Ashes of eden / William Shatner - Captain Kirk is called off to a mysterious planet by an unknown woman and saves the universe. that's not a spoiler, because when do the folks from Star Trek not manage to save the universe? :) this was a fun read. it was a little slow to begin with, but ended up reading fairly quickly. this is book one of a triology.
The man who ate everything : and other gastronomic feats, disputes, and pleasurable pursuits / Jeffrey Steingarten - this is a massive, many hundred page book, that ate quite a bit of my reading energy for the first half of the month. Jeffrey Steingarten is the food editor for Vogue, and the book is a pile of essays by him, about everything under the sun - his own experiments in the kitchen, the science behind how your cooking works, great meals he'd eaten all over the globe, his interesting (and hopefully half-joking) ideas on nutricion, and many other topics.
this was a good read, there was just a lot of it. if i read the sequel - which i probably will, eventually - i'll probably look for it used so i can stretch out the reading of it over a greater period of time, instead of just marching through it.
Sucker bet : a Tony Valentine novel / James Swain. - book three of a series about an ex-cop who runs a business catching cheaters and cons in casinos. i enjoyed this one much more than the second book - it read a lot less choppily, and had better characters. i'm looking forward to the next one, when he writes it.
The return / William Shatner the second in a triology. this one was really, really, really horribly slow to get started - i felt like i was slogging through the book until about halfway through it. it was pretty standard - things are going wrong in the universe, and Spock, Kirk, Picard, and the rest swoop in to fix it. i probably wouldn't have kept slogging through this if Jeff hadn't promised me that the third book was better, but it wasn't a bad read, just slow. really, incredibly slow.
Under the Tuscan sun : at home in Italy / by Frances Mayes - i checked this out because i've been reading a lot of books about travel and living in other countries lately, and it looked vaguely interesting. the movie hadn't look like my kind of thing, so i thought maybe the book would be.
i've no idea what the movie was like, but the book was horrible. the only reason i kept reading it was because i hoped it would get better, and because i hate giving up on books. it was slow and rambled and wasn't written with any coherency whatsoever. (i know, like i'm one to talk.) the next to the last chapter devolved into babble about cathedrals in Italy and miracles in the South. i skimmed.
right. i did not like this book. moving on. :)
Glass Mountain / Cynthia Voigt - Cynthia Voigt usually writes YA novels (very very good YA novels, by the way; i might give some time this summer to rereading a few of them.) this book was a reread for me - it was her first adult novel, and i read it when it came out and have a couple of times since, though it's been a few years. Gregor is a man on the hunt for a wife; he is more than he appears, as is the woman whom he eventually works on snaring.
the description in the book jacket describes Gregor as predatory, something that i didn't agree with the last time i read this book. this time, i wondered how i could not have agreed with that assesment. i liked Gregor as a character a lot less this time around. i liked the book just as much, though. i'm not sure i agree with the end assesment of how the characters would have acted.
it's a very quick read, even accounting for having read it before; i killed it in about a day and a half.
Avenger / by William Shatner - more Star Trek. Jeff was right, this book was much better. i swallowed half of this book seemingly whole on the train down Saturday. it was a nice little candy-coated romp through the Universe, with enough tension to keep it interesting while knowing that there was going to be a happy ending. it also raised some interesting questions about space colonization and agriculture. it was well worth getting through the other two books for this.
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i'm up to 32 books for the year. the unofficial mental goal is 100. if i get there, great. if not, whatever. =)
current reading is Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald. i loved The Great Gatsby in high school (which is also checked out of the library) so i thought i would try something else of his. my brain is no longer sure of what to do with books that have words of more than two syllables (heh, and i'm only half kidding) so it's slow reading. i'm probably going to start something else to run in conjunction with it, since as i said this morning, it's guaranteed naptime if i try to read it when i'm too sleepy. i'm not really sure what i want to start next, though - i have twelve books that aren't cookbooks or other non-reading material checked out (which is actually kind of low) and stuff of my own lurking on my shelves that i want to reread, so...