What I'm Reading MARCH 2015

[Ken]

John wrote: "Started Essays After Eighty, a memoir by poet Donald Hall. Constant Readers may appreciate this one, which I'm glad I got from library on impulse."

Enjoyed it very much. Some repetitive parts, but hey... he's a poet and allowed his refrains, esp. in his 80s.

Ann -- I loved A Constellation of Vital Phenomena too.

[Kat]

Bernadette wrote: "I’ve just started The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi. I’m just three chapters in, but really enjoying it, probably because it is set in the publishing world, a world close to my heart."

I put this on my TBR, Bernadette. Thanks for posting.

[Ann D]

Newengland,
It's nice to hear from another reader who also enjoyed A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I wondered where this young American author got the idea for setting his book in Chechnya. It turns out he spent a semester studying in St. Petersburg in 2006. I read that he is currently working on a set of linked stories covering the Chechen wars from the Russian perspective. http://www.foyles.co.uk/anthony-marra

I like the way Marra's work tries to view events from multiple sides. His characters may be damaged but they are deeply human and capable of great sacrifice.

[Larry]

Just catching up on some of my recent books here. I finished Tokyo Kill: A Thriller by Barry Lancet. Even better than his first in this new series, but maybe a little too much unrealistic violence. I finished the history The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America. It's just what the title says, and actually starts explaining settlement of the Eastern colonies by taking it back before the European colonists arrived to discuss the existing Indian tribes and the many conflicts among them, which were thoroughly exploited by the white settlers. Just an excellent history of the first two centuries of what was to become the United States of America.

I completed Thomas Perry's most recent Jane Whitefield mystery, A String of Beads, and it is as strong an offering in that series as he has written. He is bringing out more and more of the Seneca background of Jane Whitefield and it really works well in this book. (It starts with the seven clan mothers coming to her and giving her a task. Great mix of Indian matters with the modern world.)

And I'm still working my way through This Is NPR: The First Forty Years. This is a good one, with a fair history and a lot of good anecdotes, but I have discovered that apparently no one has published an authoritative history of NPR. I wonder if there is a good dissertation out there on this subject. I became really interested in the history of NPR and NPR stations when I noticed about a month ago that some NPR stations are rapidly expanding into some of the smaller but important cities in Virginia, while in the Washington, DC area, NPR is actually shrinking in offerings (WAMU just dropped one of its three HD stations). (That doesn't really matter too much since I can stream virtually anything, but it remains one of the mysteries of life to me that Harrisonburg, VA now has six NPR stations (88.1, 88.5, 89.3, 90.7, 91.1, and 91.7) while the DC area still only has only three (two WAMU stations and WETA). And it’s not just Harrisonburg, either. Fredericksburg has four NPR stations and Charlottesville has six plus one other public radio station (WTJU) that isn’t formally an NPR station. I wonder about these kind of things when I'm not reading or trying to figure out what to read next.

[Larry]

Newengland wrote: "John wrote: "Started Essays After Eighty, a memoir by poet Donald Hall. Constant Readers may appreciate this one, which I'm glad I got from library on impulse."

Enjoyed it very muc..."


John and Newengland, I just checked this one out from our library also. I'm looking forward to reading it.

[Robert]

Larry, as always, an intriguing, eclectic list.

[Ken]

Larry wrote: "Newengland wrote: "John wrote: "Started Essays After Eighty, a memoir by poet Donald Hall. Constant Readers may appreciate this one, which I'm glad I got from library on impulse."

Hope you enjoy, Larry!


Ann wrote: "Newengland,
It's nice to hear from another reader who also enjoyed A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I wondered where this young American author got the idea for setting his book ..."

Well-written and complex characters. Also, a hell of a job on female characters. When I write fiction, I feel unequal to the task with women characters because, well, they're a lot more complex than the manunkinds. (Sorry for blanket statement, but...).

[Larry]

I also finished Robert Lipsyte's An Accidental Sportswriter, which is a memoir about Lipsyte's career as a sportswriter for the New York Times and elsewhere. Great stories about his early days at the Times, as well as interesting insights into Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Bob Costas, and others. And I'm halfway through Scott Turow's Identical. I love Turow's novels set in the fictionalized Chicago of Kindle City. This book is about a politician running for mayor just as his twin brother has been let out of prison for killing his girlfriend about 25 years earlier. And now, all of a sudden, the politician has to answer a claim by the dead woman's brother that he and not his convicted brother was actually the killer. Turow's plots are always fun, with a lot of twists and turns but never in a way that seems contrived. But it's his characters that are especially interesting to me. Turow manages a great depiction of human strengths and weaknesses among all the major characters in this book ... and I have no idea how things are going to turn out.

[Lyn]

Just zipped through Harlan Coben's The Stranger. It was a page turner like all of his novels, but in the end not quite as enjoyable as most of the other ones.

[Robert]

Finishing up the latest in a series of Nikola Tesla biographies I've read over the years, and this is the first one that A) actually seemed to understand the science and B) made Tesla seem like a real human being rather than the wizard who was thwarted from giving us the future. With "Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age," W. Bernard Carlson may not have the smoothest style, but he does understand his subject extremely well. Tesla's plan to broadcast wireless power is still floating around the twenty-something counterculture that fueled the Occupy movement a couple of years ago, along with a considerable mishmash of ideas (most of which they don't really understand as anything other than "what should have happened / be happening.") Carlson shows that Tesla was pursuing a dream more than real science, but along the way, he made important discoveries. Fascinating man, and a grounded biography that finally does him justice.