Library Loot April 17 to 22

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Just one checkout this week, a poetry collection. I will probably read it this weekend.

about the author (from GoodReads):

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. She performs nationally and internationally solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in venues in every major U.S. city and internationally. Most recently she performed We Were There When Jazz Was Invented at the Chan Centre at UBC in Vancouver, BC, and appeared at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico... 

Library Loot: April 10 to 16

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Of the books from last week, I have reviewed Women & Power: A Manifesto, Good Omens & Cloud Atlas. 

Reviews pending: Monstress vol. 2,  City of Bones. 

Still checked out, unread: Redshirts,  The Apex Book of World SF

The Maltese Falcon (audiobook) for Back to the Classics 2019 -- my library hold on this came in.

The Left Hand of Darkness (ebook) -- for a group read in a GoodReads group this month. One of my favorite SF novels! (reread)

Monstress, vol. 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu

Olio, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry (for Poetry Month)

Also for Poetry Month, a book about poetry (nonfiction)

for Back to the Classics, maybe? Or it might go back to the library until next month. I have not decided.

Library Loot : April 3 to 9

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

I probably have more books checked out than I can read! Some of them will go back to the library unread, I think.

I missed this last time, so this is what I checked out last week:

(Finished, I need to review this)

On OverDrive:

(my current audiobook, and my first time listening to it; I have read the book twice before)

5 stars from 2 of my friends on GoodReads, and a past group read in the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Club, one of my GoodReads groups (but I did not read it when it was the book for the month).

Not started:

I have previously read The Player of Games (the second book in the Culture series) and I thought it was great. I have not read anything else by this author yet. This is another past group read in the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Book Club. The series is science fiction, with lots of AI and political intrigue. 

Classic science fiction from 1961. One of my GoodReads friends recommended this.  

This has been on my reading list for so long that I have no idea where I first heard of it. An anthology of contemporary science fiction from all over the world. 

Another past group read! I tried the audio once and hated it, but I'm still interested in the book, so I checked out the print version. I think it is a post-apocalyptic fantasy in a desert setting. Anyway, I liked the beginning, but could not stand the audio narrator.

I really liked the first volume of this graphic novel series (the link goes to my review),

set in an alternate version of Asia. Not perfect but definitely promising!

Yet another past group read! I am not sure if this is really my thing, but I think it is supposed to be funny? I doubt I will be able to read all of these anyway, but I might give this one a try. 

Library Loot: March 13 to 19

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

I did this once last year but I then I forgot about it and stopped following this one. Here is my post for March 13 to 19. These are books I currently have checked out from the library.

A Stranger in Olondria  -- I started this last week and just finished it on the 14th. I will write a review soon. Here is the blurb on GoodReads:

Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting "her" free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading.

Citizen -- I will read this sometime this month.  

A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold  -- I have this one checked out through OverDrive right now.

In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carre brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.

Library Loot October 2

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. 

This week (with a quote from the blurb for each book): 

Eichmann in Jerusalem 

Hannah Arendt covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, where her report first appeared as a series of articles in 1963. For this revised edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem, the author has added further factual material that has come to light since the trial, and a Postscript commenting on the controversy that has arisen over her book. 

I plan to read this sometime in the next month, but in case I don't get to it, I’ll be sure to check it out again in November. This is one of the books I have thought about reading for the Back to the Classics challenge.

A Night in the Lonesome October

Loyally accompanying a mysterious knife-wielding gentleman named Jack on his midnight rounds through the murky streets of London, good dog Snuff is busy helping his master collect the grisly ingredients needed for an unearthly rite that will take place not long after the death of the moon. But Snuff and his master are not alone. All manner of participants, both human and not, are gathering with their ancient tools and their animal familiars in preparation for the dread night. It is brave, devoted Snuff who must calculate the patterns of the Game and keep track of the Players—the witch, the mad monk, the vengeful vicar, the Count who sleeps by day, the Good Doctor and the hulking Experiment Man he fashioned from human body parts, and a wild-card American named Larry Talbot—all the while keeping Things at bay and staying a leap ahead of the Great Detective, who knows quite a bit more than he lets on.

Boldly original and wildly entertaining, A Night in the Lonesome October is a darkly sparkling gem, an amalgam of horror, humor, mystery, and fantasy. First published in 1993, it was Zelazny’s last book prior to his untimely death.

On Bullshit

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."

Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here...