DHRBC07

Anthony Bourdain- Kitchen Confidential

SV2

What is the What by Dave Eggers. This is a biographical novel about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys" of Sudan. The style of this is completely different from Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

garland

Wow, padad. I see what you mean. Maybe I'll just save that one for retirement! I gotta Pynchon novel I've been trying to get to; it'll be light reading compared to that one. thanks for the feedback.

SV2--I thought What is the What was excellent!

JHS

1. My wife bought the first few Gossip Girl books for me, after I commented favorably on Janet Malcolm's essay about them in The New Yorker. I spent an hour with one of them, and my curiosity was satisfied. But after a conversation with one of our 11th-grader virtual nieces, my wife started reading them, and she's addicted. I think she's on book six at this point. Sometimes she's horrified, but she's clearly enjoying them.

2. My reading event of the year has been Roberto Bolano's posthumous magnum opus 2666. Over the course of the 1990s, Bolano slowly emerged as the leading Spanish-language author in the world who was not in the twilight of his career. But, tragically, it turned out he was; he got sick and died in 2002 at age 52. At that point, only one of his books had been translated into English. By November, when 2666 comes out, all of them will have been translated. It is a loooooong book (over 1200 pages; he thought about publishing it as five separate books), but certainly his best work, and very readable.

Jolynne Smyth

epistrophy--we also have a "Jane Austen" book club. So far we've read Northanger Abbey, Masfield Park and Emma. Emma was head & shoulders above anything else, so far!

I recently enjoyed: "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door," by Lynn Truss (author of "Eats Shoots and Leaves").

dbwes

JHS -- you've "outed" your wife's guilty pleasure! LOL. My daughters and I LOVE watching the Gossip Girl TV series . . .

epistrophy

Padad: Sounds like you're in great reading shape to start Proust (if you haven't already)!

I'm now in the midst of the third volume and am loving it (why should it seem so surprising that a "classic" should yield so much pleasure?), but I'm taking it at a pace that might be characterized as, uh, leisurely. About 10 pages per day seems like about the right amount for me, as his writing is so dense (in a good sense) with images and ideas. And even that gets hard to do when work projects become too demanding and time becomes scarcer.

But no matter how long you've been away, Proust welcomes you back with open arms. And one of the advantages of reading fiction where "plot" is comparatively unimportant is that you don't have to worry much about what you may have already forgotten.

***************************

Well, I expect that you'll continue to enjoy your travels through Austen's world from here on out. Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park are both quite a bit different (in different ways) than Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion.

Tiredofsnow

overseas, Crossing to Safety by Stegner is one of my favorite books. I have read Angle of Repose and am anxious to read more of his works. I don't know why Crossing to Safety affected me so deeply; I first read it 10 or 15 years ago and about a year ago I was driven to pick it up again.

padad

epistrophy, I have the good fortune of having read In Search of Lost Time twice. Actually both under the first translation title of Remembrance of Things Past, which I like because Anita Bookner alluded to it so marveloulsy in one of her novel (Incidences at the Rue Langiere) and provides one of the best examples of why it matters to pay attention to the first sentence in a novel. By the way, I love long novels, if only because it is the ultimate escape into stange worlds. Some of my favorites in this category include CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence of 11 novels, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time in 12 novels, and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series of 20 novels. In between, I always reread a Jane Austen.

I want you to know that I appreciate your posts in the LTS thread.

overseas

Wallace Stegner's writing is magical: how he is able to capture the natural world and incorporate it into his imagery, things that we all know and react to. I missed that in my hurry to get the story last time around. I read Angle of Repose first. That is a wonderful story and different than Crossing to Safety. I may try The Big Rock Candy Mountain later this summer. I think Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig (not all his novels) are my favorite western writers.

mafool

I, too, love Stegner.

About Angle of Repose: I admit, that in my haste to get my hands on another book by the author I had then just recently discovered, I didn't read the title very carefully. As I read an enjoyed the book, in the back of my mind I was wondering about that reposing angel and what the meaning of the title might be.

epistrophy

I've read a few of Anita Brookner's novels, but not this one (yet). I'll have to get to it.

For those who aren't aware of Brookner, when it comes to composing sentences and paragraphs that are not only graceful and elegant but also psychologically acute and complex, she's just about as good as it gets these days, I think.

Don't expect much to happen in her novels, in the sense of external action. Little does (as is usually the case in real life). The "action" mostly takes place inside, in the characters' minds and hearts.

Brookner's had an unusually interesting life, too. She was an art history professor at Cambridge and didn't publish her first novel until she was in her 50s. Her best known novel, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize in the early '80s.

Anita Brookner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ilsa belter

The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor. Just a cozy, pleasant read.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. I had not heard of it--just happened to be surfing Amazon connections and came across it.

epistrophy

quick follow-up to #350 (re the first volume of Hilary Spurling's 2-volume biography of Henri Matisse)

Having now finished this book (I was taking my time with it), I highly recommend it. It takes a lot of historical imagination (not to mention research) to conjure a world in which Matisse's paintings - particularly, his use of color - would have had folks up in arms, and this book does a fine job of bringing that world (late 1800s, early 1900s France), along with Matisse himself, his wife and children, his fellow painters, and his dealers and collectors, to life. Fascinating.

On to the second volume.

overseas

Thanks for all the tips! I am basically apartment bound for the next month and reading up a storm. I am now finishing Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett that I missed when it came out in 1989, I believe. Then I will go back to the John Adam's biography by David McCullough. Then I better head over to the Young Adult section and gobble up many of them. First in line is Martha Southgate's The Fall of Rome about a lone African American Latin teacher at an elite all boys boarding school in Connecticut. A friend grabbed it from my pile for the summer and read it and said it was fantastic. I am so sorry that this form of literature so pertinent to our students about their issues in life gets overlooked and rejected many times for the "masters." Anyway, I read 'em and love 'em as much as the masters. It just depends on my frame of mind.