True Grit by Charles Portis (5 stars)

This chick has grit. Lots of grit. Great read, loved her hard-nosed determination:

All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk

5 stars!

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (5 stars)

Post apocalyptic brilliance. Totally bleak, hopeless and uncompromising. The dialog adds to the sense of a world without hope - it is short, with both speakers seeing little point in conversation. Amazing book.

5 stars!

Update: I just saw a repeat of the 'First Tuesday of the Month Book Club' discussion of this book from April 07 on the ABC, and they loved it - called it a 'masterpiece'.  Jennifer Byrne said "he's got the Pulitzer Prize, next stop the Nobel".

I also just watched the movie, which captured the essence of the book really well.  As in the book, the ending felt like it was more hopeful than it should have been (unless of course the family were bad guys).

A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World by Stephen Bown (2.5 stars)

Fairly interesting, but a bit rambling.

2.5 stars.

Pre-blog reading

I wish I'd started this blog well before 2008.

A few years ago I made a rule to never re-read books, since there is just too much interesting stuff out there. In that vein I've decided to give away a bunch of books that I've dragged through four international moves, but was really only keeping for show. I figured I'd start out by recording those books here and then update this post to record other pre-blog reading if I ever get the inclination.

• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre by Jane Austen
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
• Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card
• Papillon by Henri Charriere
• The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher
• The Miracle Strain by Michael Cordy
• Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Airframe by Michael Crichton
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
• Dayworld Breakup by Philip Jose Farmer
• The diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
• The Riftwar Saga: Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon by Raymond E. Feist
• The Beach by Alex Garland
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta
• Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich
• Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
• The English Patiet by Michael Ondaatje
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
• The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon and Edward Burns
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
• River God, The Seventh Scroll, Warlock, The Quest by Wilbur Smith
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• War and Peace, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Cloudstreet by Time Winton