Who is Simon Warwick? / Patricia Moyes (1/7; fiction) - this is your standrad nice British mystery novel. someone dies and there's a little danger, but not really. there was a nice twist at the end, however.
Shooting at loons / Margaret Maron (1/8; fiction)
Up jumps the Devil / Margaret Maron (1/12; fiction)
Killer market / Margaret Maron (1/23; fiction)
Home fires / Margaret Maron (2/13; fiction)
- these are part of a series of mystery novels about a judge that lives in eastern North Carolina. like a lot of good mysteries, the mysteries are pretty irrelevant - interesting and well-written, but irrelevant in the end - but i keep reading these because the characters are very well done, very real and true to life, and keep growing.
Conquistador / S.M. Stirling (1/15; fiction) - mmmm, Stirling. this one is a one-shot, not part of a trilogy, and it's about an alternate world where the Europeans never "found" the New World, the folks who can hop back and forth between the worlds, and the complications therein. i liked it, but then again, Stirling would have to write something pretty bad before i didn't like it. i'm eagerly waiting for the sequel to Dies the Fire to come out.
Eats, shoots & leaves : the zero tolerance approach to punctuation / Lynne Truss (1/31; non-fiction) - this was a teeny little quick read. it was informative and snarky, which meant that it was fun. :) i would have liked a little less on the actual use of various punctuation marks and more about the history of said punctuation, but i certainly enjoyed the book anyhow.
Adventure capitalists ; the ultimate investor's road trip / Jim Rogers (2/16; non-fiction) - Jim Rogers and his fiance/wife (they got married on the trip) spent three years driving around the world, and this book is his travelouge and observations about the economics of the countries that they were driving through. i wanted more travelouge, less economics. it was interesting, but dense; it took me something like a month and a half of reading a little every night to get through this. i learned a lot about countries that i didn't know anything about.
Fighting the lamb's war : skirmishes with the American Empire / Philip Berrigan (2/25; non-fiction) - Phillip Berrigan was a Catholic priest, a husband and father, (he was ex-communicated for getting married, though eventually the ex-communication was lifted, though he wasn't allowed to serve in a priestly capacity. interestingly enough, he married a nun.), a pacifist, and an activist who spent the 60s through the 90s protesting war, specifically the Vietnam War, and then nuclear weapons. along with several colleagues and his brother, he was involved in actions that involved breaking into draft boards and destroying draft records. later on, he participated in breaking into factories that were involved in building nuclear weapons. he spent a fair amount of his adult life in court or in jail. i'm still out on what i think of the actions and protesting in fashions like this, but Berrigan is engaging and has some very interesting things to say about war, what they did to protest the war, and why they did it. we had to read a chapter from this for class, and i was hooked enough to get the whole book out of the library and read it.
you would think, with what i'm reading for class, that i would only want to read fluff for pleasure reading. heh. perversely, my appetite/tolerance for fluff has gone way done, and my desire to read non-fiction, or at least pithy fiction, has gone way up. this means that my pleasure reading, which has been going slowly anyhow with school, is even slower. i'm currently trying to read Watergate, though at the rate i'm going, it's going to take a couple months, and i started The Jane Austen Book Club last night, though i'm not sure i like it.