Recently Read

As usual, skip it if you wanna.


1.  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.  Eh. Meh.  I don't know - Sometimes I wonder if I'm just not smart enough to appreciate some of these "modern classics".  This novel, about sisters who are cared for by relatives after their mother dies, just rang blah to me.  None of the characters are particularly likeable, and I got the feeling that even the author didn't really care for them, she wrote about them so dispassionately.  Can't recommend.  So sue me.

2.  Tallulah Falls by Christine Fletcher - YA novel about a teen runaway.  Good.

3.  Eggs in the Coffee, Sheep in the Corn by Marjorie Myers Douglas - Memoir by a farmer's wife in the fifties and sixties.  Interesting.

4. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr - I've read this one before, but I really enjoyed it, so I read it again.  Memoir about the author's messed-up Texas childhood, told so that you'll laugh out loud.  I wasn't so fond of her later memoirs, but this one, the first, is a gem.

5.  Documentary time!  Paul Williams is Still Alive is an eponymous doc about the 70's songwriter.  I LOVE his songs, and yet this documentary was annoying as sh*t, so I gave up about a half-hour in. 

6.  The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg - I love anything Ms. Flagg writes, and this book, about a group of sisters in WWII, was very enjoyable.

7.  Time for another documentary:  Twenty Feet from Stardom is a doc about backup singers.  Very interesting.

8.  Joyland by Stephen King - I almost skipped this one, because it was marketed as a one-off, a noir novel, but it really wasn't noir.  Atypical  King, for sure, because it came in at under 300 pages, but it was almost a relief to pick up a King book that I didn't need to invest the next few months of my reading time in.  Good book about a murder at an amusement park and one summer in the life of a college student.

9. Movie time!  Geez Louise, I'm not taking recommendations  from other bloggers seriously anymore.  "What Maisie Knew" is a boring-ass, painful movie about divorce from a kid's point of view, featuring Julianne Moore and some random dude screaming at each other in front of their daughter.  The young actress who plays Maisie is great, but the movie itself is a dog.

10.  The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani - This book got great critical reviews, but I didn't like it.  I need to start reading the negative reader reviews on Amazon* - If I had done that with this book, I would have found that reviewer after reviewer called it boring with unlikeable main characters, and I would have skipped it.  As it is, I only got 40 pages in.


So!  Better World Books had another awesome sale, so I've got more books on the way.  Hopefully they'll be good ones.  What have you been reading?




*Which are sometimes hilarious.