Susan1
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Thank you?!!!!
The best one ever was in, I think, a David Rosenfeld book
Geez!! "Rosenfelt" - even me!
Thank you?!!!!
The best one ever was in, I think, a David Rosenfeld book
It's on the library 7 day shelf. I already had three reserved books to check out, so I'll just wait till that one shows up as ready and I won't have read it in 7 days.New Harlan Coben book released tomorrow called 'Run Away".
I treated myself to Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty for my Honolulu to Newark flight last night into this morning.
I always enjoy Liane Moriarty novels and I hardly put it down (not that there were many opportunities to wander around on the plane), but it does have a very distinct plot turn about midway through the book, that while it upped the suspense, took up a lot of space and felt unbelievable to me.
But it certainly made a nine hour plane ride feel shorter.
I've read a lot of books in the past couple of weeks but the only one I remember is Chemistry, which is about an overachieving Chinese-American Ph.D candidate surrounded by other overachieving people who feels as if she can't possibly measure up to anyone or anything (especially her parents' expectations) and maybe doesn't want to be a chemist after all. When her boyfriend proposes and asks her to move to Oberlin with him, she has something of an anxiety-and-indecision-induced breakdown. The author packs a lot into her spare prose--generational angst, humor, science, graduate school psychosis, sexism in the sciences, marriage and baby indecision, and a lot of other things. I'd probably have liked it even more if I were, say, in my 20s, but I still enjoyed it. She has an interesting voice and a real knack for the subtle zinger.
If you like memoirs (not a genre I usually enjoy, so not sure why I picked this one out at the library), I highly recommend Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic. She's old enough to remember Yugoslavia before it went to shit, but got out right as the war was beginning. She's Serbian, but her family opposed Milosevic from the start, so it's interesting to hear about that, since most of the news I recall painted all the Serbs as evil. I mean, I know that couldn't have been true, but I worked only with Bosnian and Croatian refugees in Germany, so I admit my own perspective was skewed that way. So not only did I enjoy the book (she's an excellent writer), but it forced me to abandon one of my prejudices.
I really struggled with this one - perhaps the prose was too spare or abstract for me, but the style just didn’t work for me.
I just picked that one up at Costco on the weekend. I'm really looking forward to it; I loved The Alice Network.If you haven't read The Huntress by Kate Quinn, do it!
I'm trying to get some fun stuff read before my class starts next week. I just finished The Arsonist by Stephanie Oakes. It's YA, and centers around the diary of an East German Anne Frank, for lack of a better description, and two teenagers trying to solve her murder. Lots of interesting sub-plots and the male and female leads DO NOT FALL IN LOVE OMG so refreshing. And there is also an overweight, yet heroic, pug. Highly recommend.
The Woman in the Window--yet another thriller with an unreliable narrator that is something of an homage to Hitchcock and Hitchcockian movies. In this one, a child psychologist has agoraphobia and spies on her neighbors for entertainment. She briefly meets and likes a new neighbor and then later sees the neighbor stagger past the neighbor's living room window, bleeding profusely with a knife or something like a knife protruding from her chest. But when the police arrive, it seems that the woman doesn't exist, there is no sign of murder and no one can corroborate her story, while it is also apparent to all that she drinks, abuses prescription drugs and is the victim of some sort of severe trauma, which slowly emerges as the tale winds on. Overall, I liked this one more than some, as I liked the protagonist more than some. There are two twists--one I didn't see coming and one I thought was clunkily obvious, which made the end pretty meh.
So in spite of the weird profiles of the author, I read this and enjoyed it too. So I have this terrible habit of skipping to the end of books (I can’t handle suspense so I enjoy books better when I know the ending) so I obviously saw all the plot twists coming since I cheated. I am curious for someone who didn’t, which was considered the clunkily obvious and which one you saw coming.
I finished Bad Blood by John Carreyrou on the Theranos scandal. Jesus Christ. The gall of these people.
I'm listening to the podcast The Drop Out. I'm only into the second episode and find it fascinating. I remember first reading about Theranos when the scandal broke.I finished Bad Blood by John Carreyrou on the Theranos scandal. Jesus Christ. The gall of these people.
I know. Shouldn't half the world's population be gone? (It's a great typo. ) But seriously, I wonder the same thing. If given the time, I wonder if the technology really could've worked. I don't know if it's just impatient naivety or outright fraud.I've read a lot about the Thanos debacle and watched some YouTube videso about it and I still don't know if they knowing set out to commit fraud or if they were certain they could get the whole thing to work and thought "oh, I'll just fudge a bit now to buy time."
It's too bad they couldn't do the research properly and (maybe) come up with a product that really did work, even if it wasn't as ambitious.If they had just said "we're going to do 7 tests with a few drops of blood," that would have been revolutionary in and of itself. But, no, they had to promise 250 tests with a few drops of blood!
I get 7-11 vials of blood taken every year during my annual physical and I would have been happy if even a few of them went away.
I loved Novik's Temeraire books (well, maybe not the one set in Australia). Those are more alt-history with fantasy elements, and I agree that she's very good at combining the serious and the fantastical.I read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. It's a loose retelling of Rumplestiltskin and I found it pretty enjoyable. Fantasy is not my usual genre, so it was nice to read something different. This book has tales within tales with multiple narrators and lovely worldbuilding. It also explores anti-semitism in a rather matter-of-fact way--not something I expected to find in a fairy tale. The book is a good combination of serious and fantastical.
I read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. It's a loose retelling of Rumplestiltskin and I found it pretty enjoyable. Fantasy is not my usual genre, so it was nice to read something different. This book has tales within tales with multiple narrators and lovely worldbuilding. It also explores anti-semitism in a rather matter-of-fact way--not something I expected to find in a fairy tale. The book is a good combination of serious and fantastical.