First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: A Pox On Me

41 Comments

I just finished a week off, for which I'm appropriately thankful. I can't wait to see what kind of mess the office is in.... Nah, I'm sure everything is fine. I work for the gubmint, after all.

Even with the week off, I didn't get much reading done. I blame HBO's free weekend, or something. Truth be told, I'm still trying to finish The Black Count (highly recommended).

But for the sake of this feature, I started something new last night: Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox.

I'm only a chapter in, so it is a bit premature to be assessing. My main fear is that the author is trying to hard to story-ify the history. Whereas Tom Reiss's The Black Count manages to tell an engaging story while clearly maintaining a popular historian's quasi-scholarly edge, Carrell's book (or the first chapter, at least) swings much further into literary territory, striving to read more like a novel.

That said, others have praised her book for historical and medical accuracy. So, she's got that going for her. I'll see how far I get.

What are you reading?

41 thoughts on “First Monday Book Day: A Pox On Me”

  1. Switched from the roughly million short stories to the Hardball Times Annual. More to comment next month.

    In an effort to get the boy started early with his science fiction literature, this short list from NPR was very helpful.

  2. I finished Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance. I've never been a big philosophy guy, so I didn't really get into the philosophical reasoning. I would, however, like to read a straight-up travelogue/motorcycle maintenance book.

    I also read City of Thieves. Sat down on a Saturday and read the whole thing. It was pretty engrossing, and not too terribly difficult of a read. Would recommend. Regarding Benioff (author of CoT and GoT showrunner) and the character of Vika - she has to be based, even if on some unconscious level, on Ygritte from GoT. A strong, female redhead from a group of roving warriors who takes no shit off of anyone, be they the Night's Watch or Einsatzgruppen.

  4. Finished Egil's Saga (Zombieman, you had a recommendation for me, right?). Good stuff. Just found my book of Flannery O'Connor's short stories the other day. I intend to re-read some of those before too long.

    1. Ooh, I love Flannery O'Connor's short stories (or at least, I did when I last read a bunch of them).

  5. I had two library books that I had requested finally show up this month. First, I read Kathryn Davis's Duplex after hearing a review on NPR or something. I don't usually dabble in modern fiction and this was a good reason why. It had brief interesting moments, but on the whole didn't do much for me. Oh well...

    I finished The Day of Battle yesterday to complete Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy. I think each book was progressively less interesting to me, but that is probably because each subject has been progressively oversaturated in coverage by other sources. Still, it was an excellent read.

    Now, I'm back to War and Peace.

      1. I recently finished the chapter(s) on Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in The Black Count. I'm really starting to wonder how that little [redacted} didn't get his head chopped off during the revolutionary/republican era.

        1. Saw that graphic at an E. Tufte presentation at Yale a whilst back. Napoleon Russian march is classic. Also London cholera well-graphified.

  6. I finished my Halloween read before Thanksgiving!

    I read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Two women live alone with their disabled uncle in a manor house near a village that despises them. Rumors have swirled for a long time regarding the fate of their family who used to live in the house. It was appropriately haunting and unsettling, although more "gothic" than "horror" if that makes any sense. It's the first I've read of Jackson outside of "The Lottery" and I thought it was pretty good.

    I finished High Tide by Inga Abele (from Latvia). The story of a woman's life told in reverse from multiple points of view. There were a lot of ideas here that made me stop and think, and I appreciated the approach of the book and really enjoyed the first half. That said, it was a hard book to get into, the pace was slow (which worked well in places). Glad to have read it, but not sure it would make my favorites list.

    On the plane home yesterday I read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse. It's a modern setting of one of the labors of Hercules told from the point of view of Geryon, the all-red monster that Hercules had to slay in order to steal his cattle. This is an ambitious book, the images are very good, and although I doubted it would get to a satisfactory ending, it ended up working out pretty well. This one might benefit from a re-read, but I'll save that for another time.

    Lastly, I want to highly recommend Gabe Durham's Fun Camp. The story of a week at summer camp told in snippets and fragments. At some point I'm going to buy a physical copy so that I can have it on my bookshelf, the narrative voice was perfect for me, and I found myself marking page after page for a line or a paragraph that I wanted to remember or use in some way. It's a short little book, but it might be my favorite of 2013.

    --------------------

    After I read Fun Camp, I sent an email to the publisher, gushing about how much I loved it (it was published by a small indie press, Publishing Genius). The guy who runs the press responded by sending me a free copy of another of their e-books, Pee on Water by Rachel Glaser, which I'm reading now. Short stories that I'm still trying to get a handle on. I've only made it two stories in so far, so I'm holding off judgement.

  7. I slacked and then took up 5 days at Memorial seriously over the weekend. I'm a little over half way through, and can tell you that I've had nightmares about flooding and making extremely difficult moral choices. I've come the the section of the book where the lawyers and state investigators make their entrance. While I haven't finished the book I still can offer a recommendation if you have any interest in the immediate, and lasting, effects of hurricane Katrina. Dr. Chop and I went to see Ms. Fink talk about the book a couple of weeks ago, and we both decided to exit early. The talk was painful to watch because the author was clearly afraid of her audience. I respect that talking about the storm, and great burden placed on caregivers, is still a sensitive topic, but if you wrote the words you need to be willing to defend them.

  8. Catch & Release by Blythe Woolston a strange little YA novel in which two teen survivors of a MRSA outbreak take a road trip/fishing trip. There were some wonderful sentences in this. The main characters were compelling, but I found I wanted more from this book--more description, more plot, more digging into who these people are.

    The Real Boy by Anne Ursu. I loved Ursu's Breadcrumbs when it came out a couple years ago. This is an engrossing middle-grade fantasy told from the point of view of Oscar, young boy who lives with and works for the local magician on the island of Aletheia. Bad things start to happen, and Oscar and the healer's apprentice Callie get caught up in trying to figure out what is really going on. Oscar is an awkward, endearing character and in discovering the truth about Aletheia, he learns more about himself as well. (I know that's a big ol'cliché, but I promise Ursu pulls it off well.) Nice use of language throughout--no easy feat in a book for younger readers. My one criticism is that I wish the character of the magician had been more fully developed.

    2. I'd like to read more by Anne Ursu. I've only read The Disapparation of James, but I liked that one a lot. Plus, she rules forever for being Bat Girl.

      2. I read both Thd Disapparation of James and Spilling Clarence and really liked them both a lot.

  9. I just finished reading something called The Force #1: Deadly Snow by someone using the name Jake Decker. It's a cut-rate spy novel from the 80's that I got at a flea market for 25 cents. It's jam-packed with preposterous dialogue, ridiculous scenarios, and psychic powers(!). And even for genre dreck it's laughably sexist. But it's shockingly well-written from a technical standpoint, which made it kinda fun to rip through.

    I also finished The Peripatetic Coffin, a short story collection by Ethan Rutherford that has been sitting on my shelf forever. It was generally pretty good, but I don't have much to say other than that. The sort of stories that are enjoyable enough to read but aren't very memorable.

    Right now I'm re-reading The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno. It's still one of my favorite books of all time.

    My sister also recently gave me access to her Audible.com library, and I've been listening to To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis. It's a time-travel farce that's as goofy as the title suggests, but it's really fun so far.

    1. But it's shockingly well-written from a technical standpoint

      It's amazing how many novels from the 70's and 80's that this is true about. I read Alistair Maclean, Louis L'amour and other authors of that period while I was growing up, and though much of the dialogue and plots were not so good, they definitely took pains to get a lot of the smaller details right.

  10. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card: I read a bit of science fiction in middle school and high school so I'm not sure how I missed this back then. It would have been right up my alley - even the thirty-something me really enjoyed it.

    Stardust - Neil Gaiman: A "fairy tale for grown-ups" and a well-done one at that. This was different than any of his adult fiction in tone, but sort-of a perfect middle-ground if you've read his 'children's' stuff as well. Tore through it in ~36 hours.

    Mortal Prey - John Sanford: I don't like to start a series from anywhere but the first book, but I picked this up at the thrift store not knowing it was #13 out of 23...I've been sitting on it for about 2 years and realized I probably wasn't going to seek out the first 12, so I started reading. It's been interesting so far, but I really regret my decision not to go through the back catalogue first.

    Northwest Angle - William Kent Krueger: First Prey, then this. Read a half-dozen pages and realized I'd done it again. I have to pay more attention!

    1. I read some of Sanford's Prey novels, but gave up after they all started blending together. I always eventually lose interest in open-ended detective series, but that might be because I never start them with the first novel, either.

  11. Bought The Black Count and am into in 20-30 pages. Tell me it gets better and I will stick it out…

    Started The Dante Club. Kinda crusty but still going.

    Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow still sitting on the table in the sunroom, calling to me. Tough read, but it seems worth it.

    1. Tough read, but it seems worth it.

      It is, indeed. Dr. Chop suggests you read it in episodic bites to keep from reaching overload.

    2. Bo, I think The Black Count hits its stride about the start of the Revolution, although I found a lot of the earlier stuff about the twisted racial politics of the late ancien regime France to be pretty interesting. But YMMV, obviously.

    3. I'm no Dr. Chop, but I do love me some Pynchon. I'd guess meat is better suited for actual discussion, but... you might be able to tempt me in to reading alongside you (read: well behind you), if you're interested. I'd probably want to push it back to the new year at least, but... let me know. I always like knowing someone else is working their way through things too.

        1. I still haven't read Inherent Vice, much less the newest one. I was anticipating tackling IV sometime after the calendar flipped, so just subbing out for GR works for me.

        2. I got about 4 pages into Gravity's Rainbow once. I should really give it another go, so I'd be definitely in for reading along (and perhaps a WGOM Radio discussion panel episode?)

Comments are closed.