Now reading...

[Matthew]

No Eyes: Lester Young by David Meltzer. My first read of this, which is a book long poem on Lester Young, I didn't think too much of it. This time, I really enjoyed it -- recommended if you want something different on Lester Young.

[hot scotch&lemon]

[A Lark Ascending]

Great stories - I read many of them 30 years ago at the height of my Irish phase.

[hot scotch&lemon]

Great stories - I read many of them 30 years ago at the height of my Irish phase.

I descovered them when I was at school. Faolein , o Connor ,Mary Lavin and several others; great indeed

[John Tapscott]

[medjuck]

Finished The Holy and the Broken: Leonard Cohen , Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" by Alan Light. Really a long magazine article published as a book and probably more than most people want to know about the history of one song, but I liked it.

Also The Tin Horse by Janice Steinberg. A novel about a woman who makes a brief appearance in The Big Sleep. Philip Marlowe makes a guest appearance here but it's not a noir mystery- or even a mystery really.

[paul secor]

My reaction to this one wasn't as positive as John Litweiler's was.

[B. Goren.]

[jazzbo]

Not as good as I expected, at least so far.

[ejp626]

About halfway through Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Only a few sections have me laughing out loud, but Twain was an accute observer and he has some interesting things to say about the vagaries of fate on the lives of men. He watched the decline of the riverboat trade, brought about by the Civil War and then finished off by the railroads and essentially the industrialization of river-borne shipping.

[jlhoots]

Benjamin Black: Elegy For April

[BillF]

[paul secor]

Eliot Weinberger: Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

Very good essays, in general.

[paul secor]

Don Lee: The Collective

Lee tells an okay story but, when it was over, not much stayed with me.

[ejp626]

Finally wrapped up Kerouac's On the Road, much of it read on sitting at the back of a public bus, which is just a bit pathetic... Anyway, I really started to dislike the Dean/Neal character as the book went on. I found myself so out of sympathy with these folks and their crap behavior (esp. towards their wives and girlfriends) that it made reading a chore. I don't recall that from my previous reading, but it was a loo-ong time ago.

Just starting Michael Crummey's Galore, which is kind of interesting. It's hard to judge the tone, since the story kicks off with a man being rescued from the belly of a whale. And other miraculous and semi-miraculous things occur, but I can't quite tell if Crummey is saying that God is still around us and miracles do occur, or if he is just indulging in magic realism. I'll know more after a while. It seems well-written anyway and moves at a relatively quick pace.

At the other end of the spectrum is Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow, where God has literally died and his body is towed back to earth. I didn't think the rest in the trilogy were as good, but the first book is definitely worth a read. If you like SF mixed with Nietzsche, so to speak.

[BillF]

[A Lark Ascending]

Hopping between 3:

[jlhoots]

C.J. Box: Force Of Nature

[erwbol]

I ordered these two books a couple of days ago. I read Dawkins' The God Delusion at the time of its release, but felt that was enough. I'm not in need of convincing.

Edited April 16, 2013 by erwbol

[ejp626]

Just starting Michael Crummey's Galore, which is kind of interesting. It's hard to judge the tone, since the story kicks off with a man being rescued from the belly of a whale. And other miraculous and semi-miraculous things occur, but I can't quite tell if Crummey is saying that God is still around us and miracles do occur, or if he is just indulging in magic realism. I'll know more after a while. It seems well-written anyway and moves at a relatively quick pace.

At the other end of the spectrum is Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow, where God has literally died and his body is towed back to earth. I didn't think the rest in the trilogy were as good, but the first book is definitely worth a read. If you like SF mixed with Nietzsche, so to speak.

Having trouble getting into this. Crummey is trying so hard to replicate Garcia Marquez's sprawling generational epics (with more than a bit of magic realism) -- and the characters don't seem as much characters as chess pieces moved around by two of the main figures in the book. Towing Jehovah is far more to my taste.

Also reading Grossman's Everything Flows, which is a shorter work written after his masterpiece, Life and Fate. It is pretty didactic but still interesting in places.

[paul secor]

Just finished rereading A Confederacy of Dunces. Read it shortly after it was published thirty three years ago. A better read and much funnier than I remembered.

[jeffcrom]

Just finished rereading A Confederacy of Dunces. Read it shortly after it was published thirty three years ago. A better read and much funnier than I remembered.

As you know from elsewhere on the web, one of my favorite novels.

[paul secor]

Just finished rereading A Confederacy of Dunces. Read it shortly after it was published thirty three years ago. A better read and much funnier than I remembered.

As you know from elsewhere on the web, one of my favorite novels.

Your review led me to reread the novel.

[BillF]

[ejp626]

Just finished rereading A Confederacy of Dunces. Read it shortly after it was published thirty three years ago. A better read and much funnier than I remembered.

As you know from elsewhere on the web, one of my favorite novels.

Your review led me to reread the novel.

I actually saw a staged version of this, in Atlanta of all places. It is definitely an interesting novel (I've read it twice) but it's one where I deeply dislike the main character but find the book quite compelling anyway. (I suspect this unlikeable quality of Ignatius is why it was so hard to find a publisher in the first place.)

I may have mentioned that there is a very similar book by a Canadian author -- Guy Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age. It isn't as epic as Confederacy, but the main character is an overweight, failed academic who gets up to some strange misadventures. I assume both authors were drawing heavily on Shakespeare's Falstaff.