it would be, Charly!
I've been leafing through a couple nonfiction books, and officially beginning Paris in the Present Tense for my neighborhood book group.
Other than the third volume of Louis L'Amour's collected Western stories (which I've already been reading in intermittently since last year), for various reasons, since finishing my most recent paper-format book, I've been slow to permanently start on another one. That's been partly due to the fact that I've been pretty sick with (I think) the flu since Tuesday, and I'm not well yet. Often, I haven't felt like reading, and my ability to focus mentally on any prose that's very demanding has been limited. (That's why I started one book and then put it aside for a later time.)However, since so far today I've been free of fever (crosses fingers and knocks on wood!), I've now started on a nonfiction read about paranormal phenomena,
Shane Leslie's Ghost Book. My copy is actually of the 2017 reprint edition, but it's not a review copy. Instead, it was a thoughtful gift from my friend and fellow writer of supernatural fiction (though he writes better, and more prolifically, than I do!), Andrew Seddon, who knows we share an interest in the real-life investigation of the supernatural.
My reading continues to be slowed down by my miserable case of flu, which keeps coming back every time I think I've shaken it. :-) But I have managed, over the weekend, to start reading the e-book edition of Joni Dee's debut espionage thriller,
And The Wolf Shall Dwell. This is a review copy; I didn't really know what to expect from it, but I was very pleasantly surprised! I'm thoroughly captivated already, though only a few chapters in.
Sorry to hear you've got the flu, Werner! I hope it departs for good, as soon as possible. Glad to know you've got some good reading to distract you, meantime. Take care!!
Thanks, Christine! I'm glad to report that I'm recovered, and back to work (Monday was my first day back).
: ) So glad to hear it, Werner! The flu strains this year are terrible.
Christine wrote: ": ) So glad to hear it, Werner! The flu strains this year are terrible."Yes --from what I hear, Hawaii is the only U.S. state where it isn't rampant.
In all the years that Sadie Forsythe and I have been Goodreads friends, she's never pressured me to read her fantasy novel,
The Weeping Empress. However, I've been interested in it on my own, and bought a copy a few years ago. As usual with books that find their way into my mountainous physical TBR piles, this one sat there for longer than I'd have wished; but I finally started my long-awaited read of it today!
Although I took the opportunity, awhile back, to download the opening novel of Josie Brown's Housewife Assassin series
The Housewife Assassin's Handbook to my Kindle app, to try it out for free and see if it was worth buying a paper copy, I hadn't originally intended to start on it very soon. But I'm not reading anything else in electronic format right now, so I broke down and started it last night. I'm already hooked, so now I'm sucked into another long series. (Sigh!)I'm also about to start (tomorrow, barring anything unforeseen)
The Deerslayer, which is chronologically the first novel in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales series, though it was actually the last one to be written. This is part of my conscious effort to finish up some of the many "dangling" series I've started --and this one has been dangling quite awhile, since I first embarked on it as a kid in the fourth grade, with The Last of the Mohicans!
I would guess that ** rates as less-than-fascinating. ;-)I searched the house for Irish books or novels by Irish authors, and finally settled on Tara Road for my next read.
I was amazed due to the publication date; however, George Orwell's 1984 did precede it by several years.Not so sure what to make of Tara Road... my first book by this author. I have started it once before, but more determined to wade through it this time. I see lots of posts here and on social media about not wasting time on books that don't immediately grab or pull one in, but I have been rewarded more than once by continuing. (Have we had that as one of our rhetorical questions?)
I've begun reading my review copy of
Tabla Rosa, the debut novel by D. E. Heil. (My guess is that the title is a take-off on the Latin phrase tabula rasa, meaning "blank slate;" but I don't know what the significance is here.) This one will probably prove to be a fairly quick read.
Charly wrote: "I guess the mind has a little bit of auto correct in it, because I saw another reference to this somewhere and simply read in my head Tabula Rasa."I did the same thing mentally, until I looked more closely; I even referred to it, when I mentioned it in an e-mail to an Internet friend, as Tabula Rasa. :-)
Good one, Charly! :-)
Well, I'm just tearing through Tara Road... it's easy reading, I'll give it that. About halfway through, I finally started developing some interest in the protagonist.
Continuing my reading of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, I've now started on
The Pathfinder (1840). It was the penultimate volume of the five-book series to actually be written; but in relation to the events of the protagonist's life, it's the third in the internal chronology. (From somewhere, I'd picked up the impression that it was set during the Revolutionary War, but it's actually still set during the French and Indian War --just later than the events of The Last of the Mohicans.)
Werner, that is nteresting about the timing of the book's events. Did he write a book that would fill in between the two? Or are they unrelated?
Reggia wrote: "Werner, that is nteresting about the timing of the book's events. Did he write a book that would fill in between the two? Or are they unrelated?"All of the Leatherstocking Tales books are related, in that they all follow the life of their fictional protagonist Natty Bumpo, from early manhood to old age and death. But Cooper wrote them at different stages in his own life, and out of chronological order. In The Pioneers, written very early in Cooper's career (1823), and set in the 1790s when the author was a child, Natty is an old man. In the second book to be written, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), he's depicted in his prime. He dies in the third book to be written, The Prairie, published a year later, but set in the early 1800s. Cooper at first intended that to be the last book featuring Natty, but in 1840-41 he returned to the character in two more novels, The Pathfinder, set after the events of The Last of the Mohicans, and finally The Deerslayer, set in 1744 when Natty is just beginning his wilderness career. Collectively, the books came to be called the Leatherstocking Tales, after one of Natty's many nicknames. Hope that explanation helps a little, Reggia!
Yes, it does! you've done all the legwork, thank you!
As our next "car book," Barb and I are returning to fictional Fergus, Idaho for the second volume in Susan Page Davis' Ladies Shooting Club trilogy,
The Gunsmith's Gallantry. For us, this will wrap up the series, since we actually started with the third book.
I finished Bella which was actually a novelization of a movie, and am now beginning How to Behave in a Crowd.I noticed a children's book that I had marked as "want to read", and wishing Goodreads had more selections for how to categorize a book. I'd like to keep track of children's books but don't want them counted in my "read" list. I know we have the secondary categories but they still must first be listed as Read, Currently Reading and Want to Read. Have I overlooked a possibility?
Read, Currently Reading and Want to Read are the three "exclusive" shelves that every Goodreader automatically has for his/her books. (That is, a book listed on one of them can't be listed on either of the other two --and the Goodreads program lists every book on Read unless you put it on another exclusive shelf.) BUT, as you know, you can create customized shelves; and it's actually possible to make one or more of those an exclusive shelf, too. (For instance, I have nine exclusive shelves, with titles such as "Read in Condensed Versions;" books that appear on the six customized exclusive shelves don't appear on the "Read" one.) So you could create a "Children's" shelf and make it exclusive.
So none of your six exclusive shelves appear on Read, To Read or Currently? I'm going to take a peek at your shelves...
Okay, I get it now... I can make a shelf exclusive! This is awesome -- thank you, I'm very pleased to realize this. :-)
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