Now reading...

[erwbol]

[ejp626]

Should have tried working on the plane this weekend, but just too cramped, so I gave up and read the books I brought instead. I wrapped up Edward Jones' Lost in the City, comprised of short stories set in Washington D.C. After reading several of them, it struck me that the tone was quite similar to Raymond Carver, though the stories were not nearly as tight. Carver often wrote about working class whites, and Jones is writing about Blacks further down the class spectrum, though there are a handful of children who "escape" and live among the ghosts, i.e. in white neighborhoods in D.C. The stories are accomplished, but boy were they depressing. I'm not sure there is a single one with an uplifting ending.

I also read Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version. This was recently made into a movie, though so much of it covers the same territory as Sideways and Paul Giamatti is in it as well, that it seems really redundant. Anyway, it has some amusing moments, but I did feel somewhat manipulated into siding with a guy who was an absolute boor and drunkard, and whom I would avoid in my real life.

Back to my other reading, I am about halfway through Madame Bovary. It certainly has its moments, but I wouldn't call it a page-turner or anything like that.

[BillF]

[A Lark Ascending]

Must read that again. I loved it when I first read it.

[jazzbo]

Henry Miller "Complete Book of Friends." This British edition sure could have used a better editor, more typos than I've seen in ages in one book.

[medjuck]

Alice Munro's "Dear Life". Probably the last book by the best writer in the English language, and one of her best. (How's that for hyperbole?)

[BillF]

Agree with you about Munro. Very talented writer.

[ejp626]

Completed Madame Bovary. What a downer. Not that I expected things to turn out well for her (that's pretty much a given), but her husband really was such a simpleton. So many people in the novel make such bad choices, though I suppose it really is the Bovarys that end up the worst by the end. Still, I kind of felt Flaubert really piled it on in the last few pages. I guess his point is that there are some people you can't save from themselves, and this includes M. Bovary.

I have some shorter pieces to read, including Mahfouz's Karnak Cafe, and then will try to wrap up Midnight's Children.

[Shawn]

"I, Robot" - Isaac Asimov

[A Lark Ascending]

Finally finished the Kennan bio.

But it made me realise how much US history I've forgotten. I did two major courses from colonial times up to the 60s back in the 1970s at uni; since then I've run into key moments in my teaching, especially foreign policy after 1945 and civil rights, but have huge gaps elsewhere. So I've started this:

[jlhoots]

Ariel Winter: The Twenty-Year Death

[alankin]

David Simon - Homicide

[medjuck]

I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. A good and well written biography but may be more than you want to know about Leonard Cohen. Gets most of the details right but not very good on Canadian geography. (Where have all the editors gone.)

Edited January 22, 2013 by medjuck

[BillF]

[jazzbo]

[ejp626]

How is this? It seems most of the reviews are positive, but always nice to have another opinion.

I am on the home stretch of Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It definitely has its moments, but it feels over-written to me now (on rereading), much too aware of being a "literary" novel, largely in the tradition of John Barth (whom I no longer enjoy either).

Looking forward to rereading Greene's Travels with My Aunt, which I thought was great when younger. Hope that isn't another book that doesn't satisfy as much now that I am somewhat grizzled...

[jlhoots]

Completed Madame Bovary. What a downer. Not that I expected things to turn out well for her (that's pretty much a given), but her husband really was such a simpleton. So many people in the novel make such bad choices, though I suppose it really is the Bovarys that end up the worst by the end. Still, I kind of felt Flaubert really piled it on in the last few pages. I guess his point is that there are some people you can't save from themselves, and this includes M. Bovary.

Read it for our Book Club. I didn't like it either.

[BillF]

How is this? It seems most of the reviews are positive, but always nice to have another opinion.

Very readable. Got through its almost six hundred pages in just five days, which is unusual for me. Fictionalised, slightly larger than life, slightly satirised, but essentially accurate and telling picture of present-day London and its inhabitants.

[sidewinder]

essentially accurate and telling picture of present-day London and its inhabitants.

'Bonfire of the Vanities' without the morals? Sounds just up my street..

Edited January 29, 2013 by sidewinder

[BillF]

essentially accurate and telling picture of present-day London and its inhabitants.

'Bonfire of the Vanities' without the morals? Sounds just up my street..

You're on the ball, Sidewinder! I told my wife it was the English equivalent of Tom Wolfe, Wolfe being like bourbon and Lanchester like tea.

[erwbol]

[jlhoots]

Patrick deWitt: The Sisters Brothers

[BillF]

Another excellent one by John Lanchester - sharply observed, outrageousy funny, good on male sexual fantasies, too.

[niels]

Orhan Pamuk - The Silent House. One of the last books I didn't read from him yet.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I’ve loved swords and sorcery fantasies since I first read Tolkien in the early 60s. Since the beginning of December, I’ve been reading Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of time’ series; a huge swords and sorcery series of 14 books – big books, with about 30 main characters, about a hundred (or maybe more) significant characters and a cast of probably thousands of bit parts. I’ve easily read the early books half a dozen times; the later ones not so often. I stopped buying them in about 2004, thinking that Jordan had made the thing too complex for its own good, that it would be impossible for him to pull the whole thing together coherently. But then I heard he’d died, leaving the final books outlined with lots of parts drafted, and that his wife had organised completion by one Brandon Sanderson. So I decided I’d save the last four up until the final volume was published (it came out on 8 January over here) and read the whole thing.

Well, Jordan and Sanderson did manage to pull the whole thing together – a terrific feat of concentration and focus, which made the last three books the most unputdownable I can ever remember reading. All of what seemed to be artificial complexity, created because Jordan had to produce another book for the publishers, turned out to be not just relevant but necessary. All but about two of the threads were tied up in the end.

I suspect this was mostly Sanderson’s work; for Jordan to have even outlined how he proposed to tie all this up, it would probably have been necessary for him to have written virtually the whole thing, which he definitely didn’t. Sanderson’s an interesting writer – I haven’t ready anything else he’s done, but whereas Jordan seemed to lose his sense of humour as he wrote (his Conan books are full of humour), Sanderson’s sense of humour is very nice. Many of the later exchanges between Mat and Talmanes are drily hilarious.

If you read this, make sure you haven’t anything better to do for a couple of months.

Now going on to a bit of SF; Peter F Hamilton’s Confederation and Void series.

MG