Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler for about the 20th time. :lol: The first time I read it was just after watching the movie for the first time. This got me absolutely hooked on the sinking of the Titanic. My obsession was just in time for Dr. Ballard to actually find the Titanic. :lol: Susan
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. It's unabridged and intense. My favorite character is Javert because he's just awesome. I know he's the bad guy, but he's so dedicated. Also I laughed so hard when I read the scene where Fantine thinks that he's letting her go instead of Monsieur Madeleine. It's my favorite scene so far I think.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I bought The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo the other day. I'm only like 30 pages in, so far it's kind of boring but the girl at the book store said that once you get past the first few chapters it gets way better and she's sold a lot of them, so I'm gonna keep going. (It's like 840 pages long though, it's going to take me forever.) My mom also bought my For The Win by Cory Doctorow, but I'm not allowed to read it until my birthday. But, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is one of my favourite books ever, so I can't wait.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 'Mop Men' by Alan Emmins. Emmins is an English journalist who lives in Denmark. He decided how he wanted to write a book about death, and specifically how 'death sells' because people are fascinated by it. So he decided to report on and follow the work of Neal Smither, a California man who runs his own Crime Scene Cleaners business (though they also do accidental deaths and suicides and natural deaths) Neal at first appears to be crass, unsympathetic, and kind of a b*stard, but as Emmins spends more time with him, he realizes that while Neal is all these things he's also intelligent and smart and that he does have compassion, even if he keeps it turned off most of the time because otherwise he wouldn't be able to do his job. The book is also a bit of a 'travel book' in that it describes a little of Emmins' travels around California and the various crappy places he stays. There are some real gross-out moments, and a lot of profanity from Neal and his coworkers (which, given what they do, is understandable) there are some insightful and compassionate moments too. There are also some very funny moments, such as Neal's kamikaze driving style. I just wish I hadn't been reading it while eating my beef enchilada wrap at lunch today, especially as the part I was reading involved a dead, bloated, maggot-and-fly infested body in a bathroom. This is NOT a book you want to read at the table! Oh, I'm also reading 'Roald Dahl's Ghost Stories' - a selection of 14 of Dahl's favourite ghost stories. They're okay, some of them are very good and creepy, but others, IMO, are so-so, and there are no M.R. James stories at all in the collection which is just wrong if you ask me. But they're fun to read right before I go to bed.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I just finished my Jill Mansell book and now I'm reading "Girl with Nine Wigs" by Sophie van der Stap. It's a dutch book, so I translated the title. It's a story about Sophie, who's in her early twenties, and she discovers she has cancer. She loses her hair and starts wearing wigs. She has nine of them and with every wig she feels different. Like she has nine new personalities. She gives each personality a name. It's written as a diary and it's a true story. It's a dramatic theme, but it's a really light read. She deals with her disease on her very own way, sometimes with a bit of humour and sarcasm. I read 5 chapters or so, and it's hard to put it down. I don't know if they have this book in the US, but I do know that she published it in France, Spain and Portugal.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I'm reading Les Miserables. I've always wanted to read it and it took me buying an iPod Touch to do it. It's one of the books you can get free with the bookshelf app. I've actually not read much since college. I was an English major. That pretty much killed my love of reading. Hopefully this will get me back on track.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 Wow, I wanna see if this is translated into English over here anywhere. It sounds so good. I wanna read it.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 'A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards' by Ann Bauer. It's about a couple, Rachel and Jack. They have a son called Edward. At age 4, Edward begins presenting with autism-like symptoms, and withdrawing from his family - his parents and little brother, Matt into his own world. As well as telling the story of how Edward and his family deal with Edward's slow, painful withdrawal into autism, there is also the story of Rachel's late Uncle Mickey, who suffered from similar symptoms back in the 1930s/1940s, when attitudes were very different. Still listening to 'The Crossroads' by Chris Grabenstein on audiobook, it's still really good.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I just finished reading "MYSTIC RIVER" by Dennis Lehane. I had seen the movie a few years ago, it was wonderful, but the book is better than the movie!
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman - a collection of stories by Neil Gaiman, mostly with a horror/sci-fi-y aspect. Really enjoying them so far. The Victors by Stephen E. Ambrose - it's about Eisenhower and the American soldiers who fought in World War II. Pretty interesting so far.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I'm reading "Shadow Sister" by Simone van der Vlugt (a Dutch book by a Dutch author, so I translated the title). It's about a teacher at a highschool, who is treathened by one of her students. The treaths are getting more serious by the minute. It's a very interesting story, because I'm a teacher as well (not high school, but anyway). The story isn't told chronologicaly and has a lot of surprising twists. I started two days ago and I'm almost finished. And it has over 300 pages. It's one fo those books where it's hard to put it down once you're reading it. Very good book and well written.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 I've finished The Victors. I really enjoyed it. It focuses almost entirely on the American Army in World War II from D-Day until the end of the war. It was really interesting. It really conveys the horror that the soldiers went through and the difficulties they had to overcome, but also the comradeship between the men, their pride in their units, and, particularly, the bravery of the junior officers and NCOs who had to lead their men into battles and died/were wounded in incredibly high numbers. It also explores Eisenhower's life during the war, the decisions he made, the mistakes he made. Two pages in my copy were completely blank, which was a bit annoying, but it didn't really affect my enjoyment of the book too much. On audio, I'm listening to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's about a young boy, Bod. When Bod is a baby, his entire family is murdered by The Man Jack, but Bod escapes and is found and taken in by the inhabitants of a nearby graveyard. Bod grows up learning about life from the dead. Really enjoying it so far.
Re: What Are You Reading?-#3 it's one of my favouritest books of all time, it's just fantastic, so complex and tragic but with bits of real humour too, and so much empathy for people's lives. i hope you both enjoy it. my favourite character is eponine (even in the musical, before i ever read the book she was my favourite but she's even better in the book) - i always feel so sad for her, she tries so hard to make something better of herself but everyone else just gets in the way. i love the thenardiers too, so mean and nasty, i do like a good villain. det higgins i see what you mean about javert - he is a great counterpoint to valjean, but he's a bit too dedicated for me, his principles are admirable but you have to have some flexibility, right? perfectanomaly i know what you mean about reading - i did politics, philosophy & history and all three subjects are so book-based, reading just became a chore, i'd always loved it but after that it was just too much like work. i'm back into it now, mostly, but not like i was before that degree, it's kind of sad really! i'm reading steinbeck - again! this time it's cup of gold which is one of his less well known ones - it's about a young (well, 15) welsh boy (it really surprised me when i started it and realised he was writing about wales!) who goes off to the indies to be a buccaneer, so far, so good while i was away i read a few books - the ones that stood out were steinbeck (shock!) the moon is down - it's about a small capital city that gets occupied by an invading force, and how the people of the city react to that. it's never made explicit that it's about the nazis, but it was written in 1942 and the occupiers are frequently described as "efficient" which i think is a pretty clear hint. it quickly became required reading for many clandestine resistance movements, being published on underground presses etc, and citizens of many of the occupied nations of ww2 have said it was absolutely spot on in its depiction, and after the war it was one of the first books to be officially published in many of those nations, with huge print runs that sold out fast. oddly though, america thought it was too lenient towards the "occupiers" and made them too human (newsflash: the nazis were human, that's what made them so frightening!). anyway, aside from the history lesson (!) it really was very good indeed. maybe i'm biased as i'd read anything that man wrote, but having studied occupied france, to me it definitely seemed to ring true in many ways. i really liked it a lot. kathryn stockett's the help - it's about black maids working for white women in 50s mississippi - oddly it was written by a white woman but from the perspective of 3 different characters, only one of whom was white. i liked it tho, it was funny in parts and tragic and kind of depressing in parts but also quite uplifting as well. definitely worth checking out. hillary jordan's mudbound - another one about the south in the 50s (well, late 40s really), but from a different point of view, i didn't know what to expect from it but i really liked it. it started pretty dark and got darker as it went on. definitely not one for anyone that likes happy endings! in fact the ending was pretty horrific (in a good way, if that makes sense) but it was very well written and quite gripping.