Archive for the 'currently reading' Category

After supper, by the fire, we drank hot beer. On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.

From The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, page 11

Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

February has been surprisingly busy, the past two weeks especially. Getting a nasty cold didn’t help.

I don’t have long before I need to get dinner ready and watch the Oscars, but I wanted to do a quick post about what I’m reading, since it’s been a while.

During my trip to Michigan I was in the mood for a love story, so I googled lists of best love story novels. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough was on almost every list, so I picked up a copy at Schuler Books. It’s a whopping 673 pages, and I’m currently about 200 pages from the end. I love it so far, and it’s exactly what I was looking for.

I’m also read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which is excellent. I’ve marked it all up with circles and stars because there are so many little quotes and passages that are wonderful. I’ll gather the best of them for a post when I’m done with the book. In the book she writes about the difficulties she had writing her second novel, Rosie. It went through 3 major re-writes, but finally came together and is one of her most beloved and bestselling novels. I really want to read it now, and I picked up a copy at Strand last week.

After I finish these I think I need to read something shorter to try to keep up with my goal of 100 books. Maybe Thank You, Jeeves – I’m in the mood for a P. G. Wodehouse. :)

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The Journal of Jules Renard

Jules Renard

I’m currently reading Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes, and it’s incredible. I’ll need to write a post about it after I finish it.

Throughout the book Julian Barnes quotes and references many famous authors, philosophers, and thinkers from history. One of the people that he quotes and discusses most often is Jules Renard. He quotes many snippets from Jules Renard’s journal, and all of them are fantastic. So much so that it made me log on to Amazon and order The Journal of Jules Renard before I had even finished the Julian Barnes book. Now I’m reading both, and they compliment each other wonderfully.

The blurb on the back of the book is from the man behind my favorite podcast (KCRW’s Bookworm), Michael Silverblatt:

“You are holding a secret book, which influenced many great writers. I received it first from Donald Barthelme who received it from Susan Sontag. Once you have found it, you will find again and again that many of the writers you love have read it. Renard’s way with the detail is unforgettable. I have never forgotten the starfish placed like a badge on a little boy’s swimsuit at the beach, his baby arms and legs wiggling like the starfishes. Renard writes about spiders, about the moon, and the poetry he makes from the things his eyes tell him is joyful, particular-the world in a detail.”-Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW Radio

Here is the description from the book jacket:
Spanning from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains largely undiscovered in the United States. Throughout his journal, Renard develops not only his artistic convictions but also his humanity, as he reflects on the nineteenth-century French literary and art scene and the emergence of his position as an important novelist and playwright in that world, provides aphorisms and quips, and portrays the details of his personal life-his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father-which often appear in his work.

The edition I bought just came out this month, and is greatly abridged from Renard’s original journal. It’s 300 pages, which is down from the 1200+ pages of the 1960 English “compact” edition. This edition includes the gems of the entire journal, his thoughts of life and writing mainly, among other things. Long personal histories and events in France from the time period were removed. Normally I don’t like abridgments, but I’m ok with it in this case.

I’ve loved every bit of the Journal so far. Here’s one of my favorite parts, right on the first page of the Journal:

“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. The exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the genuises – the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”

A few more favorite lines:

“To lie watching one’s mind, pen raised, ready to spear the smallest thought that may come out.”

“This evening, memories are using my brain as a tambourine.”

I’m glad I discovered both of these books. I’ll post more about them when I finish them. I highly recommend picking either or both of them up next time you’re in a bookstore, and flipping through them to see if it’s something you might enjoy too.

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The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)

Anne Enright

2 comments

I’m reading The Gathering right now.

I’m enjoying it, even though it’s incredibly dark. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a dark novel when I started, but it’s working for me now. How much I enjoy the book overall will be largely dependent on what happens in the second half. For now I’m impressed with Anne Enright’s style. Her writing is very sharp and unique. It feels like it’s getting into my bones and messing with me.

Here are some passages that struck me as so vivid and honest that I’ve marked my paperback all up with circles and lines:

“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy – and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.” page 28

“But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.
I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.” page 82

“He handed it to Ada and pressed her forearm, like they had lived too much, each of them, to have anything left to say.” page 86

“‘Oh, he treated her like a queen,’ as they would say over the funeral cooked meats. They had a story, Ada and Charlie, that is for sure, in which they each played the most important roles, and when she walked across the room to him, you could tell how fated they felt, as if their love was a great burden to them as well as a joy.” page 103

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The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders

Recently purchased: The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. I’ve heard many great things about this, and after flipping through the book myself in Barnes and Noble, confirmed them to be true. The essays look excellent, and I’m excited to read his tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, which is also included in the book. Also, there’s a fun self interview George Saunders did on this Amazon Blog Post.

Recently finished: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. I bought this last spring, when it was a Barnes and Noble Recommends selection. I’ve had good luck with their selections; I’ve never disliked any of them. And I’ve also discovered some of my very favorite books there – including The Thirteenth Tale and The Book Thief. Unfortunately, it sat on my shelves for several months because there’s always too much to read. I was inspired to start it this weekend after seeing that it made the shortlist for one of my favorite book awards – The Man Booker Prize. After finishing it I can definitely see why it made the shortlist – it’s amazing. It’s very short (no pun intended) and practically impossible to put down. It has a very unique point of view – the narrator is telling his story in first person to another person, who we never really meet. He pauses during the retelling of his history to interact with his listener, a man who he has recently met and is dining with. But we only know what the listener is doing through the narrator; the listener never speaks dialogue we can read. The tension builds as we listen in on his story of being a Pakistani who comes to America for college, and then starts a job in New York City, shortly before 9/11. It’s not really a 9/11 novel, but it’s fascinating to read about America and New York from the perspective of someone from the Middle East. The end is stunning and I still think about it, days after finishing.

Reading now: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. This has been on my reading list ever since I read my first Margaret Atwood book (The Edible Woman) and fell in love with her beautiful sentences. So I’m finally reading it, and as an added bonus I can add it to the list of Booker Prize winning novels that I’ve read. It’s great so far.

…
Apparently I’m in a “The (Adjective) (Noun)” book title phase.

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Remainder

Tom Mccarthy

I’m almost done reading Remainder by Tom McCarthy. It’s a very strange book so far, but I like it.

The blurb on the back made me want to read it:

“A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.

Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.

How he goes about bringing his visions to life – and what happens afterword – makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.

Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.”

The user reviews on amazon for this book are very mixed. Some people loved it, and some people didn’t get it. I’m anxious to get to the end to see where it’s going…very unusual so far.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)