Infinte Jest Online Book Club

So someone is proposing an online book club for David Foster Wallace's Infinte Jest: http://www.infinitesummer.org/. I've meant to read the book for a long time, and the book club starts on my birthday....hmmm.....

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

This book was great fun to read.

It was about a young boy who stumbles into an enchanted forest after trying to escape the reality of his unhappy life. In the forest he meets many characters who are familiar to him (and us) from common fairy tales. However, their versions of the stories we know are not the same. And the little boy's search for a way home from the forest forms the narrative of the story.

I really enjoyed the book - it was a book that was full of wolves and castles and rickety bridges. The good guys were good and the villains were bad. It was perfect for staying up late and reading under the covers with a flashlight...err...grown-up booklight.

There were definitely themes of adulthood and voice of a child, etc., etc., in this book that I suppose you could appreciate. Also parallels between his life in the real world and that of the enchanted forest. I tried not to overthink it and just devoured the story.

Flash Forward a TV show

Flash Forward, a good read by Robert Sawyer, is being made into a TV show: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/102316.

Dracula

Check this out - Stoker's Dracula was never copyright-ed and even so it'd be in the public domain by now. Since it's written in letters and articles, this blogger is putting the book up on the actual days that correspond to the story. Cool.

http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/2009/05/dracula-begins.html

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

Some organization named this book the best spy novel of all time and so I bought it a couple years ago. Picked it up recently and read it in a few short days. You'll notice there's no photo of the book - that's because the edition I have is from 1965 and I couldn't find an image of the cover - in fact, pieces of the cover were flaking off and pages falling out of my edition. It made it easier to remember that when the book was written it was during the Cold War era and the Berlin Wall, which plays prominently in the story, was a reality of the times.

The story is about a spy who is disgraced when the post he covers is compromised. He goes to meet his boss ostensibly to be fired, but he is asked to complete one more mission and then retire. This book is about his last mission - a mission to ruin the cover of a double agent.

The writing is simple but kept me at the end of my seat. I thought the first half of the book was good but not too complex then I came to a point in the book when I realized I had no idea what as going and I had to flip back about 10 pages. The climax is a worthwhile payoff and the denouement not a disappointment.