Books for the autumn

[Scrabblemaster]

I started a new topic although it is technically still summer, but for me autumn already began. And because I have loads and loads an tons of work to do, I won't start these books right away. I will buy these  books. Normally I would wait until I can borrow them from the library but I became a very slow reader in the last couple of months due to less time. Last time I borrowed 2 books from the library I did not read them in 7 weeks until I gave them back because I gave up. 

I definitely will read "Ida" from Katharina Adler. The book is about the great-grandmother from the author, Katharina Adler, and she is the client Sigmund Freud called Dora. It's about her life and I want to read it because she was more than just a client from Freud and she deserves to get a voice. The book is only available in german, when I understood amazon right. 

I will read "The accidental further adventures of the hundred-year-old-man" from Jonas Jonasson. I read the first one and listened to the Audio books of the other two books (the girl who saved the king of sweden, and Hitman Anders and the meaning of it all). 

I want to read the second book from Deborah Feldmann, "Exodus". I read Unorthodox because one of you recommended it, so I want to know how the story goes on. 

I wanted to add Frank Schätzing's  Die Tyrannei des Schmetterlings (no idea if there is an english version...sorry) but I have a love or hate relationship with that author. I don't want to spend my money on a hardcover book I will hate. For this book I will wait for my turn on the list in the library. Well, or not. Maybe I won't read it at all. 

That's all for now. 

[CTRLZero]

I may have mentioned that I binge read a lot of fiction in the summer (and not all of it very high quality, ahem).  I am finishing up a couple time travel novels by Nathan Van Coop, which turned out to be better than I'd expected.

As the days turn colder and darker, I intend to tackle some non-fiction.  I need to pick up Hamilton again (I only got part way through).  My husband has been reading a book entitled Ghost Soldiers:  The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides.  When he's done, I think I'll start on that.  I am also tempted to invest in Bob Woodward's latest on Trump, Fear: Trump in the White House.

[Kailash]

I just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is an amazing book. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time. It was worth the wait! 

[SilverBeach]

On 9/8/2018 at 2:27 PM, Kailash said:

I just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is an amazing book. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time. It was worth the wait! 

One of my all-time favorite books. Check out the movie starring Oprah. Such a tragedy, what happened to the family.

[louisa05]

I am struggling to find anything interesting that is not YA. 

Two things I am tired of in popular fiction: 

1--The hero/heroine forced to go home to the small town that they left or move to one they've never been to against their will and stay for some reason. The small town then solves all of their life problems and fulfills them because small towns are full of special, wonderful, loving people who will bestow a happy, fulfilling life on all who move in to them. I strongly suspect that the people who write these books never lived in very small towns and if they did, they certainly didn't move in as an outsider. 

2--Four hundred and ninety seven points of view. I am so sick of picking up a novel, starting to read and getting engaged by a character and situation then turning the page to chapter two only to be reading from the point of view of a brand new character. Then another in chapter three. And another in chapter four. And so on and so on until I'm not sure who's who or what's going on anymore. There is nothing wrong with a plot from the point of view of one well developed character. We didn't need a chapter in To Kill A Mockingbird from the point of view of Scout's teacher to understand her school experience. We needed Scout to be a well developed character to understand that. 

For some reason, it seems that YA is, thus far, immune to both trends. But sometimes, I would like to read an adult book. 

 

[Maggie Mae]

20 hours ago, louisa05 said:

1--The hero/heroine forced to go home to the small town that they left or move to one they've never been to against their will and stay for some reason. The small town then solves all of their life problems and fulfills them because small towns are full of special, wonderful, loving people who will bestow a happy, fulfilling life on all who move in to them. I strongly suspect that the people who write these books never lived in very small towns and if they did, they certainly didn't move in as an outsider. 

This was a "thing" in YA fiction when I was growing up.  It's also popular on TV shows - Buffy, Everwood, Northern Exposure. 

I have to say, as someone who went from one place to another, I am sorely disappointed in the expectations that popular culture gave me about living in a small town. People are not that nice. 

I wish I had a book to recommend for you. Have you tried non-fiction? I like reading funny people's autobiographies. 

[AliceInFundyland]

Someone recommended Ravensbruck. It’s excellent. If you want to read a well-crafted history of a lesser known women’s concentration camp. It’s 750 pages long. It goes into great detail about the various groups who ended up there (most of whom were not Jewish) I learned a lot of things I didn’t know. Especially about the end of the war  

Then I fell down a hole and watched Genocide (Oscar winning doc from 1981) and Nazi Children (on Amazon Prime as well).

I need light fiction now. 

[louisa05]

5 hours ago, Maggie Mae said:

This was a "thing" in YA fiction when I was growing up.  It's also popular on TV shows - Buffy, Everwood, Northern Exposure. 

I have to say, as someone who went from one place to another, I am sorely disappointed in the expectations that popular culture gave me about living in a small town. People are not that nice. 

I wish I had a book to recommend for you. Have you tried non-fiction? I like reading funny people's autobiographies. 

I read a lot of non-fiction. I recently read both of Mindy Kaling's books and Amy Poehler's. Fun stuff. I am limited by the digital collection my library has access to, also. I've read a lot of pretty serious non-fiction lately, too, so I have been in the mood for some good fiction. 

I lived in a series of very small towns growing up. I think they can be quite lovely if you are from one of the two or three big families who never left (and every small town has two or three families like that who are the important people in town no matter how useless they are). But otherwise, most are not welcoming to outsiders. And the "nice" people are actually nosy and gossipy and often lack normal boundaries. So I just don't buy that trope in books or on television. 

 

 

[Kailash]

@louisa05 Have you read The Dry by Jane Harper?  It’s about a man who returns “home” only for a funeral. (No great welcoming/this place is awesome). It’s set in Australia so that was interesting to me also. 

[louisa05]

15 hours ago, Kailash said:

@louisa05 Have you read The Dry by Jane Harper?  It’s about a man who returns “home” only for a funeral. (No great welcoming/this place is awesome). It’s set in Australia so that was interesting to me also. 

Nope. I'll look for it.  

I get the reason for the "going home" trope. I do have an English degree after all. It is one of the archetypal themes of western literature. But I think that it is currently overused in one limited way. Odysseus goes out and then returns home. His story is about the desire for home and the journey as much as it is about what happens when you are home. He also doesn't find easy perfection when he gets there. But more than anything, it is the romanticizing of small town America that irritates me. Like I said, I suspect the writers doing it have no real experience of that world. And why not a story of someone returning home to the city? Or why not the story of going out and then returning home? Why just the return? 

Another one that my library's "new arrivals" page is full of is the story of the adoption of the dog who makes everyone's life perfect. No idea where that one came from, but, really? Pets are wonderful. But it's mostly about picking up poop and cleaning up shedded fur, not personal transformation. 

And this being a small conservative town, they also have lots of Christian fiction. Just three words for that: kill me now. 

[formergothardite]

On 10/3/2018 at 5:07 PM, louisa05 said:

Four hundred and ninety seven points of view.

I'm finding this to be getting old too. I just finished Dry by Jarrod and Neal Shusterman and I got annoyed because we would have multiple points of view and then suddenly it would be from the point of view of a totally new person. 

This is a book about a drought where most of California runs totally out of water.  I hated the main female character. She was of those characters who did super stupid life threatening things that I find takes me out of the story because it just isn't realistic. 

Spoiler

The main characters got miraculously saved one too many times for me. 

I got to the end of the book and I'm still not sure what point the authors were trying to make. 

Spoiler

It didn't seem to be that we should plan for the worsts because the characters who did that were made to seem selfish and bad. It wasn't that if you do plan and have water you should share because that was also shown to be bad. At the end the problem wasn't really solved and people were still shown taking showers that they admitted wasted water so it wasn't that they learned some important lesson or figured out how to live in a world where one area becomes uninhabitable and where it wasn't feasible to continue shipping water from far places. 

 

[clueliss]

As a mystery/suspense reader can we please be done/over unreliable narrator stuff?  

[formergothardite]

I've been in a reading slump this fall. During the summer I found so many books I enjoyed reading but this fall I haven't had as much luck. Any suggestions? 

[CTRLZero]

On 11/1/2018 at 5:46 AM, formergothardite said:

I've been in a reading slump this fall. During the summer I found so many books I enjoyed reading but this fall I haven't had as much luck. Any suggestions? 

I've been going through the same thing.  I binge read a bunch of light fiction per usual over the summer.  The minute the weather changed, I haven't been able to really concentrate (except for hours at FJ).  Maybe it's election anxiety.

Anyway, I was looking on the bookshelf at home this evening and found a book called "Appalachia: A History" by John Alexander Williams.  I've leafed through it a few times, but am going to tackle it as it's a geographic area I have an interest in.  It has photos and maps, so that should pull me along through the chapters.

Good luck on restarting your reading. 

[PennySycamore]

I picked up Mansfield Park after I got home from the Jane Austen Festival this July.  As a lighter read and because two of my daughters had been to see the movie Crazy Rich Asians, I read that trilogy by Kevin Kwan.   Good fun light reading.  My next light reading (what I read when I'm not reading MP) was Lover, Come Hack by Diane Vallere.  I'm not sure what I think about the book.  It was okay, but one of the major elements of the book (Jane Strong ending her partnership and friendship with Madison Night) seems unmotivated/ is never explained and the author uses the term "pregnant pause" twice by the middle of the novel.  I know I'd read another novel by Kevin Kwan, but I think I'd skip another one by Diane Vallere.

This is NOT light reading, but I just started Boy Erased by Garrard Conley.  It is excellent and heartbreaking!  Garrard was from Arkansas and the son of a Missionary Baptist preacher.  (Missionary Baptist is a demomination of Baptist.)  Garrard is sent to Love in Action, an "ex-gay ministry" that operated out of Memphis.  It's a good exploration of the kind of psychological  bullshit that the kids in fundie families could be subjected to if they were suspected of being LGBTQ. It also describes the tight leash that fundie kids are put on.   Maybe I can see the movie soon.  

[AuntKrazy]

@PennySycamore

I wanted to ask if you saw the Boy Erased movie yet and what you thought?  I want to both see it and read the book; but normally I try to see the movie first because otherwise, I always am normally disappointed in the film.

[PennySycamore]

@AuntKrazy,  I have not seen the movie yet and may have to wait until it comes out on Netflix or DVD.  My car's been acting up since early October and right now she's just sitting in the garage.  She gets a new engine later this week.  I hope the movie is as good as the book.