your last five novels
 

knowing full well this thread is doomed...:)

since following hockey normally consumes approx 71% of my free time; there is lots of free time to fill, ( downloaded all five seasons of The Wire this morning. yeah, i've already seen it ) and i've been 'catching up on some reading'. i greatly enjoyed each of the five novels on this list. if you've got a recent favourite, please post.

thank you to wikipedia for much of the folowing content;

1. The Bishop's Man, Linden MacIntyre.

The Bishop's Man is a novel by Canadian writer Linden MacIntyre, published in August 2009. The story follows a Catholic priest named Duncan MacAskill who became so successful at resolving potential church scandals quickly and quietly that he had to accept a position at remote parish on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia to give himself a low profile. MacIntyre, a native of Cape Breton, released the novel amidst the on-going sexual abuse scandal in Antigonish diocese in Nova Scotia. The book was awarded the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association's Fiction Book of the Year. Critics gave positive reviews, especially noting MacIntyre's successful development of characters.

2. Capital, John Lanchester. great read. loved it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012...chester-review

3. Quality of Mercy, Barry Unsworth. sequel to Sacred Hunger, (Sacred Hunger is a historical novel by Barry Unsworth first published in 1992. It shared the Booker Prize that year with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

The story is set in the mid 18th century and centres around the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship employed in the triangular trade, a central trade route in the Atlantic slave trade. The two main characters are cousins Erasmus Kemp, son of a wealthy merchant from Lancashire and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who goes on the voyage. The novel's central theme is greed, with the subject of slavery being a primary medium for exploring the issue. The story line has a very extensive cast of characters, some featuring in only one scene, others continually developed throughout the story, but most described in intricate detail. The narrative interweaves elements of appalling cruelty and horror with extended comedic interludes, and employs frequent period expressions.) which i read several years ago. Quality is his last book, as Unsworth died in june.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011...nsworth-review

4. Live By Night, Dennis Lehane. one of my favourite novelists. starting one of his books is a bit like breaking the limb you are sitting on, high up a tree. thrilling rides, many collisions, you can't stop. Lehane has written several books that have been made into movies, including, Shutter Island, Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone.

this book is the sequel to The Given Day ( The Given Day is a novel by Dennis Lehane published in September 2008; it is about the early twentieth-century period and set in Boston, Massachusetts, where its actions include the 1919 police strike, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the thriving Greenwood District was known as the "Black Wall Street". Lehane has said he intends to write at least two follow-up novels. In October 2012 Lehane released his first follow up novel, "Live By Night." )

5. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel.

Wolf Hall (2009) is a multi-award winning historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family seat of Wolfhall or Wulfhall in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a fictionalized biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII of England, through the death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[1][2] In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".[3]

The book is the first in a planned trilogy; the sequel Bring Up the Bodies was published in 2012.[4]

i've just begun Bring Up the Bodies. clearly, i enjoy the historical fiction genre.

I have been going through all the Jack Reacher novels (Lee Childs). I'm on the 11th one. Great, quick reads.
So I guess those are my last 11 books...other than the Down Goes Brown one (hilarious) and I'm chipping away at a Washington Capitals book by Ted Starkey called Red Rising.

And I'm 12 books into the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan...but took a break from that since Book 14 isn't out until February so I thought I'd save Book 13 for closer to that release date. Yes...definitely more reading time available

My last 5:

-The Hobbit: Read it because the movie's coming out. Thought it was meh... definitely not up to par with the LOTR series.

-No Easy Day: I dedicated an entire thread to this one so you know it was amazing.

-Bill Clinton - Back to work: Interesting since I'm a big fan of Clinton, but pretty much one-sided propaganda designed to bash the Republicans and win over Democrat votes before the election happened.

-The Intelligent Investor: Often referred to as the greatest book on fundamental investing ever written. Interesting lessons that are still somewhat relevant, but overall pretty outdated since it was originally written in the 60's and the market has evolved leaps and bounds since then. Also heavily technical, so steer clear if you're not a finance person.

-The Alchemist: Way overhyped. I get the lesson that Coelho's trying to teach, but I thought the story was bland and overly vague. Then again - I'm not really an abstract kind of guy, so I'm probably the wrong type of audience to be critiquing it.

Since law school has started, I am pretty much stuck reading textbooks.

However, the last few novels that I remember reading were;

1. Fight Club, which I avoided because I saw the movie, but ran out of Palanhniuck books to read, so went for it.

2. Atlas Shrug, which I've been reading on and off for years Ha.

3. Wait, a book that is Malcolm Gladwell-ish, but looks how we should make decisions and when is the ideal moment to make decisions.

4. Outliers, which is Malcolm Gladwell; and on a side note, has an interesting hockey blurb, about how a lot of professionals are born in January-March because older players are usually bigger and get picked up by better teams, and play better hockey. And that sort of gives them a step on everybody else in their age group. Was something I never thought about before but makes sense.

That's all I can remember from this summer, and I was big into the Wheel of Time, but eventually stopped and stuck in this spot where I'm like 7 books in but don't remember enough to get back into them. I really enjoyed them.

I actually got back into reading this year thanks to my wife's Kindle.

(current), 1. The Twelve (Justin Cronin), 4/5 stars. This is the 2nd of an intended trilogy. I love the way it jumps between time presence and characters. Very enjoyable.

2. FEED: Newsflesh Trilogy Book1 (Mira Grant), 2.5/5 stars. The world-building in this book is phenomenal. I've been into the Zombie thing recently, so thought I'd try this. Characters were uninteresting and story/plot was a bit weak and predictable.

3. The Passage (Justin Cronin), 5/5 stars. Awesome. Loved everything about this book. Story, characters, timelines, oh soooo good.

4. A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking), incomplete 4/5 stars. This was the book I picked up to get back into reading. Non-fiction. Science is supposed to be simplified for the common folk, but is still difficult to fully grasp... if I would have read it directly after college (and physics courses), I'd probably get more of it. Being now 10+ years away from college, some of it is too complex to be enjoyable.

...

5. Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann). 3.5/5 stars. I worked on this book for 10pg at a time over a 5-year period of dating/marriage to my wife. Tough read, not very exciting at all. Crawls at a snails pace. All that said, the overall story is very good... specifically, there's a paragraph about the flow of time that I found to be one of the best thought-written paragraphs I've ever read. If this book was half it's length, I think it would've been a gem.

Last 5:

Battle Royale
Slaughter House Five
Atlas Shrugged
Infinite Jest
Broom of the System

I'd recommend all of the above, although most of this recent batch I found does require a bit more of a commitment to reading them.

Shame you didn't like Feed. That must have been from my recommendation. Oh well.

I've just received The Passage as a gift (probably from your recommendation, can't remember). Hope I enjoy it as much as you did.

LOL, maybe. I hold your opinion in high-regard... maybe I just set the bar too high in advance. It is one of those books that could be turned into a pretty good action movie though.

I also have a terrible, terrible, terrible (I'm ashamed really) pre-set-novel-disposition where I can't get fully invested into a book with a female lead character. It's bad, I know. Wish it wasn't that way. That probably hurt my own evaluation of the book.

For example, about 5 years ago my wife recommended a book called "The Thirteenth Tale", which was critically reviewed very well. I read it and told my wife I thought it was poor. It could just be that female-main-character thing. I don't know.

We also watch TV series True Blood & Nurse Jackie. While I like them, I don't love them... and I think the female-lead is the reason why.

Like I said... it's a bad built-in trait of mine... not sure where I got it from. Bad Pengwin, bad.

Haven't read much for novel's recently been mostly on the non-fiction train. The last novel I read was probably "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach. It's a baseball book but only in the sense that it is the plot device the author has used to deliver his fantastic story about the struggles of youth around the college age. Being I just graduated from university a year and a half ago and am still bumbling about aimlessly I found this novel very easy to identify with.

I also gave it to my brother who is not a baseball fan in the slightest and he really enjoyed it as well so like I said, it's a baseball book but it's definitely for everyone.

I read the Alchemist recently as well, WAY overhyped... how is this one of the top 5-10 most read books in the world??? wtf?!?... I mean, it wasn't BAD... but it wasn't THAT good.

To answer that, one of my 5 most recently read books...
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (ISBN 0-316-31696-2) is a book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000.

Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."[1] The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do."[2] The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990.

Read this book! Very interesting... helps explain how things explode in all social aspects of society.

Others I've read which are good reads: Blink (Gladwell), What the Dog Saw (Gladwell), Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom), Five people you meet in heaven (Mitch Albom), the Alchemist. Currently working on the Hobbit.