"Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie"

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane - Katherine Howe

Pretty good for a first novel, but there were a couple of times that I wanted to shout at the main character's stupidity, being that she's a doctoral candidate in American History and she can't figure out something blazingly simple for close to two whole chapters.

Other than that, it's very cool, story jumps between Colonial and Modern(ish, set in 1991, probably because she didn't want to have cellphones) New England.

Just started Glenn Beck's Common Sense

Still chugging along with Raven.

Nation, by Terry Pratchett. What a superb book. I think it was written with older children in mind. It doesn't pull its punches. Funny and also quite horrifying in places.

Y'all seem to read quite a bit. I am impress how y'all have the time to read and be on here this often. If I'm here, I don't have time to read. If I'm reading, I am absent from the forum. :p

Anyways, I am currently reading (slowly) The Mission Song by John Le Carre. :D

I don't read anywhere near as much as I used to. I tend to listen to audio plays and books a lot these days...mainly Doctor Who if I'm honest...

Just finished Kate Atkinson's Scenes from Behind the Museum - brilliant! Loved every minute of it!

Time Traveler's Wife - left me cold. It was about 200 pages too long. *sorry!* :blush: I know a lot of you loved it. I found the characters shallow and the author waaaay too eager to show off her vast hipness-factor (Punk rock! Art! Obscure artists! French phrases! GERMAN phrases! A rich girl with maids and a Mama and they dress for dinner!) And I felt like I'd lived all of this before. Then, I remembered: I had!

TV show Quantum Leap

"Theorizing that one could travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.
He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al; an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap home." -from the show's intro.


Now on to Yiddish Policeman's Union - Chabon.

a special thankee to the Dwellar who so kindly sent these books along!

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. Excellent, but it suffers from the "year 2000" problem, where 2000 seemed so futuristic in the '70s.

Oh thank goodness I'm not alone. I mean, sure, it was a reasonable concept, but I found the writing to be insipid, and I didn't care about the characters at all. In addition to all the hip-references, I found all the instances of sex to be really awkwardly crammed in as well (so to speak.) And the foreshadowing was anything but subtle. Anyway, I could see how people liked it as a bit of read-on-vacation fluff, but it was too "Oprah's Book Club" for me.

great book. I got a kick out of how technology changed so quickly from their perspective because of relativity and space travel.

I don't remember the "year 2000" problem, but I read it in the 80's so 2000 was still a little over a decade away.

yeah. I remember when Oprah called White Oleander "liquid poetry." I read that book and wondered what was wrong with me. Then I figured it out - Oprah is stupid.

The main character's girlfriend was born a year before me.

Ridley Scott's got the rights (he'd been after them for years). I wonder whether he'll set it in the future, or make it an alternate history.

The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde

Too fat to fish - Artie Lange

Do let me know your opinion - I loved the pants off it. I became more lukewarm as the series went on, but The Eyre Affair had me laughing out loud on the bus.

Ah Bri and Clod - I mourn for you.
I guess I'm just too much of a romantic. TTTW had me from the moment Claire ran whooping across the square because she'd finally got to meet Henry. Oprah might well be stupid - I have no idea about any of her other book choices - but I don't think this book is insipid. And I now know I have vast hipness factor, because I didn't find any of that stuff obscure :) I didn't always agree with her tastes of course. Thai, meh.

I cared deeply about the characters. To me it was a romance first. A book about a relationship and how it has to crack and bend along the way. With an imaginative external device. And blood and spew and drunkeness and the Violent Femmes and beautiful beautiful hair. And world enough, and time.

Of course it is all purely subjective and I love you none the less.
Just be warned that when I get my mind-probe working, you're on my list.

Hope you adore The Yiddish Detectives Union to make up for it!

Really, it was my fault, because I don't do romance at all and I already know this. I had been misled to believe it was almost more of a fantasy/sci-fi book, so I went in expecting all the wrong things.