Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic 50 Book Challenge 2015/What I've Read in 2015

33. Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry

This book was published in the 80's, but though the names of the people involved change, the situations really don't. It's timeless humor because the same things keep happening over and over.

#10 The Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

A boy remembers a mystical childhood experience.

The writer does a good job capturing the perspective of a 7 year old - how the world seems very different. Yet, I'm not sure what's off but the book didn't fully engage me.

Joan

34. Insane City, by Dave Barry

I've been reading a lot of Dave Barry books lately, and this one is pretty good. A groom-to-be arrives in Miami with his three groomsmen, who are idiots. The groom can't figure out why the bride wants to marry him, since she's a successful lawyer and the daughter of a multi-billionaire, while he still lives with his parents and makes a living tweeting ads for feminine hygiene products. Over the next couple of days, things are complicated by lost luggage (with the ring in it), his idiot friends losing their shirts (literally, as well as their wallets and everything else), a stripper with a heart of gold, Haitian refugees, marijuana brownies, and an orangutan.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

A lovely romance between a very proper English gentleman of a certain age and an Indian lady. Sweet story I highly recommend.

#11 City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

#4 in the City of Bones series

Jace isn't himself after his latest experience and Simon learns to cope with being a vampire. Add to that an ancient vampire is pursuing Simon.

Okay....It's official. I'm finally hooked on this series. With the way this one ended, I may have to start the next one. Soon.

Joan

35. Naked Came the Manatee, by Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry, James W. Hall, Edna Buchanan, Les Standiford, Paul Levine, Brian Antoni, Tananarive Due, John Dufresne, Vicki Hendricks, Carolina Hospital, and Evelyn Mayerson

In South Florida, everyone wants to get a head. But not just any head. A very famous human head--severed and snugged away in a cryonic container. A head that could spark a revolution and change the course of history.

Everybody wants a piece of the noggin: rotund gangster Big Joey G., a 102-year-old environmentalist, hard-boiled Miami reporter Britt Montero, lawyer Jake Lassiter, and a would-be dictator in exile--with ex-president Jimmy Carter and a lovable manatee named Booger thrown in for good measure.

With bodies piling up it's anybody's guess what will happen from one chapter to the next, as an all-star line-up of Florida's finest writers take turns at taking this outrageously original novel to the limit--and beyond.

Inspired by the earlier Naked Came the Stranger

I'm going to have to try that one.

36. Go the F to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes
37. You Have to F'ing Eat, by Adam Mansbach and Owen Brozman

These books parody children's books, with the same sort of illustrations and simple words, but with one key change -- the F word. These books aren't meant for children, but are suitable for any adult who has had to deal with a child who refuses to sleep or who is a finicky eater.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
"The story is set in a near-term future in which the new, new form of the Internet is a realistic virtual multi-verse called the OASIS. Most human interaction takes place via goggles and gloves in millions of unique worlds, including the boring (and free) “public education” world from which our teenage protagonist must escape.

Our unlikely hero is an overweight trailer park kid who goes by Wade Watts in real life, and “Parzival” to his best friends and mortal enemies--all of whom he interacts with virtually. Just like the Arthurian knight that is his namesake, young Wade is on a quest for an incredible treasure guarded by mythical creatures. Specifically, the creator of the OASIS and richest man on the planet, James Halliday, stipulated in his will that his fortune be given to the first person who can find an “Easter egg” hidden somewhere in the OASIS. The catch? Every devilishly complex clue on this treasure hunt is rooted in an intimate knowledge of 1980s pop culture."
Fun, fascinating, and quick-moving. I couldn't put it down.

Everytime I need a good laugh I go and re-read my Jasper Fforde books:
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde.
" Now in the fourth installment, the resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap—as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon’s patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn’t bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet. Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And will she ever find reliable child care?"

Hilarious Fforde as usual. "Hamlet" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" are getting mixed up in the Bookworld. As Thursday says, "It takes a long time to get funny and then everybody dies." Politicians go on the TV interview show, "Evade the Question" and do just that. Don't miss the Thursday Next series.

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde.
"Meet Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division. The dedicated but underappreciated investigator in the Reading, England, Nursery Crimes Division, is depressed because the court finds the three little pigs "not guilty of all charges relating to the first-degree murder of Mr. Wolff. He's now investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down, and all those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play."

38. Violence in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy

This book is from Greenhaven Press's Social Issues in Literature series. It contains essays written by various people about the Hunger Games series. Some of the essays were very good (and I may use some of the concepts in my fic Panem), but others suffered from such issues as confirmation bias and Did Not Do the Research (as in it was obvious the person writing the critique hadn't read the whole series).

39. Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, by Dave Barry

This book is pretty funny. Barry writes about the results of a survey of songs people hate. The funniest part is the chapter on misheard lyrics, which contains such gems as:

Not a book to read when you're supposed to be solemn.

40. Plum Lovin', by Janet Evanovich

One of the Stephanie Plum 'Between the Numbers' novels. Diesel pops into Stephanie's life just in time for Valentine's Day, as she is trying to catch a self-styled Cupid who is also FTA. In order to catch her, Stephanie and Diesel must take on her caseload, finding romance for a number of people while searching for an "Unmentionable" (person with paranormal powers), who is at the root of the trouble.

The Republic of Thieves (The Gentleman B**tards Series #3) - Scott Lynch

As with book two in this series, I enjoyed it, but not as much as book one. Once again, there was a chunk that bored me. In this case, the entire theatre troupe subplot. But the arrival of the fabled and until now unseen Sebetha and the machinations of the election dirty tricks and backstabbing along with some pretty shocking character revelations were enough to keep me on board.

LabRat

Suspect - Robert Crais

I hate reading about animals being hurt. Especially dogs. So the summary of this one gave me pause. But I've always loved Crais' detective novels so decided to chance it. So glad I did. I loved this tale of Maggie - a military explosive dog whose handler is killed and who is partnered with Scott, a cop whose partner was shot.

Now they face twin challenges. To find the killers of Scott's partner and find a way past the grief, mourning and PTSD both are suffering from. More uplifting than tragic but I did snuffle a bit here and there.

LabRat

41. Explosive Eighteen, by Janet Evanovich

In this installment in the series, Stephanie is pursued by the FBI, two fake FBI agents, and a terrorist named Razzle Dazzle, all of whom want a photo that was accidentally slipped into her bag while she was en route from Hawaii to Trenton. There are brief descriptions of her Hawaiian vacation, which would have made a better novel than this one.

42. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James

This is the famous erotic work adapted from a Twilight fanfic. It had its moments, but frequently I found myself going, "Seriously? That's supposed to be erotic?" I guess I don't quite understand BDSM (although from what I've read, this book gets a lot of things wrong about the BDSM scene, so who knows). Anastasia's subconscious and "inner goddess" war for her attention, which I think is supposed to be like devil vs. angel but which frequently make her sound like she suffers from multiple personality disorder. Still, there was something of a plot, and I felt sorry for the characters at the end of the book.


In spite of everything, the book had enough good moments that I think I'll read the next two books in the trilogy to see what happens.

#12 Firefight by Brandon Sanderson

Second in the Reckoners series. David and the Recknoner go to Babilar (Former New York City) to battle the epic Regalia. Lots of exciting revelations about the mysterious epics and how to defeat them. Can't believe I have to wait a year for the next installment!

Ravished Armenia - a biography

This is a first person account of the attempted genocide of the christian Armenians in that area controlled by the Ottoman Turkish Muslims. It is a rather horrific, though factual account of the brutality practiced by what some recently have called the religion of peace. Reading this book you come to realize that the only peace you can have under Muslim domination is the peace of death.

Following is the Wiki write-up:

Biography
A film poster/flyer for the 1919 film "Auction of Souls"

Aurora Mardiganian was the daughter of a prosperous Armenian family living in Chmshgatsak (Çemişgezek), twenty miles north of Harput, Ottoman Turkey. Witnessing the deaths of her family members and being forced to march over 1,400 miles, during which she was kidnapped and sold into the slave markets of Anatolia. Mardiganian escaped to Tiflis (modern Tbilisi, Georgia), then to St. Petersburg, from where she traveled to Oslo and finally, with the help of Near East Relief, to New York.

In New York, she was approached by Harvey Gates, a young screenwriter, who helped her write and publish a narrative that is often described as a memoir titled Ravished Armenia (full title Ravished Armenia; the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl, Who Survived the Great Massacres (1918).[1]

The narrative Ravished Armenia was used for writing a film script that was produced in 1919, Mardiganian playing herself, and first screened in London as the Auction of Souls. The first New York performance of the silent film, entitled Ravished Armenia took place on February 16, 1919, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, with society leaders, Mrs. Oliver Harriman and Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, serving as co-hostesses on behalf of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief.[1]

Mardiganian was referred to in the press as the Joan of Arc of Armenia, describing her role as the spokesperson for the victims of the horrors that were then taking place in Turkey and the catalyst for the humanist movement in America. In the 1920s Mardiganian married and lived in Los Angeles until her death on February 6, 1994.

Sorry, Ken, had to delete that paragraph in your post. Just a little too graphic for the PG side of the boards.

LabRat

No problem. I didn't mean to offend. It was just a quote from Wiki, not what I wrote.

No worries. It's easy to forget the rating at times, when you're absorbed in posting. It was easy to fix.

LabRat

43. The Bear in the Attic, by Patrick F. McManus

Most of the stories in this book are re-printed from McManus's column in Outdoor Life. It's pretty funny, although the titular story takes a while to make sense.