Now reading...

[jazzbo]

[John Litweiler]

Recently I read 2 "literary detective stories" (a hateful term) by Michael Collins that really capture the bleakness of modern, small midwestern cities after all the industry moved out. "Lost Souls" and "The Keepers of Truth" are the titles and dammit, these people are people I used to know or else the sons and daughters of the working people I grew up with. Along with the sense of emptiness I get now in Indiana. Never mind the plots, which are sort of pulpish. The sense of people and place are what make these interesting.

Collins is not an American, he's an Irishman who went to school at Notre Dame. "The Keepers of Truth" seems to take place in a city much like Elkhart, my mother's city, but Elkhart long after Conn and Selmer and Buescher and the rest of the musical instrument industry, and other industry, vanished. The protagonist works for a newspaper, the "Truth," which seems like the trash that the Elkhart Truth (once a decent daily) has turned into in this post-Gannett-etc. era.

Collins apparently wins lit'ry prizes in the UK but I wonder if anyone outside the midwestern US reads him.

[paul secor]

Recently I read 2 "literary detective stories" (a hateful term) by Michael Collins that really capture the bleakness of modern, small midwestern cities after all the industry moved out. "Lost Souls" and "The Keepers of Truth" are the titles and dammit, these people are people I used to know or else the sons and daughters of the working people I grew up with. Along with the sense of emptiness I get now in Indiana. Never mind the plots, which are sort of pulpish. The sense of people and place are what make these interesting.

Collins is not an American, he's an Irishman who went to school at Notre Dame. "The Keepers of Truth" seems to take place in a city much like Elkhart, my mother's city, but Elkhart long after Conn and Selmer and Buescher and the rest of the musical instrument industry, and other industry, vanished. The protagonist works for a newspaper, the "Truth," which seems like the trash that the Elkhart Truth (once a decent daily) has turned into in this post-Gannett-etc. era.

Collins apparently wins lit'ry prizes in the UK but I wonder if anyone outside the midwestern US reads him.

Amazingly, my local library has one of the two titles you mention. And three other titles by him are in the system. I'll have to check him out. Thanks.

[BillF]

Despite lots of youthful Steinbeck reading, I never read East of Eden till now, probably because of the length (650 pages in my edition). Spurred to do this by rewatching the movie, which in fact only deals with the events of the last third of the book.

[erwbol]

[jazzbo]

Reading a piece that an acquaintance had published within.

[Matthew]

Owen Johnson: The Lawrenceville Stories.

[paul secor]

Not much there (at least for me), even if it won the Man Booker Prize.

[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: