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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, October 12, 2014 - 11:19 am 
And the good news is that the books will probably be less expensive, or, in the case of library, have a shorter wait time 
Deeper into my book.. orcas, Sea World/Navy..
Don't know if they will cover the area of the Blackfish documentary (which I've watched so many times with such sadness and anger and now wonder what part the cold war navy had in that situation..).
Interesting people and locations, too. I do love nonfiction books that expand my knowledge!! (and of course some fictional books do that too)
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Monday, October 13, 2014 - 1:33 pm
Finished that book, learning much..
Started a book by an unrelated kidney donor.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - 10:49 pm
Wow.. quite a woman..
Eldonna Edwards, Lost in Transplantation: Memoir of an Unconventional Organ Donor.
Starting a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, When You Were Older.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Saturday, October 18, 2014 - 11:43 am
So I finished that novel and I liked it.. nothing mindblowing, but I enjoyed it.. and I thought.. hmm, I think I have other books by this author.. and indeed, by Catherine Ryan Hyde I also have, unread,
Don't Let Me Go
Pay It Forward (yes the movie was made from this)
Second Hand Heart
Take Me With You
Walk Me Home
When I Found You
Where We Belong
All bought at bargain prices, too.
So. Starting Second Hand Heart.
Ric, since you come in this thread, do you keep track of your miles daily??
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Mak1
Member
08-11-2002
| Sunday, October 19, 2014 - 10:26 am
I just finished Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I think it has been recommended here before. I loved it. It's not a very long book but is packed with storylines...war, prejudice, love, loss, jazz music, loyalty. It was so good!
Now I'm about to start Kate Morton's The Distant Hours.
I'm also about half-way through The Time of My Life by Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, October 19, 2014 - 12:40 pm
Ohh, I LOVED The Time of My Life, Mak!!!
The Jamie Ford is at $7.99.. hope it will drop more in time and then I'll snap it up.
Finished Second Hand Heart, which was pretty good and now reading When I Found You, which is better.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Sunday, October 19, 2014 - 4:20 pm
Sea, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed your question! It caught me by surprise, but I'm glad to reply: Yes, I do keep track of my miles via the Garmin web application called Garmin Connect as well as something called Daily Mile. Runners tend to be obsessive about such things and I'm no different.
Before I forget, I tracked down the Michael Benfante memoir about 9/11 that you recommended (Reluctant Hero) and liked it a lot, especially the section where his life kind of fell apart and then he was able to figure out how to fix it. The book I read before that one (Land of Shadows) was excellent. It's the first book about LAPD detective Elouise Norton, written by Rachel Howzell Hall, a new voice in L.A. crime fiction. I hope there's a follow-up because it was really good.
Then I read Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge which won the Pulitzer Prize and is being dramatized in a 4-part mini-series on HBO next month. Strout's style reminded me a bit of Anne Tyler (who I adore), but Strout made Olive a no-nonsense New Englander who wasn't always the most sympathetic of characters (I thought Olive was great: very rough around the edges AND interesting).
I'm now reading Haruki Murakami's newest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which sold a million copies (in Japan) immediately upon publication. It's my first time reading Murakami and I'm enjoying it immensely. I totally get why he's so popular. I've been meaning to read his stuff for years and I'm finally getting around to it!
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Sunday, October 19, 2014 - 6:27 pm
I figured you would track your stats!! Some of us do that here (for walking, though I assume we are allowed to run and one of us bikes) of course on a much lower level than yours. I track with my FitBit (which isn't getting much in the way of numbers this weekend)..
I have read Anne Tyler in the past, like her.
Oh I finished When I Found You and will be starting Take Me With You next.
Glad you liked the Benfante book.
Hmm Haruki Murakami is pretty prolific (but not in a crank out a formula novel a year way). I just homed in on his non fiction book and am tempted to get that..
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Monday, October 20, 2014 - 12:34 pm
I usually try to read a writer's body of work in the order the books were written, but because a copy of Murakami's latest was on the "Hot New Titles" shelf at the library, I grabbed it (I just have to read it quickly because it's a 7-day, instead of a 21-day, loan).
And talking about prolific, I can't believe all the books Ms. Hyde (or is it Ms. Ryan-Hyde?) has written since Pay it Forward (the only one of hers I've read) - very impressive.
Keeping track of your fitness is definitely the way to go. I run with a heart rate monitor (most geeky runners do) as that's the most efficient tool to determine what shape you're in, especially if you've taken a break from training. I had to take two months off (June/July) from running (due a mild case of vertigo that the ENT doc helped me clear up). When I resumed training after the two-month layoff, my resting heart rate was 66 bpm. And now that I've got 2½ months of training under my belt, my resting heart rate is back down to 40 bpm. That's what great about training with a monitor: you can see real results.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Monday, October 20, 2014 - 1:54 pm
I have one of those Polar strap and watch things, but no idea what happened to it.. so I just have my fitbit, which doesn't do pulse and heart rate.
I have a pulse oximeter, somewhere.
I do get pulse done at the HIGI station at Rite Aid.
My resting heart rate is quite a bit higher.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Monday, October 20, 2014 - 5:43 pm
But you're out there, Sea, doing as much as you can, which is a LOT more than the average (sedentary) person does!
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Tuesday, October 21, 2014 - 6:06 pm
Well I'm out there, some days and doing better than in the past so I have to be happy with that. Still, I sure admire your work ethic with your running!!
and your wide ranging reading too.
Still reading Take Me With You.. the best so far I my batch of books by this author. She has a knack for characters who can be sort of irritating but human. And deals with issues such as alcoholism, child abandonment and neglect, heart transplant, and brain injury, oh and the backlash against muslims after 9/11 in this country, with a bit about the internment camps in WWII of Japanese Americans.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 10:22 am
Finished Take Me With You and starting Don't Let Me Go. Also bought Jumpstart the World which won awards.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 10:42 am
Thank you, Sea, very sweet of you to say! Running and reading - my absolute faves. But if I had to choose one over the other, it would be NO CONTEST: reading is the single greatest gift any human being can ever have.
I finished the Murakami book and LOVED it. I must get my butt-scratchers on everything he's ever written! And I have to take another look at Ms. Hyde's works too. I'm glad you provided the various themes she's covered over the years.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 8:18 pm
Oh this book I started has an alcoholic, I think, a child afraid to go inside and an agoraphobic afraid to go outside and I haven't gotten far, other characters as well.
And Jumpstart the World won a Lambda award for a transsexual character.. and she has any number of other books.
Her style is sort of spare, so far always narrated by the characters, not as detailed/deep as Jodi Picoult but dealing with somewhat non traditional characters and certainly no blue sky apple pie situations or gushy romance, not mystery..
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Friday, October 24, 2014 - 4:48 am
OK, not always narrated by the characters.
The book I started, I just finished.. liked it. Don't Let Me Go.. next is Where We Belong, which tackles autistic spectrum disorder.
Her list of interesting sounding books is so long.. but I am enjoying quite a run of the ones I had already bought when the were deals of the day.
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Mamie316
Member
07-08-2003
| Friday, October 24, 2014 - 5:53 pm
We just read California by Eden Lepucki for my book club. It's a very interesting take on what happens when there is a world disaster. I loved that you never knew exactly what happened in the world and it really was a great outing for a first time novelist.
I am now reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I have had it on my TBR shelf forever and the size was just daunting but I decided it was time.
I am also reading The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain, not as daunting.
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Friday, October 24, 2014 - 8:49 pm
Hey, some days you want to be daunted and some days you don't..
I think the most daunting book I ever read of my own choice was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was in HS (just as free reading), especially since I read the paperback, unwieldy as all heck and insisted on reading all the footnotes too. Eeek.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 2:10 pm
I hope you enjoy Freedom, Mamie - I certainly did and thought it was better than The Corrections, but the two are pretty close in quality.
I admire your tenacity, Sea, but I tried three or four times to read TRAFOTTR, and using that same gigantic brick paperback version, too, but I never made it past page 50. I was in high school, too. You must have gone to a better high school.
My most daunting was Proust's mammoth Remembrance of Things Past, which I conquered about 15 years ago. It was in three beefy paperback volumes, over 1,000 pages each - grand total was 3,294. It took over 3 months to finish everything, but I was glad I did because it was really good!
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm
Well it was a good high school at that time but that had nothing to do with me choosing that book. We just all (at least in the classes I was in) tended to have a paperback book we hauled around in addition to our textbooks. We even had a bookstore on campus run by ASF (they used the profits to help with the exchange student program) so you could browse books right there. No internet, no video games, no cell phones and more time to read for me.
That is probably more daunting anyway, Proust, for many people.
I finished Where We Belong, which I liked! And starting Walk Me Home.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 6:04 pm
Oh, yes, I got that part, Sea. I hope you didn't think I thought your HS had anything to do with you reading TRAFOTTR - I understood you were reading it for "fun" - I'm just amazed you stuck with it to the end!
And I had to do something (by reading the Proust classic) to make up for some of my less-than-admirable reading choices over the years. The book-reading story I love to tell above all others involves my 6th-grade teacher, Miss Bowman. I'll never forget the look of shock/horror/disbelief on her face the day I brought my paperback copy of Valley of the Dolls to class. This would've been late '68, I was 10 at the time.
"Do your parents know you're reading that???" Miss Bowman half-shrieked at me. "Well," I replied, "I've never had a father and my mother can't read English, so she doesn't really care what I read." I was next instructed to NEVER bring that book to class ever again! (But she always let me sit with the best readers in the class during reading time.)
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 7:30 pm
Heh.. I didn't get caught until I was 13. We were reading Ivanhoe in English. Junior High in Santa Ana, after we moved to California from Detroit and before we moved to Corona del Mar.
Ivanhoe was okay but I was way ahead of the class and they were slowly reading aloud. I had my parents (mom's) hardback of Peyton Place wrapped in brown paper with "Ivanhoe" written on it.
I had Ivanhoe inside that book in case I was called on to read.
But little did I know that our student teacher's supervisor had slipped into the seat behind me. So the jig was up.
My mom thought it was sort of funny, actually. She wasn't a fan of unchallenging classes..
I always hoped I didn't get the student teacher in too much trouble, though.
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Uncle_ricky
Member
07-02-2007
| Saturday, October 25, 2014 - 9:53 pm
Ahhhh, the glorious fun of our bygone youthful era -- what nice memories we have to look back on! To quote the immortal Edith & Archie, "Those were the days!"
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Seamonkey
Moderator
09-07-2000
| Monday, October 27, 2014 - 10:03 am
Indeed..
Finished Walk Me Home, then read Jumpstart the World, New reading Pay it Forward, the last of the Catherine Ryan Hyde books I own on Kindle. There are many more that sound good but I have other books needing attention after this one.
She sure knows how to create stubborn characters.
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Mamie316
Member
07-08-2003
| Wednesday, October 29, 2014 - 12:39 pm
I definitely didn't mean daunting like reading Proust! LOL That is daunting. It's just that lately I have been reading things that are not so long because of taking care of mom every day, my time to read can be longer or shorter, depending on what state she's in at the moment. Right now she's sleeping so I can get good reading time in but later today, she may decide she needs to go somewhere every 5 minutes. It's definitely been a roller coaster ride.
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