Three Cups of Tea is also the required summer reading for 10th Grade Honors English at my son’s high school.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Long, but worth it.
And my not-much-of-a-fiction-reader S also read it!
Just finished – The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett. Wit’s End by Karen Joy Fowler. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.
The Magician’s Assistant is captivating in its detail, but ends abruptly, I think. I had ambiguous feelings about the main character, Sabine.
Wit’s End is very different from Jane Austen Book Club, very whimsical, almost random in some of its details, but moving and funny.
Olive Kitteridge is gorgeous writing, beautifully observed, but sad, sad, sad. Highly recommend her other books, Amy and Isabelle and Abide with Me, as well.
Now reading River of Heaven by Lee Martin (author of the Bright Forever.)
Just finished “Emma” by Jane Austen. I really never enjoyed Jane’s other books, but really like this one! I finally see what all the “Austen-fuss” is about. I enjoyed the lively main character and witty, subtle writing.
I just read The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster, who was recommended earlier in this thread. For those of you who are familiar with his work, what else of his would you recommend to someone who enjoyed Follies?
While personal favorites vary, Emma is often cited as JA’s finest novel.
For example:
[The</a> 100 greatest novels of all time: The list | News | guardian.co.uk Books](<a href=“The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list | Books | The Guardian”>The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list | Books | The Guardian)
(My wife and I, a while back [even before there was a novel by this name], had our own Jane Austen book club going. We read [or reread] all of her novels, going out for dinner and book-chat after finishing each one. Each of these outings was a vacation of sorts - to another time, place, and sensibility [and, putting aside the difficulty of time travel, much cheaper than round-trip air fare to England].)
Just finished reading Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Like it quite a bit but kind of wish that I didn’t start reading it in the first place.
Padad, could you explain that further? It seems that in the last couple years, I have seen references to this book over and over, with reverence, fear, or something in between. And, said to say, before that, I had never heard of it. I’d love to hear more from you, considering that interesting reaction you had.
I have just picked up Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety and I am reading it for a second time.
I’m really enjoying “The Terror,” by Dan Simmons. It’s a fictionalized account of an 1846 British expedition to search for the Northwest Passage. I’ve been suffering in the summer heat lately, so a book about being trapped in a sea of ice has some appeal.
I just finished Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia based on Aeneas’ last wife in The Aeneid. It almost makes me want to read the new translation, though I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that she says it’s untranslatable. I’m certainly not learning Latin at this late date, so no need to feel guilty!
And at Linfield College, too! I saw the book at Costco, bought it and could not put it down. Greg Mortenson was listed as the commencement speaker at UW Bothell this year.
Thanks for the list, epistrophy! I see that The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is listed among the 100 greatest books; it is my favorite mystery novel of all time. I was quite a reader when I was much younger. I printed the list, and I’m going to catch up on what I missed.
I just decided to do “three cups of tea” with my second semester comp class this fall. I read it last month and thought it’d be great to get them talking and writing (I hope.)
garland, I spent too much time thinking about some of the sweeping ideas/statements made by the characters. Musil has a very clever way of putting ideas down in one or two sentences, and the novel is full of them. So instead of reading a novel that is just over a thousand pages, it drags on a lot longer for me as I find myself having to read on a wide range of topics just so that I can at least make my own arguments. It was also frustrating that I couldn’t find anyone to argue with either. It took me seven years to finish the book with lots of detour.
When We Get to Surf City by Bob Greene- a must-read for anyone in their 50s/60s. I am a huge Bob Greene fan (despite the unfortunate sexual misconduct in 2002 which led to him getting canned by the Chicago Tribune). This book will bring back memories for those of us who grew up loving the music of Jan and Dean.
Anthony Bourdain- Kitchen Confidential
What is the What by Dave Eggers. This is a biographical novel about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “lost boys” of Sudan. The style of this is completely different from Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Wow, padad. I see what you mean. Maybe I’ll just save that one for retirement! I gotta Pynchon novel I’ve been trying to get to; it’ll be light reading compared to that one. thanks for the feedback.
SV2–I thought *What is the What *was excellent!
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My wife bought the first few Gossip Girl books for me, after I commented favorably on Janet Malcolm’s essay about them in The New Yorker. I spent an hour with one of them, and my curiosity was satisfied. But after a conversation with one of our 11th-grader virtual nieces, my wife started reading them, and she’s addicted. I think she’s on book six at this point. Sometimes she’s horrified, but she’s clearly enjoying them.
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My reading event of the year has been Roberto Bolano’s posthumous magnum opus 2666. Over the course of the 1990s, Bolano slowly emerged as the leading Spanish-language author in the world who was not in the twilight of his career. But, tragically, it turned out he was; he got sick and died in 2002 at age 52. At that point, only one of his books had been translated into English. By November, when 2666 comes out, all of them will have been translated. It is a loooooong book (over 1200 pages; he thought about publishing it as five separate books), but certainly his best work, and very readable.
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epistrophy–we also have a “Jane Austen” book club. So far we’ve read Northanger Abbey, Masfield Park and Emma. Emma was head & shoulders above anything else, so far!
I recently enjoyed: “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door,” by Lynn Truss (author of “Eats Shoots and Leaves”).