JHS – you’ve “outed” your wife’s guilty pleasure! LOL. My daughters and I LOVE watching the Gossip Girl TV series . . .
Padad: Sounds like you’re in great reading shape to start Proust (if you haven’t already)!
I’m now in the midst of the third volume and am loving it (why should it seem so surprising that a “classic” should yield so much pleasure?), but I’m taking it at a pace that might be characterized as, uh, leisurely. About 10 pages per day seems like about the right amount for me, as his writing is so dense (in a good sense) with images and ideas. And even that gets hard to do when work projects become too demanding and time becomes scarcer.
But no matter how long you’ve been away, Proust welcomes you back with open arms. And one of the advantages of reading fiction where “plot” is comparatively unimportant is that you don’t have to worry much about what you may have already forgotten.
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Well, I expect that you’ll continue to enjoy your travels through Austen’s world from here on out. Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park are both quite a bit different (in different ways) than Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion.
overseas, Crossing to Safety by Stegner is one of my favorite books. I have read Angle of Repose and am anxious to read more of his works. I don’t know why Crossing to Safety affected me so deeply; I first read it 10 or 15 years ago and about a year ago I was driven to pick it up again.
epistrophy, I have the good fortune of having read In Search of Lost Time twice. Actually both under the first translation title of Remembrance of Things Past, which I like because Anita Bookner alluded to it so marveloulsy in one of her novel (Incidences at the Rue Langiere) and provides one of the best examples of why it matters to pay attention to the first sentence in a novel. By the way, I love long novels, if only because it is the ultimate escape into stange worlds. Some of my favorites in this category include CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence of 11 novels, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time in 12 novels, and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series of 20 novels. In between, I always reread a Jane Austen.
I want you to know that I appreciate your posts in the LTS thread.
Wallace Stegner’s writing is magical: how he is able to capture the natural world and incorporate it into his imagery, things that we all know and react to. I missed that in my hurry to get the story last time around. I read Angle of Repose first. That is a wonderful story and different than Crossing to Safety. I may try The Big Rock Candy Mountain later this summer. I think Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig (not all his novels) are my favorite western writers.
I, too, love Stegner.
About Angle of Repose: I admit, that in my haste to get my hands on another book by the author I had then just recently discovered, I didn’t read the title very carefully. As I read an enjoyed the book, in the back of my mind I was wondering about that reposing angel and what the meaning of the title might be.
I’ve read a few of Anita Brookner’s novels, but not this one (yet). I’ll have to get to it.
For those who aren’t aware of Brookner, when it comes to composing sentences and paragraphs that are not only graceful and elegant but also psychologically acute and complex, she’s just about as good as it gets these days, I think.
Don’t expect much to happen in her novels, in the sense of external action. Little does (as is usually the case in real life). The “action” mostly takes place inside, in the characters’ minds and hearts.
Brookner’s had an unusually interesting life, too. She was an art history professor at Cambridge and didn’t publish her first novel until she was in her 50s. Her best known novel, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize in the early '80s.
[Anita</a> Brookner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Brookner]Anita”>Anita Brookner - Wikipedia)
The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor. Just a cozy, pleasant read.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. I had not heard of it–just happened to be surfing Amazon connections and came across it.
quick follow-up to #350 (re the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s 2-volume biography of Henri Matisse)
Having now finished this book (I was taking my time with it), I highly recommend it. It takes a lot of historical imagination (not to mention research) to conjure a world in which Matisse’s paintings - particularly, his use of color - would have had folks up in arms, and this book does a fine job of bringing that world (late 1800s, early 1900s France), along with Matisse himself, his wife and children, his fellow painters, and his dealers and collectors, to life. Fascinating.
On to the second volume.
Thanks for all the tips! I am basically apartment bound for the next month and reading up a storm. I am now finishing Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett that I missed when it came out in 1989, I believe. Then I will go back to the John Adam’s biography by David McCullough. Then I better head over to the Young Adult section and gobble up many of them. First in line is Martha Southgate’s The Fall of Rome about a lone African American Latin teacher at an elite all boys boarding school in Connecticut. A friend grabbed it from my pile for the summer and read it and said it was fantastic. I am so sorry that this form of literature so pertinent to our students about their issues in life gets overlooked and rejected many times for the “masters.” Anyway, I read 'em and love 'em as much as the masters. It just depends on my frame of mind.
Anyone else read Dennis McFarland? I recently discovered this author and have enjoyed two of his novels – Singing Boy and School for the Blind. Looking forward to reading the others, including the better known Music Room and Prince Edward. His characters are complex and lovable, and he is able to examine – not sure how I want to say this – an ethical or moral dimension to our modern existence as well as the emotional and social ones – that is, while his characters’ emotional states are very finely drawn, they also muse about their choices in the larger scheme of things. Very good writing.
I’ve read two of McFarland’s novels: School for the Blind and The Music Room. Both were terrific: vivid, intimate, moving, memorable, lyrical.
[|||</a> Dennis McFarland - Home |||](<a href=“http://dennismcfarland.com/]|||”>http://dennismcfarland.com/)
I’m reading “Eat, Pray Love” right now (I know it’s been popular for a while) & enjoying it.
I just started on Marley & Me. Good so far.
One take on the best literary blogs:
[Guardian</a> Unlimited Books’ top 10 literary blogs | Links | guardian.co.uk Books](<a href=“http://books.guardian.co.uk/links/areas_of_interest/general/links/0,6135,1406190,00.html]Guardian”>Books blog | Books | The Guardian)
I just finished David Eggers “What is the what?”–the novelized autobiography of one Sudanese “lost boy.” I couldn’t put it down. Read it straight through. Incredible story, beautifully written.
I just finished reading “The Tender Bar” by JR Moehringer, thanks to a member of my book club. I enjoyed it more than most I’ve read in the past year. What a wonderful writer he is. The book, and the author, have won awards including"Best Book of the Year by NYTimes, Pulitzer Prize, etc.
Here’s a summary I stole from a Borders website:
“JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a sanctuary for all sorts of men – cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar taught JR, tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee… In the rich tradition of bestselling memoirs about self-invention, THE TENDER BAR is by turns riveting, moving, and achingly funny. An evocative portrait of one boy’s struggle to become a man, it’s also a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.”
DMD–I absolutely *loved *What is the What (may have mentioned it much earlier on this thread.) I like pretty much everything Eggers does, but he went outside himself for this in a pretty impressive way.
Anyone read Pynchon’s Against the Day? I was determined to this summer, but after a month and four hundred pages ( 600 to go) I am flagging. When I can keep up with it, it’s often entertaining, and has many sentences of haunting beauty, and many others that are hilarious. Yet overall, it is a whole lotta work.
“The Kite Runner.”
I’ve also reread all the Harry Potter books recently. I’ve started rereading “The Chronicles of Narnia” because my husband is reading them (for the first time!), inspired by our viewing of the movie Prince Caspian. He didn’t know we had a set of these books in the house, and I couldn’t believe he had never read them, so found the set and plopped them down on his office chair.
I’m waiting to read “The Life of Pi,” which I sent off to CTY first session with the kid, hoping he’d read it there, but did he? Noooo! So it got packed up for the second session, and here I am, waiting waiting waiting for it…