What Are You Reading

[AmateisGal]

Just started "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah - only a few pages in, so no real opinion yet.

I'll be curious as to what you think of this one. I enjoyed it a lot.

 

[Fading Fast]

I'll be curious as to what you think of this one. I enjoyed it a lot.

About 100 pages in and, so far, enjoying it a lot, but feel that it is setting up the book to really take off. So far, it's competently drawing a picture of German occupied France that isn't groundbreaking, but is emotionally impactful. Now, I'm excited to see how Isabell does in the resistance.

 

[FStephenMasek]

You might also enjoy reading a book I just finished, as I learned quite a few things I'd not previously known. It is How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Another excellent book I recently enjoyed is Freedom's Forge, subtitle How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman.

The book What Hydronics Taught Holohan by Dan Holohan is not the technical book you might think, and is inspirational, plus funny at times.

 

[greatestescaper]

I've been hooked once again by Jim Butcher. This time, while waiting for Butcher's next Harry Dresden mystery I've picked up his new series The Aeronauts Windlass! It's proved an excellent read. A wonderfully painted world, full of vivid characters, well written action, and airships!

 

[AmateisGal]

Currently reading At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen (author of Water for Elephants, which I haven't read).

I dunno. I rather detest all of the main characters, and I keep hoping they will redeem themselves, but so far, nothing.

 

[Touchofevil]

Murray Sinclair's
Tough Luck L.A.

 

[Fading Fast]

Currently reading At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen (author of Water for Elephants, which I haven't read).

I dunno. I rather detest all of the main characters, and I keep hoping they will redeem themselves, but so far, nothing.

To enjoy a novel, I need someone to root for. I'm sure that's shallow, but I find books with all negative people that I dislike, eventually, fail to hold my interest.

 

[AmateisGal]

To enjoy a novel, I need someone to root for. I'm sure that's shallow, but I find books with all negative people that I dislike, eventually, fail to hold my interest.

Exactly. Which is why I'm not sure I'll keep reading this one...

 

[Fading Fast]

Exactly. Which is why I'm not sure I'll keep reading this one...

P.S. Half way through "Nightingale" and a big fan of both Vianne and Isabell.

 

[AmateisGal]

P.S. Half way through "Nightingale" and a big fan of both Vianne and Isabell.

Oh good!

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Make Me a Map of the Valley, being the journal of Jedediah Hotchkiss, topographical engineer under Stonewall Jackson.

 

[greatestescaper]

Make Me a Map of the Valley, being the journal of Jedediah Hotchkiss, topographical engineer under Stonewall Jackson.

Sounds keen. I think this is one I will have to order!

 

[AmateisGal]

Gave up on the novel I was reading. I skimmed through it to see how the story resolved, and was happy I didn't spend my time slogging through it.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Rereading Robert A. Heinlein's penultimate novel, The Cat who Walks through Walls. The kitten in question doesn't appear until page 288 of the paperback edition, but you don't miss him. Things happen in Heinlein novels -- as sf writer (and Heinlein devotee) Spider Robinson once wrote, "Heinlein is incapable of writing dull."

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Facts and Frauds in Woman's Hygiene: A Medical Guide Against Misleading Claims and Dangerous Products," by Rachel Lynn Palmer and Sarah K. Greenberg, M. D.

Published by Vanguard Press in 1936, this is a landmark book by women about women's bodies -- an ancestor of "Our Bodies Our Selves" and similar works. It's also a landmark work in the consumer rights movement, the first serious attempt to rip down the curtain of fraud, deception, and dangerous malarkey the Boys From Marketing had long drawn across women's health. Specifically addressed are the ways in which advertising creates and then exploits a sense of shame in woman toward the natural functions of their own bodies, along with chapters on drugs and nostrums sold for menstrual pain, for "inducing delayed menses," or to speak plainly, drugs sold to induce abortion, and the truth about what works and doesn't work in the way of contraception. Dangerous beauty and weight-loss products are also discussed in depth.

Those who think women had to wait until the 1960s or 1970s for this kind of hard-hitting, no-nonsense discussion of their own bodies would do well to obtain and read this book. You can change the names of the products and find much of the same nonsense being sold in your favorite drug store right now.

Dr. Sarah Greenberg, by the way, is deserving of a biography of her own. She was the first female OB/GYN in New York City, beginning her career in 1908, and was known as "The Angel of Williamsburg" by the thousands of working-class patients she served over the sixty years of her career in Brooklyn.

 

[newsman]

Steven F Cohins, "The victims have returned." A brief history of the soviet gulag.

Russian history would make a stone weep.

 

[AmateisGal]

Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures by Konstantin Akinsha and Grigoril Kozlov.

Fascinating look at the Soviet Trophy Brigades who went into Europe and specifically Germany, with lists of art they wanted to take back to the Soviet Union.

 

[Harp]

The flaw for me in "The Great Gatsby" is that Daisy isn't worth it, isn't close to being worth it, isn't even interesting. I get the whole "poor boy loves the unattainable rich girl" thing, but then the poor boy grows up, goes to war, builds a shady business and, eventually, should get over a early dull crush.

Homer's quip, "Aphrodite robs the wits of the wise, so'er prudent," describes Gatsby and Emily Bronte's character Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Just finished Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, where Cupid's dart flies fast and leaves a sting.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Salute To Spring," a 1940 collection of short stories by Meridel Le Seuer, one of the most acclaimed of the proletarian authors of the 1930s. The opening selection is a tale of the Dust Bowl, "Corn Village," which begins thusly:

"Like many Americans, I will never recover from my sparse childhood in Kansas. The blackness, weight, and terror of childhood in mid-America strike deep into the stem of life. Like desert flowers we learned to crouch near the earth, fearful that we would die before the rains, cunning, waiting the season of good growth. Those who survived without psychic mutilation have a life cunning, to keep the stem tight and spare, withholding the deep blossom. letting it sour rather than bloom and be blighted."

In other words, kiddies, this ain't "Little House on the Prairie."

 

[greatestescaper]

Lately I've had the taste for adventure, and also for some time in the wilderness. It'll be a while yet before I can get out there in the rugged Big Bend country again, as such I've started rereading such classics as Allan Quatermain.