Books read and a meme

40. The Potter's Field: The Seventeenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, Ellis Peters. While tilling a field recently given to the Benedictine abbey at Shrewsbury, the body of a young woman is discovered. It may be the missing wife of the previous tenant, who left his wife abruptly a year earlier to join the abbey. Or maybe not, because the younger son of the landowner claims he has proof that she was recently seen alive. When an itinerant peddlar is arrested for the murder, the son is able to clear his name as well, making Cadfael think that the son may know more than he's saying about what happened. The overall mood of this one seemed more melancholy and dark than the other Cadfael books I've read so far. Still enjoyable as all of them are, but a little bit of a slog because of the gloom.
    
41. Strapped : Why America's 20- and 30-somethings Can't Get Ahead, Tamara Draut. There is a strong assumption made in this book that everyone wants to do the "get married, buy a house, have kids" thing. These days, in order to achieve the comfortable middle-class existence (get middle-management job, get married, buy a house, have kids) previous generations could enjoy, you have to go to college. Going to college means starting out many thousands of dollars in debt. Since you've got so much student loan debt, you end up forced to live on credit cards and you can't afford to buy a house and can maybe barely afford to have kids. In short: you're screwed. Honestly, I'm about 20 pages from the end (where she lays out her suggestions for how to address the problem) and I just can't go back and pick it up to finish it. I hoped it would be more engaging than I found it.
    
42. Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, Diana Gabaldon. The upcoming remarriage of Lord John Grey's mother introduces him to a new romance, and coincides with the mysterious receipt by his older brother and his mother of pages from one of his father's diaries which has been missing since his death (supposedly a suicide after being accused of being a Jacobite agent). John tries to find out who is sending the diary pages and to clear his father's name, which requires grudging assistance from Jamie Fraser. The real heart (as it were) of the story though is John's romance with Percy Wainwright, who is the stepson of the man John's mother is about to marry. If the idea of two men having a romantic and physical relationship bothers you, this is not a book you should pick up.
    

Also interspersed in there are chapters from "Databases Demystified" as part of a class I'm taking.

And now, a meme ganked from chadu:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As usual, bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. (I've added asterisks next to the ones that are tagged "unread" in my own library.)

( the titles )

(no subject)

Forgot this one in the recent reading list (typo: rending):

43. Exit Music, Ian Rankin. There's no announced US release date for this final Rebus novel yet, so I sucked it up and ordered from Amazon.co.uk. I won't disclose the ending (although you might catch some sotto voce grumbling) but I think it was a fitting way to wrap things up.