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Post by mei on Dec 1, 2021 11:10:32 GMT -5
A festive month! Hopefully with plenty of time for reading, maybe you're receiving some new books as gifts? Share them here :-) November thread is here! |
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Post by sprite on Dec 1, 2021 12:08:16 GMT -5
I should probably start reading from my stack again, instead of just doing killer sudoku before bed...
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 1, 2021 12:38:13 GMT -5
Thank you mei!
I'm just about to start a climate sci-fi novel by Premee Mohamed. I follow her on Twitter because she is interesting and amusing but hadn't found one of her books anywhere until now. Already drawing me in despite just being page 3, but I must get back to the office now....
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 1, 2021 17:36:01 GMT -5
Thank you, Mei.
76. A Murderous Cruise Habit, Dawn Brookes. I may as well listen to a murder on a Caribbean cruise while driving through the rain. I’m getting through a lot more audiobooks than real or ebooks at the moment, driving to workplaces.
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Post by Oweena on Dec 1, 2021 19:23:58 GMT -5
I'm about 100 pages into the 790 pages of 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois' and it may take all month to read.
Really liking it though.
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Post by HalcyonDaze on Dec 1, 2021 23:50:36 GMT -5
I have to finish (well, start actually) Becoming by Michelle Obama for book club on Monday night.
Wish me luck.
Which means I should put down the latest Invisible Library book but it is so much fun
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Post by scrubb on Dec 2, 2021 14:38:10 GMT -5
I'm about 100 pages into the 790 pages of 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois' and it may take all month to read. Really liking it though. I looked that up - it sounds very good. I look forward to your final review. Hal - I've heard that Becoming is very good, at least! I'm about half way through "Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death" by Berndt Heinrich. He is a biologist who wrote a book about hibernation that I read a few years ago and really enjoyed, and I'm enjoying this too. It's about the natural cycle of death and what happens to carcasses (of both animals and plants - lots on trees). Not even only about death - the current chapter is about dung beetles. It's really more about all the connections between species and the cycle of life. I must buy one of his books about ravens ones of these days - they were his main focus for many years of research and I think his books on them have won awards. |
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Post by scrubb on Dec 2, 2021 19:53:43 GMT -5
Finished "Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death" by Bernd Heinrich. Interesting discussion of decay, metamorphosis, and a little bit on human ways of dealing with death, though not a lot. He's pretty purely a biologist with just a touch of philosophy. Overall good if you're quite interested in biology, especially beetles in this case.
He kind of blew it, though. Towards the end while talking about how humans change not only physically but also emotionally and mentally, he mentions that he inherited a "masculine, vigorous love of nature". WTF is masculine about a vigorous love of nature? And if he meant them as two independent discriptors, then WTF is a masculine love of nature? Is Jane Goodall masculine? Am I? Grrrrrr. I'm trying to remember that he was over 70 when he wrote that, but still, it annoyed me a lot.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 2, 2021 21:58:07 GMT -5
Yeah that's irritating scrubb. Too bad because I loved his raven books, and I'm really into beetles right now (though it sounds like it could be kinda gross).
Anyway --
45) Premee Mohamed, The Annual Migration of Clouds
Another postapocalyptic novel to add to the big pile of them that I've been reading lately. This one is pretty amazing - a very short novel set in a community that's settled in an abandoned university somewhere in Canada (the author's based in Edmonston). Really really good.
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 3, 2021 5:31:46 GMT -5
I've been hearing good things about The Love Songs of WEB Dubois from various sources.
Scrubb- so annoying!
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Post by tucano on Dec 3, 2021 6:24:18 GMT -5
Work is giving us all a book token for Christmas. Will be scrolling these threads for ideas.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 3, 2021 13:10:45 GMT -5
Well, DON'T spend it on "The Laundress" by Barbara Sapienza, tucano!
A bookbub special that wasn't worth the $1.99 or whatever it cost. Not sure why I bothered to finish it, actually, although admittedly I skimmed the last half in less than an hour. 26 year old woman is a self-absorbed idiot, is the plot.
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Post by mei on Dec 6, 2021 6:27:20 GMT -5
#21 La Belle Sauvage (volume 1 of The Book of Dust) by Philip Pullman.
Came across this accidentally in the library. Really enjoyed it. Perfect escapism for right now. YA fantasy in the world of His Dark Materials. The second part dragged on a bit I thought but other then that there's a lot of suspense and excitement in the book. Will have to find part 2...
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Post by sprite on Dec 6, 2021 7:10:36 GMT -5
Mei, the bbc had an audio version of it for a while, not sure if it's still available. Liiisa, I have to be pedantic: Edmonton, or Edumunston? The first is the capital of Alberta, with a surprisingly diverse cultural output, given it's a city where people unironically wear "I <3 oil" t-shirts. The other is a large town on the East Coast, but mostly francophone.  I'm into 'Quicksilver' starting the Baroque series by Neil Stephenson. I borrowed it because the one I was looking for, about an internet Metaverse, is booked up. I found that from an article in the Economist. Anyway, I think the Baroque series is going to lead to a lot of reading hangovers. Excellent turns of phrase. A bit too much sometimes, like he feels the need to write every.single.metaphor.he.ever.thinks.of. But some of them are thought-provoking. I really should copy and paste them to remember later. |
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Post by scrubb on Dec 6, 2021 19:51:25 GMT -5
#21 La Belle Sauvage (volume 1 of The Book of Dust) by Philip Pullman. Came across this accidentally in the library. Really enjoyed it. Perfect escapism for right now. YA fantasy in the world of His Dark Materials. The second part dragged on a bit I thought but other then that there's a lot of suspense and excitement in the book. Will have to find part 2... Oh, I got that from bookbub a while back - haven't read it yet but am glad to hear it's good. Am half way through "Another Life" by Robert Haller. It's very readable but I'm not sure yet whether I'll hate it in the end, or if it'll continue to be reasonably good. Telling the stories of 4 different people (rotating chapters from their points of view, and they're all interacting with each other). The slightly weird bit is that they're all involved with a Vacation Bible School. The church is presented as being fairly mainstream, but that could only be from an American point of view - they have people speaking in tongues, and a prophecizer (sp?). The church is a big enough part of the book to make me wonder why. |
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 6, 2021 21:44:48 GMT -5
sprite the book jacket says "Edmonton," so that sounds like the Oil place
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Post by sprite on Dec 7, 2021 13:43:28 GMT -5
Deffo.
It's a slightly odd city, in that it's a hub for all these Oil/Gas types who are typically conservative socially and politically, and aren't keen on immigration--they get all the cheap labour they need from the East Coast.
Then there's also a thriving art scene, which is very multicultural and open to all sorts of ideas.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 7, 2021 22:45:29 GMT -5
Am half way through "Another Life" by Robert Haller. It's very readable but I'm not sure yet whether I'll hate it in the end, or if it'll continue to be reasonably good. Telling the stories of 4 different people (rotating chapters from their points of view, and they're all interacting with each other). The slightly weird bit is that they're all involved with a Vacation Bible School. The church is presented as being fairly mainstream, but that could only be from an American point of view - they have people speaking in tongues, and a prophecizer (sp?). The church is a big enough part of the book to make me wonder why. I finished it. Overall I liked it and it even stopped before it wrapped everything up neatly in a bow, leaving some things open to the imagination. I still found the setting - the church, the vacation bible school - a bit odd. I guess I expected the religion to be a bigger part of the story, since there really was a lot of focus on it. But in the end, it could have been set anywhere. So, that did leave me wondering why the author bothered including all the long prayers and sermons that the characters listened to. It seemed weird to me that a bunch of the characters only attended this church out of habit or social pressure, and didn't seem to consider religion a big part of their lives, hen it was an evangelical (in the American sense of the word) church. This church took all the teenagers to protest at an abortion clinic - that is absolutely not a "mainstream" church in my world. Is that mainstream in the USA? |
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 8, 2021 2:19:03 GMT -5
77. The Long Way Home. Another brilliant Inspector Gamache mystery. This is a series that makes the most sense when books are read in order, so I’m glad that’s what I’ve done.
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 8, 2021 3:00:04 GMT -5
Cloud Cuckoo Land was cheap for Kindle, so I've just bought it on the recommendations here and because I did enjoy All the Light we Cannot See very much.
I reread Andres Neumann's How to Travel without Seeing, a book about travelling around Latin America on a whirlwind book tour that I had previously read while on a bus in Latin America. I remembered liking it a lot, and I still did, but, wow... I had totally forgotten it was written at the time of the swine flu outbreak. Presumably at the time that aspect didn't seem as important to me as it does now. Now, it hit pretty close to home. Here's an extract:
"Face masks pop up in the most remote corners of the country [Argentina], and the population is divided into two. Every time a person without a mask walks by a masked person, they look at each other in mistrust. They mutually judge. THey evaluate the other's condition. The masked one says, "You won't infect me, you sick animal". THe one without a mask thinks at the same time, "That's not going to do you any good, you stupid alarmist". Each, in his or her own way, infects the other with the most common and dangerous virus: human nature."
Aside from that I have several books on the go. I decided I wanted to get through the books I have received as gifts this year before Christmas, and I have a couple left that are not quick reads, so we'll see.
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Post by sprite on Dec 8, 2021 4:45:14 GMT -5
It seemed weird to me that a bunch of the characters only attended this church out of habit or social pressure, and didn't seem to consider religion a big part of their lives, when it was an evangelical (in the American sense of the word) church. This church took all the teenagers to protest at an abortion clinic - that is absolutely not a "mainstream" church in my world. Is that mainstream in the USA? Obvs I can't speak for the Americans, but if you live in a small c conservative area of Canada, it is mainstream. I mean, even in the UK there's still a social class where going to church is important socially, so the pews are full of people who don't really believe. I only learned, when I was 9, that not everyone went to church on Sunday. I genuinely couldn't imagine what they did with Sunday. (Clean the house, was the answer.) Speaking in tongues and prophesying was just a regular part of the service, and while the youth group didn't go on a protest field trip, when there was a protest at the abortion clinic, we were encouraged to go. How seriously the congregation takes the doctrine varies from church to church, but my experience was that smaller = serious, while larger = socialising. |
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 8, 2021 6:27:30 GMT -5
Here in the US I really think it's a rural vs urban thing. Growing up in the NYC suburbs I didn't know a soul who was Evangelical, everybody was either Catholic or Congregational or Episcopalian and you didn't really talk about it. My (Catholic) family went only sporadically - mainly when I was staying with my grandma was when I'd go - though they did make me do Catechism class (though I now think that was daycare for Saturday morning).
Looking back I think it seemed to me at the time that people actually being serious about believing in religion was something you'd read about in other countries or history books. But that could also be because it was the late 60s.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 8, 2021 11:07:41 GMT -5
I totally get going to church out of habit/social pressure. It just seems weird to me in the case of evangelism. I grew up going to church regularly but it was a church that welcomes people with doubts and focuses on trying to help alleviate poverty, and doesn't try to convert anyone, or expect anyone to "accept Jesus as your personal saviour".
I don't understand how people casually attend an evangelical church. But I guess if that's the only church around, it makes sense.
Thanks for your insight, Sprite. The kind of preaching in this book, and that you talk about, is something I only ever heard once, when a friend took me to her evangelical Baptist church in an effort to save me. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard in United or Lutheran churches.
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Post by sophie on Dec 8, 2021 13:11:37 GMT -5
The Song of the Jade Lily by Kirsty Manning. A bit of a chick lit novel dealing with Jewish refugees in Shanghai during WW2.. well researched and interesting. Not a fabulous novel but I enjoyed it as it was very readable.
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Post by sophie on Dec 8, 2021 13:14:19 GMT -5
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. Set in the late 1300’s China, this novel has some elements of magic realism and fantasy. The premise (poor orphaned peasant girl becomes a Buddhist monk then a significant warrior/ruler) is a bit unrealistic. Okay read.
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Post by Queen on Dec 8, 2021 17:36:12 GMT -5
Written in Bone Sue Black Sue Black is awesome en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Black,_Baroness_Black_of_Strome She can be found running through cold cases on YouTube. This book is part anatomy lesson and part memorial of some cases she’s worked on - including looking at photos of torture victims smuggled out of Syria. It’s not for everyone, but I was fascinated… I’d have liked more diagrams, but that’s a minor quibble. |
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 9, 2021 1:02:53 GMT -5
Ah yes, I seem to remember her episode of Desert Island Discs (will be in the archive somewhere if you're interested).
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Post by sprite on Dec 9, 2021 5:40:47 GMT -5
Q, that is a really good book! It shows so clearly how human the people in that job are. It confirmed my decision to leave my body to science.
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Post by scrubb on Dec 9, 2021 15:24:50 GMT -5
Q, that is a really good book! It shows so clearly how human the people in that job are. It confirmed my decision to leave my body to science. I recently learned that's not as straight forward as I expected. At least in Canada. I need to arrange it way in advance, fill out forms, have them witnessed etc., and i think there is still a chance of "science" refusing it, if they don't need any corpses at that exact time. |
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 9, 2021 16:01:45 GMT -5
I looked into leaving my body to science in Germany and was pretty surprised to discover you have to pay!
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