gallows fodder: Uke is perfectly fine. It’s what I usually go by myself.
Before I even got to the second half of your post, I was thinking “This guy wants a modern Japanese novel!” Have you read Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes? Sufferin’ humanity! Repression! Nightmare! It made a good movie, too. (If you have, his The Face of Another is good, too.)
drop: WAS Eternity a bestseller? Yeah, it probably was, after the flick won all those Oscars. But I’ll betcha fewer than 5% made it through all one thousand-plus pages.
Hah! I read the Anne Rice softporn back when it was published under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure! I’m sure they never sold in Rice numbers until her publisher convinced her to re-issue under her own name! Neener, neener!
PunditLisa: You need a copy of the early (1929) Jean Rhys novel Quartet. Adulterous group sex, complex psychology, AND murder!
Plus your kids will see it and think “Oooooh, momma’s reading a novel by the acclaimed author of The Wide Sargasso Sea! What a hip chick!” little dreaming you’re digging on Marya’s hot sticky relationship with that odd Englishman and his wife.
It doesn’t matter the circumstances under which they became bestsellers. Bestsellers they were.
(Christ! I write more like James Fenimore Cooper every day. I probably SHOULD read something more recent.)
To Kill a Mockingbird was a bestseller.
Are you saying that three million Chicagoans can be wrong?
(insert winking smiley here)
TKaMB didn’t have gratuitous sex scenes interupting the violence. No, that sanctamonious SOB Atticus does. Then Bo Radley does. Nothing but interrupted violence in that book, but no smut. If I want smut I take it neat, thank you. Anthracite writes some mean porn, for instance.
Thanks, Uke! I’ll get right on it.
Humble Servant, I actually loved Persuasion – the book and the movie. Anne’s and Frederick’s torment was palpable. Delicious!
Me next me next
read:
Confederacy of Dunces
David Sedaris
just finished all of Christopher Moore(my new favorite author)
Witness from the Grave by Clyde Snow MD
**Ann Rule **
Kyle Mills
**Cecil Adams **
The Reader
almost every John Irving I belive A Prayer for Owen Meany is his best work
Caleb Carr
The Onion’s Finest News Reporting
Gone With The Wind
Several books on the making of the film Gone With The Wind
and the search for Scarlett
So…what do ya think?
Eve I’ve gotta go get Vamp now. I read a biography of her years ago and it was damn interesting. I can’t wait to read yours!!
ps
is it REALLY true about the UCLA football team?
I know, I know…read the book.
Gee, could that have been an imposter at the party Saturday? Based on your reading, I could swear you were my wife. Just throw in some books on invertebrates, fossil and otherwise, and you’ve got her reading list covered.
OH SH%T! Dammit dammit dammit…I told you it was a while ago…I’m still going to go get Vamp
Oh, and here’s a book for you, Miss Creant…
The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard (first translated into English in 1997, although the author lived 1931-1989).
One hundred and four pages, one hundred and four stories. Well, not so much “stories” as a series of parable-like anecdotes, subtle and acerbic, portraying an ordinary world teetering on the edge of absurdity.
The subtitle reads “18 suicides…6 painful deaths…26 murders…1 love affair…13 instances of lunacy…20 surprises…4 disappearances…2 instances of libel…3 character attacks…5 early deaths…1 memory lapse…4 cover-ups.”
(Yes, I know that’s one short, but that IS the subtitle.)