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Hello yes sign me up please! Vanilla number: 52 Booklord challenge: yes
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Dec 27, 2016 15:40
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:22 |
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I'm in the middle of two books right now, but I think the one I'm gonna finish first is Judy Melinek's Working Stiff, which is just a medical examiner talking about her years working for city of New York. It's a nice balance of her talking about what actually goes on in her job re: figuring out cause of death and helping solve the occasional homicide and her just recounting the gnarliest corpses she encountered. It rules.
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Jan 2, 2017 17:02
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Enfys posted:Awww boo, I was going to get that recently in a sale but was busy over the holidays and forgot. I read it on scribd, so if you don't mind reading on the computer you can probably sign up for a free trial and read it for free.
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Jan 6, 2017 01:17
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The obvious one is probably All Quiet on the Western Front.
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Jan 23, 2017 01:45
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ulvir posted:
Have you read The Book Thief? It's from the perspective of Death. Someone wildcard me now please.
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Jan 31, 2017 19:48
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's an almost 400 year old work, so it's easy to find online. I second the suggestion of reading it with its companion piece, The Garden of Cyrus. Yeah, I found a copy online with both works. I will admit the title totally threw me off at first too, but having done some extremely cursory research I'm kind of excited to see what I think of it. Thanks, a human heart! Sorry in advance that I'm probably too dumb to really appreciate the work. Anyway, here's my January list: 1. Working Stiff- Judy Melinek. A NY medical examiner talks about her job. It's a good mix of the actual process of handling each case and the gory details of things like "worst death you ever saw" that most readers are probably looking for. 2. Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked?- Robert D. Webster. loving awful. Ostensibly a book about what being a funeral director is like, but in reality just Webster complaining about other people (especially The Youth) and talking about how perfect and upstanding he is compared to other funeral directors. Garbage. 3. Rest in Pieces: the Curious Fates of Famous Corpses- Bess Lovejoy. More like a series of short articles than a coherent book, but very entertaining nonetheless. Pretty much exactly what the title says: each section focuses on one famous corpse and describes all the weird poo poo that happened to it. Like, a bunch of people in the 1800s tried to steal Lincoln's corpse and hold it ransom once (they failed). 4. Catalyst: A Rogue One novel- James Luceno. Okay, this is a Star Wars novel so maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but this was uninteresting and trite. Takes all the interesting moral implications of Galen Erso's character from the movie and replaces them with boring black-and-white bullshit. 5. Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand- Dana Kollmann. A forensic CSI talks about her job. Okay but forgettable. Thought it was a lot funnier than it was. 6. Agent Zigzag- Ben Macintyre. I'm a sucker for Macintyre's genre of "weird WWII shenanigans" so I loved this. 7. Longitude: The True Story of a Long Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time- Dava Sobel. How the problem of finding longitude was solved. Very short (only like 120 pages?) and definitely felt more like a glorified article than a book. Definitely "pop history"- favors the narrative over incorporating source material into the work itself (rather than just listed in the back) and doesn't go into a lot of detail. 8. British Intelligence: Secrets, Spies, and Sources- Stephen Twigge. A general overview of each aspect of the British Intelligence apparatus from its foundation to modern times. Less exciting than the title sounds, especially as it doesn't really go into detail on any individual secrets, spies, or sources- it's mainly focused on the evolution of intelligence organizations as a whole over time. What it's really good for is as a reference for National Archive materials- if it mentions something in passing it will cite the Archives codes for the source materials, which makes it a really handy tool for further, more in depth research. 9. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary- Simon Winchester. I felt it became very repetitive by the end; the story of WC Minor, a criminally insane dude who helped create the OED, just doesn't have enough to it to support an entire book by itself. The details about how the dictionary was put together were much more interesting, but were pushed aside to focus on Minor's day to day life. By the end, both dictionary and Professor are only mentioned in passing, which is disappointing from a book that from first glance appears to be about all three equally.
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Feb 1, 2017 20:59
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February! 10. We Should All Be Feminists- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A nice, simple overview of feminism and why it's necessary. If you've ever read anything about feminism before it's probably too simple, but it's a great primer to give to people who think feminists hate men or think "egalitarian" is a good term. 11. Hydriotaphia & the Garden of Cyprus- Thomas Browne. My wildcard! I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting when I first got. The part where Browne points out that you're going to be dead an infinitely longer time than you're going to be alive has really stuck with me. 12. The Venus Fixers- Ilaria Dagnini Brey. A book about the Monuments Men in Italy during WWII. Suffers from my common complaint about Monuments Men books, in that it doesn't have enough pictures of the art it's talking about. 13. Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World- Aja Raden. A sort of pop history/sociology look at jewelry and how humans decide what is valuable. Super interesting when talking about gemstones themselves (like the De Beers monopoly on diamonds and their perceived worth vs their actual rarity), but some of the historical claims seem to overstate the role of jewelry (I sincerely doubt that England's sea empire was entirely the result of Queen Elizabeth being jealous of one pearl necklace). 14. The Hanging Tree- Ben Aaronovitch. I love the Rivers of London series with all my heart and I greatly enjoyed this even though it was probably the worst series entry so far. The writing is fun and humorous as always, but the plot goes literally nowhere and at the end the characters are all in exactly the same places they were in the beginning.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:56
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Corrode posted:I'm glad you liked Revenge! I love that book. I also enjoyed the Saxon Stories stuff, it's light but fun historical fiction, and Half of a Yellow Sun is a great book and every time I see Adichie's name I wonder why I haven't read more of her work. Good month. I'm almost done with Americanah right now and I'm so glad I finally picked it up because it's excellent.
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Feb 28, 2017 19:30
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March 15. Americanah- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 16. Necropolis: London and Its Dead- Catharine Arnold 17. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Meets World- Shannon Hale. A cute middle grade novel about Squirrel Girl. It captures the humor of North's SG pretty well. 18. The Princess Diarist- Carrie Fisher. Underwhelming. I basically haven't read anything in the past two weeks because I started a new job (!!!!) with a crazy schedule and oh my god I'm so tired.
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Mar 31, 2017 01:50
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Apparently I forgot to update for April so here's two months April 19. The Complete Cosmicomics- Italo Calvino 20. Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World- Sharon Waxman 21. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History- Elizabeth Kolbert 22. The Fifth Season- NK Jemisin 23. All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot 24 For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond- Ben Macintyre 25. Consider Phlebas- Iain M Banks May 26. A Fire Upon the Deep- Vernor Vinge 27. Red Rising- Pierce Brown 28. Ninefox Gambit- Yoon Ha Lee 29. In The First Circle- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 30. Agapē Agape- William Gaddis 31. Omon Ra- Viktor Pelevin Standouts for the months: The Fifth Season- great setting, and I love me some second person when it's done well Omon Ra- extremely funny Negative Standouts: Red Rising- imagine all the generic tropes of young adult fiction in the last few years mixed up into one bad book I found myself underwhelmed by Consider Phlebas? I know Banks is supposed to be great and the Culture series is a popular favorite, but Phlebas was just very forgettable to me. Is there a better place to start with Banks?
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Jun 1, 2017 17:19
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Talas posted:Yeah. I'm reading it in Spanish, so it's also in three parts Have you read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun?
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Jul 5, 2017 17:55
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:22 |
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mdemone posted:58. IBM and the Holocaust - Edwin Black11, 12 This sounds interesting, how was it?
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Sep 16, 2017 03:33
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