What did you read this week? Tell us - we wants to know!

NottaSackville

NottaSackville

Valinor
Well, I never did make it through the Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I didn't have that much further to go - maybe 70 pages out of ~280, but it was really dragging for me. And then the author decided that "not finishing books she didn't like" was going to be part of her project and I said "you know, good point", and put the book down. It's not a bad book, but not a great read either. I did take away a few good points from it - the most important to me to be "Be Notta" - worry less about what things society, friends, advertisements, etc, lead you to THINK should make you happy (like finishing a best selling book recommended by Mrs. Notta), and spend more time enjoying things that actually DO make you happy (like reading & posting on TORN).

Next up was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's a young adult book, but Gaiman can be so deep and dark and twisted in his adult books that mellowing out at bit for kids actually improves him, I think. In the book, a young baby finds itself orphaned and alone in a graveyard, the inhabitants of which (ghosts of course, or at least most of them are....) decide to adopt and care for him. It's a delightful book with a bit of creepiness, and I admit to actually tearing up at the end of it (but to avoid spoilers I won't say whether they were tears of happiness, sadness, or due to salt in my eyes from not having showered after my Walk to Rivendell run earlier in the day...) I'd definitely recommend it for adults or kids (maybe for my 10 year old).

I'm now on to Asimov's Foundation and Empire, the second in a trilogy I started a few months back. The first book, Foundation, was good - certainly not my favorite sci fi book of all time, but definitely good enough to make me want to keep going.

Notta
 
Well, maybe not "winging" — I don't read as fast or as long as I used to.

I finished the latest Percy Jackson book and am now discovering the imagination of Tamora Pierce. My daughter gave me Terrier to read. It's fantasy/detective fiction, and it works really well. I have only had to check the Glossary once, and intend to boast to my daughter about that. I expect I'll finish the Beka Cooper novels and another of the kids' books that comes out next week and then consider curling up with LOTR again.
 
Or whatever the cool kids would say these days? Good for you to only need the Glossary once...

Kids have such great books to read!

Notta
 
And then the author decided that "not finishing books she didn't like" was going to be part of her project and I said "you know, good point", and put the book down.

How funny! She was hoist with her own petard, then. I remember talking to someone years and years ago who'd been given LotR by her son, and who gritted her teeth and plowed her way through it even though she didn't enjoy it, because she believed she should always finish things she started.

Well, no. Even LotR doesn't suit everyone, heresy as it might be to say that!

I, too, had a DNF (Did Not Finish). I was given a book titled Winter Blossom, by Tara Heavey, about several people reclaiming an overgrown garden in Dublin. The cover copy led me to believe there was a murder mystery involved, but by the time I gave up on the story, 2/3 of the way through, I hadn't found it.

It's not a bad book. It's very nicely written--even though I got next to no sense of place, Dublin or no Dublin. It's simply one of those where we learn the life story of each character, and go through their individual traumas, and see how getting together and working on the garden makes them all happy again. Which is fine---I'd much rather have characters come out happy than, say, eaten by zombies. But there was so little plot the book simply didn't hold my interest.
 
Have never read one of his before. This was a give-away so I thought "why not"? I almost despaired a couple of chapters in, because it is a huge book set in an extremely complicated universe with a very convoluted plot, necessitating a lot of exposition that wasn't all that clear and jumping from new place to new place and new character to new character. Think "Dune" multiplied by about 5, only most of the characters are ciphers. But I found a character to stick to - fortunately, the main character as it's turning out - and now the action is moving forward to a convergence point, so I'm finally hooked. May have to go back and re-read those first chapters though.
 
I'd much rather have characters come out happy than, say, eaten by zombies.
Click to expand...

Frankly, I think a bit of zombie-munching may have done the Happiness Project some good...[cool]

I had to chuckle a bit about you working 2/3 of the way through the book expecting a murder plot to evolve. As I've discussed this in the past, I have a very hard time getting into books that are, as you describe so aptly "simply one of those where we learn the life story of each character, and go through their individual traumas, and see how...[it all turns out]". I read a book a year or two ago, Spooner, where I spent much of the book waiting for the plot to develop. I must have been 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the long book before the little light went on in my head and I saw the flashing sign "his life IS the plot". Ah well, at least in that case the book was a very enjoyable read anyway.

Notta
 
Narrated by Sir Nigel Hawthorne. The ending is sort of...blah. No real resolution to the issue of the will is ever made because everyone just sort of drops it. But I still love the book, and Hawthorne did a very good job with the reading.

Now I'm on to "Barchester Towers," that I thought he also read, but it's Simon Vance. Vance is actually a better audiobook performer than Hawthorne (he has received a number of awards for his audiobook narrating), but it was still cool hearing Hawthorne, one of my favorite actors, and knowing that one of the characters in the book was a role he played.

Anyway, I love this book, too, and I expect I will really enjoy the audiobook.

I took back to the library the book of three Josephine Tey stories. I was running out of renewals and hadn't made any progress. So I'll try them one at a time later when I get a chance to. They didn't have Inspector Grant in them, and even though I think he's a terrible detective, he has captured my interest enough that I look forward to reading about him.
 
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I'm currently in between books, as it were, and I'm casually reading Life's George Harrison mag that came out not long ago (I'd gotten it for my birthday). Simple reading with some solid info and pictures that I've never seen that are awesome to look at.
 
I saw this at the grocery store and did a double-take. After waiting for years, it had somehow slipped off my radar that this book was in the works. This is the fourth and final installment of the Wicked series. I was seriously bummed by the third book, which I had hoped would be the finale but which didn't go much of anywhere.

I'm only about a quarter of the way into this one, but I think it will be very satisfying and tie up all those loose ends I've been waiting on all these years. Tip and Mombie (excuse me, Mombey) seem to be ready to make an appearance finally, and we find out more about Elphaba's granddaughter, and about Nor.

At the beginning, Glinda is under house arrest under Cherrystone, and lots of interesting and fun sparks fly there. It's much more of a page-turner for me than either the second or the third book were. I'll say more after I've read more.

Oh, and the way Dorothy arrives in Oz this time seems to be a nod to the canon book "Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz" :-)
 
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But let me see: "Matter" is 593 pages long, "Dune" is 489 - not counting the appendices in both. Not that size matters: LOTR beats them both by a mile, but is the easiest to follow. (Unless you're my mother, who gave up partway through FOTR because she was so confused by all the different names everyone had.)
 
I am reading the Song of Ice and Fire series from G.R.R. Martin, I haven't read a series this good since LOTR series
 
Some people's life stories are simply more interesting, even exciting, than others. A biography of Aragorn, for example, would have me on the edge of my seat. Several people planting a garden in Dublin, not so much.

Sometimes the antagonist in a story is a situation (think Apollo 13, for example---there are no bad people, just circumstances) and yet the story can still leave you breathless for the next scene. But people's personal problems, while certainly life-changing for them, are not enough to hold my interest in a story.

By some definitions, this is the difference between literary and genre fiction, the proportion of character development/ narrative musing to plot. Sometimes you do need a few zombies [tongue]
 
One of my daughters-in-law is a big fan of the musical Wicked. I think she's read the book---I'll have to ask. She may not be aware of the sequels, though. It's very clever of Maguire to expand on the canon stories.
 
Is he intentionally the bumbling type that just runs into the answer eventually, or do you think the author doesn't do a good job with him?

Dave
 
Having never watch the Wizard of Oz, you can imagine that I haven't read the Wicked series either. Oddly enough, I've been curious to read them. I almost went to see the show with Mrs. Notta, but she outmaneuvered me and took a friend instead (yes, outmaneuvered is the correct verb in this case, I've never quite figured out exactly HOW that ended up happening... [crazy]).

Maybe after I watch the show with my girls I'll have the momentum to get the first book going.

Notta
 
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