<p>Momwaitingfornew, have you read his latest book? Is it better - or at least more fun - than House of Leaves?</p>
<p>Berurah, I’m guessing if you didn’t finish it, it’s not worth my continuing. Maybe I should just save it for airplane reading - it might be better suited for long flights when there just isn’t anything else to do. I was hoping it would get more intriguing, but, format - just frustrating. I find that I start to read a footnote, get into it, and then go back to the core story, and then - it just doesn’t really make me very happy. Then I tried ignoring the footnotes, but, couldn’t. :(</p>
<p>I wanna read The Devil in the White City, since I saw Weenie’s post. Will probably go buy it tonight, since the library card thing hasn’t worked out.</p>
<p>latetoschool: Let me know how you like it. You won’t believe the amazing confluence of new inventions and fascinating people that occurred in 1893! Susan B. Anthony flirting with Buffalo Bill Cody?!</p>
<p>odyssey: I love Fannie Flagg! It’s Southern lit at its best. I just finished her new book, Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven. It was sweet.</p>
<p>Speaking of southern lit, has anybody ever read any of the Sweet Potato Queens? They are hilarious (at least I thought so - but I love funny stuff). If you’re looking for a really feel good book, start with the first one.</p>
<p>The best book Fannie Flagg has written so far is one of her oldest, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man. It is absolutely hilarious and appropriate for all ages. My daughter read it as a young teen and loved it as much as I did. I have reread it a few times and it is just as funny each time.</p>
<p>Late, I have his new books, but haven’t started it yet (story of my life). One narrator begins at one cover, with the print starting large and getting smaller. When you finish, you flip over the book and read the other story started at the other cover. Same things with the typeface.</p>
<p>I enjoyed “The Emperor’s Children” by Clare Messud. Interesting characters (mostly Brown grads) set in NYC, ending shortly after 9/11. </p>
<p>I saw Adriana Tragiani (sp?) featured in USA today this week – the series didn’t interest me much, but I thought the stand-alone “Rococo” might be fun. Anyone read her?</p>
<p>I love “Enemies: A Love Story!” and miss Singer so much.</p>
<p>My favorite read in the last year was Alice Munro’s Runaway, which is anchored by a trilogy of shorts stories about one character as a young woman, a mom of a college aged girl, and a woman aging but unreconciled with her own daughter…heart-stopping. The New Yorker published the entire trilogy together.
I think she deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature for her incredible writing about women’s lives and her ability to make Ordinary better than well fiction.</p>
<p>We lost a great Virginian from the post WWII era this week. I am really sad today about Wm Styron’s passing. He was supposed to come to a college close by a few years ago and had to cancel due to his poor health. He fought the good fight. Nice story about him and James Baldwin in the Wash Post today but then there are so many interesting stories about Styron.</p>
<p>“A Spot of Bother”–Mark Haddon, guy who wrote “The Mysterious INcident of the Dog in the Night”. Not quite as obviously good, but got better and better as I read it.</p>
<p>“The Brambles” Eliza Minot. My favorite of the Minot family novels so far (haven’t read them all). Really gets the little details of families in a beautiful, near-perfect way.</p>
<p>Add my to the “thought Charlotte Simmons was dumb” column.</p>
<p>Aww, cmon you guys, Charlotte was a reflection- the central characters were the basketball player (sports, jocks), frat boy (class, politics) and academia. She was a sacrificial lamb. Or maybe I missed the point after all. Anyway, agree about Devil In the White City. I’ve given that book out to friends almost as much as Garden of Good and Evil.</p>
<p>I’m enjoying reading your posts and have jotted down several of the books mentioned. My copy of Charlotte Simmons is now in the hands of DD, who has just started it at my insistence (after blowing through the latest “Gossip Girl” installment in one day). Although I too wanted to shake Charlotte several times, I think it’s a fairly realistic portrait of college life (or what could happen!) I regret to say I too have read the entire Outlander series, starting when DD was in kindergarten and loved Time Traveler’s Wife as well. I’m now finishing Smashed by Koren Zailckas, also very depressing but I think DD should also read it.
Our last trip to the bookstore produced The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (and there’s also a sequel), On Beauty by Zadie Smith and John Irving’s Until We Find Love and I’m wondering if anyone has read any of these?</p>
<p>Weenie and Odyssey: with a dog as big as a beardie, looking at the sky when he’s jumping could be dangerous. My standard poodles (smaller than a beardie) have knocked me flat when I’ve tried that. My answer has been to train a VERY solid sit, then step back and say SIT in my best kindergarten-teacher voice when they start to think about jumping. And then–ALWAYS have a treat handy for that sit.</p>
<p>For a while I had a sign outside the front door “please tell the dog FIRMLY to sit the second you walk in.” It helped.</p>
<p>Correction–didn’t just think that the character was dumb, thought the whole book was. Maybe I just prefer characters who are not reduced to cheezy, (and lazy) stereotypes. Plus, Wolfe obviously can’t stand women. There are no postive women students at Dupont. Actually, we don 't know that–we know that CS doesn’t like other women students–made fun of those farther down the social food chain than she was throughout the book.</p>
<p>Just finished “Memory Keeper’s Daughter” by Edwards and “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” by Lisa See for my Book Club. Future Book Club reads are
“Missing Mom” by Joyce Carol Oates and “Water for Elephants” by Gruen. “Glass Castle” was excellent but upsetting; I am amazed at the resiliency of 3 of the 4 children in the family.</p>
<p>Last month’s selection for our book club was “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Piccoult-everyone loved it and after finishing I read another one of hers, “The Pact”. The subject matters are very emotional, conceiving a child to save the life of another through tissue donation and teen suicide, but they are very well done and I highly recommend them both. </p>
<p>This month we are reading “One Thousand White Women” by Jim Fergus and next month, “The Book of Ruth” by Jane Hamilton. I am also currently enjoying “The Glass Castle” and have heard very good things about “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”.</p>
<p>Just curious: what do your book clubs look for when selecting books? I know every club is different, but I see many common selections among them.</p>
<p>Our book club each women chooses a book for her “month”. Then she hosts the group the month we discuss the book. We have read My Sister’s Keeper and just did Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Our last book was Mountains Beyond Mountains. I think the reason you see common selections is that the media hypes certain books and when books become popular among one book club or group those members tell their friends outside the group, etc. I personally just read The Other Boleyn Sister by Phillipa Gregory. My husband read it and even he liked it. It is historically accurate, fascinating. Not romance novel like at all.</p>
<p>If you want to be a bit retro, you might consider Helen Hooven Santmyer’s “…and Ladies of the Club,” first publisehd by the Ohio State University Press in 1982 when the author was 88 (she had been writing it for 50 years). It is a wonderful piece of American social history, not profound or deliberately philosophical but very interesting despite (or to unphilosphical history buffs like me, becase of) its lack of conventional literary pretension.</p>
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