Reading on the Road

I spent most of August on planes and in hotel rooms. Bad for the soul, really, but good for the reading. I wrote a long letter to a reading friend and here’s the section about books:

I finished off Maisie Dobbs and am working on Bernard Cornwell’s series on Alfred. I picked up a few books at the airport that were fun: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was an engrossing fantasy story with a sequel coming out in January. David Baldacci’s One Summer was a bit predictable, but I enjoyed it anyway. I’ve also been diving into some young adult fiction from Cory Doctorow who writes about ed tech topics. Little Brother and Homeland were really science fiction but dealt with contemporary issues of privacy and surveillance.

I also read Rhett Butler’s People, authorized by the Margaret Mitchell Foundation. It took me a bit to get into it as it was written in somewhat stilted prose but it turned into a good story, very sympathetic to Rhett. And it led to another book by Donald McCaig that is waiting on the Kindle: Jacob’s Ladder, considered one of the best fiction books about the Civil War and set in Virginia.

And more: Wallace  Stegner’s Angle of Repose, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and West of Here by Jonathan Evison. The last was sort-of-historical fiction set on the Olympic Peninsula. The story moved between past and present. It took me a few chapters to get into it, mostly because I was only able to find time to read a few pages here and there, but one I started in earnest, I found it hard to put down.

I’ve also been listening to a new mystery series set in London during WW II. The main character is an American, Maggie Hope, who ends up as Winston Churchill’s secretary. Lots of fun work with cryptography and cyphers that has led me to Alan Turing and more about Blechley Park.

Now, I’m recuperating with a few days at the beach, and I visited the Island Bookstore in Corolla, always a favorite. I have a bagful of books. I pulled out Beautiful Ruins and read it in two days. I loved the complexity of the characters but also the engaging prose.

One more link to a blog entry I wrote about unions on my professional blog.

OK, just one more link: here’s the full list for 2013. I’m up to 54 since the Daniel Pink anthology included five novels.

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