What are you reading NOW November 09?

What are you reading NOW?

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Just finished Sex Scandal America by David Rosen. A great book on a great topic. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of American sexual schizophrenia.

Still reading American Gods, Journey to the end of the Night, Justice at Nuremberg, Das Kapital Volume 1, and White House Years

Midway through The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams.

Fellowship of the Ring; used to reread these books every year, but now I'm getting back to it after about a 5 year absence.

Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway; based on the true story of the cellist who played for 22 days after 22 people were bombed. Could be a little maudlin but the girlfriend insists I read it.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - excellent so far, if one hell of a bummer. Guess what? Being poor in India sucks.

I read CELLIST and thought it quite good., Really gave a hint of what it was like to survive in Yugoslavia during their time of Troubles. Civil wars are the ugliest...and, ironically, the least civil.

I also thought Cellist of Sarajevo was very good.

I've just started The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens.

Sherron just finished WIFE'S TALE with her book club and didn't have much good to say about it. She was a fan of Lansens' previous books but thought this one was over-written and needed better editing.

Speaking of Ms. Lansens:

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2009/10/30/chatham-lori-lansens-online-091030...

How Stories Mean and An Aesthetic Underground by John Metcalf.

Ah, John Metcalf. GENERAL LUDD made me laugh my ass off.

A fellow curmudgeon...

I've just startedThe Healing of America by T.R. Reid which is required reading for another group meeting next week.

Just finished The Tourists which I thought was an excellent character study of the bright and the beautiful (under 30) in NYC.

I'm also a little bit into
Bridge of Sighs which is great, as is most of Russo's work.

Lots of Russo fans here, mate...and be sure to read the new one, it's a beauty.

I just finished the snarky, bratty Babylon by Bus. Ah, to be young and foolish again.

And in keeping with the spirit of the season, I bulled through The Great Influenza.

I'm currently reading The Brothers Karamazov. That should take me to the end of the year...

Finished The Brooklyn Follies yesterday and The Magician's Nephew today. I can tell that Follies isn't Auster at his peak, though it's all I've read of him thus far. Despite that, I really enjoyed it and am sad it had to end; felt like it could have gone on forever, and I'd probably have kept reading...

As for Narnia, Aslan scares me.

Oh, and last week we started To Kill a Mockingbird in Lit class. It's a good book, but I don't care for the themes. They've never interested me much.

#11 Good mix of titles. BABYLON looks fun--are you familiar with Craig Grant's THE LAST INDIA OVERLAND? It's a work of fiction but based of a trip Grant took in 1979--his was one of the last tour buses to go through Iran before the revolution. Fun, fun book, one of the over-looked Canadian classics--so over-looked, in fact, it doesn't appear to have a touchstone. Ah, well...seems to be out of print. Too bad, I always called it a Canadian ON THE ROAD...

#12--Try Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY and IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS. Terrific reads.

Finishing Kafka Americana, midway through Ron Hansen's Exiles and starting Ian Campbell's Iron Angels which has no touchstone, but is a sequel to Scar Night which I enjoyed.

We also just made some room on our shelves by deaccessioning 3 bulky O.S. Card hardbacks and 6 Card paperbacks. Keeping Ender's Game, Lovelock & maybe Speaker for the dead. And a number of other books get to move from piles on our loft floor into shelf space.

Finished a collection of essays about Jane Eyre. Spent a lot of my reading time this weekend playing tennis on my new Wii....

#15 GeoffWyss: Was it worth reading? If so, title & editor please?

I've started the new edition of A Moveable Feast that was edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway .

#17--Much controversy over that one. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.

#15--I second Medilla's request, please. Sounds interesting.

Life and fate by Grossman.

>11 Sandydog1:
Agreed about Karamazov. I started that one in August, got about a hundred pages into it, then school started up again. I haven't picked the book up since. Whoever said senior year was easy and fun LIED. Maybe I'll get around to it over Christmas break...

>12 Irieisa:
I agree about Mockingbird. Good book, but I doubt I ever would have read it on my own if it wasn't considered a "classic."

I feel like Mockingbird has suffered in a way just because it HAS been forced on so many students. You know, hard to love something when everyone tells you it's an amazing classic and that you SHOULD love it, damnit.

It's a beautiful, well-written novel... that reminds pretty much everyone of literature class from 7th to 10th grade, depending on when he or she read it.

I'm finishing The Crying of Lot 49 this evening and then moving on to Dogeaters.

Finished Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter back in October, here's my review:

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/battle-for-the-abyss-the-hor...

OK, not High Literature by a long shot. More like a nice pint of Guinness or whatever the UK equivalent of Bud Light is.

Medellia,

The book was Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, edited by Harold Bloom, and yes, I found it to be very worth reading. The best of the lot was the feminist reading by Gilbert and Gubar (and the worst, disappointingly, the Marxist reading by Terry Eagleton). The essays really deepened my understanding of and appreciation for the novel.

Gave up on Viktor Pelevin's HELMET OF HORROR about halfway through. It was going nowhere and despite an interesting premise, the book provoked more yawns than anything else.

Thing I'll tackle some sci fi next, mebbe Alastair Reynolds' CENTURY RAIN...

I finished Earthly Powers this morning. Burgess is astonishingly good - it seems incredible to me that this book isn't better known, indeed I'm indebted to my fellow snobs for alerting me to its existence. This is a big book in all senses of the word, but Burgess can wield words in such a way that he carries questions of power, family and the human soul with flair. Great stuff.

Ah, Ben, good on you for tackling a big, fat book, packed full of intelligence and, yup, dern fine writin'.

It's been on my Top 5 list for 15 years and shows no signs of losing that status.

I just finished Distant Star by Bolaño and Monstrous Possibility by Curtis White. The former was a pretty good novel (but not great), and the latter was pretty good despite covering topics that are not very important to me.

I feel as if in reading it I've read several books concurrently. I suppose, in a way, I have. I'm going to take a while to digest it before I read any more fiction.

I'm currently reading Journey into Space by Toby Litt. Like most literary attempts at sf, it feels odd - good writing, but with a slow and somewhat old-fashioned approach to its plot and ideas.

Good writing is the key to me--SF writers (and fans) should be devouring a book like Litt's in order to see how to make prose "cry and sing", instead of clunk, clunk, THUD...

Currently in the middle of Tamar, an excellent YA novel of family, love, and memory. A teenage daughter in mid 90s England slowly recovers the story of her Dutch/English grandfather who was an Brit agent in the Dutch underground @ the end of WWII. Carnegie medal winner, which, for me, is the most consistently accurate guide to a book that I'll like of any of the major prizes, whether for kids, YA or adult fiction. Even though I (assume) the "betrayal" is a bit heavily foreshadowed, (maybe i'm wrong) the book is still taut and well written.

#31 Bad writing can kill a book, but good writing alone can't save it. The bulk of sf suffers from bad writing, but I'd like to see a story/novel with good writing which deploys science fiction in an interesting manner. Both Journey into Space and Never Let Me Go are too diffident with their deployment of tropes, and that lack of confidence gives them a peculiar apologetic air, which often reads as somewhat old-fashioned.

NEVER LET ME GO was dull--which, to me, denotes bad writing. But I see your point...

Cliff: Your threshold of excitement tends to be much higher than mine. Never Let Me Go gripped me enough that I read it all in a day. Remains of the Day, too. I find a quiet, perfectly paced psychological portrait enchanting.

Medellia: I don't know if my "threshold of excitement" is higher (I like that term by the way)--after all, I LOVED the oft-mentioned EARTHLY POWERS, which is hardly thriller material. NEVER LET ME GO is the only Ishiguro I've read, though I saw the movie adaptation of REMAINS OF THE DAY and quite liked it. Who knows, I may give the dude another chance some day. But I just didn't get into NEVER LET ME GO--neither the characters nor the story got their hooks into me...

I agree with Cliff on Never Let Me Go. Dull, dull, dull. I began with the audiobook, switched to paper because I thought it might be better to read. Not improved in print!
Several people were outraged, however, when I said I didn't like it.

I won't be outraged by people not liking Never Let Me Go--it's not the best Ishiguro I've read, and I can see how individual tastes would factor into that book. I am generally outraged when someone dislikes Remains of the Day. It's just a great book. It is. :)

Cliff, I haven't seen the movie--I should, one of these days, if only because I'm curious to see how they adapted such an inwardly oriented novel into a film.

I promise I'll read Earthly Powers, someday, my dear Snobs.

And c'mon, Cliff, you're the guy who's always complaining about how Canadian literature has no "action verbs." ;)

Got me on that one, you nasty thing.

Btw, for all you Never Let Me Go lovers (I know you secretly love it), I hear there's a film adaptation coming out next year. It has Keira Knightley in it, so you know it's gonna be quality.

42: Ms. Knightley didn't do "Love, Actually" any favors. Then again, a tedious movie with 9000 simultaneous plots does that.

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Finished American Gods It was OK.

>20 SilverTome:,21 - Definitely agree Mockingbird's a good book. Still don't like (not to be mistaken for dislike) it. I wish we weren't reading so many American books in Lit class this year; all at once can be a bit overpowering.

Isaac Babel's Collected Works, Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze and The Brothers Karamazov.

I'm finding the Karamazovs hysterical so far; Foulds's prose is pleasure in itself but his overall narrative is disjointed - but then I do tend to fall for 'inspired but flawed' more often than plain 'inspired; and I'm enjoying the vicarious pleasures of Babel's simple evocation of a singularly brutal milieu. (That was a mouthful, sorry.)

>Leuntje

How are you finding Life and Fate? I picked up a copy a few months back and immediately took a dislike to the style of writing - perhaps it's just a poor translation (Robert Chandler). I expect I'll be reading it pretty soon, nonetheless.

Decided to give up on Neuromancer. Sci-fi's just not my thing. Will devoted full attention to The Brothers Karamazov now.

#44: that's weird, I just bought Babe's collected stories last week. Reading the poetry of John Donne befor starting on Posession

reading "the girl with the dragon tattoo". am i the last person in the world to read this?

Nope, that would be me...

Does she have a pearl earring as well?

Paul Auster's Invisible. It's my first Auster.

Yike, a new Auster I didn't know about. Released on my birthday too. Shame on Cliff...

Not Flesh Nor Feathers by Cherie Priest, the third in her "Eden Moore" trilogy. I'd gotten Four and Twenty Blackbirds as a freebie download when I first got my Kindle and I finally got around to reading it right around Halloween, and it's prompted me to buy the rest of "Eden Moore" for my Kindle.

Unfortunately, it looks like Not Flesh Nor Feathers may be the last of Eden.

Glad to hear someone's enjoying Babel's stories; I have them, but haven't dug in yet.

>49 CliffBurns: - Me, too; I don't think it's on my list to read.

>53 CliffBurns: - Your birthday? Seems like it would have made a good present.

Speaking of Auster, I happened to come upon Travels in the Scriptorium, and decided to throw caution to the wind and read it. Oh, how I see what you mean. Read half the other day; will finish and be done soon.

SCRIPTORIUM was a disappointment to me--self-indulgent (he references characters from many of his novels) and boring. Far better to read BROOKLYN FOLLIES, NEW YORK TRILOGY, IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS or nearly anything else.

>56 CliffBurns: - Luckily, it flew by quickly, and now it's done with. I hope to get a hold of more and better Auster sooner rather than later, but...

Ah, and at least Auster at his worst is still far better than certain authors-who-shall-not-be-named at their best. A reminder that things could always be worse.

The problem with SCRIPTORIUM is that it references characters from other Auster novels so unless you've read them all, you miss the point.

Finished Journey into Space. It was... okay. It felt more like a writing exercise than an exploration of its ideas. I've also been dipping into The New Space Opera 2, and I seem to have lost my taste for it. So many of the stories are just ordinary - they do nothing interesting with sf tropes or their deployment of them. I seem to remember the first book being better than this. And as for the blurb's "most beloved writers in science fiction", since when was that a criteria for publication?

More curmudgeonly John Metcalf, in the form of Standing Stones, a short story collection.

I am reading Little Dorrit. However, I will probably be at it for awhile because I am moving next week. Packing, moving, unpacking. I am really enjoying the book so far.

GeoffWyss - The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar may interest you.

I am reading the final volume of Javier Marias Your Face Tomorrow (library thing has got the wrong one, this volume is called Poison, Shadow and Farewell), having waited for about six months for the English translation. It's just as good as I hoped, and what's more I'm going to hear the author talk about it on Tuesday - perfect timing

Fellowship of the Ring and A Fine Balance still - LOVING Fine Balance, though I know it's going to end very badly.

Going to start Fires on the Plain soon, my friend gives it the highest recommendation.

I just finished The Ninja by Eric van Lustbader.I read the whole Ninja trilogy except in reverse order from buying the White Ninja at my local library book sale first..I found a collectable paperback copy of Chiricahua by Will Henry which was a great read...And beginning with the Barnaby Skye series by Richard Wheeler;Far Tribes is the second title that I just bought online.

Wheeler wrote one of my fave westerns, THE BUFFALO COMMONS.

>58 CliffBurns: - So I gathered. That's all right, though - I've missed points in other books, and I get along okay. I'm told I missed the point of Bridge to Terabithia, where I broke into laughter when I read that the girl died - I just can't get over how stupid it is to try and swing yourself over a river in stormy weather when the river's swelled up...

Started Kafka on the Shore, my first Murakami.

About 2/3 of the way through Alastair Reynolds' CENTURY RAIN--much better than the usual run-of-the-mill SF and I like the juxtaposition of a 1950's era parallel Earth with a 23rd century of nanotechnology disasters, intergalactic travel and warring factions.

68:
I've never read Kafka on the Shore, but good luck with it. I started on Murakami a number of years ago with A Wild Sheep Chase and, while I liked it ok, I didn't read any more Murakami for a long time. The weirdness in that one just never quite cohered for me. It left me feeling uneasy in an unpleasant way.

That's how most of Murakami strikes me, but I find it intriguing instead of unpleasant. His endings leave a little something to be desired, though, at least when he's doing his weird dream-logic thing. The only book of his with a really satisfying ending, to me, is Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My Auster's dust jacket now is all wrinkled and curdled-looking. On my weekend flight from Baltimore, i was seated next to a 14-month-old who was intrigued by my can of ginger ale and tipped it onto my lap. Do you know how long it takes jeans to dry out when you're sitting in an airplane?

And then kafka on the shore might be my favorite Murakami - both dreamworld but very moving (a combination that doesn't come naturally to many authors).

Dave: Getting pants to dry is tough but it's probably much harder to surreptitiously strangle said toddler under similar circumstances.

Great story, made me smile this mornin'...

Finished A Moveable Feast a few days ago . I really enjoyed it . I'm glad I read the new version and have no desire to get the original .

I read Hemingway in high school and could never get into him after that. Then again, I like Norman Mailer and William Vollmann, both of whom can be described as "Hemingwayesque."

I am reading Petersburg by Adrei Bely. A difficult book to read and to find on the shelves of new or used book stores. The translation and notes by and Malmsted are very good. They tell you some of the things you are missing by not reading the russian original. I found this book in a used book store which,I have been informed, is closing when the lease runs out.

Finished The New Space Opera 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan & Gardner Dozois. I like space opera - it's the sub-genre which got me into sf, and some space opera books remain among my favourite sf novels. When "New British Space Opera" appeared, I knew it to be a good thing. But over a decade later, and I'm not so sure. Because there's little that's "new" about this anthology. Half of its contents could have been written twenty or thirty years ago. There are some good stories in it, but most are bland and dull and seem to have forgotten what it is that made "New (British) Space Opera" interesting. As for the back cover blurb's "some of the most beloved names in science fiction"... beloved? Wtf does that mean?

Just started All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. The only other book by him I've read is The Road - which I quite liked (see here).

Just finished Haiku by Andrew Vachss. Might be the best thing he's written.

Has space opera become a "brand", do you think? Which immediately confines it to its consumers' (readers') expectations. Anything that seems different or too far off-base is rejected...and maybe then we get ourselves a NEW sub-sub-genre.

I have McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" but haven't read them. That seems to be the point where his writing changes (this from other McCarthy fans and reviews) and becomes more reader-friendly. I think THE ROAD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN are far more commercial and not nearly as psychologically dense and stylistically and thematically fascinating as earlier work like THE OUTER DARK and CHILD OF GOD. Have a go at BLOOD MERIDIAN. The Wild West with backdrops painted by Dali and Francis Bacon (the 20th century one). I just don't think Monsieur McCarthy is on top of his game any more; my son, Sam (14 years old), a critical reader and the best 14-year old aspiring writer in town, found NO COUNTRY "formulaic". A tough judgment but, I have to confess, no entirely undeserved...

Speaking of NO COUNTRY, I've heard from places that the Coen Bros. movie is better than the book.

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Recently finished Sex Scandal America by David Rosen. Here's my review:

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/sex-scandal-america-politics...

#80 people have been arguing about what constitutes new space opera since someone first coined the term, so it's no real surprise that some of the stories pimped as new actually feel quite old. There are a few stylistically experimental stories in The New Space Opera 2, but they're more notable for the attempt than for their success. Or maybe I'm just getting to jaded with it all...

Space Opera? Like Blakes 7?

I read a few of those Isaac Babel stories the other night; it's easy to see why he was so popular with the public at the time and also easy to see why he was executed by the authorities a few years later. Concentrated, powerful stuff.

83> I read a couple more myself, went back to the Odessa stories.

And the reportage from St Petersberg reads almost as well as the fiction...

Got my copy of Under the Dome today... sorry, guys, but I am a Constant Reader.

Also started Fires on the Plain and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Good stuff both.

Finished Possession last night. I enjoyed it an awful lot and because of my enjoyment of ridiculous Victorian fiction I was able to grant Byatt the necessary leeway in terms of coincidences in scholarship. Great fun though.

#86 I have the book although I've yet to read it. But I've seen the film, and it's surprisingly dull.

#87: I've not seen the film, but I've snobbishly decided that the book's better

Well, of course; goes without saying...

Finished All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. I don't get it. I don't get the bizarre punctuation - some contractions use apostrophes, some don't; no quotation marks for dialogue. I don't get why McCarthy is currently considered one of the US's great writers. He has a good eye for landscape, and parts of All the Pretty Horses are actually quite funny. But. It took me ages to work out when the story was set - 1949, apparently. The two sixteen-year-old protagonists act like thirtysomethings, and it's, well, it's a western. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the book. Nor do I think it is rubbish - it is quite good. But I can't honestly see what all the fuss is about.

90>

Try Blood Meridian. As far as I can tell, that's the main source of his huge reputation. It shows a similarly Faulkneresque disdain for grammar and punctuation. It's apocalyptic, very violent, and riddled with Biblical allegory and parallels with eg Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. Bloody and black.

I wouldn't say BLOOD MERIDIAN is the "main" source of his huge reputation--it's one of four or five books he's written that really are remarkable, original and brilliant. Monsieur Sales, once again I urge you to read some of the earlier work, pre-"Border Trilogy". That's when the writing is monstrously good...

92>

Fair enough. I guess for me Blood Meridian is far and away his best, but I accept that he's written other exceptionally fine novels. I'd list Suttree among them.

Cliff, how are they different? He still uses the daft punctuation, doesn't he? Is his characterisation and sense of time better (his sense of place is pretty damn good in All the Pretty Horses)?

I get the sense that starting with "Border trilogy" and right up to THE ROAD and NO COUNTRY, you're getting "Cormac Lite". The writing in BLOOD MERIDIAN is hallucinatory, deeper and richer, tuned to a peculiar pitch. OUTER DARKNESS and CHILD OF GOD are unrelenting, an assault on the higher and lower orders of the mind, emotion and intellect equally besieged. I dunno how else to put it--those earlier novels pack a clout that other writers can't deliver. They lack the courage, honesty and cruelty. The best of McCarthy's efforts are horrifying and gorgeous, baroque; like a chapel painted in blood.

93: I thought Suttree was really good. My father is a big McCarthy fan and it's his favorite - I found it reminiscent of some of the stuff I read in college (such as that Kennedy novel, what was it called again... about a homeless person, Iron something) but it was very, very good. I really like novels that focus on character.

I thought No Country for Old Men was pretty much EXACTLY like the movie. His spare writing style worked very well to be turned into a film.

86-88: I also loved Possession and was also not interested in seeing the film!

You do a good job of selling him. If I stumble across Blood Meridian or one of his earlier books in a charity shop then I shall buy it. But given the size of the TBR pile, I'll not bother paying full price for one...

96> You mean Ironweed :-)

98: Duh....

So, I am going to start Les Miserables in December, and am between books right now but will probably read le Desert which I have been putting off for lo these many months.

I just finished Hour of the Star and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and reviewed them. One was a group read and the other was an Early Reviewer book.

So Bob (32), you're the local Young Adult expert it seems. I read Zusak's I am The Messenger and really enjoyed it. Is The Book Thief as good and worth reading?

I occasionally get into YA stuff, but not so much now that the kids are older and the real reader of the two has decided he likes silly high fantasy series. Used to be I would read along with my kids, but I draw the line at Tolkien fanfic.

If I stumble across Blood Meridian or one of his earlier books in a charity shop then I shall buy it... I'll not bother paying full price for one...

Your loss.

#100: I thought The Book Thief was substantially better than I Am the Messenger.

Currently reading: Middlemarch. I wish someone had told me before now that this is not just another 19th century British novel. It's fabulous.

iansales: I've done my complaining here about McCarthy and won't repeat it; but my reaction to him is the same as yours.

80 pages into James Meek's The People's Act of Love; so far very impressed.

Reading Keats: a biography by Andrew Motion, along with The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger and dipping into Selected Cronicas by Clarice Lispector.

100: Book Thief was very, very good. One of my favorites I've read all year.

The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Brind Morrow
Don Quixote
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar
Study is Hard Work

As well as a text book on Art and one on Archeology.

Anna-
take Medellia's word for it - I haven't read the Book Thief yet - despite my immersion in YA lit. Been out of life w/ the "Mother of all Colds" for the last 3+ weeks. Unfortunately this was one of the very few times that Patty has caught a bug from me - she's usually much more resistant - so haven't been posting/keeping up w/ much of anything lately. And trying to get hold of certified documentation that proves i am who I am and can keep working @ the job i've had for ~ 24 yrs.
I AM eagerly awaiting the Abebook orders for the secret history of moscow, i'm gone and Paper cities to show up.

Been reading (slowly) a longish YA novel that was well reviewed - but i may abandon it soon..the name of the wind. And a rather more interesting social/environmental history of the New Madrid earthquake when the mississippi ran backwards. It's really more of a history of land speculation and Anglo/Spanish/AmerIndian relations in the region rather than a McPhee like geological essay w/ social subtopics.

I wasn't aware The Name of the Wind was classified as a YA - in fact, I seem to recall it's been published as a straight genre high fantasy.

i was going by where i came across reviews. It IS pretty much a genre high fantasy.

Thanks, all! It is now on my to be read list. In other news, I am doing a group read of Les Miserables starting in December and I have Foucault's Pendulum waiting at the library for me.

Still reading Journey to the End of the Night -- good stuff, highly recommended. A dark comedy for these dark times. Ferdinand Celine is like a French Bill Hicks minus the humanistic core of Bill Hicks.

Judgment at Nuremberg by Robert Conot continues to impress. A spellbinding courtroom drama. It offers up compelling discussions on culpability, international law, and the ethics of war. It is funny how similar the Nazis wanting to circumvent the Geneva Convention sound a lot like Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo Too bad those thugs will never be prosecuted or be forced to explain themselves, at least not to a prestigious law school or think tank that will pay them handsomely.

On a similar note, still reading White House Years by Dr. Killinger, er, Kissinger.

Still reading Das Kapital but haven't read it in a while.

"My name is Dr. Henry Killinger, and this is my magic murder bag."

Still working my way through Under the Dome, and need to get headway into Fires on the Plain. Saving The Two Towers until I finish Dome.

Just finished A Fine Balance , and True Compass Just started My Mortal Enemy only a novella, will finish it tonight. Starting Silas Marner tomorrow.

100, The Book Thief 106 is right. It is very good.

114: How'd you like Fine Balance? I really enjoyed it... well, until the end. Still good, just horribly sad.

Celine appears to be out of print in the UK, scandalously. I'm reading Northanger Abbey, god help me

116: I think it is really, really funny. It helps if you've read the Gothic fiction that she's making fun of (e.g., Anne Radcliffe).

Read Echenoz's brief but fascinating biopic of Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek. Follows his career from a teen working in a shoe factory during the Nazi occupation; his meteoric rise to the top of the distance running, culminating with the Helsinki Olympic triumphs; his status as a caged pet of the communist party through to his state imposed sham shame for supporting the Prague Spring movt. of Dubcek. The outline is well known to fans of running, but the details, fictional or not, make the book so intriguing. Whether a reader uninterested in sport/running in particular is problematic..but for anyone who's spent hours, days, years slogging through self-imposed workouts, a defn. bonus. The quirky use of the present tense was intrusive initially, but soon faded into the background as did Zatopek's inimitably awkward but devastatingly effective "style."

Nearly done with Judgment at Nuremberg by Robert Conot It's right up there with A Civil Action for non-fiction legal thriller. All of the Nazis on trial remind me of Dick Tracy villains. What a crazy bunch of thugs.

Finished a rather lifeless biography, BILLY THE KID: THE ENDLESS RIDE by Michael Wallis. The author seems to have good creds but this take on the famous outlaw, while admirable for its refusal to speculate and extrapolate, is little more than a chronological history of the Kid, offering few insights into his character and motivations. Good account of the Lincoln County war but Wallis doesn't capture the ambience of the West often enough or with the bloody, terrible beauty such a grim and magnificent history requires.

Finished Justice at Nuremberg by Robert Conot. I confused the title with Judgment at Nuremberg, something completely different. A fantastic read. Part courtroom drama, part historical inquiry, and an epilogue that is finely balanced between moral outrage and objectivity. It could put a thousand facile political arguments to rest with its power.

Started a book by Peter Weissman -- I Think, Therefore Who Am I?, a kind of psychedelic memoir. A nice break from the unrelenting bleakness of WW2 history.

Finished Under the Dome - One of King's best since the mid-90s.

Continuing on Fires on the Plain and picking up Two Towers.

Finished Brain Thief, Alexander Jablokov, which I have to review for Interzone. A good book, almost the novel Bruce Sterling might have written had he not written The Caryatids.

Also finished Spies by Michael Frayn, a somewhat Banksian meditation on childhood and childhood games, set during world War II. Took a couple of chapters to build up steam, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected.

(I see the touchstones are being useless again...)

Just finished Kafka on the Shore. Disturbing and beautiful at the same time. Would like to read more Murakami, but I think I need to go off in a corner and mull over this one for a while first.

I'm planning to get back to War and Peace. I'm about half-way through it now. However, I needed something lighter first, so I started a YA novel, Word Nerd, that has been nominated for a number of Canadian awards. It's about a nerdy boy who discovers the world of competitive Scrabble. I used to play in tournaments myself and recommend Steven Fatsis's Word Freak.

But there are also shorter Murakami novels and a couple of collects of short stories that can be dipped into..
If you liked Murakami, you might enjoy Victor Pelevin - a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more surreal and nightmarish, but the same sort of normal universe seen askew. Or the Sedia's the secret history of moscow.

About to start paper cities: an anthology of urban fantasy ed. by Sedia. A mix of authors whom I've read before and liked (eg. Richard Parks, Catherynne Valente, Barth Anderson) and ones whom I believe are new to me (Ben Peek, Mark Teppo, Kaaron Warren..).

Word Freak was great fun, as was the documentary, Word Wars, which features many of the same talented obsessives. And a great "extra" when the directors and several of the players were interviewed after the screening @ Sundance a few yrs back. I'm pretty crap at xwords and scrabble, and boggle, but enjoy reading about word games as my dad's hobby, back in the day, was creating acrostics and xwords, some of which ended up being used by the NYTimes. We've dug up some of his old acrostics, but there was a Valentine's day puzzle in the shape of a heart, that i haven't found yet.

I read Frayn's Spies a while back and enjoyed it v. much..though i might have gotten more bits if I'd been of an age. His comic novel based on his Fleet steet career in the 60s, Towards the end of the morning was very good too.

125: I'd encountered a few of those players featured in Word Freak, and they really are as talented, obsessive and fascinating as Fatsis portrays them. At one point in my life, I too spent my spare time studying word lists but I was just an amateur compared to those guys.

Your father created acrostics and crosswords? That is very, very cool.

115 Fine Balance was extremely well written. He put you right there. Sadly "right there" was not a comfortable place to be. I did enjoy it despite the all the sadness and nothing going right. Unfortunately that was and is life for the Untouchables in India.

I just finished The Big Sleep, which I started a couple of months ago. It took a while, since I was mostly using it as a travel/subway book and kept forgetting it. I really liked it though! The plot got a little hairy toward the end, but I was surprised and impressed by the quality of the writing. Some great turns of phrase in there. I'm sure I'll reread it at some point, and I'll do it with a pencil in hand this time. I'm moving on to The Long Goodbye next.

>130 Sutpen:

Chandler is a superb writer, no doubt. There's an early scene in The Big Sleep where Marlowe first meets the old colonel (or whatever he was) in a glasshouse which is positively throbbing with metaphors for sticky sex. All those big flowers and pululating greenery, the humidity and the sweat - and in comes Marlowe to see the impotent old man in the wheelchair whose daughters are running wild and screwing whatever moves. Brilliantly done.

My girlfriend is going through Chandler novels like they're going out of style. She also started reading Kavalier and Clay

132, that's wierd - I'm 150 pages into Kavalier and Clay and I'm really enjoying it. I also dug out The Golem to follow it up with.

Northanger Abbey was a delight, in the end, and very funny, indeed.

Just finished The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It's like the Twilight of its generation - all melodramatic lovelies who live life to the limit. And not very well written, either. Characters lecture each other at length, there are pages and pages of book-saidisms, and when was the last time you saw someone "knit their brows"? Okay, there's some witty bon mots, and Wilde was good with the paradoxical aphorism. But history has seriously misrepresented this book - Dorian doesn't even spot what's happening to the portrait until chapter seven...

Oh, and I'll be starting Austerlitz by WG Sebald next.

Had a sick day yesterday and finished Bible and Sword and Foucault's Pendulum. I learned a lot from both, though definitely B&S is about the weakest Tuchman I've yet read (it was her first book, written in 1956).

I really enjoyed the ending of FP - it gave me a lot to think about.

134: I'd have to disagree with Mr. Sales regarding Dorian Gray, at least in regards to the quality of the writing. It is a wonderfully decadent little book, a kind of British version of Against Nature by Huysmans. Then again, full-on hothouse decadent prose isn't for everybody. (I dislike Hemingway's clipped minimalist style and the macho posturing.)

Wilde does have a few things going for him rather than Twilight -- no sparkling vampires, no passive-doormat female protagonists, and his fabulous homosexuality. Meyer, like Orson Scott Card, is a homophobic one-trick pony with little writing talent and a giant psychotic fanbase.

Dorian's first love Sibyl Vane certainly qualifies as a doormat. But, true, there's no sparkly vampires. As for decadence... it's all told, not shown. And I must admit I find book-saidism especially annoying - Wilde he even has one character "warbling".

I discovered when trying to write an essay on Dorian Gray that the prose is workmanlike and about half the characters are cardboard. It's the marvellous central theme and the aura of Oscar himself that propel it forward

I once reluctantly took part in a "parlour game" (must have been a slow night) where you wrote out answers to various questions and tossed them in a hat--and I recall one question was "what figure from history would you most like to meet?". Oscar Wilde was the one who immediately came to mind, without hesitation.

I remember my answer, spontaneously given, surprised me at the time but I think, in retrospect, you could spend hours with Oscar and never once find him a bore (boor)...

I just finished The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, now I'm working through The War: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras.

139:
I totally agree. Speaking of Irish writers, I think Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) would be an interesting guy to talk to (rather than *listen to*, which might be the case with Wilde). On the other hand, I have the sense that Joyce would be odd, and not a lot of fun.

Apparently, Joyce liked to get drunk, bang out songs on the piano and sing his heart out. Typical Irishman, in other words.

I'd throw him out after about 20 minutes. Once he started warbling: "I'll take you home again, Kathleen..." his ass would be over the threshold and on its way back to merry Dublin.

Ah, but Wilde would be a scream. Bitchy, catty comments and droll put downs. Kind of like, well, Graham Chapman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXW6tfl2Y0

So basically, ideal dinner party: Graham Chapman and Oscar Wilde?

Finished Fires on the Plain. Doing a bit of the fantasy reading with The Dragon Reborn and The Two Towers, and I think I'm gonna start reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test soon.

Depends if you want to get a word in yourself.

I suspect Wilde would simply trot out all his aphorisms he's used in his plays, stories and book. Not so much a case of "I wish I'd said that" / "You will, my dear, you will"... as "Haven't you said that before, Oscar?"...

One of my favorite Python sketches had Chapman PLAYING Wilde.

"Your highness is like a stream of bat's piss..."

Am very much enjoying and much impressed by Austerlitz. Sebald is going on the list of authors whose entire oeuvres I want to read. Fortunately, he only wrote four novels - The Emigrants, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz.

I read RINGS OF SATURN and liked it VERY much...

Wasn't Wilde known as a witty conversationalist well before he wrote anything? Seems he started writing to stop the incessant chatter about how he hadn't actually DONE anything yet.

just read Tim O'Brien's July, July last night. Sequelae of Vietnam and college played out at a 30th class reunion. Very good..more later, off for Thanksgiving.

Hoping to start EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED (Wells Tower) very soon. Some good, tight, well-executed short stories are just what I require.

This one made the aforementioned NYTRB list for 2009, by the way...

Almost done with To Kill a Mockingbird. Read a lot of it today, and hope to finish it today, too.

Finished a beautifully quiet novella yesterday, the professor and the housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa. A brilliant mathematician, victim of a serious auto accident has retained his knowledge and sense of who he was but post accident can only keep 80 minutes of short term memory on hand. A single mom w/ a 10 yr old son becomes the latest in a long line of post accident housekeeper/assistants.

The professor keeps track of current "life" via sticky notes stuck to his clothing, so that, say, when the housekeeper and her son come the next day, he can look down and relearn their names and roles. The son and professor share a love for the same baseball team - but the prof's encyclopedic knowledge of the team's stats ends in 1985 and he's bemused as to why his favorite player, long since retired, never shows up in the lineup when they listen or (rather more fraught w/ potential hazard) take in a game.

A lovely, gentle novel of creating a family of sorts out of nothing. (0 - zero is defn. a non-trivial entity in the book).

Dancing Nightly in the Tavern by Mark A. Jarman. The first story collection from one of Canada's most dazzling stylists.

Rereading dog soldiers a decade or so on. While i haven't read no country for old men just whiffs of the plotline suggests similarities? People who've read both - opinions? Any influence of Stone on McCarthy?

I don't think they influence each other but they DO complement one another. Both deal with men (primarily men) in extremis, morally compromising themselves, swimming around in the abyss, very rarely escaping (and never intact)...

Okay, now I'm done with To Kill a Mockingbird. It was uncomfortably clear throughout that it was Lee's first major writing attempt. Like a soup with chunks spread out in it, some little bits and pieces, and mostly broth.

It was all right, but I never found myself caring.

Still ... better than A Separate Peace

I haaaaaaate A Separate Peace.

>157 kswolff: - Oh, now that's just cold comfort. ;-)

To my knowledge, I won't have to read A Separate Peace in my high school. Though it may just depend on my English teachers... One can hope.

I am reading too bloody little at the moment. But I've managed to snatch time for a couple of decent movies...

157 - just add a word and you're on to something very good, however..cold comfort farm by Stella Gibbons. where something nasty happened in the ........a sendup up english manor novels. very funny

>160 CliffBurns: - I'm reading about the same, probably less. I'll say it's because I have to understand material I just don't get or remember for two quizzes this week, and finals next month... But I'm surprised I still have an A in one of those classes where, thus far, I have learned the material the mornings of quizzes/tests. It's funny and sad. Story of my life.

>161 bobmcconnaughey: - Haha, I hadn't noticed that! No comparison with A Separate Peace, really.

Just read the first canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is just as rubbish as I remembered it from the first time around. Still, I'm looking forward to three and four, which I *know* (or, at least, I remember having known) are much better...

Reading Macbeth by Shakespeare with a local Shakespeare Reading Group, if you want to get literarily nasty in many ways

In some US states, reading A Separate Peace constitutes child abuse. Seriously, that book is a perfect storm of suck.

Lucky me, I get to teach SP every spring. I did get on the textbook adoption committee. Our decision will be based largely on which publisher gives us the most novels. We are all working to get this dog of a book off the curriculum. Wish us luck!

You would like this website:

http://awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com/

English (or Literature or whatever it's called these days) needs to weed its curriculum just as badly as libraries. Whatever its literary merits -- Young Adult WW 2 novel, etc. -- I'm sure there are better examples or classics that have been missed.

On the cusp of finishing Journey to the End of the Night by Ferdinand Celine. Excellent stuff. Darkly comical, picaresque, hallucinatory, bawdy, and misanthropic. It was written in 1932 prior to Celine becoming a Vichy collaborationist scumbag.

It was written in 1932 prior to Celine becoming a Vichy collaborationist scumbag.

Yeah, prior to the war he was just a scumbag waiting for the appropriate world-historical moment.

168> It's the other way around - there's a whole bunch of possible world-historical moments just waiting for the relevant selection of scumbags to appear on the scene and enact them. Like the Jewish holocaust generally - always an existing possibility, it just needed the appropriate selection of bastards to get together and give it a go.

It's always disappointing when utter scumbag and brilliant writer are embodied in the same person, but never really a surprise.

This last couple of weeks I finished Silas Marner by Gorge Eliot, My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Mountain Windsong by Robert J. Conley. I am starting Voices behind the Veil: The World of Islam THrough the Eyes of Women by Ergun Mehmet Caner. After this line up I think I need something light hearted and fun.

Finished the first story in Liver by Will Self

Harvard Bookstore just had a sale this morning and I picked up April 1865 and Animals in Translation. I think I will start with the Grandin book first.

Kswolff, these touchstones-from-out-in-left-field really crack me up! This should be the one: Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. It looks like a good reading choice, I'll keep an eye out for it.

Here's one of the more prominent of LT touchstone flubs: The Bible. Holy Duncan Hines...

The Sea, John Banville. Won the Man Booker in 2005. Max Morden, a dilettante art critic returns to the Irish seaside village where he holidayed as a child after his wife dies of cancer. He reflects on his life, and one particular summer when he met the Grace family - father Carolo, mother Constance, twins Myles and Chloe (who became his girlfriend for that summer), and "governess" Rose. But something happened that summer, which affected them all... I can't say I'm all that taken with Banville's prose - it feels a bit old-fashioned, and there are the odd sentences that feel like he chose the wrong word. And the plot isn't that much different from many other mainstream novels - like Spies, which I read only a couple of weeks ago (and which is the better book).

Halfway through Blood-Red Rivers by Jean-Christophe Grangé, which is the novel the film "The Crimson Rivers" is based on. It's not very good. I don't know if Grangé is just a poor writer, or he's been poorly served by his translator, but this is almost Dan Brown levels of prose.

Posted my piece on Philip José Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go on my blog - see here.