What are you reading?

[AmyG]

Wow. Thanks @Bobster. I definitely want to hear this. I had heard about the book but never read it. What did you guys think of Feud. I enjoyed it immensely but I can see how it might be polarizing to long-time fans of either of the ladies.

[mrssondheim]

Thank you Bobster!!!  Very excited about this.

[Bobster]

Enjoy you all!

I personally loved Feud even with its "flaws" or "errors". 

[iheartgranola]

Current audiobook for my commute: Absolute Power by David Baldacci
Current "paper" [actually kindle] book for all other times: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Next up will be either Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, which @Diane recommended to me years ago but I never got a chance to read or Eddie Izzard's new memoir Believe Me. I may need to forgo both of those for a quick readthrough of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

[artscallion]

Next up will be either Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, which @Diane recommended to me years ago but I never got a chance to read or Eddie Izzard's new memoir Believe Me. I may need to forgo both of those for a quick readthrough of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

I also recommend Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Very enjoyable read. Recently saw Izzard on Colbert's show. Thanks for reminding me about his book!

[Gordonb]

"To Kill the President" by Sam Bourne

"The United States has elected a volatile demagogue as president, backed by his ruthless chief strategist, Crawford 'Mac' McNamara.
When a war of words with the North Korean regime spirals out of control and the President comes perilously close to launching a nuclear attack, it's clear someone has to act, or the world will be reduced to ashes....."

An implausible premise surely .....

[Leighton]

"To Kill the President" by Sam Bourne

"The United States has elected a volatile demagogue as president, backed by his ruthless chief strategist, Crawford 'Mac' McNamara.
When a war of words with the North Korean regime spirals out of control and the President comes perilously close to launching a nuclear attack, it's clear someone has to act, or the world will be reduced to ashes....."

An implausible premise surely .....

How is that?! I bought it but haven't read it yet!

[Chris L]

"To Kill the President" by Sam Bourne

"The United States has elected a volatile demagogue as president, backed by his ruthless chief strategist, Crawford 'Mac' McNamara.
When a war of words with the North Korean regime spirals out of control and the President comes perilously close to launching a nuclear attack, it's clear someone has to act, or the world will be reduced to ashes....."

An implausible premise surely .....

With recent events, this is getting wildly close to reality. Maybe I should read the book to find out how it's going to play out...

[Leighton]

I have enjoyed three books recently, and would recommend all of them:

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, by Richard Yates
Insomniac City, by Bill Hayes
The Long-Winded Lady (Notes from The New Yorker), by Maeve Brennan

[KathyB]

Plot summary of Marlena by Julie Buntin:

Fifteen-year-old Cat and her family move to northern Michigan, next door to seventeen-year-old Marlena. Cat and Marlena smoke and drink together. Marlena takes pills. Cat and Marlena smoke some more and drink some more. They skip school and smoke and drink. They party. Marlena dies. Cat reminisces as she smokes and drinks.

I didn't enjoy this book very much.

[KathyB]

In contrast to Marlena:

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer is glorious--maybe even the second-best book I've read this year. It's a novel about a family, with chapters alternating between third-person (as the family is growing up in the 1970s) and first-person (each member of the family in 2006). This is a book I don't want to end (I'm about 85% of the way through it).

[Diane]

In contrast to Marlena:

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer is glorious--maybe even the second-best book I've read this year. It's a novel about a family, with chapters alternating between third-person (as the family is growing up in the 1970s) and first-person (each member of the family in 2006). This is a book I don't want to end (I'm about 85% of the way through it).

What was the best book?

[KathyB]

In contrast to Marlena:

The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer is glorious--maybe even the second-best book I've read this year. It's a novel about a family, with chapters alternating between third-person (as the family is growing up in the 1970s) and first-person (each member of the family in 2006). This is a book I don't want to end (I'm about 85% of the way through it).

What was the best book?

The Nix by Nathan Hill.

[Leighton]

On to Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox ... enjoying the creeping sense of dread so far!

[Chris L]

Two books that I'm halfway through and swear to God that I'm going to finish:

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

Hawley is the showrunner on the TV show Fargo and this is what he was doing before he got into television. The novel is about the crash of a private jet and opens cold, with no explanation of what caused the crash or even why the flight was taking place, only a depiction of the two survivors, a struggling 30-something painter and the son of the plane's wealthy owner (the Rupert Murdoch-like CEO of a Fox News-style TV channel), fighting to swim back to New York from the crash site in the Atlantic. The backstory -- what happened "before the fall," as it were -- is told through flashbacks interspersed with a plot thread about gradual suspicion being cast via a Bill O'Reilly-style TV news host on the older survivor as the person responsible for the explosion that apparently downed the plane. It's a novel of character as much as a thriller, much like Hawley's TV show. From what I've read so far, I recommend it.

Afterlife by Marcus Sakey

Sakey is a crime writer who's begun turning to light fantasy/science fiction designed for readers who don't follow those genres. His Brilliance trilogy, about mounting ethnic tension and eventual civil war between normal humans and a breed of super-intelligent mutants who have mental powers, like pattern matching and body-language reading, that normal people don't have, was the best series of thrillers I've read in, well, ever, gripping because both the good and bad characters were drawn in shades of gray that made them believable and often sympathetic. Afterlife is about an FBI agent murdered by a serial killer who finds himself in a kind of purgatory that's an "echo" of the real world -- all of the inanimate objects are present without living beings -- populated by other dead people who died relatively young. So far it hasn't gripped me, but the Brlliance novels didn't begin to grip until about halfway through, so I still have hope.