As of late, the posts have been all about baking. Time to fix that and so here it is, another summer reading list. The thing is, I've had a bit of a dry-spell, a reader's block (I swear, it's a real thing). There is no rhyme or reason to these choices, a mix of the books I have on my nightstand already and those in my GoodReads queue that stood out.
First, The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt. I very much enjoyed Possession and Angels and Insects, but the former is a dense terribly clever read while the latter is, well, you'd have to read it. The Matisse Stories are mercifully brief, less than 200 pages, three short stories about women, the book threaded together by references to the said artist.
The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, awesome title, right? It's about a pig. It's Irish. If I end up loving it, the book is a part of The Pig Trilogy.
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. The book is about Earnest Hemingway and his wife Hadley during the Paris years paling around with the Lost Generation posse. I know very little about Hemingway and A Farewell to Arms might be the only one of his books I actually read, an oversight, clearly. Though I usually gravitate to more wacky book choices rather than historical ones, this will be a nice change of pace (and I already have it, thought I cannot say with any certainty where I got it).
The Cuckoo's Calling by the writer that shall not be named. The Casual Vacancy was a little tough for me, the writing was excellent, of course, but the topics the book tackled were difficult at best (some pages still haunt me). I expect this will be very different still and I have been curious to read it for a while but never quite got to it.
Jasper Fforde never fails to deliver an alternate reality that makes perfect sense: why couldn't you jump into fiction? Of course color-spectrum-perception determines the social pecking order! His Dragonslayer series are not quite so far fetched, it's just about the shortage of magic. The Eye of Zoltar, the final Dragonslayer book just came out (at least on this side of the Atlantic), so naturally it makes the cut for my summer reading.
Here are book picks from the years past - what are you reading these days?
2013 Summer Reading
2012 Summer Reading
Winter List
Other picks worth a look
First, The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt. I very much enjoyed Possession and Angels and Insects, but the former is a dense terribly clever read while the latter is, well, you'd have to read it. The Matisse Stories are mercifully brief, less than 200 pages, three short stories about women, the book threaded together by references to the said artist.
The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, awesome title, right? It's about a pig. It's Irish. If I end up loving it, the book is a part of The Pig Trilogy.
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. The book is about Earnest Hemingway and his wife Hadley during the Paris years paling around with the Lost Generation posse. I know very little about Hemingway and A Farewell to Arms might be the only one of his books I actually read, an oversight, clearly. Though I usually gravitate to more wacky book choices rather than historical ones, this will be a nice change of pace (and I already have it, thought I cannot say with any certainty where I got it).
The Cuckoo's Calling by the writer that shall not be named. The Casual Vacancy was a little tough for me, the writing was excellent, of course, but the topics the book tackled were difficult at best (some pages still haunt me). I expect this will be very different still and I have been curious to read it for a while but never quite got to it.
Jasper Fforde never fails to deliver an alternate reality that makes perfect sense: why couldn't you jump into fiction? Of course color-spectrum-perception determines the social pecking order! His Dragonslayer series are not quite so far fetched, it's just about the shortage of magic. The Eye of Zoltar, the final Dragonslayer book just came out (at least on this side of the Atlantic), so naturally it makes the cut for my summer reading.
Here are book picks from the years past - what are you reading these days?
2013 Summer Reading
2012 Summer Reading
Winter List
Other picks worth a look