What are you reading in October?

I've started J. K. Rowlings' new book, The Casual Vacancy and am liking it quite a bit. I'd heard it was poorly written, but it's got its hooks in me. There are bad parents, loving (dead) parents, despised sons, teen age angst, hard working mothers, gossips - Harry Potter without the magic? Well, I don't know about that, but it does show various slices of life and relationships.

Oh, for anyone who liked Half the Sky, PBS in the US is doing a documentary on it which starts tonight - at least tonight's show is the first I was aware of.

Alternating between Romola by George Eliot and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

I'm on a fiction kick reading The Girl With the Golden Bouffant in the Jane Bond series. It's pretty fun reading.

How do you pronounce Siobhan? I'm sure it's nothing like it looks. I'm loving the new J K Rowling.

Shuh vawn

I'm enjoying another adventure with the intrepid archaeologist, Amelia Peabody, in Elizabeth Peters' The Hippopotamus Pool. Just good fun.

I'm steaming towards the end of Blow Your House Down.

Finally started Disturbed By Her Song last night. Great fun so far.

I loved (if you could say that) The Casual Vacancy. Good for Rowling. Now I'll start another British book, Call the Midwife.

I've finished and reviewed The Book of Not, Tsitsi Dangarembga's sequel to Nervous Conditions and a powerful look at the psychological trauma of racism and colonialism.

I loved Call the Midwife. PBS has started airing a miniseries based on it, though it has more romance and less grit. The book gives a good history of The East Enders and obstetrical care in the 1950's, there's also a good side plot about prostitution and life in a workhouse and learning to adjust one's worldview to accommodate the life of the poor. I also finished an excellent Modern Scholar course The Basics of Genetics by Betsey Dexter Dyer who made it all understandable. Now I've started The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker which is a coming of age story set against a science fiction background as the earth has slowed rotation on its axis and it appears life may come to an end.

I've also finished and reviewed the chilling and important The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.

I'm reading Howard's End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill, which is a chatty book about books. Sort of a cozy read--like listening to a friend talk about books over a cup of tea.

Hey, where is everybody? I'm still slogging through Romola. The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Death Comes to Pemberly are up next.

Hard to think of agatha Christe as a 'girly' I guess. I'm reading Murder on the Links.

I've been doing lots of comfort reading lately. I've just finished listening to Bath Tangle and I'm currently working my way through middle section of the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer - a many-times re-read

I recently finished Playing with Matches by Carolyn Wall, which was just eh. I also re-read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and loved it all over again.

Now I'm thinking about re-reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. I also just picked up The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul by Deborah Rodriguez.

Otherwise, I've been reading books by men / watching too much TV.

18>> "Otherwise, I've been reading books by men / watching too much TV."

Which is worse?

I'm almost done with Howard's End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill. It is a book about book for readers who like to read about reading.

>> 19 Haha, I don't think either are bad, just not relevant to this discussion board :)

I'm simultaneously reading The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories and just beginning Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century, partly (as to the latter) because I noticed a slight overlap in the person of Mrs Henry Wood -- her play East Lynne and her ghost story "Reality or Delusion?"

I picked up on the Female Playwrights book from a reference to Joanna Baillie in the first volume of Harriet Martineau's Autobiography during ALL VIRAGO/ALL AUGUST.

Oh, I think "watching too much TV" is worse by a long shot! Although I think I can go one better: I've been wasting my time reading Twitter... (lots of feminist outrage from all my Australian tweeters, so not so bad though, maybe. ;)

Have been having difficulty focussing on any one book for most of this month, but finally got suckered in by G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen, which I'm really enjoying. Computer hacking and djinni! Hard combo to beat, in my mind. :)

> 23 Probably true for most of the garbage that's on TV today but I should clarify that it's really "watching too much Netflix", which is better I think :)

Twitter can easily become the biggest time suck, which is why I don't allow myself to go on very often ... but then again, I'm constantly befuddled as to why everyone loves Twitter as much as they do. The content is of course entirely dependent on whom you are following so it isn't necessarily bad!

Twitter baffles me. How on earth do you figure out who to follow?

I don't get Twitter at all either!

I finished my favorite book of the month, The Midwife of Hope River by Patricia Harman (who is herself a former practical midwife who became a Certified Nurse Midwife). The childbirth scenes are all accurate and the commentary about life during the depression and racial and union struggles was informative and interesting. One of the things I most appreciated was the character of a 90 year old African American lay midwife. Usually these women are depicted as backward and even dangerous. Mrs. Potts was well read, respected, and very valuable. The main character, Patience, was also a lay midwife and showed the confusion one would except of someone entering the profession. Sex is represented realistically, there's no coquettish romance - relationships are realistic. Really, I can't recommend the book highly enough.
Now I'm almost finished with Birthmarked by Caragh O'Brien, a science fiction book that also has lots of good births and is about a draught devastated US of the future and the power structure that forces the poor to give up their babies to the rich who live inside an enclaved oasis.
I also have been reading lots of guy books - about genetics and politics and now the new Nobel Prize winners novel about reincarnation - Life and Death are Wearing Me Out.

I'm reading The Virgin Cure, by Ami McKay, for my book club. So far it seems like fairly standard historical fiction.

Reading a girly crime book, The Likeness by Tana French, which I'm loving so far.

27>> I just finished Promised, the conclusion of the "Birthmarked" trilogy, earlier this month. Overall I'd give the trilogy 3½***, and I gave Birthmarked itself 4****. There are also a couple short-story "transition" pieces that are available on Kindle, but they're not really essential to the trilogy.

I think I got Birthmarked as a free Nook offering. Evidently they thought I'd like it enough to purchase the remaining ones. That might happen.

I'm back with my beloved Daphne du Maurier reading The Parasites. I was pretty sure I'd read this at some time in the dim and distant past but I'm not recognising anything about it yet so maybe it is completely new to me. The DdM's I used to own became so tattered that when they were reissued a few years ago I treated myself to the entire set of fiction and discarded the old ones so now I have no way of checking whether I ever did own this one at all.

> 25, 26 Well, as I mentioned earlier, I use Twitter but I'm not really sure why everyone is obsessed with it as they are.

There a few ways to figure out who to follow:

- when you sign up, you can choose to allow Twitter access to your e-mail contacts and they'll tell you if any of those contacts are on Twitter.
- you can search Twitter by keywords/topics for people or organizations that might interest you
- you can look at lists that others have compiled based on a topic/theme (i.e., I have a list of organizations and people highlighting women's rights: https://twitter.com/sweetiegherkin/women-s-rights/members). You can follow an entire list or just pick and choose those members you want to follow.
- people will eventually start to follow you and you can decide whether you want to follow them back
- when you are out surfing the internet, you'll undoubtedly come across webpages noting that you can follow them on Twitter -- if it's a group you really like, a newspaper you read a lot, or any other thing that perks your interest, you may decide to take them up on that!
- there's also a "who to follow" personalized page where Twitter recommends users you might be interested in following based on who you follow now. It's not always the greatest, but sometimes it's not half-bad. For instance, right now I'm noticing that my personalized suggestions include MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, probably because I already follow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

Basically, Twitter is just another tool for keeping up with friends/family/co-workers and/or with news and events. It's not for everyone, but then again, nothing really is.

Thanks for the Twitter info. I'm not sure it's something I want to get into, but your post will help me figure out what to do if I do go for it!

> 34 You're welcome! I wouldn't necessarily encourage anyone to use it, especially if they have cold feet to begin with, but I'm always happy to help with any bit of knowledge I might have about how it all works.

I join Rebecca in thanking you, sweetiegherkin. I also join her in thinking I probably won't use it, but it's nice to know how.

How do you read the tweets? I have an account, and I've signed up to follow some people, but how do I know they've tweeted something. When I go back to Twitter, there isn't much there.

WARNING: LONG RANT ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA.

I have experimented with Twitter in English and communication classes, but blogs work better at focusing discussion and comments.

For those flummoxed by Twitter, think of it as the ADHD version of FaceBook. You post very short messages (140 characters) about what you're doing (Brrr! Making onion soup for supper!"), and your "followers" are your friends who can see what you post ("Yum!").

Corporations, organizations, and famous people have Twitter accounts, and you can "follow" them to glean their peals of wisdom. Such as Roseanne Barr's comment that everybody who eats at Chick-Fil-A should "get the cancer."

Celebrities, politicians, and businesses use their Twitter accounts to jack up attention for themselves and build loyalty to the brand. I find that part of Twitter somewhat insidious--instead of being sold to, we are now seeking out identities in affiliation with famous people and stuff companies make.

Some study or other that was aired on NPR indicated that the most common word (after "the") on Twitter was "I." My main concern with FB and Twitter (and even social media like LT) is that it does not really encourage two-way communication (lookit my message here; I'm just blabbering what I think instead of really communicating with anybody). Plus that insidious "like" button on FB is a great way to build the echo chamber so that you only hear the stuff that makes you happy.

OTOH, it is sometimes instructive to see how people and organizations spin opinions and other info, and "futurists" are talking about interesting literary forms that are emerging from Twitter--140 character haiku-type messages, for example.

I read Flannery O'Connor's letters not long ago, and have stashed away the wonderful letters of Groucho Marx as Xmas present to myself. I wonder how we will collect these kinds of wonderful insights in future decades. E-mails? FB messages? When a dear friend died some years ago, I was sick at having purged my e-mail so frequently. There were some hilarious messages she wrote, and the only ones I was able to collect and print were the ones she wrote after she got sick.

nohrt4me2 - I enjoyed your short essay on social media. (You did go over 140 characters, however).

#39, LOL!

I go through phases with twitter, haven't now been on for a while because I've been reading (hallelujah!). I like the brevity of 140 characters, because I can be an awful waffler, and chatter happens on FB, where my Twitter post ends up as well.

I like reading Twitter to get a feel as to what's happening (like all the feminist outrage in Australia the other week), and I also like it as information from people/events I am interested in. It's not social so much as an information feed I've tailored to me interests.

I did love all of Alif the Unseen, and then found the author on Twitter and started following her. Yet to send an "OMG LOVED your book" tweet though. I follow a lot of authors, but am still shy at barging in on the conversation sometimes...

WARNING MORE LONG RANT (which I promise to proofread better than the last one, e.g. "peals of wisdom"):

Wookie, my son was following Twitter during the presidential debates while his Luddite parents watched them on TV (the cathode tube one with the unreliable converter box).

Son would give us updates from Twitter, and about five minutes after I burst out laughing at Romney's "binders full of women," son reported that there was an entire Twitter group with that title that was stuffed with hundreds of "tweets."

While it's gratifying to see that so many people instantly agreed with me that that line was a hilarious misstep, I'm not sure that a) turning politics into comedy is a good idea (though I have to say Jon Stewart often does a better job as an interviewer than many professional reporters) and b) Romney's comment deserved to cause the uproar it did (yeah, it was humorous phrasing, but does it REALLY say anything more substantive than the candidate has in more serious moments?).

My sense is that we are becoming seriously ill equipped to really analyze political (or any other kind of) rhetoric and so (with the encouragement of media manipulators starting with Lee Atwater on down) we tend to look for that sound byte that sums it all up ... and we so often pick the wrong one and try to MAKE it important (e.g., binders full of women).

And social media with it's limited characters and emphasis on getting quantities of visceral responses (vs. thoughtful quality engagement) is helping to erode analysis.

The fact that you feel you're an "awful waffler" is sad. As a former reporter who had to play Devil's Advocate with politicians and policy makers all the time, I became an "awful waffler" pretty early on in life. There are some issues on which being a waffler shows that you grasp the ambiguities and nuances of life. It's why I can be neither whole-heartedly pro-life or pro-choice. I'm pro-waffle!

I read an essay long ago by Norman Mailer, who addressed the "waffler" phenom after he wrote Executioner's Song. He said that he went into the book generally against capital punishment, but that in writing the story and uncovering different perspectives caused him to re-examine an opinion that had largely been formed by what others thought he should think. Perhaps admitting that waffling was sometimes the mark of a thinking person was perhaps the manliest thing old Norman ever did.

OK, time for me to get offa here and continue slogging through Romola, which has taken me several weeks to admit to myself is a dreadful bore. But this will be the last Eliot novel I have not read, and I need to cross it off the bucket list.

> 36 You're welcome! Glad to be of help at any time.

> 37 If you are logged into Twitter, you have a home page that contains a feed of all the things tweeted and retweeted by the people you follow. If there's not much there, then perhaps the people you are following are not saying much. My problem with Twitter tends to be the opposite, there's WAAY too much going on and I get overwhelmed. For example, in the time it's taken me to write this paragraph, 20 new tweets appeared in my feed. In recent months, I've noticed that Twitter sends out occasional (perhaps once a week) e-mails to the address you used to sign up -- these contain a few of the more popular tweets (as measured by number of times retweeted) from the people that you follow. I find this far more digestible and useful.

> 38, 41 Thanks for sharing your thoughts on social media. (I'm feeling more and more like perhaps we should start a new thread for all this Twitter/social media talk!) I was an early adopter to Twitter and at first, I hated it. I did view it as a stripped down version of Facebook and thought it was pointless. I didn't delete my account but basically abandoned it for two whole years. Then I had to start using Twitter for school and work, and by that time more organizations, etc. had gotten on to Twitter. While sometimes even these people say stupid things as you point out, I do view Twitter now more as a sometimes helpful filter for information. Like wookiebender, I use it more as an information feed tailored to my interests -- I can get updates and links to more information on topics related to women's rights, library science, etc. For the most part, I try to avoid people who write about the mundane details of their lives and instead look for those who provide a factoid with a link to more information so I get dig further into topics that interest me. And you're right, there is a great deal more introspection/self-focus in social media than there is give-and-take conversation in many cases. But in general it's been my experience that humans are pretty self-absorbed, so it's really no wonder that translates on to the Internet as well.

There are definitely concerns about archiving in the digital era, but that doesn't mean it isn't being done. In fact, some time back the Library of Congress announced that they would be archiving what they considered to be "important" tweets such as ones related to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. And while we might wax nostalgic about how we never get handwritten notes anymore, it's worth noting that not all of those got saved either -- some people chose to toss them right away, others had to "purge" as you put it when they moved or needed more space, or others saved them only to have these items destroyed by later generations. Or the letters could get lost or damaged by time, weather, and disasters like floods or fires.

My sense is that we are becoming seriously ill equipped to really analyze political (or any other kind of) rhetoric and so (with the encouragement of media manipulators starting with Lee Atwater on down) we tend to look for that sound byte that sums it all up ... and we so often pick the wrong one and try to MAKE it important (e.g., binders full of women).

And social media with it's limited characters and emphasis on getting quantities of visceral responses (vs. thoughtful quality engagement) is helping to erode analysis.

These are definitely valid points. But while social media does not necessarily help, the sound byte culture existed long before it with radio and TV. TV news and its "analysis" (which is usually anything but, and rarely ever of quality, thoughtful, or substantive) bother me a great deal more in this respect and these 24-hour news channels have nothing but time and unlimited "characters" so there's really no good excuse for them. While it's not always so, there are those on the web making thoughtful arguments, in contrast to this.

All this is to say that while I personally don't love Twitter and respect the opinions of those who don't like as well as those who do like it, we can't really dismiss it out of hand. For better or for worse, it's part of our culture now and like many things, it has both its pros and cons. Again, like most things, it all depends on who is using it and for what purpose.

Oh, yes, 42, I would agree that TV sound-byte communication predisposed social media users to flock to those sites so they, too, could communicate in sound-bytes they wrote themselves or, if they can't muster up even that, the endless "sharing" of memes and granny spam.

OTOH, I enjoy reading about Twitter and how it might eventually shake out. I'll be on the end of that trend; I thought the Kindle was an idiotic idea ... until I got one and realized how many free classics I could snag. That thing paid for itself in a week, and allowed me send any number of crumbling ancient paperbacks to the recycling center.

Those on the East Coast, please stay safe. We have an eerie but beautiful blood red sunset in Michigan, with high winds and snow on the way.

> 43 Definitely. But sometimes the sharing of memes can be fun too :)

Been fairly lucky over here on the East Coast (I'm in New Jersey) though I know a lot of the state has done worse than my little neighborhood. Still no power at home but have it here at work and I'm happy to be able to log onto to the Internet again and see what's happening in the rest of the world outside my dead-end street. Also, very happy to have heat!

Message moved to the November thread:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/144222