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Recently Finished

Li Yiyun (or Yiyun Li since she's a US citizen now), A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers. Very good short story collection from a changing China, that could still have done more.
 
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin, tr. Alexander Glinka.
A diary from a dystopian sci-fi future. Fabulous, in every sense of the word!
:star5:
 
I quit reading Dagger Quick by Brian Eames. It might be a great story, but I couldn't get past pg 70 it annoyed me so much. 0 stars if I could give that.

Just finished Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Imposters...it was decent. 4 stars.
 
Just finished: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. I'm starting to love historical non-fiction that reads like a novel. This book has to be read to understand what I'm saying about non-fiction reading like Agatha Christies Murder on the OrientExpress. Book Reviews And Comments By Rick O
 
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlo Ruiz Zafon :star5: Loved it so much!

I started reading The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory last month...it started off interesting enough, but I soon found myself losing interest around 154 pages in. I think it's largely to do with the fact that I don't really like Hannah all that much...so far she's dull and a bit of a hypocrite with the way she judges others sometimes, plus her lust for Lord Robert is very tiresome. I've put it aside for now to resume reading later, because I'm clearly just not in the mood for it right now.

I'm now happily reading Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott. Hopefully it remains interesting, and doesn't disappoint in the end!
 
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell :star4: The first Cornwell novel I've ever read and really enjoyed it. It's set in 9th century England and graphicly depicts the Danes steady occupation of Northumbria,Mercia and East Anglia leaving only Wessex to conquer and this is where Alfred The Great steps up!
 
"What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper" by Paula Marantz Cohen :star3:
I enjoy reading about Jack the Ripper, so this was of interest to me. Not a book I am "jumping up and down" to recommend to everyone :lol:
 
The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen - Thomas Caplan. Missing nukes. Reminiscent of Clancy. A nice break from serious reading.
 
The Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes. Intensely introspective story of a hapless guy trying to figure out his own life, which he thought had been rather ordinary. (re-read)
 
August Strindberg, Confessions Of A Fool.

...Wow. That's pretty much the divorce album to end all divorce albums. Strindberg's marriage to actress Siri von Essen fell apart, and he responded by doing a coredump of all his thoughts on the matter - 300 pages of blatant misogyny in one long monologue. It's so over the top that if you ignore that he probably meant every word of it, it reads as a pretty clever Nabokovian satire of itself. The man was still a brilliant writer, and there are enough places where his emotions shine through and you can almost glimpse the other side of the story - passion, grief, love - but... Wow. He refused to have it published in Swedish in his lifetime, and I can understand why; this is ugly.

:star3: for it as a work of fiction.
 
Benedict Wells, Spinner

I don't think it's intended that way, but he has a character sum it up pretty well:
"Your book is total stagnation," he said. "Nothing happens, everything stagnates. You're afraid to do somethin, you just wait. Also, it's remarkably dull. In spite of all the travels and countless massacres at the end..."
Click to expand...
Yeah, pretty much. Self-important twelfth-rate Holden Caulfield warmed over and served with some incredibly clumsy writing (he literally breaks narration to point out metaphors to the reader every time he finds them). Awful.

:star1:
 
Falling Man - Delillo. Not the Delillo 9/11 book I was expecting.
Its simplicity nicely contrasts and thereby highlights the immensity of the event and how it changed the world so f*ing much.

I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas - Adam Roberts. Worth a few chuckles, nothing more.
 
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