What Are You Reading The Week of May 16, 2015?
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1hemlokgang
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-700/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/...
Studs Terkel — master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, veteran radical and vibrant soul of the midwestern capital of Chicago — has died, aged 96. To register him as "writer and broadcaster" would be like calling Louis Armstrong a "trumpeter" or the Empire State Building an "office block". Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.
He is best known to Americans as the voice that asked the questions on the Studs Terkel Show which ran for 45 years, syndicated from the WFMT radio station of downtown Chicago. The tapes of his interviews take up rack after rack at WFMT; there are 9,000 of them, and Studs was setting about a catalogue when he fell ill.
The names of his guests, written in magic marker on the side of each tape, constitute the recent history not only of America but of the world: Simone de Beauvoir, Margot Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, JK Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, Andrés Segovia, Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Bronowski and so on — including Bertrand Russell, recorded at the age of 90 during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
As you listen, you know in your bones that each person has never told their story as cogently or as fully before and will never do so again, for that was Terkel's art. He was maestro of that most precious craft in the practice of both journalism and history: listening. He was the world's greatest — and loudest-mouthed — listener. He even called his 1973 autobiography Talking to Myself.
But this distinction did much more for the archives of history than bequeath unrepeatable recordings of the great, the good and the gregarious. Terkel's obsessive interest in the propulsion of people's lives was at its most curious and passionate — and his subjects at their most brilliantly articulate — when he was dealing with everyday people, from whatever background: carpenters, judges, hub-cap fitters, priests, admirals, sharecroppers, models, signalmen, tennis players, war veterans and cooks. His book Coming of Age: the History of our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), was made up of interviews with elderly people. It is a vivid record of an America which, for the most part, is now distant if not passed away along with Terkel himself.
People call Terkel's business "oral history", but it is more like the weaving of a fabulous verbal tapestry, the threads of which are human preoccupations. It is the rich art of taking the vernacular, and making it eternal. Such a process does not merely record the details that keep people's minds busy, it gives them value. Terkel harvested not only the most complete American history of this century, but the most compassionate.
In a way, Terkel's story is best told through that of Hobart Foote. When one asked Terkel which of all 9,000 interviewees he valued most, the answer was this one, which made it into a book, Working (1974).
Foote lived in a mobile home near the Illinois-Indiana state line with his wife, a Bible and little else but "the clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago bound". The area is a great mesh of railroad lines, criss-crossing the roads. And so Foote talks about the "train problem" he has getting to work, since his journey is punctuated by so many railway crossings and long waits for lumbering freight trains to pass, and if he arrives a minute after nine, he gets docked for the whole hour.
And so Foote's drive to work is a daily adventure, driving at speed to a detailed but flexible system across the assault course of railway crossings, changing the route according to which train is late or on time, which crossing shut and which open. "It's a game you're playing," he tells Studs. "Catch this light at a certain time, and then you've got the next light. But if there's a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue and watch those crossings. And if I make her okay, you've got a train just over on the Burnham line you gotta watch for. But it's generally fast ..."
Why does Terkel remember this especially? "Because it's a great suspense tale. An adventure thriller through the railroads every morning, so this man doesn't get docked for the whole hour. The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts — I've always believed that — and that ordinary people can speak poetically. Also that no one else speaks like that and that there is no other person like that in the world."
Terkel used to recommend a poem to people he met, called Chicago, by Carl Sandburg: "Hog Butcher for the world / Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler / Stormy, husky, brawling / City of the Big Shoulders ..."
This was the city to which Terkel's family moved from the New York Bronx in 1920, when he was nine years old. He had been born in New York the year the Titanic sunk: "I'm a Titanic baby," he used to say. His real name was Louis; "Studs" came later, pinched from Studs Lonigan, title of a Chicago 1930s novel by James T Farrell.
If America consists of two great coasts, the south and a vast real-life in-between, then Chicago is the capital of that in-between. It was, and is, the capital of work, the cast-iron, steel-and-glass leveller of men; the city where dust from the "subway" system elevated above the streets on iron stilts showers down on the bipeds beneath regardless of status. Chicago, said Terkel, "is the country. It is America, it is a metaphor for everything."
His mother Annie opened a boarding hotel for migrant workers — roughnecks, political agitators and vagrants, by whom the young boy was captivated. "I used to listen to their stories for hours and hours. The good and the bad, coming through my own house, and I couldn't hear enough of it."
The young Studs was also entranced by the sounds of jazz and blues — "to which people would dance on a dime" — coming out from the the smoky, sweaty music halls. "I used to stand by the door, on the sidewalk, and listen."
Later, Studs would guide the careers of Big Bill Broonzy and other blues stars, and befriend Billie Holiday. "She was really something," Studs recalled, "with that gardenia in her hair." Holiday once sang Willow Weep for Me for Terkel and nine other people. "We weren't weeping for her, we were weeping for ourselves," he later said, "That's an artist."
Terkel went to study law at Chicago University, graduating in 1934. "I was miserable," he recalled, and conceived an ambition to join the civil service. But after an unsuccessful interview with the FBI, he failed to qualify and abandoned that aspiration. From then on, Studs said, his progress was "an accumulation of accidents".
A perforated eardrum restricted his war years to "limited service", and he was drafted into the remarkable Works Project Administration scheme, assigned to chart the nooks, crannies, ways and means of his beloved Chicago.
It was a blue-collar town built on steel mills, stockyards, the railroad and the construction of its own mighty self. This is how Terkel saw it: "It is in every way a city of steel. A real city. New York is many cities at once. Chicago is one city. The blacks from the deep South didn't go to New York, they came to Chicago. And the Irish, and the East Europeans and the Koreans, to make one big steel city. It's no coincidence that the skyscraper came from Chicago. It is the architectural Athens of America."
The war over, Terkel became involved in radical theatre and radio soap operas, playing bit parts — "usually criminals or gangsters". He also worked as a DJ, playing his favourite music: jazz, blues, folk and opera.
With the advent of television, in 1945 Terkel was allocated his own chat show, Studs's Place, set in a Chicago diner, but it was terminated when his political views came to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which shared the anti-communist views of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The committee's veto sent Terkel back to radio. He heard Woody Guthrie on air one day, asked what station he was listening to, and the answer was WMFT. There he went, in 1953, and there he stayed.
While celebrities graced his programme, ordinary Americans populated his books. The first publication was Division Street America (1966), about race in Chicago. The white Appalachian hillibillies and the black Mississippi sharecroppers did not meet on the city's streets, but they did in Terkel's book, explaining their views of themselves and of each other.
Hard Times (1970) looked back on the Depression. Here were people like Dynamite Garland from Cleveland who eventually found work in a bakery and lived off eclairs that slipped onto the floor (''roaches all over the floor, big roaches''). Although bankrupt and living with her husband and two children in a garage on $14 a week, she nevertheless blew her first $65 on a fur coat. In a similar vein was The Good War (1985), which had Americans look back at their hopes, jokes, fears and survival mechanisms during the second world war.
But the most bountiful harvest of humanity had by then been gathered in Working. Terkel won a Pulitzer prize for these stories, like that of Hobart Foote, or Babe Secoli the supermarket checker, who described customers engaged in something less like shopping than dodgem cars with trolleys, and garbage man Nick Salerno, discoursing on his long experience of how people pack their rubbish: "You get just like the milkman's horse — used to it."
In 1981, American Dreams Lost and Found was published, including a remarkable interview with a former president of the Ku Klux Klan, CP Ellis. But shortly afterwards came something of a heresy. The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) was Terkel ill-at-ease, in a book about rifts across society, not just between "haves, have somewhats and have-nots", but race and religion.
Coming of Age, was something of a valedictory address, not only by its dramatis personae but by Terkel himself. Kurt Vonnegut called its cast of characters "uncelebrated but undefeated, brave and just Americans whose long lifetimes are likely to expire along with a notoriously disgraceful century".
In its pages, the Americans of an epoch bid their successors farewell - people like Carolyn Peery of Cleveland, aged 99, who remembers her mother in law, "born into slavery ... jumping up and down saying 'God bless Mr Lincoln. God bless Mr Lincoln!'".
Best of all, Terkel liked the ghost-town storekeeper in Kentucky who says: "The last flicker of my life will be against something I don't think has to be."
Terkel commuted from near-northside Chicago to the radio station on what he called the "Geriatric Express" bus. He engaged his fellow passengers in conversation, aware that he was often considered "some old nut", feeling like "the Ancient Mariner" and worried that America is "starting to suffer from a sort of collective Alzheimer's disease".
But when I met him, Studs's mental agility at the age of 83 was exhausting company. His face was puckish but kind, and flickered between reflection and mischief.
He arrived at a club he liked for lunch without the obligatory tie. It was duly kitted out by the girl at reception, and knotted by Terkel around the outside of his jacket collar. He recommended a stiff Stoli Martini to kick off and "a little wine" to follow.
The journey to and from his office was through a subterranean labyrinth of corridors and shopping arcades linking the WMFT building with the tower containing the luncheon club. Besides the elevator door was an Irish attendant he knew, and they burst into song. Then there was an extraordinary ritual, involving an employee at Johnny's Shoe Shine. "Another day!" bellowed Terkel, from quite a distance. "Another triumph!" boomed back the reply.
Terkel disliked this nether region beneath the skyscrapers. "It's supposed to tell you that you're just a little cog in a big machine," he objected, "Bring back the man!"
His radio broadcasts finished in 1998, and the following year his wife Ida died after 60 years of happy marriage. But the books continued: two on faith, in 2001 and 2003; two on entertainment - The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them (1999) and And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005); a memoir, Touch and Go (2007); and - still to come - PS Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening. His son Dan survives him.
• Studs (Louis) Terkel, broadcaster and oral historian, born May 16 1912; died October 31 2008
Studs Terkel — master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, veteran radical and vibrant soul of the midwestern capital of Chicago — has died, aged 96. To register him as "writer and broadcaster" would be like calling Louis Armstrong a "trumpeter" or the Empire State Building an "office block". Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.
He is best known to Americans as the voice that asked the questions on the Studs Terkel Show which ran for 45 years, syndicated from the WFMT radio station of downtown Chicago. The tapes of his interviews take up rack after rack at WFMT; there are 9,000 of them, and Studs was setting about a catalogue when he fell ill.
The names of his guests, written in magic marker on the side of each tape, constitute the recent history not only of America but of the world: Simone de Beauvoir, Margot Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, JK Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, Andrés Segovia, Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Bronowski and so on — including Bertrand Russell, recorded at the age of 90 during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
As you listen, you know in your bones that each person has never told their story as cogently or as fully before and will never do so again, for that was Terkel's art. He was maestro of that most precious craft in the practice of both journalism and history: listening. He was the world's greatest — and loudest-mouthed — listener. He even called his 1973 autobiography Talking to Myself.
But this distinction did much more for the archives of history than bequeath unrepeatable recordings of the great, the good and the gregarious. Terkel's obsessive interest in the propulsion of people's lives was at its most curious and passionate — and his subjects at their most brilliantly articulate — when he was dealing with everyday people, from whatever background: carpenters, judges, hub-cap fitters, priests, admirals, sharecroppers, models, signalmen, tennis players, war veterans and cooks. His book Coming of Age: the History of our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), was made up of interviews with elderly people. It is a vivid record of an America which, for the most part, is now distant if not passed away along with Terkel himself.
People call Terkel's business "oral history", but it is more like the weaving of a fabulous verbal tapestry, the threads of which are human preoccupations. It is the rich art of taking the vernacular, and making it eternal. Such a process does not merely record the details that keep people's minds busy, it gives them value. Terkel harvested not only the most complete American history of this century, but the most compassionate.
In a way, Terkel's story is best told through that of Hobart Foote. When one asked Terkel which of all 9,000 interviewees he valued most, the answer was this one, which made it into a book, Working (1974).
Foote lived in a mobile home near the Illinois-Indiana state line with his wife, a Bible and little else but "the clangor of trains, Gary-to-Chicago bound". The area is a great mesh of railroad lines, criss-crossing the roads. And so Foote talks about the "train problem" he has getting to work, since his journey is punctuated by so many railway crossings and long waits for lumbering freight trains to pass, and if he arrives a minute after nine, he gets docked for the whole hour.
And so Foote's drive to work is a daily adventure, driving at speed to a detailed but flexible system across the assault course of railway crossings, changing the route according to which train is late or on time, which crossing shut and which open. "It's a game you're playing," he tells Studs. "Catch this light at a certain time, and then you've got the next light. But if there's a train there, I take off down Cicero Avenue and watch those crossings. And if I make her okay, you've got a train just over on the Burnham line you gotta watch for. But it's generally fast ..."
Why does Terkel remember this especially? "Because it's a great suspense tale. An adventure thriller through the railroads every morning, so this man doesn't get docked for the whole hour. The principle is that ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts — I've always believed that — and that ordinary people can speak poetically. Also that no one else speaks like that and that there is no other person like that in the world."
Terkel used to recommend a poem to people he met, called Chicago, by Carl Sandburg: "Hog Butcher for the world / Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler / Stormy, husky, brawling / City of the Big Shoulders ..."
This was the city to which Terkel's family moved from the New York Bronx in 1920, when he was nine years old. He had been born in New York the year the Titanic sunk: "I'm a Titanic baby," he used to say. His real name was Louis; "Studs" came later, pinched from Studs Lonigan, title of a Chicago 1930s novel by James T Farrell.
If America consists of two great coasts, the south and a vast real-life in-between, then Chicago is the capital of that in-between. It was, and is, the capital of work, the cast-iron, steel-and-glass leveller of men; the city where dust from the "subway" system elevated above the streets on iron stilts showers down on the bipeds beneath regardless of status. Chicago, said Terkel, "is the country. It is America, it is a metaphor for everything."
His mother Annie opened a boarding hotel for migrant workers — roughnecks, political agitators and vagrants, by whom the young boy was captivated. "I used to listen to their stories for hours and hours. The good and the bad, coming through my own house, and I couldn't hear enough of it."
The young Studs was also entranced by the sounds of jazz and blues — "to which people would dance on a dime" — coming out from the the smoky, sweaty music halls. "I used to stand by the door, on the sidewalk, and listen."
Later, Studs would guide the careers of Big Bill Broonzy and other blues stars, and befriend Billie Holiday. "She was really something," Studs recalled, "with that gardenia in her hair." Holiday once sang Willow Weep for Me for Terkel and nine other people. "We weren't weeping for her, we were weeping for ourselves," he later said, "That's an artist."
Terkel went to study law at Chicago University, graduating in 1934. "I was miserable," he recalled, and conceived an ambition to join the civil service. But after an unsuccessful interview with the FBI, he failed to qualify and abandoned that aspiration. From then on, Studs said, his progress was "an accumulation of accidents".
A perforated eardrum restricted his war years to "limited service", and he was drafted into the remarkable Works Project Administration scheme, assigned to chart the nooks, crannies, ways and means of his beloved Chicago.
It was a blue-collar town built on steel mills, stockyards, the railroad and the construction of its own mighty self. This is how Terkel saw it: "It is in every way a city of steel. A real city. New York is many cities at once. Chicago is one city. The blacks from the deep South didn't go to New York, they came to Chicago. And the Irish, and the East Europeans and the Koreans, to make one big steel city. It's no coincidence that the skyscraper came from Chicago. It is the architectural Athens of America."
The war over, Terkel became involved in radical theatre and radio soap operas, playing bit parts — "usually criminals or gangsters". He also worked as a DJ, playing his favourite music: jazz, blues, folk and opera.
With the advent of television, in 1945 Terkel was allocated his own chat show, Studs's Place, set in a Chicago diner, but it was terminated when his political views came to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which shared the anti-communist views of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The committee's veto sent Terkel back to radio. He heard Woody Guthrie on air one day, asked what station he was listening to, and the answer was WMFT. There he went, in 1953, and there he stayed.
While celebrities graced his programme, ordinary Americans populated his books. The first publication was Division Street America (1966), about race in Chicago. The white Appalachian hillibillies and the black Mississippi sharecroppers did not meet on the city's streets, but they did in Terkel's book, explaining their views of themselves and of each other.
Hard Times (1970) looked back on the Depression. Here were people like Dynamite Garland from Cleveland who eventually found work in a bakery and lived off eclairs that slipped onto the floor (''roaches all over the floor, big roaches''). Although bankrupt and living with her husband and two children in a garage on $14 a week, she nevertheless blew her first $65 on a fur coat. In a similar vein was The Good War (1985), which had Americans look back at their hopes, jokes, fears and survival mechanisms during the second world war.
But the most bountiful harvest of humanity had by then been gathered in Working. Terkel won a Pulitzer prize for these stories, like that of Hobart Foote, or Babe Secoli the supermarket checker, who described customers engaged in something less like shopping than dodgem cars with trolleys, and garbage man Nick Salerno, discoursing on his long experience of how people pack their rubbish: "You get just like the milkman's horse — used to it."
In 1981, American Dreams Lost and Found was published, including a remarkable interview with a former president of the Ku Klux Klan, CP Ellis. But shortly afterwards came something of a heresy. The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) was Terkel ill-at-ease, in a book about rifts across society, not just between "haves, have somewhats and have-nots", but race and religion.
Coming of Age, was something of a valedictory address, not only by its dramatis personae but by Terkel himself. Kurt Vonnegut called its cast of characters "uncelebrated but undefeated, brave and just Americans whose long lifetimes are likely to expire along with a notoriously disgraceful century".
In its pages, the Americans of an epoch bid their successors farewell - people like Carolyn Peery of Cleveland, aged 99, who remembers her mother in law, "born into slavery ... jumping up and down saying 'God bless Mr Lincoln. God bless Mr Lincoln!'".
Best of all, Terkel liked the ghost-town storekeeper in Kentucky who says: "The last flicker of my life will be against something I don't think has to be."
Terkel commuted from near-northside Chicago to the radio station on what he called the "Geriatric Express" bus. He engaged his fellow passengers in conversation, aware that he was often considered "some old nut", feeling like "the Ancient Mariner" and worried that America is "starting to suffer from a sort of collective Alzheimer's disease".
But when I met him, Studs's mental agility at the age of 83 was exhausting company. His face was puckish but kind, and flickered between reflection and mischief.
He arrived at a club he liked for lunch without the obligatory tie. It was duly kitted out by the girl at reception, and knotted by Terkel around the outside of his jacket collar. He recommended a stiff Stoli Martini to kick off and "a little wine" to follow.
The journey to and from his office was through a subterranean labyrinth of corridors and shopping arcades linking the WMFT building with the tower containing the luncheon club. Besides the elevator door was an Irish attendant he knew, and they burst into song. Then there was an extraordinary ritual, involving an employee at Johnny's Shoe Shine. "Another day!" bellowed Terkel, from quite a distance. "Another triumph!" boomed back the reply.
Terkel disliked this nether region beneath the skyscrapers. "It's supposed to tell you that you're just a little cog in a big machine," he objected, "Bring back the man!"
His radio broadcasts finished in 1998, and the following year his wife Ida died after 60 years of happy marriage. But the books continued: two on faith, in 2001 and 2003; two on entertainment - The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them (1999) and And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005); a memoir, Touch and Go (2007); and - still to come - PS Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening. His son Dan survives him.
• Studs (Louis) Terkel, broadcaster and oral historian, born May 16 1912; died October 31 2008
2hemlokgang
I am reading The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg and listening to Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline.
4Travis1259
Just finished The King's Spy by Thomas Hill, an English Civil War mystery. Reading Ruin Valley, A Mystery of the Third Reich by J. Sydney Jones that takes place during the Nuremberg trials. What surprised me? Each novel showcased the methods a cryptographer can use to decipher a code.
5mollygrace
>1 hemlokgang: Thank you for the information about Studs Terkel.
I'm reading Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Penelope Fitzgerald's short story collection, The Means of Escape.
I'm reading Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Penelope Fitzgerald's short story collection, The Means of Escape.
6benitastrnad
Good War by Studs Terkel was one of the first " grown-up books I ever read. Since then his books are titles that I often give as gifts. They are just wonderful. I am glad that a person like him walked this earth and took the time to record the lives of those he met along the way.
I am making my way rapidly through Red Queen by Margaret Drabble. This is for the British Author Challenge and I like this book. The author is using some literary tricks but so far they are working to make this an interesting novel. The subject is a woman who was a Queen of Korea in the 18th century and wrote a memoir about a perilous life in that royal household. The second half of the book is set in modern times and is about a middle aged female academic who discovers this book and makes it the subject of her research. I have had this book in my collection for almost ten years and I don't know why I did not pick it up sooner. Guess I needed the prompting of the BAC group.
I am making my way rapidly through Red Queen by Margaret Drabble. This is for the British Author Challenge and I like this book. The author is using some literary tricks but so far they are working to make this an interesting novel. The subject is a woman who was a Queen of Korea in the 18th century and wrote a memoir about a perilous life in that royal household. The second half of the book is set in modern times and is about a middle aged female academic who discovers this book and makes it the subject of her research. I have had this book in my collection for almost ten years and I don't know why I did not pick it up sooner. Guess I needed the prompting of the BAC group.
7NarratorLady
Next up: Erik Larsen's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.
8snash
I finished Bellweather Rhapsody which was an entertaining mystery with a collection of interesting and peculiar but believable characters. It all takes place in an old Catskill hotel during a high school music festival. I usually avoid mysteries but I enjoyed this one.
9whymaggiemay
>1 hemlokgang: I read two of Studs Turkel's books and liked both for the writing and the content. He was not a flowery writer, but every sentence was packed with the essence of what you needed to know. I've always intended to read more of his work.
11fredbacon
I'm slowly working my way through The Private Lives of the Impressionists. The problem is that I don't find them all that interesting.
12rocketjk
I finished Beyond Einstein: the Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe by Michio Kaku and, as a "between book" (anthologies/collections I read one entry at a time between the books--novels, histories, etc.--I read straight through), Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris. The former was mostly good, though with some problems of presentation. The latter I thought was delightful. You can read my more in-depth review on the Kaku book on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread. The 50-Book thread also has a short review of the Sedaris book.
I've now started In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: a Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue. Bellaigue is a European journalist married to an Iranian who had lived in a suburb near Tehran for many years when he published this memoir in 2005. I'm about 20 pages in and so far it seems like a series of slice of life vignettes, with some cultural history worked in. I'm not sure if this is the structure of the entire work, but anyway it's interesting and enjoyable so far.
I've now started In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: a Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue. Bellaigue is a European journalist married to an Iranian who had lived in a suburb near Tehran for many years when he published this memoir in 2005. I'm about 20 pages in and so far it seems like a series of slice of life vignettes, with some cultural history worked in. I'm not sure if this is the structure of the entire work, but anyway it's interesting and enjoyable so far.
14sebago
I have started The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel. This novel has been recommended to me by sooo many folks, I finally broke down and ordered it. :) It has all of the elements I love.. books, books.. oh and books! :)
15Limelite
Studs Terkel, B B King -- the red lights on the caboose of an era.
A pleasure to read your obit/bio. Need to re-read some Studs. Will his books ever cease to be contemporary?
Finished Kaku's The Future of the Mind. Don't know whether to be thrilled or horrified about man's future intersection with robots.
Read aloud with spouse, the very short but funny Force of Habit by James Scott Bell. Stars a nun like no other. Share it with someone, it's hilarious.
Enjoying Longbourn on CD every time I get in the car.
About half way through historical mystery set in 18th C. China. Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart, a new author who displays great command of her subject and craft. This from someone who avoids murder mysteries. High praise, indeed.
Getting ready to open this year's Pulitzer for fiction, All the Light We Cannot See. Hope it's unputdownable.
A pleasure to read your obit/bio. Need to re-read some Studs. Will his books ever cease to be contemporary?
Finished Kaku's The Future of the Mind. Don't know whether to be thrilled or horrified about man's future intersection with robots.
Read aloud with spouse, the very short but funny Force of Habit by James Scott Bell. Stars a nun like no other. Share it with someone, it's hilarious.
Enjoying Longbourn on CD every time I get in the car.
About half way through historical mystery set in 18th C. China. Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart, a new author who displays great command of her subject and craft. This from someone who avoids murder mysteries. High praise, indeed.
Getting ready to open this year's Pulitzer for fiction, All the Light We Cannot See. Hope it's unputdownable.
16Peace2
Listened to the very short The Garden of Truth by E. Nesbit yesterday. Now have The House at Riverton by Kate Morton in the house and Dear Life by Alice Munro in the car.
I'm still trying to finish Dracula. I'm also making my way through Pegasus Bridge by Stephen E. Ambrose about the British taking of the aforementioned Pegasus Bridge on D-Day in order to secure it and the neighbouring canal bridge for the troops landing on the beaches. I'll be in that area next week for a day or two, and wonder if we'll have time to visit it.
I'm still trying to finish Dracula. I'm also making my way through Pegasus Bridge by Stephen E. Ambrose about the British taking of the aforementioned Pegasus Bridge on D-Day in order to secure it and the neighbouring canal bridge for the troops landing on the beaches. I'll be in that area next week for a day or two, and wonder if we'll have time to visit it.
17brenzi
I finished and really enjoyed Ann Patchett's book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Now I'm reading Kate Atkinson's new one, A God in Ruins.
18momom248
Sebago I lived AJ Fikry. I hope you do too! And Limelite I absolutely loved All The Light We Cannot See. One of my top 10 of all time.
19ahef1963
I've just finished reading The Black Path by Asa Larsson, and am trying to figure out what to read next. I am not quite sure what I'm in the mood for reading.
20Iudita
I am listening to The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. It is a nice story but very very slow. I have also started reading An Ember in the Ashes.
21Meredy
>7 NarratorLady: I'm reading that too, about 100 pages in.
22Zumbanista
Feel like I've finally broken through with Invention of Wings but it's taken me till the 40% point to do so. I can't pinpoint why I didn't find it more than mildly interesting at first. I'm not bowled over with the writing and haven't had any "ah hah" moments yet.
23enaid
I'm almost finished with Robert Harris's Imperium which is a reread for me. Conspirata is out and I wanted to remind myself what the story was about . I read An Officer and a Spy a couple of weeks ago and was blown away. I was ignorant about the Dreyfus Affair and now I'm ruminating on it a lot and haunted by it. The French really have a lot to answer for!
24Citizenjoyce
Thanks for the start, hemlokgang. What a guy he was.
I read about 1/3 of The Dream Lover and put it aside because I found I just didn't care about the people. Maybe if I'd got to the part with Chopin it could have generated some interest. Women who love their sons but not their daughters don't do much for me.
I just finished Jane Smiley's latest, Early Warning. The first book started with a couple who had five children. By the time of this book the children have grown and the character list expands exponentially. It's mighty hard to keep everyone straight, but eventually I could and loved this one as much as Some Luck.
I'm very surprised by The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't a history of women in the early twentieth century. Very interesting, even though men who extol the virtues of women whilst keeping a foot on their necks aren't really my type of guy.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through The Nightingale which is a combination Suite Francais, The Girl In The Blue Beret, and Sarah's Key. It's very well researched and interesting with emphasis both on the heroic woman and her more confused and compliant "normal" sister.
I'm also doing my best with Death By Black Hole. I can hear Neil deGrasse Tyson lovingly trying to make astrophysics understandable to the masses, but alas, not succeeding with me. I'll just continue to let it wash over me and see if anything sticks.
I read about 1/3 of The Dream Lover and put it aside because I found I just didn't care about the people. Maybe if I'd got to the part with Chopin it could have generated some interest. Women who love their sons but not their daughters don't do much for me.
I just finished Jane Smiley's latest, Early Warning. The first book started with a couple who had five children. By the time of this book the children have grown and the character list expands exponentially. It's mighty hard to keep everyone straight, but eventually I could and loved this one as much as Some Luck.
I'm very surprised by The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't a history of women in the early twentieth century. Very interesting, even though men who extol the virtues of women whilst keeping a foot on their necks aren't really my type of guy.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through The Nightingale which is a combination Suite Francais, The Girl In The Blue Beret, and Sarah's Key. It's very well researched and interesting with emphasis both on the heroic woman and her more confused and compliant "normal" sister.
I'm also doing my best with Death By Black Hole. I can hear Neil deGrasse Tyson lovingly trying to make astrophysics understandable to the masses, but alas, not succeeding with me. I'll just continue to let it wash over me and see if anything sticks.
25flips
Just started on The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss.
26hemlokgang
I finished The Dream Lover, reluctantly. I do not like teasing fact from fiction with someone as important as George Sand. It distracted me and I was unable to suspend that frustration enough to enjoy it as fiction.
Next up is The Melancholy of Resistance by Lazslo Krasznahorkai.
Next up is The Melancholy of Resistance by Lazslo Krasznahorkai.
27nhlsecord
>13 rocketjk: Good one, rocketjk ! I have a nasty headache and you gave me a smile :)
I am reading A Book of Voyages edited by Patrick O'Brian - travel writing from a few centuries back, and The Eye of Strife by Dave Duncan, a LTER book that is not making a good impression on me.
I am reading A Book of Voyages edited by Patrick O'Brian - travel writing from a few centuries back, and The Eye of Strife by Dave Duncan, a LTER book that is not making a good impression on me.
28cappybear
Still reading Gallipoli Memories by Compton Mackenzie. I find the author's breezy narrative slightly irritating, but it's early days yet.
Also still reading A Survey of Russian Music by M.D. Calvocoressi which has got me reacquainting myself with the music of Balakirev, Borodin, and so on.
Also still reading A Survey of Russian Music by M.D. Calvocoressi which has got me reacquainting myself with the music of Balakirev, Borodin, and so on.
29enaid
I picked up a book late last night, Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor. I could hardly put it down and finished it as soon as I had my coffee this morning. It was great. I know there are some Barbara Pym fans here so I thought you all should know about Soul of Kindness. Elizabeth Taylor is a bit more sassy and there is a little more "action" but it was truly reminiscent of the best of Barbara Pym, in my opinion.
30benitastrnad
I finished my Margaret Drabble book for the BAC. I read The Red Queen and really enjoyed it. The second half of the book did not reach the heights of the first book, but it was still an over-all excellent book. Glad I finally got around to reading it. It was one of the first books I entered in to my LT account back in 2008. I should have read it much earlier so I am glad that Paul had Drabble in his BAC list. Now I am on to Gone Girl for my real life book club and the Murder & Mayham in May group read.
31Kammbia1
I just finished reading The Buried Giant a few days ago and I had mixed feelings about the novel.
Here's my review: http://marion-hill.com/book-review-64-the-buried-giant-by-kazuo-ishiguro/
I'm currently reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. I'm about 70 pages in and enjoying the book so far.
Here's my review: http://marion-hill.com/book-review-64-the-buried-giant-by-kazuo-ishiguro/
I'm currently reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. I'm about 70 pages in and enjoying the book so far.
32rocketjk
#31> I loved The Sportswriter. Read it years ago. Haven't gotten around to any of the sequels, though.
33Copperskye
>17 brenzi: I'll be starting A God in Ruins soon, too. I'm looking forward to it!
Currently I'm reading The Lost Garden and listening to The Dark Horse.
Currently I'm reading The Lost Garden and listening to The Dark Horse.
34Citizenjoyce
>31 Kammbia1: You expressed many of my feelings in your review, especially that the fantasy elements seemed tacked on to the story. Ishiguro is a great writer, but this just wasn't his element. The old couple could have made a great story in themselves, and there could even have been successful fantasy elements surrounding them. but the knights didn't add anything worthwhile to the story.
35lorannen
Switching back to Ghostwritten. I've been trying to work my way through 2312 but just can't get into it!
36seitherin
Finished Getting Warmer by Alan Carter. I liked this second book in his Cato Kwong series much better than the first.
Started The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
Started The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
37jnwelch
I'm nearing the end of Babbitt, which has been a surprisingly good ride, and I'm about halfway through and enjoying To Dance with the White Dog.
38ffortsa
This looks like a friendly place to say hello.
I've almost finished the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I'd never read before. It is unfortunately interesting how it is still relevant today.
After that, I'll be starting The Natural by Malamud. I'll probably slip in some mysteries along the line.
I've almost finished the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I'd never read before. It is unfortunately interesting how it is still relevant today.
After that, I'll be starting The Natural by Malamud. I'll probably slip in some mysteries along the line.
39rocketjk
ffortsa, hello!
I need to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X again. It's been years.
The Natural is a wonderful book. According to my high school English teacher, it is Malamud's attempt to recreate Greek mythology in the context of baseball. It is much better than the movie, in my opinion.
I need to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X again. It's been years.
The Natural is a wonderful book. According to my high school English teacher, it is Malamud's attempt to recreate Greek mythology in the context of baseball. It is much better than the movie, in my opinion.
40CarolynSchroeder
I finished and reviewed ER book The Marauders and am now settling into the wonderful, slow, quiet, almost realtime world of Some Luck by Jane Smiley (who I have not read in about a decade!) - the first novel in the trilogy.
41Kammbia1
>32 rocketjk:
I'm about 100 pages into The Sportswriter and I'm enjoying very much. It's well-written and quite easy to read. I will post a review when I'm finished.
I'm about 100 pages into The Sportswriter and I'm enjoying very much. It's well-written and quite easy to read. I will post a review when I'm finished.
42Kammbia1
>34 Citizenjoyce:
I agree with your assessment as well. I love both Fantasy and Literary Fiction and hoped those two elements would come together better in The Buried Giant. But it did not for me. A little disappointed about it.
I agree with your assessment as well. I love both Fantasy and Literary Fiction and hoped those two elements would come together better in The Buried Giant. But it did not for me. A little disappointed about it.
43Citizenjoyce
I just finished Afterimage by Helen Humphreys, and it's difficult to know what to think about it. As a purely made up novel, it's very interesting about an orphaned girl who becomes house maid to a childless Lady photographer and her husband who longs to travel. The Lady is obsessed with taking the maid's photograph in various identities. The description of the photographic process is very interesting as are the posing and ideas behind the images. Lady Isabelle's relationship with her husband and with the servants is also interesting. Isabelle is based on the famous photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, great niece of Virginia Woolfe. And here is where the problem arises. The book describes real photographs but uses a very fictional story line about Julia Cameron and her house maid Mary Hillier. Why take real people and completely rearrange their lives turning everything inside out and upside down. So, a good book but strange.
44fyrfly
Finished Leaf Storm and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shahib Nye and Purely Positive Training: Companion to Competition by Sheila Booth.
Reading Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures by W. Hampton Sides and Count Your Enemies by Paul Nathan. I am looking forward to something else.
Reading Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures by W. Hampton Sides and Count Your Enemies by Paul Nathan. I am looking forward to something else.
45jnwelch
Babbitt was surprisingly good, and now I'm reading Ross Poldark, along with To Dance with the White Dog.
46ahef1963
I'm having a hard time concentrating on books at the moment - nice weather and renewed Netflix binges. I've picked up an old favourite to re-read, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
47hemlokgang
Loved A Fine Balance....have you read Family Matters?
48Zumbanista
>46 ahef1963: A Fine Balance is such an excellent book!
Finished The Invention of Wings which fell flat for me. Now on to In The Blood, start of a genealogical mystery series.
Finished The Invention of Wings which fell flat for me. Now on to In The Blood, start of a genealogical mystery series.
49mollygrace
I finished The Means of Escape, a collection of stories by Penelope Fitzgerald. Each story was a delight. I'm continuing to read Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and enjoying it very much. I hope to finish by the end of the week. I m also going to begin reading The Magic Barrel, one story each day.
50seitherin
Finished The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I enjoyed the book much more than I thought I would. Next up is Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison.
51cappybear
Am quite enjoying Elmore Leonard's Road Dogs, the latest read for the book group.
Still dipping into The Andy Warhol Diaries.
Still dipping into The Andy Warhol Diaries.
52framboise
#46, 47 & 49: Loved A Fine Balance too. I should check out that author's other works.
54enaid
I picked up my fourth book this week from my own shelves: Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester. It's a wonderful novel about money and Hong Kong. John Lanchester also wrote Debt to Pleasure which was really good but this one is zippier and more accessible. I'll finish it up today, God willing and the creek don't rise. Highly recommended!
55Susielovesbooks
To Dance with the White Dog is one of my all time favorites.
56seitherin
Finished Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison and really enjoyed the book. Also finished Everything Burns by Vincent Zandri which was mostly meh.
Started Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Started Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
57jnwelch
>55 Susielovesbooks: To Dance with the White Dog was excellent. I've now got Artificial Absolutes going with Ross Poldark, and The Chimes in the wings.
58PrimosParadise
Terkel's Working was one of the first grown-up books I remember reading; and for some reason I still remember that Rip Torn, the actor, was one of the interviews, but I don't remember why it stuck out.
Anyway, finished The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri which is the first mystery in the series. Have started Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.
Anyway, finished The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri which is the first mystery in the series. Have started Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.
59ahef1963
Still reading Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. It's a long book, and I haven't had much reading time. Planning to spend the evening reading, which will be a delightful change.
61Limelite
>54 enaid: Thanks for the stellar rec on the Lanchester. I've owned the book for years, picked it up to read many times, but for some reason never cracked it open. Now I'll make a point to pay it attention.
62fyrfly
Finished Count Your Enemies by Paul Nathan, Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures by W. Hampton Sides, and Endangered by C. J. Box.
I didn't expect to finish the C. J. Box today, since I took it out yesterday. Now to find something for bedtime.
I didn't expect to finish the C. J. Box today, since I took it out yesterday. Now to find something for bedtime.
63vivienbrenda
Thank you for the Studs Terkel info. I've read two of his books and loved both, but never knew about his radio show or mostly anything about him. Really enjoyable.
As always I'm reading three books:Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel, The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir, and Last Letter From Your Love by Jojo Moyes. I like to switch between genres until a book gets so engrossing I just finish that one, got back to the others, and maybe add one or two. Since none of the current books are considered literary or deep reading, I don't have a problem. It's like watching different TV shows on the same night.
I love this site as I get most of my reading ideas and titles from it.
As always I'm reading three books:Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel, The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir, and Last Letter From Your Love by Jojo Moyes. I like to switch between genres until a book gets so engrossing I just finish that one, got back to the others, and maybe add one or two. Since none of the current books are considered literary or deep reading, I don't have a problem. It's like watching different TV shows on the same night.
I love this site as I get most of my reading ideas and titles from it.
64Meredy
>63 vivienbrenda: It's like watching different TV shows on the same night.
That's a very good analogy. Maybe it'll help make the idea clear for people who say they can't understand how a person could have several books in progress at once.
That's a very good analogy. Maybe it'll help make the idea clear for people who say they can't understand how a person could have several books in progress at once.
