More Great Books

I hope this blog is not turning into a book blog! Or maybe I do. Anyway, here is what I’m reading this week.

Just Finished: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth.

From Amazon:

When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won’t take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before.

I really liked this book. It was particularly relevant because I live in New York, but even if you don’t, it’s still relatable. I liked the main character (an aging old man who had cancer that made him both impotent and incontinent – poor guy) and I enjoyed reading about his interactions with the other characters as well. That was basically the whole point of the book – the interactions. It was a great book for vocab-building as well. I got all sorts of goodies that I can’t remember right now but I do have them written down on the back of a paystub at home.

In Progress: American Wife By Curtis Sittenfeld.

From Amazon:

In her third novel, Sittenfeld offers a thinly veiled account (Wisconsin, not Texas) of the life of Laura Bush, in the story of Alice Lindgren, who marries Charlie Blackwell, the ne’er-do-well son of a political dynasty who becomes President. The early chapters, in which Sittenfeld depicts an innocent childhood and adolescence disrupted by tragedy, are the most compelling. As the book progresses to more recent and familiar events, she has difficulty enlivening the ins and outs of electioneering and policymaking. The object of Sittenfeld’s fascination is the seeming incongruity between Alice’s liberal sympathies and her bookish intellect and Charlie’s conservative nature and general insouciance. Neither character is very likable—Alice weak-willed and martyrlike, Charlie unbearably self-centered—but the novel, Sittenfeld’s most fully realized yet, artfully evokes the painful reverberations of the past.

I am still in the first third of this book but already I can’t put it down. Highly recommended so far. I am oddly enthralled by this fake story of Laura Bush – she’s a pretty cool lady, apparently. I picked up this book without realizing that I had read the author’s other book, Prep. Also good.

In the Queue: PHP Object-Oriented Solutions by David Powers.

I won’t bore you with the summary of this one. A picture will suffice.

In the Queue: PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra.

Same here. Just a pic! My job is programming so I suppose I might be considered a nerd. That’s okay though. I enjoy it 🙂

I have a bunch of other books in the queue as well… I would only ever read a programming book for fun if I’m reading other things for fun concurrently.

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What are you reading?