Read any good books lately?

[elisedance]

don't mean to be fascetious but masters of what? 

Why don't you read one of them and find out.

ah, masters of teasing eh?

I'm a lousy reader - most of my reading is work stuff ... I like to hang out with the other team

[Burgess Penguin]

Write It When I'm Gone - Gerald Ford/Thomas DeFrank

Fever The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee by Peter Richmond

[Lioness]

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

[Bordertangoman]

I am listening to an audiobook of Proust's Swanns Way on tape 5 of 14.

reading Finding Flow by Mihaly Cs...something ...csikszentmihalyi

[bookworm]

Currently reading The Gathering Storm - Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson

[Lioness]

Currently reading The Gathering Storm - Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson

Is it any good?
I stopped at...3? I think. Because I couldn't get hold of the rest of the series and they're all such doorstops.

Doorstops don't put me off, but having to re-read them because I waited too long to get the next book...

[Bordertangoman]

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson another nordic masterpiece.

"Anyone familiar with Jansson knows it would be unwise to dismiss her or patronise her work on any grounds. Her books for children are complex, subtle, psychologically tricky, funny and unnerving; their morality, though never compromised, is never simple. Thus her transition to adult fiction involved no great change. Her everyday Swedes are quite as strange as trolls, and her Swedish village in winter is as beautiful and dangerous as any forest of fantasy.

If a transformation has taken place, it is in the nature of her writing. The language is more than ever spare, lean, taut, minimalist. These adjectives describe a good deal of modern narrative prose – the modishly anorectic style, well suited to thrillers, police procedurals and the existential noir, but very limited in range. Jansson's range, though effortlessly controlled, is great. Her spare exactness can express not only tension and stress but deeply felt emotion, expansion, relaxation and peace. Her description is unhurried, accurate and vivid, an artist's vision. Her style is not at all "poetic" – quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures. The sentences are beautiful in structure, movement and cadence. They have inevitable rightness. And this is a translation! Thomas Teal deserves to have his name on the title page with Jansson's: he has worked the true translator's miracle.

I wish I could quote whole pages, but a paragraph must do:

If it got really cold, it didn't make sense to go on working. The shed wasn't insulated, and the stove was barely able to warm it enough to keep their hands from stiffening. They locked it up and went home. But on the seaward side where the boats were launched, the doors had a latch that was easy to open. Mats would go out on the ice with his cod hook and when no one was in sight he'd go into the boat shed. Sometimes he'd go on with his work, usually details so trivial that no one noticed they'd been done. But most times he just sat quietly in the peaceful snowlight. He never felt cold.

The main characters are Anna Aemalin, a successful illustrator of children's books, and Katri, whose only love and ambition is for the younger brother left in her care, Mats, a shy, slow, gentle fellow. Then there are honest Liljeberg the boat-builder, the wise Madame Nygard, the malicious storekeeper, a little horde of village children, and Katri's dog. Nameless, silent and yellow-eyed, the dog is yellow-eyed Katri's creature. And she flatters herself on her own wolfish superiority to other people: "My dog and I despise them. We're hidden in our own secret life, concealed in our innermost wildness."

No one in the village seems to be married, and the relationship that will form between the two solitary women, Katri and Anna, is not sexual, though it is intensely passionate, fiercely unstable, destructive and transformative. Anna, far wealthier than Katri, keeps her parents' house piously unchanged, and illustrates little books for which the publisher provides the words. Her paintings are marvellously truthful depictions of the forest floor, patterns of leaf, twig, moss, lichen . . . to which she adds the cute bunnies of the publisher's texts. She spends much time answering letters from her child readers, and none in looking after her business interests. She sleeps, sleeps all winter until spring comes and she can see the living ground and paint it.

Wolfish young Katri, determined to provide security for her brother, and also the fishing boat that is his one heart's desire, fakes a robbery of Anna's house in order to make her afraid to live alone, and pushes her way into Anna's service and confidence. Before long she appears to be in full control and has thrown out all the old furniture and the comfortable lies that let Anna sleep. But Anna, awake now, is not the bunny-rabbit she seemed, any more than Katri is truly the wolf. The unfolding of their story through vivid contrast and interplay of truthfulness and deceit, purity and complexity, ice and thaw, winter and spring, makes the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read this year."

the Guardian

[bookworm]

Currently reading The Gathering Storm - Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson

Is it any good?
I stopped at...3? I think. Because I couldn't get hold of the rest of the series and they're all such doorstops.

Doorstops don't put me off, but having to re-read them because I waited too long to get the next book...

Yeah, I'm loving it!

[Rugby]

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Excellent book and follows the adventures of Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  This will probably be the next movie made.   

[ZPomeroy]

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Very good book, did highly enjoy reading that one

Zac

[QPO]

I can't recommend a book as i have not read one for ages. I just dont have the time or the attention span to start one

[elisedance]

Perhaps I'll write the three-word book - for people like you and me Q to say that we read a book 'yesterday'

[QPO]

Perhaps I'll write the three-word book - for people like you and me Q to say that we read a book 'yesterday'

Yes a book that is as long as an article in a magazine, my reading material while on the loo! 

[Rugby]

Homer's Odyssey
A fearless Feline Tale, Or, How I learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat

by Gwen Cooper

If you are an animal lover and have a pet you love dearly you will like this book.  It is a true story and makes us realize how amazing animals really are and how much we can learn from them. 

[Burgess Penguin]

The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor

Hilarious and deep novel about a freakishly gifted bear who plays alto sax, lives in New York and his continuing misadventures in the pursuit of truth, beauty, art, perfection and love.