Just finished The Rampart trilogy by MR Carey and I was unavailable to everyone for the week in which I read… no… inhaled the 3 long, juicy books. An absolutely delightful post-apocalyptic adventure that was un-put-downable.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach is amazing.
Just make sure you have pen and paper nearby to jot down some summaries, and most importantly: to do your homework. When Hofstadter asks you to do some simple logic excercises in a minimal formal language, don’t skip over them like I did on my first attempt through this book. It’s so, so much better if you treat it like a fun work-and-study book.
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Might be my favorite book of all time. I got to meet Hofstadter once and talk about it and it was an incredible experience.
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I don’t read thrillers or detective novels that much, but I recently finished Elizabeth George’s In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner and I really enjoyed it. Well-drawn characters, winding and rejoining plot-paths, interesting backstory and setting.
→ Elizabeth George - Wikipedia
Once in a while, when I draw a blank as to which book to read next, I let my son pick one off the bookshelf. He chose perhaps the most boring-looking specimen of them all: worn black cloth-wrapped hardcover with no discerning features except the title and the authors’ names in plain font. No pictures, no colours, no blurb on the back. A second-hand book that most probably had a shiny-paper cover wrapped around it with the blurb and title/picture, which got lost.
The content, however, is fascinating: 1000 pages of intrigue at the Emperor’s Court in 8th century China. Allegedly based in historical fact, but I can only imagine how much fictionalisation it must have taken to squeeze a novel for a western audience out of 1200 year-old Chinese court-documents.
Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Altieri: The Court of the Lion
(first part of a trilogy about the T’ang dynasty)
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I’ve been reading Joe Abercrombie’s First Law/Age of Madness books and really loving them. If you’re looking for a zippy fantasy series with 6 fat books in it, I recommend them.
But the most interesting thing I read this month was a happy accident of going through our personal library and reading all the books in it I’ve never read (in alphabetical order), which are many because Tom & I combined big book collections and because we’re part of a peer group that’s always circulating books that sometimes get shelved and forgotten. Anyway, I’m into the Bs, and found an ancient paperback copy of Blatty’s The Exorcist. So old that it’s pre-movie. Yellowed, brittle pages. And I realized I’d never read it, only seen the movie. And wow, does that movie hew closely to the book. More closely than I’ve ever seen. Dialogue that I remember Ellen Burstyn saying. Images and scenes that were faithfully filmed. It’s really a pretty good book, and it was interesting to see how devoted Friedkin was to his source material.
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I’m reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Before that, I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, and Blood Meridian is probably the best. The language and descriptions are fantastic.
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The Mighty Onion by Mark Crilley
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