6 posts tagged “books”

Finished reading the latest Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  The mister got it for me as a surprise about a month ago.  Good and funny as usual.  I had read several of the essays before (I guess in the New Yorker).  Still, he makes me laugh out loud.

Just finished The Courage to Survive by Dennis Kucinich (yep, that Kucinich).  It was good.  Easy to read.  Moved quickly.  Optimistic and interesting.

With all of the excitement in the last month, and the bigness of my belly, I haven't been sleeping much or well.  I've been up at night a lot reading in order to fall back asleep.  I almost never re-read books, but I just did.  I just think that David Sedaris is so funny.  I re-read Naked over the past 4 or 5 days and nights and enjoyed it all over again.

I also recently read a really great book about a totally unrelated subject.  New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan was really, really good.  I don't even know how this book got into my house, one day it was just on the bookshelf.  But I'm glad I picked it up.  I even found a way to cite it in the book that I'm working on writing.  Anyway...nobody associates the Northeast, or New York City with slavery--it's all about the South, right?  Well, that's wrong.  In the 1700s, slaves made up 20% of the population of NYC.  Amazing.  And the white people were so worried about slave rebellions that they basically did the Salem witch trials all over again in an effort to stamp out rumored slave uprisings.  The real irony is that at the same time the colonists were all about gaining freedom from England.  The were all about liberty and freedom while they were simultaneously keeping a large population of people in bondage.  Amazing. 

And, Jill Lepore is such a good writer.  Her sentences are so well-constructed and dramatic.  She takes what could be a really boring history book and made it fascinating and interesting, like a great novel.  It took me longer to read this book that I would have liked (about a month I think) but it was still really worth it.  And it wasn't her fault, it was that I'm a tired woman who falls asleep reading even the stuff I really want to read.  Anyway, highly recommended.

Where do you get recommendations for new books to read?

Anywhere I can.  Sometimes in bookstores.  Sometimes from reading magazines.  Sometimes for looking for other stuff while I'm at work. 

A couple of weeks ago, the mister sent me a news story about how Americans aren't reading anymore.  Maybe you saw it.  It made me remind myself that I read two books this summer and really liked both of them and that I read the New Yorker almost every week, pretty much cover to cover.  Made myself feel better.

And I've started another one this week, which is not this exact book pictured below but is actually a British version of the following book called, Social Theory, Social Policy, and Aging by Estes, Biggs, and Phillipson.  You get the idea.

Any reading suggestions for the fall?

I'm struggling to read Black Swan Green right now.  I'm only about 10 pages into it and I don't know how long I'll last.

The problem is mainly that it is written in English and I speak and read English.  I might be able to get into the story if I can just figure out what the hell they are saying.  Amazing that English really isn't English and vice versa.

In the past couple of days I've been flooded by work stuff that has to be done right now.  It's all good stuff, relatively easy stuff, but it's had to get done asap.  While that has been happening I keep having fleeting thoughts about stuff to blog about here but haven't had time to do any of them.  Here is a short, abbreviated list of those things:

• Interview with Amy Mann about the anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  She makes some interesting points, one of which is that it's good kids music.  She is right!  I LOVED that album as a child!
• Story on NPR about the wild parakeets in San Francisco, which reminded me about the film we watched last year called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, which was pretty good and about the same birds (and one man in particular who loves and cares for them).
• We've been waiting for the third season of Deadwood to be released on dvd.  For the last month or so we've been diligently watching seasons 1 and 2 and getting really into it.  We've been "out" of Deadwood for 2 weeks now and are ready for the next injection of evil.
• Heading to a warehouse sale put on by the Friends of Southern Nevada Libriaries this Sunday.  Our monkey is so addicted to books and reading (which is of course wonderful) but we get really sick of reading his same books over and over again (he doesn't seem to mind at all, however).  Gonna get a new supply and switch out some old ones.