*** December - What are you reading?

DiscussieClub Read 2013

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*** December - What are you reading?

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1lilisin
nov 30, 2013, 1:24 pm

Santa Clause is comiiiiiing to toooooown!

Final month of the year! What books are you going to read to close out the year? Do you read more, or less, due to the holidays?

Let us know what you're reading!

2rebeccanyc
dec 1, 2013, 8:07 am

I actually finished this last night, but since it's now December I'll post it here: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, a novella with an interesting idea that didn't quite work.

3kidzdoc
dec 1, 2013, 8:39 am

I've just started reading A Thousand Morons, a collection of short stories written by the Catalunan author Quim Monzó.

4wandering_star
dec 1, 2013, 11:08 am

Ripping through the funny and clever Skios by Michael Frayn.

5bragan
dec 1, 2013, 4:37 pm

I started the month by finishing Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, which I very much enjoyed. Keeping up a vaguely scientific theme, I'm now reading This Is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens, and other WTF Research by Marc Abrahams. Next up should be Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff.

6avidmom
dec 1, 2013, 4:54 pm

>5 bragan: I can't wait for the review of This Is Improbable! Anything with magnetic chickens has got my vote already.

7Nickelini
dec 1, 2013, 6:20 pm

I'm just finishing The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, which is super-charged P&P that I highly recommend to any fans of the book.

8Mr.Durick
dec 2, 2013, 1:29 am

I finished Haru Yamada's book Friday night and Sunday afternoon returned to Goethe's Faust in the Norton Critical Edition. I read the introductory scene to part 2 and some commentary on it.

Robert

9baswood
dec 2, 2013, 9:05 am

I am reading Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin

10AnnieMod
dec 2, 2013, 12:40 pm

I am making my way through the Retrieval Artist series - now reading Recovery Man

11bragan
Bewerkt: dec 2, 2013, 5:04 pm

>6 avidmom:: I think the chickens were not so much actually magnetic, as apparently able to sense magnetic fields and use them to navigate. Scientists made the chickens find a ball, or something, and if they had to do it in a strong magnetic field, they got disoriented.

12Polaris-
dec 2, 2013, 8:06 pm

Today I listened to Under Milk Wood - A Play For Voices by Dylan Thomas. It was so good I promptly listened to it all over again. Wonderful wonderful writing.

13RidgewayGirl
dec 3, 2013, 4:33 am

I have finally finished In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak. It was a fantastic book which will need more than my usual haphazard review.

I'm currently reading Roseanna by Maj Sjowall, which is a police procedural set in Sweden and first published in 1965. The details about daily life are fascinating -- everyone is smoking up a storm and a transatlantic telephone call is an event.

14wandering_star
dec 3, 2013, 5:22 am

Now reading Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Very good.

15avidmom
dec 4, 2013, 10:26 pm

Chocolate Wars turned out to be an excellent read and now I'm on to a Christmas read: In the Dark Streets Shineth by David McCullough. It's a very small book and I discovered there is an accompanying DVD with it. :)

16fuzzy_patters
dec 4, 2013, 10:33 pm

I'm reading We Are What We Pretend to Be: The First and Last Works by Kurt Vonnegut. I've always enjoyed reading Vonnegut, so this if very exciting for me.

17Esta1923
dec 5, 2013, 12:39 am

Three unread books by Samuel Selvon, long on my shelf, caught my eye. I've just begun reading them.

18RidgewayGirl
dec 5, 2013, 7:25 am

I've finished Roseanna, and have added all of the other books in the Martin Beck series to my wish list and now I can really start Saints of the Shadow Bible by Ian Rankin.

I also started The End of the World as We Know It, a memoir by Robert Goolrick (the guy who wrote A Reliable Wife) and it is excellent so far.

19NanaCC
dec 5, 2013, 7:36 am

I finished reading The Worshipful Lucia and the first book in the Dr Siri series, The Coroner's Lunch. I like the Dr Siri book, so decided to listen to the second one, Thirty-Three Teeth.

On Monday, Amazon had over 4,000 books at Daily Deal prices as part of their Cyber Monday sale. I picked up 12 books, with a few of them being first of a series. I figured $1.99 was a good way to see if I might like the series. Between Chris and I, we picked up 21 books. I decided to start Rest You Merry by Charlotte MacLeod. It is first in a series, and fits into my reading light and cozy for December.

20lilisin
dec 5, 2013, 10:25 am

I'm currently reading Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook. It's a very easy read so far compared to his other works but I'm still working on finding what it's about although I have formed a few ideas. Interested to see where it leads.

21dchaikin
Bewerkt: dec 5, 2013, 10:57 pm

Currently:
Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas - just picked this up again. I'm 1/3 through
A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz - The current audio book for my commute
A Geologic Adventure Along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina - because I was just there
Cuba by Richardo Pau-Llosa - a poetry collection I started in September

22StevenTX
dec 7, 2013, 11:43 am

Last night I read the 1772 gothic novella The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte as part of my science fiction/fantasy/horror cycle. The next book up in that cycle will be The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, another gothic work.

In the meantime I'm reading...

The Histories by Herodotus - second reading just as much fun as the first

Clear Horizon by Dorothy Richardson... on the home stretch in Pilgrimage, but this is turning out to be the most difficult of the series so far

Night and Day by Virginia Woolf - a work I shouldn't have started when I did because it's too similar to Pilgrimage but I needed something to read as an ebook while waiting for the dentist

Julie or The New Heloise by Jean-Jaçques Rousseau - just a few pages so far to get the feel of it

Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell - halfway through this chivalric romance and suddenly it's gotten extremely weird with the discovery of a centuries-old King Arthur living in a cage in Byzantium spouting wisdom like a philosopher parrot.

23avaland
dec 7, 2013, 1:03 pm

I'm reading:

Color: A Natural History of the Palette or, as my UK edition says: Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay (2002, nonfiction)

We Are All Equally Far from Love by Adania Shibli (I misplaced it and just found it yesterday) (2013, fiction)

Black Skies by Arnaldur Ondridason (Icelandic crime novel).

Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong by Joyce Carol Oates (2013, collection).

It would be nice to clean them all up before the end of the year, wouldn't it?

24kidzdoc
dec 7, 2013, 7:00 pm

I've finished two books so far today: A Thousand Morons by the Barcelonian author Quim Monzó, a very good short story collection recently published by Open Letter, and Heads and Straights: The Circle Line, the last of the 12 Penguin Underground Lines books that I've read; that book had nothing to do with the Circle Line, but it was still an entertaining read.

I'll start reading The Sixty-Five Years of Washington by the Argentinian author Juan José Saer this evening.

25avidmom
dec 7, 2013, 8:58 pm

I've started Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the First Hundred Days That Created Modern America by Adam Cohen.

26rebeccanyc
dec 8, 2013, 12:10 pm

I just finished Deep Rivers by José Maria Arguedas, a haunting and at times painful story of a boy caught between the white and indigenous cultures in Peru.

27dchaikin
dec 8, 2013, 10:47 pm

Yesterday I flipped through Guy Delisle's Pyongyang and A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting, the later took about 30 minutes. Also, I'm getting serious about Religion and the Decline of Magic. I have been reading a library paperback edition, but today I splurged on a Kindle version.

28Polaris-
dec 9, 2013, 1:43 pm

Just finished and reviewed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas. It was his first collection of short stories, published in 1940 and semi-autobiographical covering his childhood, youth and early adulthood as a cub reporter at the local newspaper.

Am now reading The Coen Brothers by Ronald Bergan.

29rebeccanyc
dec 11, 2013, 11:30 am

I just finished the puzzling and obsessive Scars by Juan José Saer.

30baswood
Bewerkt: dec 11, 2013, 12:04 pm

I am reading Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus

31japaul22
dec 11, 2013, 12:44 pm

Just finished the perplexing but enjoyable The Luminaries. Now on to The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary and determined to finally finish Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner.

32Mr.Durick
dec 11, 2013, 5:48 pm

I believe I am and claim to be reading Faust, but I am making greater headway in How to Read a Film, fourth edition. I will finish the movie book, but I think it is startlingly empty for a book gone four editions.

Robert

33dchaikin
dec 11, 2013, 6:53 pm

Flipping audio books. Finished A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Howitz, which was only OK. Started One Summer: America, 1927 by and read by Bill Bryson. I'm getting an entertaining lesson in the travails of early attempts at long distance flying (in Europe and America).

34NanaCC
Bewerkt: dec 11, 2013, 8:14 pm

I finished reading Rest You Merry and have started the fourth and final book by Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave. I have also started listening to Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. This was the first and could also be the last in the Bryant & May series., as it takes place before (through flashbacks) and after all of the other books in the series. I have to say that this has been one of my favorite audio mystery series. The reader, Tim Goodman is perfect. The stories are a blend of great mystery, humor, and some history of London thrown in for good measure. (I'll save the rest for my comments after I finish the book).

35bragan
dec 12, 2013, 1:44 pm

I'm reading my latest ER book, Joss Whedon and Religion, which is interesting, and is kind of making me want to haul out my old Buffy DVDs. Next up is Mary Poppins, the latest in my off-and-on revisitings of various books from my childhood. (Although, while I'm pretty sure I did read that one at some point, I remember almost nothing about it at all. Heck, I don't even remember the movie all that well. So it should be interesting.)

36.Monkey.
dec 12, 2013, 2:44 pm

>35 bragan: Ooh I just last month bought a little box-set of the first 3 Mary Poppins, I'm not sure that I ever read any of them!

37rebeccanyc
dec 13, 2013, 8:02 am

I finished Open Door, a puzzling and brief novel by a highly praised young Argentine writer, but I wasn't wowed by it.

38rebeccanyc
dec 14, 2013, 1:07 pm

And now I've finished The Unknown Masterpiece, and Gambara, two novellas about artistic obsession by Balzac.

39rebeccanyc
dec 21, 2013, 9:19 am

I've finished and reviewed the stunning 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning by Slavko Goldstein, a personal and historical examination of the horrors of 1941 in Croatia and how they reverberated through the years.

40Nickelini
dec 21, 2013, 12:57 pm

I'm starting The Light Between the Oceans because it's my book club read for early January.

41fuzzy_patters
dec 21, 2013, 2:49 pm

I'm reading Baseball's Creation Myth: Adam Ford, Abner Graves and the Cooperstown Story by Brian Martin. I have read about 2/3 of it. So far, Martin has done a great job of explaining the main characters involved in creating the Cooperstown myth, putting them in their historical context, and explaining the need for baseball's origins to be American in the imperialist early-1900s US.

42bragan
dec 22, 2013, 8:02 pm

I'm reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Which I was looking forward to for ages, because I really loved The Moonstone, but I'm afraid I'm finding it terribly slow going.

43NanaCC
dec 22, 2013, 8:12 pm

I finished The Code of the Woosters last night, and should finish Hercule Poirot's Christmas tonight. I just started listening to Her Royal Spyness. It seems like a good book to listen to while wrapping presents.

44timjones
dec 22, 2013, 11:18 pm

A horrendous December of deadlines is over - at least, December isn't over, but the deadlines are past. So I've just polished off the excellent Iceland Saga by Magnus Magnusson, am just about to resume my re-read of Dante's Divine Comedy - currently half-way through "Inferno" - and am heading down to the public library tomorrow for some holiday reading. On the Kindle, I have horror anthology Fresh Fear: Contemporary Horror waiting for me.

Xmas through mid-January is the main holiday period in New Zealand. I'm looking forward to getting some books read!

45rebeccanyc
dec 26, 2013, 10:17 am

I was sorry to finish the magnificent The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, a collection of seven novellas that is as much philosophical as it is adventurous.

46avidmom
dec 26, 2013, 11:46 am

I am reading So Long Insecurity, You've Been A Bad Friend to Us by Beth Moore, which was a Christmas present from my cousin, while also happiliy working my way through my son's favorite YA book Two Parties, One Tux and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman.

47baswood
dec 26, 2013, 1:41 pm

I am reading New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

48StevenTX
dec 26, 2013, 2:02 pm

I recently finished Thaïs by Anatole France. I've got several (too many!) books in progress, but the one that interests me most at the moment is The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. It's short, but I can't read it at night for fear of nightmares (which is something I've never felt about any other book I've read).

49baswood
dec 27, 2013, 5:15 pm

I am starting Notebooks 1942-1951 by Albert Camus. As these are literally jottings in his notebooks I am not sure whether I will read them straight through or intersperse them with other reading.

50AnnieMod
dec 27, 2013, 8:58 pm

Still reading the Retrieval Artist novels - on Duplicate Effort now. The way things are going, I will be still on them when the new year rolls in :)

For anyone that likes crime novels and SF rolled into one, the series is highly recommended - but read in order - even if they can be read as singles, the backstory makes the books a lot better :) Reviews and thoughts about them will probably go into my 2014 thread - not in the mood to write just now...

PS: Happy holidays everyone!

51fuzzy_patters
dec 28, 2013, 2:55 am

I'm reading The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin. Its about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's been interesting so far.

52Polaris-
dec 30, 2013, 1:53 pm

I just finished Tenth of December by George Saunders. I gave it 3.5 stars as I thought a lot of the writing was good, but the collection of short stories was a mixed bag - some of them were very strong, while others left me cold and unaffected. My review is on the book's page.

53Nickelini
dec 30, 2013, 1:54 pm

I finished my final book for the year--The Light Between the Oceans. My short review is at my ClubRead thread. I found it manipulative, but not a bad book.