Late Spring 2010

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC - 2nd book of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I needed another easy / comfort book. These books feel like an old warm blanket to me.



ON THE BEACH (Nevil Shute) - What would you do if you knew all the bombs, the rest of the world was over, and you were just waiting around for the end? I love a good apocalyptic book. I know, weird, but I just do. 99% of these are survivor stories though. You know - there's a handful of survivors and they are huddled together trying to defend their remaining soup cans from . But this one is different and man o man it made me really think.



THE EDIBLE WOMAN (Margaret Atwood) - I think I would have had a completely different experience reading this book had I not read it directly after ON THE BEACH. I kept overlaying the premise of ON THE BEACH on the plot of THE EDIBLE WOMAN. And how would we feel about gender roles and getting married and trying to create a "normal" life if the bombs had all been dropped. So yeah - given that in my brain, the protagonist was trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life and sort of going crazy at the end of the world...it was great.
WHITE TIGER (Aravind Adiga) - I did not expect the ending here. It was good. Kind of Kite-Runner-ish but about India.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND - Movie hype got me thinking that I had never actually read the books. So I did. They were like .99cents on the Kindle.
NO ONE WOULD LISTEN - The Bernie Madoff case. And WOW this was interesting to me. The guy that wrote the book was in the same business as Madoff and realized YEARS prior that something was fishy. Tried multiple times to alert the SEC and they ignored him. I love stuff like this. The writing was not annoying, and it wasn't overly complicated. I think that most anyone could read it and understand what happened even though the mechanics of hedge funds are mind boggling.