| Author |
Message |
Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, January 05, 2020 - 3:23 pm 
Really long interview with Oprah.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dvl6NpqFeWc
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, January 05, 2020 - 3:51 pm
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Starting this novel.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Wednesday, January 08, 2020 - 12:58 am
Since Tres, Rie and Mame all enjoyed The Escape Room as resoundingly as they did, methinks it's time to track down a copy.
Sea, thanks for the Winfrey interview with Westover - I'm really looking to watching it!
The first book read in 2020 is officially on the top of the list, but then there's no other book on the list just yet. The only reason I gave The Topeka School by Ben Lerner a chance was because I picked up a copy at the library, read the back-cover testimonials and found that Ocean Vuong had written one of them. And since I'd just finished reading Vuong's debut -- and because Lerner, similar to Vuong, was awarded his own MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant -- I thought it would be safe to tackle TTS.
Oy vey! What a workout. Had I not had the experience, years ago, of reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, I don't think I could've made it to the end of TTS (and the latter is only 282 pages, far fewer than ROTP's 3,000+ pages). TTS is extremely dense, but it's also fairly interesting. I don't regret reading it, but I may need the rest of the week to take a long nappy-poo (to recover from it). 
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, January 08, 2020 - 11:42 am
The other link is a shorter interview of Tara by Karamo for Queer Eye. Very good and unlike Oprah, who keeps reading from Tara's book, Karamo and Tara just talked.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, January 08, 2020 - 11:48 am
I am reading a novel translated from French, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.
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Heckagirl631
Member
09-08-2010
| Thursday, January 09, 2020 - 7:03 am
Finished "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs. It was interesting. There is a whole series of these books. I haven't seen any of the others, though. Don't know if I will seek them out, but if I run across them, I might read them.
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Tresbien
Member
08-26-2002
| Thursday, January 09, 2020 - 12:55 pm
Enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere and got me thinking about the consequences of one's actions, and how we never know what is right for someone else--and sometimes even for ourselves.
A suggestion for anyone else planning to read Prince's biography/autobiography. The second section is what he wrote in his own handwriting. I'm finding it difficult to read on my tablet and may finish on paper.
Now reading The Handmaid's Tale while waiting for books to become available from the library.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Saturday, January 11, 2020 - 5:22 pm
You all know how much I love Lisa Jewell. Well, I finished The Making of Us a little while ago and I can't help but rate it the best of hers I've read thus far. I was boo-hoo-hooing all over the place. I continue to be pleasantly surprised by just how much I love novels about siblings even though I never had any of my own. I wonder if I would've liked them as much as I do if I had had them.
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Sugar
Member
08-15-2000
| Saturday, January 11, 2020 - 9:26 pm
I have 5 siblings Uncle_ricky, would you like to borrow one? Choice of either sisters or brothers. Not particularly peeved with any of them right now so I would like them back.
One of my sisters is also an avid reader so perhaps her?
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Kappy
Member
06-28-2002
| Sunday, January 12, 2020 - 11:34 am
I've only read 2 of Lisa Jewell's books Girls in the Gardenand Then She Was Gone and both were good. I always have at least one of her books in my 'wishlist' under my account at the library so I can quickly see what might be in when I'm in need of a book.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, January 12, 2020 - 3:28 pm
So.. This novel was slow to start, then I got hooked, but it ended too soon and unhappily.
Back to non fiction.
Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Monday, January 13, 2020 - 7:16 pm
Sugar! So nice to see you back visiting among us bibliophiles! Wouldn't that be something if packs of siblings could "sample" other sibling packs, just to see if they could do some mixing and matching?
Kappy - I'm glad you have Ms. Jewell on "speed dial" 
Today I finished Elizabeth Strout's fabulous sequel to Olive Kitteridge, titled (uninterestingly enough), Olive, Again. Olive is one of the most formidable characters in modern-day literature. I loved her in the original and I love her just as much in the sequel. They really don't make them much crankier than Olive!
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Tresbien
Member
08-26-2002
| Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - 9:42 am
Going back to my comment above about the Prince biography, once I struggled through reading his handwritten pages, I found that the next section is the pages transcribed. Instead of writing "I" he writes Eye, and they have a picture of an eye in the transcription--that made me chuckle.
Finished A Handmaid's Tale and was glad I read it. I don't have Hulu but have been intrigued by the awards their adaptation has received.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - 1:57 pm
This morning I finished A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford. She takes the reader through her relationship with the tragically departed pop music icon. The scale of her drug addiction was much, much worse than I thought — it saddened me greatly to read about it (and I wasn’t even a fan of her music). I can only imagine how her fans will feel reading about the horrors of the drug abuse and the (far greater) horrors of her marriage to Bobby Brown.
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Jimmer
Board Administrator
08-29-2000
| Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - 2:28 pm
What happened to her was tragic. I saw her in concert right when she first became famous. She was talented, brilliant and intelligent. I thought she had it all. What a shame.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - 10:00 pm
That's nice you got to see her perform when she was on her rise to superstardom. The folks who saw her perform near the end of her career only got to see a shell of what she'd once been. Very sad indeed.
Attention Tres, Rie and Mamie! I just finished The Escape Room by Megan Goldin - thank you for speaking of it so highly. The praise for it is well deserved. She's definitely a star and I'm very much looking forward to her new one (which comes out in August).
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Mamie316
Member
07-08-2003
| Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - 8:55 am
Psst Ric, I have a copy of the new one.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - 12:41 pm
Do you hear the angst in Studio City? 👀
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - 3:35 pm
Wow! A whole 8 months ahead of the release date. That’s great! I hope it’s as good (or better) than The Escape Room.
Sea, if I could project angst from Studio City, I would gladly do so! Alas, our slightly dreary Van Nuys is much less nice than Studio City (much less!). Interestingly, I’m composing this post within the confines of the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library system. Our branch in Van Nuys has been closed for nearly a year (leaky roof) - it should reopen in June. (But I’ll keep going to the SC branch - it’s much nicer and has very comfy reading chairs)! 😜
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Heckagirl631
Member
09-08-2010
| Thursday, January 23, 2020 - 4:15 pm
Read "Hello, Again" by Brenda Novak. Another murder-mystery. It was pretty good. She left it wide-open for a sequel.
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Sugar
Member
08-15-2000
| Friday, January 24, 2020 - 2:39 pm
I am not going to finish Olive, Again. It is due back at the library and the 78 pages I have read do not entice me to read further. I did not really care for Olive Kitteridge either. I think I liked the movie a bit better than the book which is very unusual. I really wanted to like both books. Olive is just so very unlikable with few, if any, redeeming qualities. I'm all for a cranky curmudgeon but Olive is just mean.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Sunday, January 26, 2020 - 8:19 pm
I'm sorry you didn't care for either of the Olive books, Sugar. I loved both and I loved Olive herself even more - not when she was being mean, but when she wasn't. (I'm sure there are MANY readers who agree with you, though.)
Tonight I finished the 5th in the Inspector Lynley series, For the Sake of Elena, by Elizabeth George. It was long, but also really good. And thanks to Brit Box, tonight I'll be watching the TV adaptation so it'll be fun to see how faithful it is to the book.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Friday, January 31, 2020 - 9:45 pm
I appreciated Olive, but it was not a joy to read.
Ric, I wonder if Robyn slanted things in her reporting. I am NOT a fan of Bobby Brown and certainly wish Whitney Houston had had any other partner, but from multiple sources it seemed like she was the one to introduce drugs into the relationship. Such a sad life, such a wasted talent, though we got to see some of it.
Ronan Farrow's book.. Just WOW. Yes, non fiction, and he documents everything, but full of misuse of power far beyond the crazy history of Weinstein, Lauer, etc and coverups by NBC, among other organizations, the use of batteries of attornies (some surprises, such as Lisa Bloom) and harassment and stalking of whistle blowers and journalists alike.
..
Just finished Tom Brokaw's memoir of his active treatment of multiple myeloma, ALucky Life, Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope. He really is an engaging author, which I knew from having read The Greatest Generstion and A Long Way from Home.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Sunday, February 02, 2020 - 10:54 am
Sea, I agree about Robyn Crawford. And didn't you wish the Ronan Farrow book had been twice as long? Those insider-type glimpses into his personal life were such a treat to the reader.
Last night I finished The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff. Very somber indeed, but exceptionally researched. The book has received tremendous praise and all of it is completely deserved.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, February 02, 2020 - 8:13 pm
Dad's maybe Book by Tim O'Brien, who wrote What They Carried about the Vietnam War.
He was older when his boys were born and seemed obsessed with what he or they would miss and wrote this book over a 15 year period. Lots of good stuff, and too much stuff at times.
The huge irony, to me, is that with his constant theme of dying when they wouldn't remember him, or being too old to be active with them, he never stopped smoking 🚬 , not even after he was told he had some cardiac issues.
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