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Wretched Strangers, a poetry anthology. It's great.

It has a mix of British poets who are living abroad and poets who were born elsewhere but live in the UK. Mostly poems about immigration or identity.

I see your point!
I didn't feel too sorry for the main characters, eventually they submit to their fate with grace. Is that like us?

Yes, but if I put my mind into any one of them, their individual fate winds out as very similar to my own. That's what freaks me about Vonnegut. I'm always asking, "How did he know?"

Of course I didn't really start out as an obnoxious rich young man or like a woman who is just too good for anybody else. But the *way* they fall.

I inhabit each character as I read. Re Mars - I'm the one finding a note I wrote to myself before I killed my best friend, the note saying 'this isn't the real you, try to remember.' Mars is the business world to me. All those rules. All that brain-washing.

An anthology of short cyberpunk stories called Cyber World.

The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany by Stephen E. Ambrose.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon for my book club discussion.

Stitch and b***h Crochet: The Happy Hooker by Debbie Stoller because I want to teach myself how to crochet.

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn for my own education. It’s been a while since I picked it up, though.

The Most Beautiful Woman In Town, by Charles Bukowski.

Birthday present from my wife. Anthology of Bukowski's short fiction, set in the theme of alcoholism, poverty, and mental illness, his stories range from the truly sad, to the hilarious, to the truly bizarre. So far, a great read.

"being mortal" by atul gawande (md) what is important toward the end of life and how to get it

Just finished tonight:
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Prof. Ioan Couliano.

I'm currently reading Drop Dead Healthy by my favourite author, A.J. Jacobs. He seems like he could probably be autistic, he spends entire years devoting his life to various things, one book was about him reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (The Know It All) and another was devoting a year to living exactly as the bible says he should (The Year Of Living Biblically).

This one is about 2 years of living exactly how health programs say he should, like using noise cancelling headphones to protect his ears, running barefoot because it's natural, becoming vegan and chewing a minimum of 30 times with every bite. He's very funny.

Noise by David Hendy. Very interesting.

Just finished 2 books lately.

Alex Sinclair's Tell me no lies

my second book by this author and this one was at least as bad as the first one. How anyone can make such an exciting idea so boring is beyond me. Repetitive and boring. Never reading this author again.



Stephan Pastis: It's The End When I Say It's The End
The seventh and last Timmy Failure book.
I have loved and laughed my way through this series. As much as it is a natural end to the series, I wish there were more Timmy books in the future.

Winter by Marissa Meyer.

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights, A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism, Ed. Patsy Stoneman (Cambridge, 2000).

The classic satire Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

Re Vonnegut's cynicism - did you know he joined the Army for WWII. still in USA went home for Mothers Day, his mother hanged herself that day. A week later his sister died in a car accident. A week after that his brother-in-law died in a train accident. Vonnegut decided there is no God, which he stuck to for the rest of his life. Do you think this cynicism might have coloured Slaughterhouse 5?