Hey, look. I updated my Shelfari. I'm actually not reading any of them at the moment, as at least one of them is not yet published (the one I'm looking the most forward to but which Shelfari for some reason won't let me place at the top---"Faithful Place" by Tana French). But this is The Plan for winter break/Christmas.
So #1 is Faithful Place because I LOVED the first two books Tana French wrote. Please check them out. They don't have to be read in order because they're not technically a series but they do have the same characters....yeah. Anyway. First "In the Woods", then "The Likeness". You (probably) won't regret it, even if you don't normally like mysteries.
#2 I'm most looking forward to is "The Song is You" mainly because my favorite work of contemporary fiction is "Prague: a Novel" and this is by the same author (Arthur Phillips) and has gotten rave reviews. I think that for me it will be very hard to top "Prague" but we shall see.
#3 is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because I started reading it this summer but had to return it to the library when I was only 50 pages in (there was a queue behind me and I couldn't renew). Lesson learned: don't check out 5 books at a time, you'll never finish them all! I liked what I'd read, but I have to say I don't see what all the fuss is about. Then again, I only got 50 pages in.
#4 is Sorting Things Out because I like that kind of non-fiction (popular non-fiction about odd topics--like "Cod: the Biography of the Fish That Changed the World"), but this is about classification! Go librarians!
#5 is the Quiet American because I've been meaning to read that since before we went to Vietnam (oops....). My cousin managed to accomplish this (or read it while we were there?) and loved it and insists that I will, too. And I stayed at that hotel (the one in which it is largely set, I understand). That and it's kind of a modern classic, and while Greene's not quite one of the Lost Generation modernists (or is he? is Evelyn Waugh?... surely not, right? maybe straight-up modernists? ack, it doesn't matter and I wasn't an English major anyway), I kind of get the impression that many of the things I appreciate about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and company I would like about Greene. I'll let you know how that theory turns out.
So that's it. I've updated the Shelfari. After....a year? I've been busy.
Edited to add....alright so The Quiet American didn't show up, but Barbara Kingsolver's new one did. I just like her and have lots of her books on the "To Read" list. This one may or may not make it. Greene gets a bump. But I can't make Shelfai cooperate. Stupid Shelfari.
