I finished Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty and started Bridge of Clay, by Markus Zusak

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty This was great!

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8…, by Robert Kurson Just okay.

True Fiction, by Lee Goldberg Thriller genre.

Holy Ghost, by John Sandford Mystery genre.

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez Terrible. And Suarez doesn't even bother to give the book an ending. What a waste of time.

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama

Finished:

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood - I enjoyed this. Haven't seen the show, probably won't, but I tend to like dystopian stuff and this did a nice job.

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty - I don't tend to read murder mystery stuff usually, but this was either recommended by someone or was a goodreads recommendation, so I checked it out. Rather funny, a very quick read, and I liked the idea of part of the murder mystery being the mystery to the reader of who was murdered.

Saga Volume 3, by Brian K. Vaughn - This series is just so damned good. It's probably a good thing that each volume tends to have a bit of a wait through overdrive because I have a feeling I'd be flying through this otherwise.

Started:

The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie - This has been enjoyable so far, with a good amount of humor mixed in.

This week I'm starting Caraval, by Stephanie Garber and I'm super excited! I've heard really good things, and it's supposed to be good for fans of The Night Circus, which is a favorite of mine.

I finished Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty in a reading binge yesterday and loved it! Holy cow. I haven't been that invested in a book and the characters and the outcome in a long, long time. Feels good.

Finished Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty. On one hand it's a fun mystery where we start out only knowing that someone was killed; we don't know who, by whom, how, or why. Aside from that though, there are messages about domestic violence and how our public image doesn't always line up with our private reality.

Started and finished A Quick Guided Tour of the Bible, by Stephen M. Miller - this is similar to his A Visual Walk Through Genesis except he tries to cover the whole Bible in 224 illustration-heavy pages. The much larger scope only allows him to cover the biggest stories and each one only briefly, so it's good but not as good as Genesis.

It's helpful for context though, like at the end of the OT when it says Israel was invaded by the Babylonians for three generations in a row, the Good Book just says they displeased God by not respecting their foreign overseers (take your punishment like adults and maybe we can end it sooner). More specifically, historic records indicate that the Judean king withheld tax payments from the Empire, and that rarely ends well.

I have three other books in progress, but I only have about 100 pages left on each. If all goes well I'll wrap them up by the end of the week and start April with a clean slate.

• The Kids from Nowhere, by George Guthridge - this is one of those stories where a teacher gets assigned a class of "unteachable" kids and realizes that all he really needs to do to unlock their potential is try. The twist with this one is that the school is in an Alaska Native village on an island in the Bering Sea.
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald - I'm only about a quarter of the way through so I don't have much to say. I started with the Tim Robbins audiobook, which I didn't really care for, so I'm doing print the rest of the way.
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo - Part V Book III, wherein our heroes have returned from the darkness, but they may not get to stay long.

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

20% of the way done and I already don’t want it to end. Seriously loving the writing style and humor, not to mention the suspense about what happened at trivia night.

Finished: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (yeahhh, I'm a little late to the game)

Started: The Motherest by Kristen Iskandrian

In the last two weeks:

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Wow, Anthony Bourdain was kind of a dick. He had lots of good tips, and I learned a ton about both cooking and the restaurant business (including why owning a restaurant is really not a great idea), but he was a dick. I guess you need to be when you’re managing a kitchen, but damn.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Quick read, satisfying conclusion, saw the big twist coming a mile away but enjoyed the other surprises and loved being right.

Collected Stories by William Faulkner

I’ve been picking away at this beast since May 2017. Some were good, some kind of sucked. He’s got a thing for trickster tales, which surprised me, because they were different than the work of his I’d read so far.

For We Are Many by Dennis E. Taylor

Imagine you’re an engineer with unlimited time and resources and copies of yourself to work on the projects you’re interested in, and also you have a significant but limited amount of power so you can fix societal problems like “intelligent stone age society slowly going extinct because of predation” and “what is the best way to evacuate the entire earth”. If you liked The Martian, this should probably be on your list. This is the second book.

All These Worlds by Dennis E. Taylor

I sped through the third book and I’m not sure where I’m going to get my “engineer solves problems and has slightly obnoxious sense of humor” fix now.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

About consciousness from the perspective of a psychologist. No conclusions, lots of philosophy. I liked it, but probably not for everyone.

Working on:

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Pretty excited to finally have finished:

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon It took me 9 months to read. The first 300 pages took 8 months, the final 500+ pages took a month. It took waaaaaay too long to get interesting, but I was stubborn and I stuck it out. I'm glad I did, I really enjoyed the final 500 pages. I will not be reading any more in the series, though, because I don't want another 9 month stall.

Also read Off Season, by Jack Ketchum This one took me a day. It was 1980s cheesy, but it was an easy read.

Currently reading:

Food Junkies, by Vera Tarman

The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

lol my genres are all over the place