Kevin's Watch

Read Birds, Beasts and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods by Durrell over the weekend, concluding his "Corfu" books.

Now I'm re-reading John Man's Attila quickly.

--A

+JMJ+

Two Sisters in the Spirit by H. U. von Balthasar

Wos, I am curious what the "+JMJ+" signifies, if you don't mind sharing?

Reading three books: Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education, for my Masters; The Joy of Burnout because I am toast; and Defending Jacob, a legal thriller that was on my BILs Kindle. That was his favorite kind of book and I feel strangely like I honor him as I read them through.

Just finished a novella called Catering Girl by one of my fave indie author buds, Laurie Boris. It's cute. Not nearly as annoying as most of the chicklit I've suffered through.

+JMJ+

deer of the dawn wrote:Wos, I am curious what the "+JMJ+" signifies, if you don't mind sharing?

CLICK

Wosbald wrote:+JMJ+

deer of the dawn wrote:Wos, I am curious what the "+JMJ+" signifies, if you don't mind sharing?

CLICK

Respect!

I finished Defending Jacob by William Landay. More like "legal horror" than legal thriller.

Started reading The Shattered Pillars, second installment in the Eternal Sky trilogy which I am really enjoying. Great characters! Kind of a widespread, ambitious plot but knowing that it's a trilogy, already finished, I hope, *realizes I didn't actually check on that * oh crap if this is Game of Thrones all over again I'll be ripped.

EDIT: sigh of relief, the trilogy is complete. We can all go back to living our lives now.

Haha, I have the same feeling these days. To the point where I almost don't want to start things that aren't finished.

The GF almost always refuses to read a series unless I have all of them.

--A

Avatar wrote:Haha, I have the same feeling these days. To the point where I almost don't want to start things that aren't finished.

The GF almost always refuses to read a series unless I have all of them.

--A

See, that's what I used to do. I guess I'm going back to that. SRD finished the Chronicles in good faith, but SOI&F was the only other "current" series I've read recently, and look what he's doing to us!!!

I'm sitting on at least 5 series that I'm waiting for the next book to.

--A

+JMJ+

A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

I'm reading Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson.

I finally finished "The Call to Joy & Pain." It was awesome. A lot of it is about servant leadership.
But more, he sort of like paints a picture of a brotherhood of hard-working self-sacrificing, courageous leaders running alongside each other. He's basically like, "We CAN do this. We will be very tired sometimes, and we will have to spend time doing all sorts of things that we don't feel like doing. We will be misunderstood by others, and sometimes will be disappointed by people whom we've poured love into. It will be extremely hard. But Christ will be with us in the suffering. And He is our reward. It's worth it."

I think about that common saying, "It's lonely at the top" a bit.
So I really love all the "we"s in all that.

Re-reading "The Joy Luck Club," which has its own very special, Chinese kind of pain.
Mothers and daughters.
Fears and ghosts, dreams and hopes.
Lives moving from China to San Francisco.

I don't seem to be as emotionally-wrenched by it as the first time.
But oh well, I think you get to notice more stuff the second time.

deer of the dawn wrote:The Joy of Burnout because I am toast

:hair:
Tell me about this book...

deer wrote:and Defending Jacob, a legal thriller that was on my BILs Kindle. That was his favorite kind of book and I feel strangely like I honor him as I read them through.

I remember enjoying The Joy Luck Club, Linna. There was another of her books I read, too, that I also enjoyed. Might have been The Kitchen God's Wife.

Murrin, let me know what you think of Furiously Happy. Lawson's blog is hilarious.

aliantha wrote:I remember enjoying The Joy Luck Club, Linna. There was another of her books I read, too, that I also enjoyed. Might have been The Kitchen God's Wife.

"The Kitchen God's Wife" is the other one of hers I've read!
It was intense, too, and I enjoyed it.

I read it for a book club, where, of course, the conversation disappointed.

I finished Eternal Sky, which was excellent. Very original cosmology with *mostly* well-developed characters. And horses, lots of horses; even magical ones.

Another BIL book is The Rosie Project. Told from the point of view of an Australian geneticist with Aspergers and OCD about his quest for the perfect wife. So far it is silly and fun and hilarious, which is what I needed. But it's short, so I am already considering my next book...

I'm currently reading The Grandmother by Bozena Nemcova. It's reputed to be the best-loved book in Czech literature. Easy read, very dated, but interesting to me because it tells of Czech life and customs in the early 1800s. Here's a sort of review of the translation I'm reading, if you care:
www.ce-review.org/99/7/books7_partridge.html

(Bohemia is one of the historical Czech lands, and coincidentally is where my grandparents came from. )

+JMJ+

Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze

I loves me some Amy Tan, but I haven't read her for a long time. I really liked the movie of Joy Luck Club as well, and was surprised how closely it resembled the book. And Amy Tan has a very short cameo at the beginning of the movie. I always say Joy Luck Club is my favorite chick flick. It makes me openly weep.

aliantha wrote:Murrin, let me know what you think of Furiously Happy. Lawson's blog is hilarious.

If you like her blog, you'll like her books; it's pretty much the same stuff.

Cagliostro wrote:I loves me some Amy Tan, but I haven't read her for a long time. I really liked the movie of Joy Luck Club as well, and was surprised how closely it resembled the book... It makes me openly weep.

So. intense.
I have not seen the movie.

I remember in my first reading, there were 2 or 3 specific scenes / stories / images from it that etched themselves on my mind so strongly.
ali and Cags, what about you guys?