Books read and a meme
- The Potter's Field: The Seventeenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, Ellis Peters. While tilling a field recently given to the Benedictine abbey at Shrewsbury, the body of a young woman is discovered. It may be the missing wife of the previous tenant, who left his wife abruptly a year earlier to join the abbey. Or maybe not, because the younger son of the landowner claims he has proof that she was recently seen alive. When an itinerant peddlar is arrested for the murder, the son is able to clear his name as well, making Cadfael think that the son may know more than he's saying about what happened. The overall mood of this one seemed more melancholy and dark than the other Cadfael books I've read so far. Still enjoyable as all of them are, but a little bit of a slog because of the gloom.
- Strapped : Why America's 20- and 30-somethings Can't Get Ahead, Tamara Draut. There is a strong assumption made in this book that everyone wants to do the "get married, buy a house, have kids" thing. These days, in order to achieve the comfortable middle-class existence (get middle-management job, get married, buy a house, have kids) previous generations could enjoy, you have to go to college. Going to college means starting out many thousands of dollars in debt. Since you've got so much student loan debt, you end up forced to live on credit cards and you can't afford to buy a house and can maybe barely afford to have kids. In short: you're screwed. Honestly, I'm about 20 pages from the end (where she lays out her suggestions for how to address the problem) and I just can't go back and pick it up to finish it. I hoped it would be more engaging than I found it.
- Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, Diana Gabaldon. The upcoming remarriage of Lord John Grey's mother introduces him to a new romance, and coincides with the mysterious receipt by his older brother and his mother of pages from one of his father's diaries which has been missing since his death (supposedly a suicide after being accused of being a Jacobite agent). John tries to find out who is sending the diary pages and to clear his father's name, which requires grudging assistance from Jamie Fraser. The real heart (as it were) of the story though is John's romance with Percy Wainwright, who is the stepson of the man John's mother is about to marry. If the idea of two men having a romantic and physical relationship bothers you, this is not a book you should pick up.
Also interspersed in there are chapters from "Databases Demystified" as part of a class I'm taking.
And now, a meme ganked from chadu:
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. (I've added asterisks next to the ones that are tagged "unread" in my own library.)
If you get the impression from this that I would rather poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick than read James Joyce, you'd be entirely correct.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell **
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel **
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius **
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed **
Cloud atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics!
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down **
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers