September 2010 reads

[Guinevere Seaworth]

I really enjoyed Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. Highly recommended!

Up next is a large epic fantasy series that I never read: Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars.

[beniowa]

Yesterday I got through Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge in a couple of sittings. It was much shorter than I was expecting, but the length turned out to be just right for the story. This is a great little horror story set in a town with a very different and dark Halloween tradition. There is a monster, but with all good horror stories it's not the one you're expecting.

I also read Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald. It's a good collection of short stories in McDonald's future India. The last story in particular makes the events of River of Gods look somewhat paltry in comparison.

My next novel will be Soulless by Gail Carriger.

[Bellis]

I have been going through a rough patch and I was recommended this book called Write it Down Make it Happen, an insipid inspirational manual for visualizing and obtaining success, strictly for privileged middle class westerners, in the vein of the infamous The Secret and many others out there. To wash out the bad taste of this book, I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent work, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, Ehrenreich deconstructs the history of New Thought and positivism, in 19th-21st century business, religion, psychology, medicine and economics, culminating with the epidemic of optimism that led to the recent American financial crisis. It's easy to read, and excoriating. Yet I came away thinking that, well, but you know, it's nice to be around nice people, at least sometimes.

I bought Emile Zola's Germinal, the epic tale of labour and love in a 19th century French mining town. The people are hard, and stuck in a harder place - between dying in strikes and revolution or dying in a collapsed mine. It's realism is shockingly graphic for its time, both in terms of violence and sex. It's also one of the better books I'll read this year, and deserves to be read more widely (in the non-French speaking world). I was also left wondering why I bother with anything but the classics, for they blow most contemporary works quite away.

[Stone-Made-Soft]

I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent work, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, Ehrenreich deconstructs the history of New Thought and positivism, in 19th-21st century business, religion, psychology, medicine and economics, culminating with the epidemic of optimism that led to the recent American financial crisis. It's easy to read, and excoriating. Yet I came away thinking that, well, but you know, it's nice to be around nice people, at least sometimes.

That sounds pretty interesting but my "To read" pile is getting too large so I'll be passing on it for now.

I'm reading Alan Deniro's debut Total Oblivion, more or less.

[T.D. Newton]

Struggling to finish reading Gardens of the Moon, but will move on to 3 more Dresden (5, 6, and 7) immediately after I do.