reading wednesday

[boxofdelights]

• What are you reading?

Fullmetal Alchemist, Volume 1, by Hiromu Arakawa.
Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier.
French the easy way, by Christopher Kendris and Theodore Kendris, so I can speak French to my kid.

• What did you recently finish reading?
Arcadia, by Lauren Groff. I like stories about children who are reared apart from society, in an enclave of people who are trying to do something different and better, who then have to figure out how to be adults in the world without knowing the things everybody knows. This one is beautifully written. (Here, Bit is fourteen:)

He had liberated a red lightbulb from a photography store and stolen cash from Hannah for the chemicals, and only in the half-light of his improvised darkroom, watching the world emerge on a piece of white paper, did he feel his old self stirring. He could control this world. He could create tiny windows he could fit between his hands and study until he began to understand them.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

My book groups' next books are:
The Player of Games, by Iain Banks,
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey,
Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

Comments

[luzula]

I have read The Player of Games and enjoyed it, although I haven't really gone on to read more of the Culture books. I've also read part of Sometimes a Great Notion. I liked the writing a lot, and also the sense of place, although I kind of lost interest at the drug trips and ultimately didn't care enough about the characters to finish it.

*ponders checking out Arcadia*

Sometimes a great notion

[bibliofile]

So is this some Reed-related homework? It captures that part of the '60s very well, I thought. If you have the patience for that sort of thing, clearly.

Re: Sometimes a great notion

[luzula]

Are you asking me or boxofdelights? : )

Anyway, I don't know what you mean by Reed-related, but I picked it up because I've lived for a couple of years in the Pacific Northwest and wanted to read more books from the region, and also because I'm interested in the logging industry and wanted to know more about how it worked in the US (I'm involved in an environmental organization dealing with forestry).

Re: Sometimes a great notion

[boxofdelights]

Reed is where my daughter goes to college. It's in Portland, Oregon, a very different climate from the Colorado Front Range where she grew up. Here it's basically the high desert, 12 inches of annual rainfall. There's an old joke that goes, "That may not sound like much, but you should be here the day we get it!" That actually did happen once in the 25 years I've lived here, 12 inches of rain in one day.

Where in the PNW did you live?

Re: Sometimes a great notion

[luzula]

Ah, okay. So do you get the "desert in bloom" thing when there's a lot of rain at once? I've always wanted to see that.

I lived in Seattle for two years, when I was nine and ten years old--my dad had a post-doc at Washington University. That's when I learned English.

Re: Sometimes a great notion

[boxofdelights]

No, it's for book group. I don't know anything about it; I didn't even know it was set in the Pacific NW.