Many thanks to both of you. It’s now on my To Read List.
Clockwork And Candy, I like your nickname.
I’m in an early-'60s mode. I just finished V. by Pynchon and am now half-way through Catch-22 by Heller. Both are much better than they were when I last read them, about thirty years ago.
Next up is A Clockwork Orange, and then either The Sot-Weed Factoror Little Big Man.
I’ve just cracked Tim Dorsey’s Torpedo Juice ,and The Big Bamboo is waiting in the wings.
I’ve been on vacation, so I’ve been on a bit of a binge of light-reading for the past couple of weeks. I started with Blood Music which I found to be really disappointing. I usually like Greg Bear, but bleh. It might have been a good short story or novella, but it was too little material stretched too far.
I followed that up with The Bourne Identity. I really, really enjoyed it, and I view it as a completely separate work from the movie (which I also really liked as well). It is a bit dated, but it was just a fun book to read.
Next, I reread The Stand. I hadn’t read it since high school, and I was interested to see if I still liked it 13 years later, and I did. After reading Blood Music, it was nice to see the post-apocolyptic thing done up right.
Right now, I’m plugging through A Game of Thrones. I don’t do fantasy, but someone said that this was a very well-written book and I should give it a try. I’m reserving judgement because I’m only about 50 pages into it.
I’m reading Postwar by Tony Judt. It’s the story of Europe after WWII. Dense, but very well-written. Europe’s struggle against poverty, chaos, and the Soviet Union is incredible - it’s a miracle things have turned out as well as they have.
And I have to mention my appreciation for A Confederacy of Dunces. Fine novel. Almost as funny as Wodehouse at his best.
I’ve been reading FDR and His Enemies by Albert Fried and rereading Red Thunder by John Varley. I just started The Shadow of the Winter Palace by Edward Crankshaw yesterday. And I’ve been slowly reading When Presidents Lie by Eric Alterman at work during my lunch breaks.
Following up on a recommendation from a previous thread, I tore through New Grub Street by George Gissing a few weeks ago. It was fantastic, so now I’m reading Gissing’s Born in Exile, which so far is excellent as well. I’m usually not a fan of 19th century literature, but Gissing is incredibly readable.
I’ve also been on a Kazuo Ishiguro kick lately. I just finished An Artist of the Floating World. It wasn’t quite as good as Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, but it was better than The Unconsoled and on par with When We Were Orphans. I love Ishiguro.
I hope the person who told you that it’s well-written also told you that it’s the first in a series, currently set for six, but maybe seven books. Martin’s finished four of them to date.
I recently finished Frankenstein. It was very different than what I had expected, and altogether a rather depressing read. I did enjoy it very much, nonetheless.
I am now rereading the *Foundation *trilogy. I read it once before, probably 15 years ago. After Frankenstein, I needed something just a bit lighter.
Right now, it’s Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge : A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival. My dad read and liked it, and gave me his copy on Father’s Day. I’m about halfway through, and it’s a good read so far. Sadly, though, I can never look at the title without thinking of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge, even though I never read that book. I might have to, now.
Before this was Dean Koontz’s Velocity. I couldn’t finish it. 
Koontz has been my second-favorite author since I read a dormmate’s copy of Cold Fire when I was in college, but in recent years I’ve been less and less impressed. It’s extraordinarily rare for me to not finish a book, and this is the first time I’ve ever not finished one of his. I’ll still check out The Husband, and I’m enjoying the Frankenstein series he’s co-writing, but one more book like Velocity and I won’t be able to call him a favorite any more. I’m kind of sad about it. I was just telling my best friend the other day that I need to re-read some good classic Koontz, like Cold Fire and Watchers.
Cafe Society
I’m re-reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, which I last read more than twenty years ago. The psychology of the character’s actions is now more meaningful to me.
After that, The Analects of Confucius, which I am told has been read by every literate person in China for the last two thousand years. About time this Westerner got around to it.
If you like the old pulp fiction, try “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril”. Paul Malmont created an adventure set during those days with the creators of “Doc Savage” and “The Shadow” getting with L. Ron Hubbard and investigating mysterious goings-on involving H.P. Lovecraft. (My Amazon review there will explain further if you’re interested).
Great fun.
I just finished with “Rumspringa,” a nonfiction look at the Amish, particularly the period when 16-year-olds are allowed to taste forbidden fruits of cars, alcohol, sex and colorful clothing. Highly recommended.
I’m now getting into “Hollywood Jock: 365 Days, Four Screenplays, Three TV Pitches, Two Kids, and One Wife Who’s Ready to Pull the Plug” by Rob Ryder. The writer wrote a column of the same name for ESPN.com, and he describes his year of trying to revive his screenwriting career. Just into first two chapters, so no opinion on this yet.
After that, I’ve got M.J. Rose’s “The Venus Fix” and “Anonymous Lawyer” lined up.
Isn’t it wonderful being a book reviewer?
Just finished Lost and Found (the same author who wrote Dogs of Babel which I really liked). It was great, it was about people playing an Amazing Race like game. Ending petered out a little, but I really enjoyed it!
I just started re-reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s account of her travels throughout Yugoslavia in 1937. Probably the longest travel book you’ll ever read at over 1000 pages of small type, but highly rewarding. It gives a great perspective on the fragmentation and violence of Yugoslavia in the post-Tito years.
Well, I’m a loser. I’m rereading for the nth time the Harry Potter books (while in the bath but no one has sung to me yet), while sipping at Gould’s Dinosaur In a Haystack and the Varley book “Thirty Years of Short Fiction”.
Varley and Gould being my two favorite writers, in two entirely different genres.
Confederacy of Dunces is my favorite novel. (I think one of the reasons I have enmity for Flannery O’Connor, whose writing I admire, is blaming her in part on Toole’s death, though omission rather than commission.)
Speaking of Confederacy, I just finished Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killers by James L. Swanson, a quick but very good read about… well, what the title says. Its emphasis is on a window that most of the Lincoln conspiracy books don’t dwell on which is pretty much the day by day hour by hour hiding and fleeing of Booth & Herrold, Paine, Atzerodt, a true confederacy of dunces and drama queens. The book isn’t a huge contribution to knowledge on the issue- it’s pretty much all commercially driven compilation of research- but it’s written very well and reads like a novel, particularly the scenes of Booth and Herold’s hiding in the Pine Thicket.
Main complaint: from what I do know of the subject matter I was disappointed at some of the things Swanson left out. For example, he mentions that Boston Corbett (the man who shot Booth) was a eunuch, having castrated himself as punishment for fornication with prostitutes before the War, and this I knew, but he never mentions in his lengthy mentions of Corbett that the man had been a prisoner at Andersonville just months before he killed Booth, a fact I think would be just as relevant to his mental state and hatred of southerners. He does a great job of dispelling the myth that Dr. Mudd was a kindly country physician played by Dennis Weaver who was falsely imprisoned for helping an injured man as his oath required (in fact Dr. Mudd knew exactly who Booth was and had volunteered his farm as a place to hide Lincoln if Booth kidnapped him- I didn’t realize just how much he derailed the manhunt until this book, but even though he wasn’t part of the assassination conspiracy the book reveals that he deserved to go to prison for obstruction. However, Swanson makes comments such as “Mudd was finally freed from the black prison guards he hated so much” without giving more detail on his imprisonment or the guards, yet a piece of bloody and interesting and horrible trivia- that Mudd literally beat to death one of his slaves during the war- he omits. (I would really like to have seen Mary Surratt’s character beefed up as well, largely because she’s the one I’ve never made up my mind on other than I don’t think she deserved to be forced to walk past her own grave/coffin and hanged; I know that she had a horribly abusive marriage to a drunk who beat her and may have prostituted her to guests at their tavern but when even his mother begged her to divorce the man and come live with her she stuck it out due to her Catholic faith, though some of the more gossipy historians say she had an affair with Booth (no real evidence). Swanson gives her only sparce coverage, just as he mentions how horrible it was to Secretary Seward when his daughter Fanny died unexpectedly at 21 but doesn’t mention why (related to her childhood typhoid), doesn’t give the Booth family NEAR the mention they deserve, etc…
But at the same point it reads like a novel.
Sorry, that was much longer than I meant it to be. I also recently finished Thunder of Angels, a thin mostly oral history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was good such as it was and captures the feel of Montgomery really well, but if you don’t know much about the history of the era you’ll need a textbook to give you some basics that this book skips over. It also tends to make too heroic a figures of some “average joes” both white and black that in my opinion minimizes rather than maximizes them- some of these people had serious serious flaws but the fact they were heroes anyway makes them more interesting.
Next up is a gnostic gospel commentary. Can anybody recommend any good recent historical fiction?
I am currently rereading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and greatly enjoying rediscovering Irving’s rich characterizations and dialogue.
FWIW, I first read “Blood Music” as a novella in (Asimov’s?) one of the magazines back in the Dark Ages. It was pretty much the novel up to the “melting in the bathtub” scene. The other (two-thirds?) of the novel, I think, tries too hard to be deep and philosophical.
I just finished The Great Starvation Experiment : the heroic men who starved so that millions could live by Todd Tucker. It’s about an experiment done by Dr. Ancel Keys during World War II. It was a pretty quick read, and decent, although I wish there had been more about the experiment itself and less about the personal stories of the men.
I am currently nibbling at The Boilerplate Rhino : nature in the eye of the beholder by David Quammen. Some of the essays are interesting, some…meh.
I also just started on Alice in the Know, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. It’s a kid’s book, I know, but I see no reason to quit reading kid’s books just because I’m old. This one is the twenty-first of the Alice series! The Alice books start when Alice is in sixth grade, IIRC, and are appropriate for that age group. In the current one, she is sixteen. I’m not sure if I would have been caught reading an Alice book when I was sixteen myself, but the books are addressing increasingly complex issues, albeit in a simple fashion.