Recently Read

Skip it if you wanna.

1.  A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price - Novel about a young woman in the 1950s struggling with her relationship with her boyfriend.  Interesting.

2.  Home is Burning by Dan Marshall - Account of the year the author spent taking care of his dying father.  The author comes across as a real smart-ass dick, albeit a self-aware one, so meh.

3.  What We Have by Amy Boesky - Recounting of how cancer affected the author's family.  Did not finish.

4.  Finders Keepers by Stephen King - My love of Stephen King (especially his older stuff) is well documented, but this one, a detective story rather than something in the horror genre, just didn't do it for me.  For one thing, a lot of the characters were carried over from an earlier book (Mr. Mercedes) and a lot of time was spent alluding to or explaining the characters' relationships with each other, which Do Not Care.  And, now that I think of it, a LOT of King's work has a central theme of Children Acting Heroically, which, I do not know of a whole lot of children (myself and my friends when I was a child included) who are particularly heroic or even very kind to each other, period, a lot of the time.  At least in the case of me and my childhood friends, we were more interested in serving our own interests than we were about anything outside of ourselves.  If a giant scary monster suddenly showed up in a room full of kids, I'm pretty sure the kids would ruthlessly climb over each other in a mad dash for the door as opposed to banding together to defeat the scary monster, but I digress.

ANYway, Finders Keepers, meh, I actually had a hard time staying interested enough to keep reading until the end, and only did so by taking it along for what I knew was going to be a slow day at the office.

5.  Waterwoman by Lenore Hart - Novel. Started out interesting, about a fisherwoman in the 1920s, but then turned into a standard romantic triangle story, so eh.

6.  Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry - Novel.  Interesting setting and interesting characters, but man, one bad, horrible thing after another kept happening.  I got about halfway through and realized I didn't want to read another half-book of terrible things to get to the (presumedly) happy last chapter and quit.

7.  The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay - Like Church of Marvels, this took place in an interesting setting, in this case vaudeville of the 1920s.  But unlike Church of Marvels, this book wasn't completely focused on tragedy, although bad things certainly occurred.  The characters were interesting, the storylines were good, and a lot of it was set in the area where I live.  Good book! I enjoyed it, and look forward to reading more from this author.

8.  Green Mountain Farm by Elliott Merrick - Memoir by an author who raised his family on a Vermont farm in the 1930s.  Good.

So that's what I've been reading lately.  How about you?