I finished reading The Help and The Gardner Heist and returned them to the library yesterday. I had borrowed Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 by Piers Brendon but it's too large to tackle right now. However, I browsed in it and found it well written and of course fascinating. I made a note to borrow it again when I have time to read it.
I also returned Cinderella Man: James J Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History by Jeremy Schaap. My book club watched the movie (with Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger) and the book wasn't adding much to the story so I quit reading half way through.
I picked up some books about art, the Gardner Museum, the Bulger boys, and Ireland, inspired by The Gardner Heist. I don't plan to read them all or all of those I do read, but I want to browse in them.
Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World (2008) is about . . . the art world. Critics, auctions, exhibits, etc.
The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Douglass Shand-Tucci (1997) is a biographies of Belle Stewart and her world, which included Edith Wharton, Henry James, Henry Adams, and John Singer Sargent, who painted two famous portraits of her, one when she was paralyzed and dying. She is as shockingly beautiful in the last as in the first.
The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter of a Century by Howie Carr (2006.) Alas, the title is not an exaggeration.
Whitey Bulger disappeared in 1994 but he is almost certainly living in Ireland where he has citizenship. And so the last of the four Gardner Heist-inspired books, McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy (2000.) He has a Rule of Traveling: Never pass a bar that has your name on it. Couldn't pass it up.
I picked up a Michael Medved book, The 10 Big Lies about America (2008) because I can never resist lists like the 1000 books you must read before you die or the six rules of book reviewing or whatever.
The American Physical Therapy Association Book of Body Maintenance and Repair I got because I wanted to know more about the rotator cuff. I think I know now where to put the ice.
Warman's Vintage Jewelry by Leigh Leshner (2008) is just for fun. It's mostly pictures and it's about costume jewelry which is so much more fun than the real thing, don't you think?
And there is that pesky Jonathan Littell book again. The library has four copies which just appeared last week and as of yesterday two of them were out (one to me) and two available. So it looks like there are only two of us in Spokane who are even trying to read the book. I'm going to give it another go.