so i did not ever finished my depressing book but i did finish 2 others.
" black dogs " by ian mcewan and " terorist " by john updike, both books a little too flawed to make me go " wow " but good enough to really make me think about some issues.
black dogs it's about the evil the is dormant in the humanity and that you never know when it will resurface.
and " terorist " is an interesting portrayal of a young man of good intentions gone bad due to, well, not even bad parenting, but not very involved parenting and the lack of morals of the society around us.

i read this booked called " the girl with the oranges " by jostein gardeer. it's not a very complicated book and it has a good feeling in it and i quite liked the ending.

so nobody read anything lately??? at least this makes me feel less lazy

but i discovered a very cool magazine about books.

I have read a few books and will tell you about them when I return from lunch

Did anyone ever recommend Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series here?
I just loooove her books and I hope that Santa will bring me the newest book which has quite recently been published here in Germany
There are currently seven books plus some of a Lord John series, that kind of developed out of the original Outlander series. All books mainly play in the past (while beeing historically correct) and contain everything from romance to war. It's hard to describe them and I don't want to spoil the story, so all I can say is that I can highly recomment them

I have read two books recently. First was "Blessed Child" by Linn Ullmann. It is a perfect book about how cruel children can be, how they can suffer cruelty without any regrets and how they seem totally careless about the others, how they suffer from anxiety, how they try to forget the dark past... I love "nordic" literature, because they write so truthfully about emotions without any pity or sentimentalism. I like this style a lot, the book totally caught me, I highly reccommend it.
(A review here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/09/AR2008120903056.html)

The second book was The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins. Ive read a few reviews on it and I thought I would like the story, set in the future, where young children chosen by lottery are forced to take part in a reality show where they have to kill each other until just one remains. (Yeah, I love cruel stories.) I was looking forward to a drama, parents forced to see their children to kill or die, children forced to grow up in a minute and to fight as hard as they can... Instead of this i got kind of an action movie, and ROMANCE, in such a teenage way that the only thing that made me to finish the book was the hope that the author will be brave enough to avoid happy-end, but of course she wasnt. Lucky thing is that the guy is the more emotional and the girl is the tough one, at least. And at the end i found out this is part of a series, but i dont think i will by the next books. Anyway, for once it wasnt bad, something like a B-category action movie.

titi, i like what you say about the first book. i look around for it.

I've recently read this book 'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' by Paolo Giordano. It's a really great book about two people, a man and a woman. They both had traumatic childhood experiences which affected their whole lives. The man's twin sister is believed to have drowned, and Mattia is consumed with guilt. Eventually, he finds escape in mathematics. The woman, Alice, hates her father who she blames for a mountain ski accident which left her limping and starves herself to almost death. Ever since she saw Mattia for the first time, she knows that Mattia is her soulmate, they are meant to be together. Soon they become friends... or something more, it's just Mattia is so introverted. He only has to realize, and everything will fall into place, they will be happy, Alice knows that and she is all set to wait. What Alice doesn't know is that Mattia will choose mathematics over her, fly off to another country to do his research, and she'll have to marry another guy. As the years pass, Mattia and Alice bump into each other on a few occasions, but each time they draw apart, like two parallel lines, which always come together, but never exactly cross.
I'd strongly recommend this book to anyone who loves Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Both books are about solitude, and traumas which affect people's future, and finding the right person... Dark, sad, but also beautiful.

Rina, I also read that book a few months ago!!! I loved it too!

(Im always so happy when I discover that someone hundreds of miles away has read the same book and thinks the same about it!!!)

i read lately " the genius and the goddess " by aldous huxley. it's an easy to read book but it is a pleasant read and has lots of true ideas in it. i liked it a lot.

and also i read " juliet, naked " by nick hornby. well, i did read bettter books written by him but is was stil fun to read.

I read a great book yesterday, by Andreas Eschbach: The Carpet Makers.

I like science-fiction a lot but the ones Ive read lately seemed so uselessly long and at certain places i was bored by them. However, it couldnt happen with this book because its more like a collection of short stories, of which each one shows another part of this strange society from another angle of another character.

The Carpet Makers are a different caste in the far future, who make a carpet from their wives and daughters hairs during their life. The money they get for the carpet is enough for their son to live for their all life, while they make their own carpet, and the money they get for it will go to their son etc. The carpets are made (at least thats what the carpet makers think) to decorate the big palace of the Immortal Emperor.

Here is a review of the book: http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue143/carpet_makers_rev.html

This is a dark book. Quite depressive, mainly when you discover why it was all made. But its a very enjoyable reading and it focuses on the people, not on the technology. (In this way Im not a traditional sci-fi reader because Im not interested in the technology. And Im not really interested in a certain person, thats why I didnt miss any main character at all. Im interested in the society, and I got a brilliantly captured society in this book.)

thanks titi