What are you reading these days? How's that working out for you?
... that two people were instrumental in my joining Twitter. First, Isha . She sent out an article on it when the application was still brand new. (And I remember thinking, "Screw that noise. Like I need more online commitments.) Second was Rebecca . She joined up just a short while ago, claiming she hadn't met a bandwidth she didn't like . (And then she disappeared entirely from the internets .) It looked nice and pretty over there on her sidebar, and then I got a little jealous. The rest: history. And for those unobservant among you ( Jorge ), the Twitter feed is right there on my sidebar, replacing the old Radio 3 player that I loved, but that I think scared the bejezus out of a lot of people. Also, everyone should join Twitter. I'm needing some diversions , people.
Comments
They are far too short.
I'm actually about to read The Classical Man by O-Sensei Richard Kim. It should be a good read.
I just finished reading Oryx and Crake (which was amazing), and Shibumi (which was not).
Both fairly quick reads. But then, when you're on vacation, you've got way more time to read.
Anyway, I would recommend reading it. It reminded me of why I used to want to be a doctor.
How do people have time to read with all this blogging? Inquiring minds want to know . . .
Just before vacation, I listened to "The Red Tent" and I loved it. (yes, the car ride to work is annoying so I occasionally listen to books on CD).
So I've moved to The Kite Runner. It's our next book club book. And I've got a stack of them I'm taking home to read over the holidays.
Sad story, but so far it's a good book.
Also The Origin Of Species; clean and careful.
Also kinda reading the current Walrus magazine, which everyone should be reading every month because it kicks ass, even if other reading distracts me.
Have started Old Goriot, having read somewhere that it was a safe place to drive a wedge into the great mouldering block that is Balzac. It is acute, but not beautiful.
I, personally, LOVE men, and would be very sad if they weren't in my life, which makes them very necessary to me, indeed.
The book, however, is interesting. I don't agree with everything that Ms. Dowd says - in fact, I think she basically just took a bunch of quotes and put them together and called it a book. There is very little actual writing from her.
There are a few interesting viewpoints to it though. It's currently my 'bathroom book' (is that too much information?), so it's taking me a while to get through it.
Kyrie eleison
Christe eleison
Kyriie eleison
Woman, that shit is jive!
I'm reading 'Stasiland' by Anna Funder, about East Germany. My Dad sent it to me with 'Jarhead', which I still haven't read but so far this one is really good.
Also, and this illustrates a lot about what it means to be 30 and unemployed and living with one's mother, I picked up a Dr. Phil book at the grocery store one day.
Apparently the number one thing people are scared of is rejection.
We'll see.
Fortunately, I finally reached the top of the waiting list for Rebel Sell from the VPL (when I got on the waiting list, I was 27th) at around the same time, so I'm reading that now. Some interesting stuff in it, and some of it is just crap.
BRNQ, I absolutely FORBID you to read that Dr. Phil book. Yeesh!
I read 'The Rebel Sell' and totally agree with you: some interesting stuff buried under repetitiveness, rhetoric over analysis and petty sniping at Naomi Klein et al.
Went to the library yesterday and got 'Clara Callan' and 'Ghost Wars' about the CIA and Afghanistan. Also 'Casablanca' on video which I'm already watching for the second time in two days. If 'Clueless' was based on 'Emma' why can't someone make an intelligent movie based on Casablanca?
Finally, this week's New Yorker has two great articles: Malcolm Gladwell on racial profiling and Katherine Boo (my fave) on poor bayou mothers and the nurses who struggle to help them.
Currenly stalled on: Madame Bovary. Just get on with it and fuck somebody already.
Finished "Clara Callan" which was worth all the hype it generated a few years ago.
"Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson didn't live up to her earlier "Scenes at the Museum" even though it's had a lot more attention, at least in N. America.
Barabara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" where she takes on a bunch of low-paying jobs to experience working poverty is the kind of reporting that normally drives me crazy but because she cops to all her advantages at the get-go, I relaxed enough to be appalled by the working and living conditions her co-workers faced every day and not just as an experiment.
Just bought "Snow" but it feels pretty dense. Am giving up buying new books for lent: not a good addiction for the unemployed.
Tristram Shandy. I was annoyed to find someone was making a film of the book the day after I started on it; Great, I thought, now I'm a Johnny-come-lately. And I thought, That will be a hard film to make. And then I saw the trailer, and they aren't really making a film of the book at all, but are instead making a film about making a film about the book, like Day for Night. Which is a fine idea. This book is also not what I expected. It is overflowing. Where I thought to find Fielding or Defoe, instead I find something closer to Cervantes or Joyce, with more than a dash of Montaigne.
I'm also reading the graphic novel "Y - The Last Man"... a friend of mine gave me the first volume for Christmas and it was really good, so I've borrowed the second and third volumes to find out what happens next.
I read William Faulkner's Light In August. I keep looking for another As I Lay Dying, or The Unvanquished. Mixed results. I mean, I couldn't even finish Absalom, Absalom; I shudder in horror when I see it on the shelf, half its spine uncracked. This was somewhat on the good side of Faulkner, probably better for my taste than The Sound And The Fury, which is almost the prototypical Faulkner good yarn buried under several hundredweight of lovely, excessive, brain-curdling verbiage. Actually, I quite enjoyed A Light In August.
I am finishing a slim collection of connected stories called Marcovaldo, by Italo Calvino. Pretty. One imagines Calvino's face passing unlined into old age. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of him. The only other Calvino I've read is a (slim) collection of (connected) vignettes called Dead Cities, and I liked it better than this, because it went further, beyond the merely childlike; there were flashes in it of the fey child.
I am reading Joe Stiglitz's The Roaring Nineties, and I am infuriated, because it is a good book, and an important book, from an important author, published by Norton, and it is just arse-full of errors. They put a drunk intern on a Nobel laureate's second book. I just can't believe it. So I'm marking it up, and when I finish I'll send a letter to Norton, being sure to enclose my resume; meanwhile, I'm not really giving the book the attention in deserves. All in all, he meanders a bit too much for my taste; his style is much looser -- and his tone more partisan -- than that of Paul Krugman.
I'm also reading Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis, which BRNQ sent me! Isn't she a sweetie?
(Still) reading Dionne Brand's 'What we all long for' which is also very good. Enough that I'm already overpromising it. Makes me wish I knew Toronto better.
Oh and I read Leah McLaren's 'Continuity Girl' because I have a long-standing grudge against Leah McLaren for stealing my life and then making such a shambles of it. Anyway, it was fine, neither as bad as I hoped or good as I feared.
Oh and I finished 'What we all Long For' which was luminous and sad but great.
Incidentally, the better the book, the less I have to say about it, at least initially and unless pressed or in conversation where I mostly just listen anyway. It's like I don't wanna ruin a crazy complex beautiful work of art with a raving but half-arsed review. Better to just recommend it. On the other hand, I love reading other people's reviews, half-arsed or not.
Speaking of which, was recommended Jasper Fforde and wanted to get into it, liked the idea but the gimmick wore thin around page 157.
Oh and recently I lost a battle in my ongoing war to not buy any more books (I love my suburban shiny library). Was stressed out and feeling sorry for myself so went to two great indy bookstores while driving through Ontario: The Bookshelf and Pages. Went a little crazy. (Bought CDs too: weak! weak!) So am now reading Mary Gaitskill's 'Veronica' which so far feels more like dreaming than reading. (Same author who wrote the story that the movie 'Secretary' is based on, though I just found that out last night.)
Also Joe Sacco's graphic novel 'Palestine' which I've wanted forever. Graphic novels are somehow so good at describing conflict.
And a bunch of other stuff: Howard Zinn and Mistry and Julia Alvarez and a book about radio and 'We need to Talk about Kevin' and a bunch more. Damn.
Just finished a collection of Updike stories from the sixties and early seventies called Museums and Women. Wonderful. He has a much larger range than I'd thought, having only read Couples (which made a deep impression at the time; but I don't know what happened to my copy, and can't revisit it. If you've seen Ang Lee's The Ice Storm you're already halfway there, as I recall.), and his language is a clean and frequently surprising delight.
Beth: comics. Reading Y: The Last Man myself. Good. Still picking up the next volume of Lone Wolf and Cub now and then, and the next, and the next. It's like the Goldberg Variations played on dismembered torsos. Recently read a nice collection of Barry Windsor-Smith's Young Gods. Beautiful colour work. Speaking of Barry Windsor-Smith, I have read issue two of the Machine Man miniseries about two hundred times since I was a kid, and I finally found all four issues in a bagged set. I'm pretty disappointed. But the art is great. And the covers are great. And the writing has its moments. Also, and best, Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu. A masterpiece. Really.
I also read the new Stephen King book, Cell, and the only thing more mysterious than why I read it in the first place is why I’m admitting it to anyone.
And I’m about two-thirds through Typing: A Life in Twenty-Six Keys, which is the autobiography Matt Cohen began shortly after being diagnosed with cancer and completed three weeks before he died. While the dishy stuff is good (dealing with Denis Lee, Jack McClelland), it’s when he talks about writing that I like it best. It’s coldly reassuring to know that someone can publish novel after novel and still keep thinking that their not cut out to be a writer, and that everything that came before the current novel is crap.