Ooh, what a great thread. Ike, please suggest a book for me! Here are some I’ve enjoyed recently: Wally Lamb’s I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE, Barbara Kingsolver’s THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, and Jill Paton-Walsh’s KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS. Do you only recommend classic literature?
Leslie Irish Evans
Leslie Irish Evans’ Home Page
Just today, I was wandering the aisles of my local Half-Price Books in utter confusion. What to read, what to read?
Book Referral is a sorely needed public service. Ike, there’s money in this.
I want an Action!/Adventure! novel. Nice and long, with lots of violence, explosions, exotic locales, and hopefully weird curses and eerie cults. Improbable events and science (of some sort).
I’m thinking Indiana Jones type stuff.
I liked The Relic and most of Michael Crichton’s work.
I don’t want a cop drama or Tom Clancy, or anything that could be mistaken for happening in real life.
I do want a suspend rational thought and have fun novel.
Am I too demanding? <g>
Thanks!
AuntiePam: Vintage has a nice omnibus out called Three Classic African-American Novels…it includes William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853); Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892); and Charles W. Chestnut’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). All three deal with slavery and/or Reconstruction. How does that sound?
I also got a big kick recently out of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), a satiric novel about the discovery of a medical process that turns black people into white people. Watch what happens when the U.S. gradually sees its racial underclass disappear!
Shirley: Short and extremely funny pieces abound in Robert Benchley’s collections. Dover has kept Benchley Lost and Found in print, but any good used bookstore should have multiple copies of the collections published in his lifetime, such as My Ten Years in a Quandary and No Poems.
Stephen Leacock is trickier to find, and from an even EARLIER era (turn of the century up to the 1920s or so), but well worth seeking out. Literary Lapses and Nonsense Novels are two of his many titles. (He was Groucho Marx’s favorite humorist)
Uke
Uke – that sounds great. I’m off to Amazon, or B&N, or elgrande, or somewhere.
Tracy will be pleased.
(She thinks I just hang out here to meet guys.)
Extra points Uke. I shall have to locate a copy and read it over the next weekend.
Ahhh Titus Groan The trevails of one seriously f*ked up family and its estates. 
(Thats another one I have to reread, its been like 18 years or so I think.)
>>Nomex underwear is optional for dragons. <<
—The dragon observes
Kat: Sorry, typo. Thomas “Death in Venice” Mann, I meant. Robert Musil is best known for the two-volume doorstop novel (and landmark of 20th century literary modernism) The Man Without Qualities.
(Off to the Lewis & Clark County Library, which will almost certainly have neither, but will have multiple copies of the latest Danielle Steele. But I live in hope.)Jodi
Fiat Justitia
Not at all. Have you ever read Richard Russo? His Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie with Paul Newman a few years ago, but I enjoyed Mohawk more.
And Harry Crews. If you can get your hands on a copy of The Knockout Artist, you won’t be disappointed. Ah, Oyster Boy…
Uke
[Edited by UncleBeer on 08-29-2001 at 11:51 AM]
Kiva: How about Riptide by Child & Preston? It’s a fictional takeoff on the infamus Money Pit in Nova Scotia, of which Unca Cece wrote so profoundly…
This’ll whet your appetite:
www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_441.html
Harry Crews!!?? Ike, The stories I could tell ya!!!
The ride is short and the thrills are cheap- Men and rollercoasters. - - -Courtesy of Wally, that Signifying Guy.
Ike:
Ike, Ike. Not all of us live in the NYC area. I’ve been scouring the used bookshops of the Atlanta area for Benchley for years, and so far have only copped Benchley Lost and Found and a collection U. of Chicago Press put out some time ago called The Benchley Roundup. Perhaps my timing’s just lousy; it’s possible that there’re thousands of copies of various Benchley books circulating through the bookstores of this area and I’m always looking just when they’ve sold their last copies to a retired chicken sexer from Winder. Either that, or Benchley’s a lot harder to come by out here in the hinterlands. I have a lot more luck finding Perelman, for some reason.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
[Edited by UncleBeer on 08-29-2001 at 11:56 AM]
Lovely! They’re both available through my local library. I thought “Nobody’s Fool” was a terrific film, and that Paul Newman was robbed of the Oscar that year. If MOWHAWK was better, I’ll take your word for it and read that first.
Much obliged, Ike. And I love your screen name. I’m a huge Jimmy Stewart fan.
Leslie Irish Evans
Leslie Irish Evans’ Home Page
[Edited by UncleBeer on 08-29-2001 at 11:59 AM]
rack:
Wings Books just put out an el cheapo edition called The Best of Robert Benchley…72 pieces collected in it.
My problem with it is that is has Peter Arno illustations, Adam Barth illustrations, Herbert Roese illustrations…and NO Gluyas Williams illustrations. Some sort of copyright problem, I suppose. But for my money, Benchley just ain’t Benchley without Gluyas Williams illustrations.
I love the way he draws Bob like a big ol’ otter.
Uke
OK, Ike. Now that Patrick O’Brian has passed on, and I’ve finished off all of Dorothy Dunnett and pretty much all the Flashman series, who do I turn to for really well researched, literate historical fiction?
Fin: Edith Parteger. She wrote beaucoup historical fiction under her own name, and, as Ellis Peters, gave us the “Brother Cadfael” series of twenty historical mysteries featuring the monk/detective. Nice stuff.
If you like historical crime fiction, try also Peter Lovesey’s Sgt. Cribb/Constable Thackeray books (Wobble to Death was the first) and William Marshall’s two novels of 1880s Manhattan, The New York Detective and Faces in the Crowd. Marshall did it BEFORE Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, and, for my money, he did it better.
Uke
You’re right, “Vile Bodies” is no “Decline and Fall”—“Vile Bodies” could kick “Decline and Fall’s” butt around the block till it ran home crying to “Charles Ryder’s School Days.”
Hmmm . . . I knew you HAD a copy of one of my books, but I assumed you’d never read it, as I never heard one word about it, like, “gee, what a piece of crap!” or “You found a publisher for THAT?” Guess you were just being polite.
By the way, anyone who likes hard-boiled detective fiction along the lines of James M. Cain, I highly recommend you search out some early 1930s books by Tiffany Thayer. He’s so hard-boiled ya could roll 'im on the White House lawn at Easter.
Oh, by the way, anyone who’s looking for the ULTIMATE in well-researched, erudite yet thoroughly entertaining biography and film history, should look no further than THE BOOK OF EVE’S THAT I READ AND ENJOYED IMMENSELY,
Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara.
Watch this space for a review of EVE’S NEW BOOK, WHICH I SEE IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM AS WELL AS AT YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOP, ASK FOR IT BY NAME AND ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES,
Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway.
I am very much looking forward to purchasing and reading the above title from cover to cover, which I will slip out of the office and do just as soon as somebody admits that Decline and Fall is TWICE the book that Vile Bodies is.
Uke
Gee—there’s nothing quite so heartwarming as a spontaneous, totally candid and constructive review!
In fact, my heart just got SO warm I’d better go pack it in dry ice. I hope you all will excuse me for a few minutes.
Okay, which Tiffany Thayer should one look for? I only know him as the guy who wrote the Introduction to the collected Works of Charles Fort.
Hey, if you’re looking for some serious hard-boiled, try to find a copy of Jonathan Latimer’sSolomon’s Vineyard (1941).
This one has EVERYTHING: a private eye; a shoot-out at a roadhouse; necrophilia; a shoot-out in a steam bath; mobsters; a crooked police chief; a bizarre religious cult; a knife fight in a whorehouse; kidnapping; a mystery woman with a taste for kinky sex; human sacrifice; crypt-robbing.
First sentence: “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be good in bed.”