Good books you have read recently!

[Erika]

I have just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy (for my book club) and just found it fascinating. It is a dark and harrowing read set in post-apocalyptic America (which is dead and covered in ash probably from a series of nuclear explosions or at least constant fires) which follows a man and his son as they travel south.

At times hard to read and harsh. But it is beautifully written and gripping.

So what are you reading now or have been reading and what would you recommend?

[Christine]

Picked up The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd last week and finished it in two days - just couldn't put it down! It was amazing!!

[MathSpeak]

It was for school... but I liked it - which was a surprise.
It's called The Buffalo Creek Disaster. It was for law class and it took us through the life of a lawsuit, with particular emphasis on piercing the corporate veil. It was based on a true story and I had flashbacks of New Orleans 2005 :(

[Marzipan]

Right now I'm reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. I own (and love) The Elegant Universe, another book of his. This one is proving equally delightful. I particularly enjoy the way he takes concepts which are familiar to me and presents them with fun analogies. I also just finished The Great Mortality, which is a book about the Black Death. One of my favorite books ever is Mary Roach's Stiff. I love both fiction and non-fiction, but I've really been soaking up lots of science and history books over the past couple of years.

[Brooke]

:bump

[Kristi]

Right now I am reading The Pact by Jodi Picoult. It is pretty good and an easy read. I started 2 days ago and I am almost done

[Jejune]

I'm rereading right now, as I finished all of the new books I had. Poop. I recently read and loved an odd series of short stories that my friend lent me. It's called Magic for Beginners and it's by Kelly Link. They're odd little fantasy stories, but not in any traditional sense of the word fantasy. Actually, it's a little like Italo Calvino meets Terry Pratchett or something. Very, very strange and very, very well written.

I recently reread Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, and I absolutely love that book, though it makes me sadly envious of Vowell's glamorous life of being driven to assassination related sites and getting to write about them. LOL I wish I were kidding, but I'm not. After reading that, I chose to get out Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and read, with a critical eye, his sections on the Lincoln and McKinley administrations - Teddy Roosevelt, too, for that matter. I'm trying to get a few angles.

I'm still rereading my book on Yiddish, too, but sporadically. And a bunch of boring nonfiction on parenting, knitting, autism, homeschooling, and the like.

[Christi]

I just finished The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult, and am currently reading Salem Falls by the same!

[Jo]

I finally got to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I also read The Lance and the Shield, The Life and Times of Sitting Bull. I just started The Children's Blizzard and when I am done with that I have a book about Crazy Horse and Custer waiting for me. I am in a mood to learn about the history of the area around me in depth. When I get through the last book either I will be onto a new obsession or I will go hunt up some more about the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wyoming and Montana in the last half of the 19th century.

[Jbird]

I'm reading "The Last Witchfinder" by James Morrow. Very diffficult to get into, but interesting historical fiction, based on witchhunts in England and the American Colonies.

[Lori]

I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I haven't decided yet if I like it, and I'm almost halfway through. The story doesn't grab you as immediately as The Handmaid's Tale does, but the characters are pretty interesting and I think the story is a lot more morally complicated than Handmaid's Tale was. It's about a future where there have been a lot of environmental catastrophes and where bioengineering gets out of control. It's interesting, but not a book I just can't put down.

[Lori]

Oryx and Crake ended up being largely disappointing. Definitely not as good as The Handmaid's Tale, in the end. It could have been really good, but it started to feel very rushed and unsatisfying at the end. So, it was okay, but not a great book.