Books I’ve Read – Page 8 – commonplacebook.com

A Feast For Crows: worth the wait

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 7, 2006
Post category:Books I've Read

I finished up reading George R. R. Martin’s long-awaited fourth fantasy novel A Feast for Crows today. I’m dying to find out what happens next. The fifth book (A Dance of Dragons) in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series is due out sometime this year, and if it does drop (Martin is notorious for taking his time writing) I may have to break one of my New Year’s Resolutions and buy it.

Every review I’ve read criticizes the fact that this book was split in half; the next installment was originally planned as part of this book, and Martin reworked the story to separate out some storylines in order to tame an unwieldy volume. It was a wise decision; this half is large and complex and I can only imagine what a book twice this size would weigh, let alone how hard it would be to work through.

I mentioned when I picked up the book to read it that I had a hard time getting my bearings and recalling the “who, where and why” of the numerous story lines as they pick up from the first three books (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords). Wikipedia wasn’t quite enough to help me and I ended up re-reading sections of the previous book to refresh my memory.

That was a frustration, but worth the effort. The Song of Ice and Fire series follows hundreds of characters as they live in and fight over the fictional land of Westeros, and the intrigue and machinations of the various families fighting for control of the land is fascinating. Some character’s motives are pure, some are not; some visions and desires are far-seeing and some are not. The chapters move from one character to the next, and the villain you’re despising in one chapter is the narrator you identify with in another. Only you get a glimpse of the big picture, and even then Martin obscures much of it from view. But the part that you can see is pure poetry, and has made me one of Martin’s faithful if impatient fans.

Books I plan to read in 2006

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 3, 2006
Post category:Books I've Read

Thirty-eight books that I already own and need to read. I’m setting these aside to pick up and read in 2006. I hope I’ll get through more than just these, but this would make a big dent in my “to read” stacks.

FEB 13, 2006 UPDATE:
I ended up breaking my new years resolution and buying a few books, which I’m now adding to the list, so I don’t keep up an endless spiral of stacks of books I don’t get to.

Absolute Watchmen – Alan Moore
I bought this after reading an Entertainment Weekly review that quoted some of my favorite writers and television producers as saying it was an enormous influence on them.

A Feast for Crows – George R. R. Martin
Read My Review

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her – Melanie Rehak

Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals – William Wright

YOU: The Owner’s Manual : An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger – Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet Oz

Fiction

Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel – by Sena Jeter Naslund

Al Capone Does My Shirts – by Gennifer Choldenko

Baudolino – Umberto Eco

Best Lesbian Erotica 2006 (Best Lesbian Erotica) – by Tristan Taormino, Eileen Myles
Read My Review

The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, Book 2) – Stephen King

The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, Book 3) – Stephen King

Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, Book 4) – Stephen King

Deception Point – Dan Brown

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

House of Leaves – by Mark Z. Danielewski

The House on the Point: A Tribute to Franklin W. Dixon and The Hardy Boys – by Benjamin Hoff

I, Robot – by Isaac Asimov

The Island of the Skull (King Kong) – by Matthew Costello

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – by Susanna Clarke

Life Mask – by Emma Donoghue

Memoirs of a Geisha – by Arthur Golden

Mr. Timothy – by Louis Bayard

The Nanny Diaries – by Emma McLaughlin, Nicola Kraus

Other Side of Desire – by Paula Christian

The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga – by Edward Rutherfurd

Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) – by Neal Stephenson

Stranger In a Strange Land – by Robert Heinlein
Read My Review

Slammerkin – by Emma Donoghue

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game – by Patricia Highsmith

The Time Traveler’s Wife – by Audrey Niffenegger

Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties – by Felicia Luna Lemus

Non-Fiction

The Classic Hundred Poems – by William Harmon

The Experts’ Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do – by Samantha Ettus

The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty – by Kitty Kelley

Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme – by Chris Roberts
Read My Review

The Hero with a Thousand Faces – by Joseph Campbell

How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization : The Time and Heroic Story of How Gay Men Shaped the Modern World – by Cathy Crimmins
I ended up not finishing this book because it wasn’t a serious history book. It was a tongue-in-cheek satire of other books on subculture groups that have an impact on mainstream culture. Funny, but not what I was interested in reading.

Jesus Is Not a Republican: The Religious Right’s War on America – by Clint Willis

Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else – by David Cay Johnston

The Right Decision Every Time : How to Reach Perfect Clarity on Tough Decisions – by Luda Kopeikin

Scaling Down – by Judi Culbertson and Marj Decker
Read My Review

The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry – by Bryan Sykes

A Short History of Nearly Everything – by Bill Bryson

Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life As Handed Down by Murphy and Other Sages – by Hugh Rawson

You Already Know What to Do: Ten Invitations to the Intuitive Life – by Sharon Franquemont

A Feast for Crows: starting the book

Post author:HFM
Post published:December 30, 2005
Post category:Books I've Read

I started reading one of the books I bought with my Barnes and Noble gift cards, A Feast for Crows this week. It’s the fourth book in the fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin. I really enjoy this series because it turns many of the tired fantasy cliches upside down, or simply ignores them. There’s very little magic in the series, and what there is is subtle and in the background. There’s no “farmboy with royal lineage who discovers his personal journey to find the throne while battling a wicked magician who lives in far off mountains,” thank god. Wikipedia gives a better explanation than I could:

A Song of Ice and Fire is set in a fictitious world reminiscent of Europe in the Middle Ages, except for the fact that in this world, seasons can last as long as a decade. Driven by members of the Houses, great and small, the plot is recounted from the perspectives of more than ten main characters and takes place on the continents of Westeros and the eastern continent, the former being the locale of fierce power struggles between several aristocratic families after the death of king Robert Baratheon, who by lineage, marriage and personal relationships had united them all.

The model for the series was England’s Wars of the Roses, and the story follows several different richly-drawn characters on different sides of the struggle. The thing I found compelling was that I sympathized with characters on both sides of the war who would have been allies in other circumstances but who found themselves at odds due to family loyalties and conflicting religious beliefs.

A Feast for Crows is starting pretty slowly for me, because it begins by following some minor characters that I can’t quite remember from the previous books. The gap between the publication of the last novel and this one was large; I read A Storm of Swords in 2002 and am struggling to remember where the series left off. I read over Wikipedia’s summaries, though, and was able to get my bearings, so I have an idea of who and where everyone is.

What I Read in 2005 (51 Titles)

Post author:HFM
Post published:December 28, 2005
Post category:Books I've Read

I’m going to change around a bit how I record the books I’ve read. This coming year, I’ll log titles by doing a short blog entry about them, instead of doing a running list as I have in years past. I’m shifting my past lists of books read over into my blog, as well under the category of “Books I’ve Read.”

Secret Societies

Post author:HFM
Post published:August 2, 2005
Post category:Books Books I've Read Current Events

I’m in the middle of reading:
Secret Societies Handbook
by Michael Bradley
A History of Secret Societies
by Arkon Daraul
And I’m fascinated, especially by the Handbook, because it lists the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome and the Council on Foreign Relations; all are real groups that seem to have major influence on world events. Which makes me glad that Wikipedia has a whole section for secret societies.

Mini review: The Radioactive Boy Scout

Post author:HFM
Post published:July 30, 2005
Post category:Books Books I've Read

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor
by Ken Silverstein
In 1997, teenage Boy Scout David Hahn, who had been engaging in home-brewed science experiments for years in his parent’s backyard in Detroit, Michigan, built himself a functioning model nuclear reactor in his mother’s garden shed. He obtained his many of his materials from household sources like smoke detectors and radium-painted clocks from the 1930s. Alarmed at the amount of radiation his reactor was producing, David tore it down, but eventually he had a random encounter with police who realized what he was up to and called in federal authorities: the FBI, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA, which eventual designated his mother’s home a Superfund hazardous materials site. Silverstein’s engaging tale is an eye-opening, must-read account of both David’s personals science experiment and of the illusive promises and frightening dangers of nuclear power plants.
I can’t help but wonder how different David’s experiments would have been if they have been conducted a mere 7 years later. If he had access to a personal computer and the internet, he might have had better luck with the social engineering he did contacting various labs to obtain materials. On the other hand, he might have had more information about the dangers of what he was doing, which hopefully would have made him more cautious. He also might have had access to other amateur science enthusiasts, who perhaps could have tempered, for better or worse, what he was doing. I think it’s unfortunate that David never found a mentor who could shepherd him into a productive scientific field; he dropped out of community college and spent time in the military, where he seems to be directionless today.

Mini Reviews

Post author:HFM
Post published:July 27, 2005
Post category:Books I've Read Movies

I’ve been meaning to write reviews for all these things for a while, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time. So here are my mini reviews, because I can’t seem to keep up with everything.

All the President’s Men
I watched this movie for the first time this past weekend, and it was excellent. I knew the basics of the Watergate Scandal, but there was a lot I didn’t know, like how far beyond the simple break-in the scandal went. I was most fascinated by (and surprised by) the movie’s accounts of what Donald Segretti called “ratfucking”; the war of illegal dirty tricks waged against the Democratic Party by CREEP, using the secret six million dollar slush fund. Segretti was employed by CREEP to torpedo Democratic candidates in numerous ways, including forging letters and planting fake news stories with the press. Interestingly, Karl Rove was involved in doing some of this illegal work, and it appears he never quit.

Newsfire RSS/XML Feed Reader
I’ve been reading most of my regular news sources and favorite blogs in a piece of software that pulls in RSS or XML syndication feeds and aggregates and organizes them. Because I’m on a Mac, I chose Newsfire, which is one of the more popular readers, but there are numerous Feed readers for the PC as well, many of them are shareware or free. It’s a much easier way to keep track of my favorite websites and to make sure I don’t miss posts by my friends.

The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
I didn’t enjoy this book as much as her previous book, The Secret Life of Bees. The heroine Jessie Sullivan returns to her childhood home on a tiny island to care for her disturbed mother, who in a fit of religious mania had cut off one of her fingers. While there, Jessie has an affair with one of the monks at the island monastery. I didn’t really buy into the “existential” angst that Jessie is supposedly feeling; the motivation for her affair. I kept wanting to tell her to get over it.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
by Ruth Reichl
This was a fun, quick read by Ruth Reichl, who was the food critic for the New York Times for several years in the 80s, before moving on to become a critic and editor of Gourmet magazine. Reichl recounts how she attempted to write restaurant reviews that were useful to regular people by visiting many New York restaurants in disguise to fool restaurant owners, who would otherwise recognize her and give her special treatment that other guests wouldn’t receive. The book is an enlightening insider’s view of both the New York restaurant scene and of The New York Times, as well as an education in fine dining and in gourmet appreciation. There are some great recipes in it, as well. The only thing that bothered me was that Reichl gets a bit too into the disguises she wears at times; she revels in creating characters that seemed to me a bit over the top.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Post author:HFM
Post published:July 17, 2005
Post category:Books Books I've Read

I finished reading the new Harry Potter book last night. Throughout the book I had a notion in my head of the answers to two of the mysteries; who the half-blood prince is, and who dies in the book (don’t yell at me about spoilers; the death is commonly known!). I was wrong on both counts, and regarding the half-blood prince, I shouldn’t have been at all. I should have guessed that one right away (and so should Harry and Hermione, frankly.)

I was so certain about both answers, though, that it colored my impression of the book, and I kept telling Stephanie all the way through that “this is my favorite of all of them!” Well when I found out the answers I was surprised, and it did change the way I feel. I was expecting a quite different ending.

I also thought there was way too much unresolved at the end of it; more so than in any of the others, and I hate that; it’s one of my pet peeves of sci-fi fantasy series novels, that they don’t wrap everything up from one book to the next so you’re left hanging for the release of the next book. If you’re going to do that, just write one big book, instead of chunking it up into pieces. My mind is littered with the half-way points of fantasy series that I gave up on in disgust because they insisted on dragging everything out for the cash from one more mass-market paperback. (Robert Jordan, I’m talking to you!)

In the case of Harry Potter, I’ve never felt like that with any of the rest of the books, and this series doesn’t follow any other sci-fi fantasy genre clichés, either, which makes them enjoyable to read. I know that the next book is the final one, and there’s no way I would miss it.

Stuff I’ve Read Lately

Post author:HFM
Post published:May 11, 2005
Post category:Books I've Read

The Broom of the System
David Foster Wallace
I read this for my book group, so I’m not going say much about it before we meet to talk about it, because the first rule of book group is “don’t talk about the book before book group.” But as far as David Foster Wallace goes, I wasn’t all that impressed.

The Sticklepath Strangler (Medieval West Country Mystery)
by Michael Jecks
I picked up this paperback mystery based on the cover, which was really kind of fun and looked somewhat like the Bayeux Tapestry. I learned my lesson about not judging a book by the cover, because the book itself wasn’t great. It’s a murder mystery set in a medieval village, and while the idea of that is interesting, the plot dragged on too long and the murders were pretty gruesomely described, which I think might have contributed to some of my nightmares after surgery. Not the best book to read in the hospital.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
by Paul Jordan
I remember reading about the Seven Wonders when I was a kid, so I ordered this book recently to learn more about them. I didn’t realize that it was the Greeks that determined which architectural feats were classified as “the seven wonders” and that their choices were based on their limited knowledge; other great architectural and artistic achievements (like the great wall of china) would probably have made the cut had the Greeks known about them. The book covers each “wonder” and what we know about it today, including recent archeological excavations of some of the sites.

Misfortune
by Wesley Stace
A pleasant historical fiction novel about a boy who is rescued as a baby from a trash heap by a rich lord, and who is raised as the lord’s next heir — as a girl. An odd, charming novel that was a nice light read.