What I've Just Finished Reading

Wendy Werris' memoir An Alphabetical Life: Living it Up in the World of Books picks up somewhat after Werris moves into her dream job as a publisher's representative, selling books to bookstores in the Southwest US. She meets people, makes friends, does her job well or poorly depending on circumstances, has a few ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

Samuel Johnson is Indignant is not a bad book and it's probably an admirable one, but I didn't like it. I didn't necessarily dislike it. I was just bored and felt kind of thick and heavy and occasionally mildly curious about my complete failure to like or dislike anything about it. In general, I liked the stories ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

Nothing since The Incredulity of Father Brown, unless you count a bunch of invoices for work (I don't).

What I'm Not Reading AnymoreThanks to everyone who recommended ditching [redacted]. Life is indeed too short for books you can't even muster the energy to hate ( Read more... )

I'm posting the Wednesday Reading Meme on time this week! That's a good sign, right? Let's just pretend it's a good sign.

What I've Just Finished Reading

The Innocence of Father Brown is basically great. I like Father Brown when he's blinking stupidly at the experts he's just outwitted and gently steering suspects toward a confession. I could do ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

P. D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin, which is probably the best-ever title for a murder mystery (if it's not Died in the Wool) and a good book, though it's a sign of how far down the genre rabbit hole I've gone in the past few months that I sometimes felt it was a little too "literary." It's very slow and sad, ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

So around page 200 or just before, all the good and bad pieces of The Naked and the Dead begin to click into place and it becomes REALLY GOOD. Mailer has a gift for creating sympathetically unlikeable characters. Actually, I'm not sure that he hasn't just re-written the stock characters of WWII-era propaganda ( Read more... )

I've fallen behind on posting because of an ongoing project at work (sorting through all the books from the flooded storage unit)


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What I've Just Finished Reading

Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio, first book in the Water Damage Club. It was all right! I wouldn't have read all the way through if left to my own devices, not because it was terrible, but because I've developed the bad habit of closing a book immediately if it doesn't grab me, and because it has a specific element ( Read more... )

I brought home a small box of books today from the bookstore. The local artist's guild had "borrowed" them to use in their window display and of course they got rained on. Some were still in good enough shape to go back on the shelf, but most of them were too damaged to sell. The owner asked me to take them to the recycling center, but I took them ( Read more... )