Goodreads Bookshelf
Summer Reading '09
With our move, I haven't had a ton of time to read, but I've been doing a bit here and there and thought I'd share that with you.
I started re-reading R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series, preparing for reading the first book in Bakker's follow-up series. I'm blown away. I've already given it good reviews here, but I was even more impressed upon re-reading it as I picked up new things and developed a new appreciation for what Bakker is doing. I've still got another book in this series to read before I start the new series, and dog only knows when I'm going to get the chance.
I haven't read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma--though I've heard enough interviews with Pollan that I feel like I have--Lauren and I listened to In Defense of Food during one of our car rides. This is Pollan's exploration of the history of food science and the evolution of the American diet--and why we shouldn't eat it and what we should eat instead. The answer's pretty simple, though there's a fair bit of elaboration to it. Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables. It is very worth reading.
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother was another audiobook for us. It's a near-future world in which a terrorist attack targets the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge and, in the attack's wake, several American teens, including our narrator, are taken to a Gitmo-like detention facility. As a result, he and his friends work to undermine the Homeland Security agents who are clamping down on civil liberties. It's a techno-thriller that raises lots of interesting issues and ideas. Recommended.
Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, which starts here with Wizard's First Rule is a legendary fantasy series. I've been seeing huge swaths of the bookstore shelves filled with his tomes but never got around to reading any until now. What I didn't know when I started was how legendary the series as a whole is among many serious fantasy readers for being a huge stinking pile of crap. The first book here wasn't bad, but it definitely doesn't measure up to the work being done in the genre by writers like Bakker, George R.R. Martin, and Steven Erikson. Stylistically, those three are head and shoulders about Goodkind. For that matter, content-wise they're better too. It was a good enough story to keep me reading, but not good enough to turn me into a fan, and I feel like I have good reason to think the detractors of the series know something, because I can see the seeds here already.
I've heard Kerouac's masterpiece praised since college, and I tried to read it once in the midst of a 4-week cross-country road trip back in 2000 (seemed appropriate, right?). I didn't really care for it and didn't make it out of the first chapter, but talking to a former student earlier this summer, she expressed shock that I hadn't read it and hadn't liked what I'd read. Respecting this student's judgment, I decided to give it another try. Not having a lot of time to sit and read, I listened to this as an audio book while packing, and it really was great. I was struck by the poetry of the language. Looking back, I think I wasn't able to get into it the first time around because the sentences and paragraphs are so damned long. Visually, it's just hard to read unbroken pages of words, but when it was read to me I could appreciate the entrancing beauty of Kerouac's prose.