I've been in the middle of a Booker Binge, if you will. School started a week ago, and that means books up the wazoo.
Books I have finished since my last post:
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Thomas L. Friedman - From Beirut to Jerusalem
Shakespeare - As You Like It
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink
John Banville - The Sea
Mark Fuhrman - A Simple Act of Murder
Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
L.M. Montgomery - Rilla of Ingleside
Marion Beynon - Aleta Day
Frances Itani - Deafening
Paolo Coehlo - The Alchemist
Jane Urquhart - The Stone Carvers
Achmat Dangor - Bitter Fruit
Graham Swift - Last Orders
Pat Barker - The Ghost Road
Books I am currently reading:
Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
Gwethalyn Graham - Earth and High Heaven
Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces
Homer - The Iliad
Katherine Govier - Angel Walk
Kerry Sakamoto - One Hundred Million Hearts
Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride
and books I have yet to:
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Ben Okri - The Famished Road
Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea
Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo
James Kelman - How late it was, how late
Book recommendations, please
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Franz Ferdinand
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A Sunday At The Pool In Kigali (Dimanche A La Piscine A Kigali) by Gil Courtemanche (translation: Patricia Claxton)
I discovered this novel as a result of a film playing at the local Film Festival. I figured I would skip the screening and read it before the film arrives at the theatres.
It is set before and after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The characters are based on real people and mostly go by their real names. The main character is a French Canadian journalist living at the Hotel des Mille Collines. The actual massacres take place near the end of the book and the larger portion is concerned with the AIDS crisis and obviously the escalation of violence. While the journalist is surrounded by death what he sees everywhere is a real passion for living. The duelling crises are numbing in their scale but overall it is a very moving read.
I discovered this novel as a result of a film playing at the local Film Festival. I figured I would skip the screening and read it before the film arrives at the theatres.
It is set before and after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The characters are based on real people and mostly go by their real names. The main character is a French Canadian journalist living at the Hotel des Mille Collines. The actual massacres take place near the end of the book and the larger portion is concerned with the AIDS crisis and obviously the escalation of violence. While the journalist is surrounded by death what he sees everywhere is a real passion for living. The duelling crises are numbing in their scale but overall it is a very moving read.
So, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was due back a while ago, so I had a two day, 9 hour marathon reading session to finish it. Very much getting into and revelling in. I plan on buying it eventually.
Today, I picked up my second copy of The Known World (someone "borrowed" my first copy and has yet to return it, and qutie frankly, my bookshelf gets annoyed with me), On Beauty (I adore Zadie Smith, plus I found a great used hardcover), and Blood Meridean (just to see if it deserves such a high ranking on the New York Times list).
I'm currently reading Michel Houellebecq's new work, The Possibility of an Island.
Today, I picked up my second copy of The Known World (someone "borrowed" my first copy and has yet to return it, and qutie frankly, my bookshelf gets annoyed with me), On Beauty (I adore Zadie Smith, plus I found a great used hardcover), and Blood Meridean (just to see if it deserves such a high ranking on the New York Times list).
I'm currently reading Michel Houellebecq's new work, The Possibility of an Island.
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Franz Ferdinand
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Books I am currently in the middle of (and reading fast thanks to a broken leg and no other distractions):
Tony Judt - Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Donald Kagan - The Peloponnesian War
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas L. Friedman - From Beirut To Jerusalem
Also recently picked up Cervantes' "Don Quixote" (the Grossman translation), Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers", but I am quite intent to start Sean Wilentz's "The Rise of American Democracy". It's gonna be a long summer!
Tony Judt - Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
Donald Kagan - The Peloponnesian War
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas L. Friedman - From Beirut To Jerusalem
Also recently picked up Cervantes' "Don Quixote" (the Grossman translation), Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers", but I am quite intent to start Sean Wilentz's "The Rise of American Democracy". It's gonna be a long summer!
I will concur on Erik Larson's The Devil In The White City. Fantastic book. So was his earlier book, Isaac's Storm.
I read so little fiction now. After reading Steinbeck, E.M. Forster, Dickens, James Baldwin, Orwell the contemporary fiction that I read just seems to be poorly written. Though I am making my way back through the Adrian Mole books right now - because I recently bought the newest addition, Adrian Mole And The Weapons Of Mass Destruction. Loads of fun.
Non-Fiction rules! I now know everything about the building of the Panama Canal after reading, The Darkest Jungle by Todd Balf, and The Path Between The Seas by David McCullough.
I read so little fiction now. After reading Steinbeck, E.M. Forster, Dickens, James Baldwin, Orwell the contemporary fiction that I read just seems to be poorly written. Though I am making my way back through the Adrian Mole books right now - because I recently bought the newest addition, Adrian Mole And The Weapons Of Mass Destruction. Loads of fun.
Non-Fiction rules! I now know everything about the building of the Panama Canal after reading, The Darkest Jungle by Todd Balf, and The Path Between The Seas by David McCullough.
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Franz Ferdinand
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Okri! That makes two of us, it is a rather fascinating book.Okri wrote:I'm currently reading Tony Judt's Postwar: History of Europe Since 1945. Great so far.
I recently bought some books on ancient history (Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Holland's Rubicon: The Last Days of the Roman Republic; and Kagan's Peloponnesian War). Quite excited to read those. Fiction though...it's been done, I'm done with fiction for a while.
Does anybody here read non-fiction? Biography, auto-biography, memoir, history, science, current affairs, etc.? I like to jump back and forth between fiction and non-fiction and I'm currently plowing my way through Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962; Horne is one of the true greats, providing clarity and balance to an extraordinarily complex event.
Some recent purchases and I wonder if anybody has read them: The End of Faith by Sam Harris; The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson; and American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips...?
Some recent purchases and I wonder if anybody has read them: The End of Faith by Sam Harris; The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson; and American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips...?
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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Sonic Youth
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List shmist. I've wandered far afield from it a while ago.Nik wrote:Sonic, great list!
After clawing my way through the 650 page Kavalier and Clay and the 550 page The Corrections, I picked up the 700 page Giles Goat Boy and thought "#### this #### already." I am now happily leafing through the 275 page Everything is Illuminated, and I feel I'm a better, happier more fulfilled person for it.
Next: Horton Hears a Who.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
Nik wrote:and then moving onto Flannery O'Connor's complete short fiction.
Flannery O'Connor was one of the great masters of the short story and her oeuvre is quite magnificent. I wrote a lot of papers on her in college but one of my favorite topics was when I compared O'Connor's "The Life You Save May be Your Own" to an Emily Dickenson poem ("The Props assist the House"). I postulated that O'Connor simply must have read the Dickenson poem and based her story on it (an admittedly, daring thesis).
Her love of the grotesque is unique and her insight into Southern Gothic lifestyle is frank and unflinching. She also loves freaks!
Watch for the swiftly violent scenes that oftentimes wrap up her stories as well as the reoccuring image of a line of trees. A reference to a line of trees separating two spaces (the threshold of liminality) often precedes these violent events.
Some of her best:
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" (it's easy to see why it's so heavily anthologized)
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
"Revelation"
"Good Country People"
"The Artificial Nigger"
"Everything that Rises Must Converge"
Enjoy!
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Sonic, great list! And I'm always surprised to see someone list Naipaul - he's more well known in Western European countries and ex-British colonies than he is in the US. It will be interesting to see you r reaction once you've read it - have you by any chance read anything else from him? I find myself always enjoying his writing style while still being appalled by his politics (I've struggled with this for some time) and his obvious self loathing.
Chabon and Wilder are reliably enjoyable. James continues to fascinate me - when I originally read Portrait of a Lady and Wings of the Dove, I always thought James' work was joyless and laborious but recently I've re-read him and found it difficult not to move on to another novel of his. I am drawn to his obsession with the struggle for narrative authority and his portrayal of the relations among art, artist and artifice. His Freudian American vs Europe dialectic (figured as a struggle between parent and child) also lends itself well to wonderful Marxist interpretations. Portrait remains his best novel and his short stories are worth checking out as well (Figure in the Carpet, The Beast in the Jungle, The Middle Years and the Bench of Desolation).
Steinbeck is among our most luminary descriptive authors and even with his limitations for relying on essentialism and gender constructs, he manages to carve out a lot of wonderful critiques of class-society and capitalism. And I cannot say enough nice things about Nabokov - I've read Lolita 3 times and it improves on each reading. Truly one of the greatest novels ever.
To this list, I wanted to ask (and add) if anyone else has read anything by Jamaica Kincaid? If not, trust me, go out, purchase/borrow/steal her stunning "Annie John." You will not regret it. It is a quick read but still so loaded. Rarely is a parent child dynamic (in her case, mother-daughter) described with such real power, real pain and wonderful human doubt.
Currently, I'm reading Chabon's "The Final Solution" and then mving on to Flannery O'Connor's complete short fiction.
Chabon and Wilder are reliably enjoyable. James continues to fascinate me - when I originally read Portrait of a Lady and Wings of the Dove, I always thought James' work was joyless and laborious but recently I've re-read him and found it difficult not to move on to another novel of his. I am drawn to his obsession with the struggle for narrative authority and his portrayal of the relations among art, artist and artifice. His Freudian American vs Europe dialectic (figured as a struggle between parent and child) also lends itself well to wonderful Marxist interpretations. Portrait remains his best novel and his short stories are worth checking out as well (Figure in the Carpet, The Beast in the Jungle, The Middle Years and the Bench of Desolation).
Steinbeck is among our most luminary descriptive authors and even with his limitations for relying on essentialism and gender constructs, he manages to carve out a lot of wonderful critiques of class-society and capitalism. And I cannot say enough nice things about Nabokov - I've read Lolita 3 times and it improves on each reading. Truly one of the greatest novels ever.
To this list, I wanted to ask (and add) if anyone else has read anything by Jamaica Kincaid? If not, trust me, go out, purchase/borrow/steal her stunning "Annie John." You will not regret it. It is a quick read but still so loaded. Rarely is a parent child dynamic (in her case, mother-daughter) described with such real power, real pain and wonderful human doubt.
Currently, I'm reading Chabon's "The Final Solution" and then mving on to Flannery O'Connor's complete short fiction.
Some recent book purchases:
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
"The Retreat from Moscow" (play) by William Nicholson
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
"Beautiful Child" (play) by Nicky Silver
I Am No One You Know: Short Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stephano by Charles Isherwood.
Howard's End by E.M. Forster
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
"The Retreat from Moscow" (play) by William Nicholson
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
"Beautiful Child" (play) by Nicky Silver
I Am No One You Know: Short Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stephano by Charles Isherwood.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell