What is everyone reading?

[MrsSpoon]

Just nosey and looking for recommendations or titles to avoid.

I am currently reading the new Kate Atkinson, the name of which escapes me. It is fantastic thought nothing could live up to Case Histories but this is just as good.

Marina - are you going to let ds go on beyond book 5? (dino, did you let ds1 go further?) I am trying to persuade ds that books 6 & 7 should be saved till he's a bit older.

I have the not-at-all-derivative-or-formulaic, oh no, first Deltora suite for him next.

(And I don't do Prof McGonagall because re me it's just a weeny weeny bit coals to Newcastle )

Blu - LOL that we are the centre of the world

Have just started the Memory Keepers Daughter which I'm really enjoying. Befire that it was 'Saturday' by Iam Mcewan and 'We need to talk about Kevin' by Lional Shriver. All quite different and all v good. Am worried becasue I don't know what I'm going to read next. Haven't got anything lined up.

Just finished As Music and Splendour by Kate O'Brien which I last read when I was 20. Loved it even more this time but had to explain to DH that he would not like to read it because it makes Jane Austen look like Dan Brown (ie there is NO PLOT whatsoever).
On holiday I also read William Trevor's new collection of short stories which is ace, and Kate Mosse's Labyrinth which was utter, utter tripe.
And Dusty Answer, which I also hadn't read since my teens and is also still wonderful. And nothing happens in that either.

Andrew Marr's My Trade. Fascinating insight into world of journalism.

And latest volume of CBeebies Magazine with great Charlie and Lola bedtime story

Two that I've read recently that I'd recommend giving a miss...

Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (supposed to be hysterically funny but just pathetic imo)

The Book Of Lost Things (most irritatingly pretentious author since Tolkein! )

Andrew Marr sounds good.

Intelligent contextualising demystifying reportage is an under-appreciated sort of writing. On holiday I picked up something called "Madison Avenue USA" which was an early-sixties Penguin reprint of a very thoughtfully written assessment of the US advertising trade as it stood in the late fifties. Written in that satisfying Penguin/Pelican accessible-academic style (by which I mean making the best of both sorts of writing) - plus a particular hobbyhorse enthusiasm of mine, which is cosmopolitan-American writing - sounds contradiction in terms, but it's absolutely not (though very Ivy League) - can go on about this at length should anyone wish.

Anyway - particularly fascinating in tandem with Then We Came to the End, and full of surprising discoveries - did you know that "Unique Selling Point" or USP as beloved of Sunday supplement acronym-inventors dates back to the 30s, and to one specific adman's obsession with psychology?

My other favourite discovery was of a woman who ran the "testimonial" department of one of these iconic agencies, whose name for those purposes was something invented and anodyne. "What her real name is is nobody's business," said the book.

I loved the idea of having a nom de guerre for professional work (as opposed to writing/media/stage etc. etc., which are I think the only places you see it now?).
But my MIL (who has impeccable feminist credentials) said that that me using my maiden name for work was not so far away from that. What do you think?

I am reading Magician, byRaymond E Feist, as recommended by another thread like this one.
Very good so far.

Just finished a really entertaining book called Beyond The Great Indoors by Ingvar Ambjornsen. Unusual in that you don't get many books set in Oslo about mental patients adjusting to life in the city. Unusual in that you wouldn't think it any good but it is, very well written and great characters.

Am currently reading Extreme Motherhood by Jackie Clune, which is making me glad I had only twins to deal with and not triplets (plus toddler.)

Harlequin by Laurell K Hamilton

book 14 of the Anita Blake series quite good so far, and yes Ive read all of them, though I must admit that the first few are the best and that Obsidion Butterfly is my favourite.

Savage Garden by Mark Mills

A beautiful Tuscan villa, a mysterious garden, two hidden murders - one from the 16th century, one from the twentieth - and a family driven by dark secrets, combine in this evocative, intriguing mystery set in post-War Italy. In 1958, Adam Strickland, a young Cambridge scholar, travels to the Villa Docci in Tuscany to study a sixteenth-century garden. Designed and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, it is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills and classical inscriptions. But tragedy has hit the Docci family more recently. The German occupation during World War 2 had a devastating impact on them, and the tensions between collaborators and partisans were played out within their own tight circle. Adam is fascinated by the Doccis and increasingly aware that there are dangerous secrets hidden within the family domain. The garden itself starts to exercise a powerful influence over his imagination, its iconography seeming to point to some deeper, darker truth than was first apparent. And what really lay behind a killing at the villa towards the end of the war? Past and present, love and intrigue, intertwine in an evocative mystery which vividly captures the experience of an innocent abroad in the uncertain world of post-War Italy.

I've just finished reading One Unknown by Gill Hicks - Survivor of the London bombings. Gill (a truly amazing and inspirational woman) was one of the women who had to have both her legs amputated because of the horrific injuries that she sustained. This book made me cry everytime I read a chapter but has also given me so much to think about. I never thought a book could have such a profound affect on me.

All the talk of Atonement reminded me how much I enjoyed that book so I am now currently reading Saturday and so far it is good.

Siblings Without Rivalry. Or rather, I would be reading it if I didn't have to keep on breaking up fights.

right now scar tissue, the autobiography of anthony kiedis, but int eh last 2 weeks i have read humble pie about gordon ramsay, notes on a scandal, the kite runner, some cheapo job in a spar that i cant remember v much about, aload of darren shan, which are kids books but terribly gruesome , and some others i cant recall right now( i was away with the kids, and had no pc or tv and no adult company for 95% of the time)

Above the Clouds, The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer, Anatoli Boukreev

Half A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Aidiche (sp?)

on hols read:
Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Salaryman's Wife by Sujata Massey
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
(I'm sure there was another one, but I can't remember - too much prosecco )

oh yes, Kite Runner reminded me (thanks Lou ): the new one by Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

The Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman and also flicking through one of my Wainright walking books.

75% thru humand traces seb faulks, i love it.

hello bundle how's tricks?

Read Chesil Beach at beginning of hols. Hummm. Not sure. Liked ending.

How to be Free/Tom Hodgkinson. Fantastic - not to srong to say almost changed my life.

Middlemarch/George Elliot. For OU. Humm. Struggling a bit, but enjoying all the same.

not bad thanks, been to tuscany with dh and kids, just back to work...and you?

oh how lovely, i just got back from 2 weeks at the witterings with my kids