Just finished a Hayek Book Prize Winner and it is excellent indeed.
“The Forgotten Depression” - by James Grant
@Nrdsb4
It is a popular book, my library hold on it says I have to wait for six months!!!
@makesmesmart, wow!
It really is riveting…
Just finished The Testaments myself. I really feel that were it not for the Hulu series, there never would have been a book to write. That said, it does offer some closure to the story. However, I did feel that the plot was rushed the last half of the book. As I said to someone at work, even mediocre Atwood is better than some authors’ shining moments…
Huh. Not at Audible!
@Midwest67 “Huh. Not at Audible!”
Title is ‘one of the best books I’ve read…’
I have at least one audible, one kindle, and one hard/soft cover book going at any given time. I chose the soft copy version of this book. Good to have a real book in the hands sometimes. Maybe you can try that.
If you must have an audible, then definitely listen to Edward O. Thorp’s - “A Man for All Markets”. Fantastic!
Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About…” I really liked this audio presentation. It is dry, sad, funny, and very short LOL. Maybe don’t read it if you are over 60 LOL.
“The Music Shop” by Rachel Joyce. Fun, quirky, entertaining and informative. Great book!
Anyone read Ocean Vuong’s “on earth we’re briefly gorgeous”?
I thought it has so many beautiful passages yet certain parts were very very difficult to read. I heard one raving review before I started reading it (a short book) and only afterwards I heard that it has lots of detractors too. I also am a bit surprised that it is a novel, not a memoir. Would love to hear other’s opinions if you have read it.
The font changed? A bit easier on the eye I have to say. ?
The audio of Briefly gorgeous is good, but I haven’t finished it, I felt it needed more attention than I had at the time, so I have it on hold again. It sounded very poetic.
After finishing Ronan Farrow’s book, I have just started She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twoey. It chronicles their experiences breaking the Harvey Weinstein story for the New York Times just ahead of Ronan Farrow’s explosive story. The three shared a Pulitzer prize for their efforts.
I just finished Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. The author juxtaposed very different stories in this novel The first, details a relationship between Alice (young editor and aspiring writer) and a famous author who is 45 years older. Halliday was “friends” with Philip Roth when she was a young editor at Wiley and says this part of the book is “partially” based on their relationship. The second story details the travails of Amar, an Iraqi American, who is detained at Heathrow when he travels to Iraq from the US to see his brother. The author really gets into Amar’s head. Unlike the first section where Alice’s story is a third person account.
The final part of the novel is an interview with the famous novelist in the first section, which reviewers suggest ties the two parts together (that’s not readily obvious). The author writes well and the book kept me thinking about the relationship between the stories. It would be a great book for a book group–lots to discuss!!
“Things my son needs to know” Fredrik Bachman was lovely.
I am really enjoying The Secret Commonwealth, the second installment of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust, which is itself a new trilogy based on the world and characters in his His Dark Materials trilogy. All of which is supposedly young adult fiction, but it ain’t standard-issue American young adult fiction by any stretch of the imagination.
It isn’t and shouldn’t be of interest to anyone who hasn’t read at least the first novel of His Dark Materials. (It’s The Golden Compass in the U.S., and Northern Lights in the rest of the English-speaking world.) Or at least watched the current HBO series, I imagine – that’s probably enough. It can’t be a coincidence that the book’s publication coincides with the debut of the series.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell there’s really little or no need to have read the first book in the new series, La Belle Sauvage. That was a prequel to His Dark Materials, a story about the infancy of Lyra Belacqua, the 14-year-old co-central character of His Dark Materials. I thought that meant the whole new series was effectively going to be Episodes 1-3, with the original trilogy being Episodes 4-6, but it turns out the new book takes place 8 years after the end of the previous trilogy, so Lyra is now 22 and finishing her undergraduate degree, and has all the complexity of an orphaned young woman who has Been Through A Lot. I liked La Belle Sauvage, too, but nothing that happened in it that isn’t recapped adequately in the new book is necessary to understand the new book. At least about 20% of the way in.
The background from The Golden Compass – about Lyra’s parentage, and the interesting alternate dimension/speculative history in which she lives – is not much recapped in the new book at all, and is important to understanding what is going on.
The best part of the new trilogy, so far, is that it is sticking to Lyra’s very interesting world. I thought the original trilogy went off the rails a bit when it started jumping between multiple dimensions, rather than sticking with Lyra’s world and its shadow-twin, the world in which we live.
OK, just ordered all three books of the first trilogy on Kindle. Looks really good. Thanks for the recommendation!
The TV series “his dark materials” got rave reviews, don’t know whether or when we could get it from Netflix. Really enjoyed the golden compass books, but so disappointed with the movie.
I really liked An American Marriage.
I read that book summer before last. Actually, I mostly listened to the audiobook (the narration was fantastic). I read the last part of it when my road trip ended and I wasn’t finished with the audio. I thought it was an excellent book.
@MaineLonghorn I’m surprised you hadn’t heard about Pullman’s books before. They were very popular with my kids and their friends (and their parents) – not unlike Harry Potter, but a lot more challenging intellectually. And there was a big-budget movie of the first one, with Nicole Kidman as the principal villain.
I am always a little hesitant to recommend the His Dark Materials trilogy. The first book is absolutely fabulous, the second is not quite as good, but definitely very interesting in juxtaposition with the first, and the third . . . is a little bit crazy. It contains a great deal that is sure to offend lots of people. Most of which I couldn’t talk about without major spoilers.
Pullman is seriously anticlerical, in a way that hardly anyone on this side of the Atlantic ever is. For him, the organized Church is pretty much the root of all evil, with little or no corresponding spiritual or moral value. He’s also very sex-positive for people considerably younger than what we see as the age of consent. Those are perspectives you don’t see much in literature marketed for parents to buy for their kids, to say the least. I don’t believe The Amber Spyglass would ever have found a mainstream U.S. publisher if it hadn’t been book 3 of a very successful series by a successful author.