I finished 2 books recently: "Dear American Airlines" by Jonathan Miles and "Dr. Sweet and His Daughter" by Peter Bradshaw. Both were worth reading; the first is a better book, but is darker and more bittersweet. The latter handles family interactions beautifully, but the more fantastic elements are shakier (the author gets almost every detail of ( Read more... )

Apparently sales of Infinite Jest went way up shortly after author David Foster Wallace died early this week (an apparent suicide). These are just some random thoughts on DFW and IJ (partly to illuminate a recent status line I put on Facebook).

I liked Infinite Jest. I was surprised that it sold as well as it did, and it was a frustrating read, ( Read more... )

In the feel-good kinda trashy fantasy category - I just finished a trilogy by Elizabeth Kerner: Song in the Silence, The Lesser Kindred, and Redeeming the Lost. Manichean world view (with some subtleties), dragons, reasonable resolution, but room for a follow-up.

Also on the pile was Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton. I read it on the strength of ( Read more... )

I came across Twelve Miles from a Lemon in a used bookstore in ( Read more... )

I've been on something of a roll with actual fiction - I finished The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (no relationship to the Tom Cruise movie of the same name). It's not a perfect book but I quite enjoyed it. I also read Darkmans by Nicola Barker, and Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey. All highly recommended. But it might be time for another ( Read more... )

(written back in early January)
Recent adventures in reading. I just reread Catherine Asaro's first 3 Skolian Empire books (Primary Inversion, Catch the Lightning, and Last Hawk). All quite different, and overall pretty good stuff, if not exactly great literature. The Penn library has a big gap in the series, so I wandered to the nearest public ( Read more... )