Don Quixote by Cervantes
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Re-reading actually.
I’m with you on disliking Forever Peace; the few good ideas in the novel don’t support the ridiculous plot he saddles them with. I’m not as fond of “The Hemingway Hoax” since I found the ending to be a rather lackluster deus ex machina.
On the other hand Camouflage is right now about six down on my to read pile and I’m willing to give him a chance…
Just finished Sometimes a Great Notion now I’m on Based on the Movie by Billy Taylor.
When I’m done with that I’ll move on to The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. I read his book Know It All and really enjoyed it.
Then I’m thinking of moving onto Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.
I don’t often participate in these threads because I feel like I don’t read quickly enough. I do follow them and often get ideas from them, though.
Anyway, I just finished “The Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters. I think I’m going to have to read this one again. Very good, but I felt like it went too fast or something because of the structure. Has anyone else read this? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
I’m about halfway through “Giants in the Earth,” a reread.
Up next are “The Unexpected Mrs. Polifax,” and “The Manny.” I have a vacation coming up in a week-and-a-half and need some light fare.
Sundown Towns by James Loewen, the guy who wrote “Lies my Teavher Told Me” and “Lies Across America”. This is, I really do believe, an important book, probing a significant gap in the nation’s racial history and explaining The Way Things Turned Out. But I do have to admit that Loewen has a massianic streak that occasionally ugs me. In part it bugs me because critics might seize upon it to skewer his work, but sometimes it bothers me because it looks like shoddy work, or as if he’s letting his enthusiasm sway his thinking and writing.
On the topic of “Sundown Towns” – towns that didn’t allow blacks (or Jews, or Chinese, or Mexicans, or Catholics, but especially blacks) to live there or even stay after dark – i.e. “Don’t let the Sun go Down on you in our town!” – Loewen usefully points out that the phenomenon is MUCH more widespread than you think. It’s not anywhere near the pathological situation I’d imagined. And it’s more common in the North than the “traditional South” But his criteria for calling a town a “Sundown Town” seem pretty loose. He calls Seaside Park, N.J. such a town on the basis of a single report on an internet site (which isn’t even up anymore) that the town only had one black resident. That’s a suggestive detail, but it’s a helluva long way from making his case for the one town. He says he’s gathered evidence for hundreds of such towns, but I think I can rightly be skeptical of his claims that over 10,000 such towns existed. I’m not trying to be unreasonably rosy or optimistic in the face of an ugly historical situation, but I do think he’s got a long way to go in his research before he can so categorically say that Most American towns were Sundown Towns – as he does.
The historical facts he digs out are damning enough without having to push for a blanket condemnation.
Hey, weren’t the “Barbarians” the victors vs. the Roman Empire? 
The Hemingway Hoax is one of the few of his I haven’t read, mostly because I haven’t read any Hemingway so I figured it wouldn’t mean very much to me.
On occasion Haldeman really blows an ending with a deus ex machina of the sort that I particularly despise: introducing aliens so advanced as to be godlike.
I finished North River–it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t worth reading either. I’m back to The Shadow of the Wind, just for the sake of finishing it. It’s pretty good but obviously I have had my head turned by other books in the meantime.
Going to start The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. It’s been on my to-read pile for so long I’ve forgotten why it’s there, so here’s from Amazon:
Just got done with Ken Follet’s *The Pillars of the Earth * (wonderful read!) and decided to pore over some non-fiction for awhile.
The Invisible Lanscape by Terence and Dennis McKenna.
I finished Shadow of the Wind last night. I just sat down and plowed through the last hundred pages. Wow. Yeah. Did not expect that at all.
Gave up on Middlemarch today. Too many words, not enough footnotes, and I would have liked an explanation of exactly who the hell these people are showing up on page 367 when they haven’t been seen since page 8. Clearly, I need an annotated edition. So I got Oroonoko instead.
Ooo! That’s enough to get me re-interested, even if you are whooshing me to get me to keeping reading. 
Heh. Middlemarch remains a symbol of ugh to me. Way back in college I took 19th century fiction and most weeks you had to read one whole novel. For Middlemarch and maybe one other, you got two weeks for each. I just remember it was such a slog through that thing.
“When You Are Engulfed in Flames” ~ David Sedaris
Nah, you can’t be slower than I am. My reading time is limited, so it seems to take me forever to go through a book. I should have finished The Last Executioner: Memoirs of Thailand’s Last Prison Executioner, by Chavoret Jaruboon with Nicola Pierce, a couple of days ago. After I do finish it today or tomorrow, since we’re off to the beach, I’ve picked up something light from our library: Airframe, by Michael Crichton.
As for the memoirs, they’re very good. A decent man and practicing Buddhist thrust into the role of executioner. He goes into his early life, including entertaining US troops stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War, playing his guitar in a band and dressed like Elvis. The execution that most sticks in his mind is the first woman he attended. He was not yet an executioner at that time, but rather on the team. Executions during his day were done by machine gun, so a single pull of the trigger shot several bullets into the condemned. This one young lady had participated in the kidnapping and murder of a six-year-old boy she had been the nanny of. Ten bullets were fired into her heart, and she was taken off to the morgue after the doctor pronounced her dead. But then in the morgue, she started trying to sit up! She was not that dead after all. They had to take her back and shoot her again. Thais are very superstitious, and this was like something out of the bad horror movies they’re always flocking to see. Chavoret speculates that she may have had Kartagener’s syndrome, which he says is when a person is born with the heart on the right side.
Pinkalicious by Victoria Kann and Elizabeth Kann and *No More TV Sleepy Cat * by I forget who twelve times a day because those are my five year old’s current favorite books.
Just finished my audiobook, Song of Susannah from the Dark Tower series. In my estimation, it has now replaced Wolves of the Calla as the worst of them. It’s all right until the cliffhanger, and then the interminable jacking off (aka “writer’s diary”) at the end. And I love Stephen King. If I didn’t, I would hurl this book with great force.
I’ve now begun on Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff. Someone here got me interested in it, and then I saw that Mr. King had a blurb on the back, and the author lives in my town! Then I checked out the reviews on Goodreads, which were very mixed and nearly scared me off again, but I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did. It may not be a great book when all’s said and done, but I’m really enjoying the journey.
I finished The Last Town on Earth, by Thomas Mullen. Historical fiction about the Spanish Flu and how a mining town in the Pacific Northwest tries to quarantine themselves against it. Pretty depressing, but also really boring in parts. I almost gave up on it several times.
I just finished re-reading three of Isaac Asimov’s Elijiah Baley books: The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn.
I realized two things: his books have practically no action in them, and he was really pretty good at creating interesting characters. Also you can definitely see his progression as a writer, he made huge strides in the almost 30 years that elapsed between Caves and Robots.
Right now I am reading After the Madness: A Judge’s Own Prison Memoir about a New York State Chief Judge who spent time in a federal prison after a campaign of harrasment against his former mistress. While not perfect (he spends a little too much time complaining about the people who brought him down while never for a moment denying his own inexcusable conduct) I have found it quite interesting.
I did finish the executioner’s memoirs last night and so will not have to lug it to the beach with me. I’ve already given a general description of the book, but I’ll add that he ended it expressing how glad he was that Thailand switched to lethal injection in October 2003 and he wouldn’t have to shoot anyone else. (He is not involved in the lethal injections; that’s done by a team of three others, each one pessing a different button for a different chemical.) He went into how he was able to reconcile his job with his strong Buddhist beliefs.
Excerpt: “And now for the question that I am asked the most – do I regret being an executioner? I have given this a lot of thought and have even discussed it with Buddhist monks. Their opinion is usually the same: the convicts on death row are swamped in bad karma, and the executioner is doing them a favor by sending them on to their next incarnation for the chance to redeem themselves.”
He discusses the effects of his job on his family. I’m guessing he didn’t get asked to career day a lot at his children’s school, but he does to this day visit schools to lecture on the importance of ot being sent to jail. He says he was selected for the role of executioner partly because he seemed to be not the kind of guy who would enjoy killing people like some prison guards. I know this was all told from his point of view, but I was very much impressed by his story and the man himself. A good read for all no matter their views on the death penalty.
Will start Michael Crichton’s Airframe today on the bus.
I was so wrapped up in this book, I locked myself in the bathroom and finished it last night. It’s not the kind of book that I think I’ll read over and over again, finding new layers of meaning, but it hooked me and I didn’t want to put it down.