One of the best books I've read in the last 6 months is . .

[mommusic]

I’m reading The Plot Against America–I missed it when it came out in 2004 but just heard a discussion on the radio the other day so I ordered it from the library. The book sounded so intriguing I actually turned off the radio show so I wouldn’t hear the end of the book. So far, it’s a great read.

[dbwes]

Bromfield – I abandoned that one, too.

[bethievt]

I haven’t kept up with this thread, but I just really enjoyed “The Book Stops Here” by Ian Sansom. A fun read especially if you love Northern Ireland dialect.

[whatever4]

justthismom, I read The Shack on the recommendation of a friend who is battling brain cancer. I didn’t care for it (partially because I couldn’t get past the fact that it is FICTION), but my friend really liked it, and other friends have said they liked it, too.

[epistrophy]

Is there anything more wonderful to receive as a birthday present than a thoughtfully selected book (or two) from someone you’ve loved reading with, and talking about books with, forever (it seems)? If so, I can’t think of it at the moment.

The day is still young and already I’ve received, from my older son, Henry Green’s Loving, which he just read in a literature class, and a collection of Rousseau’s writings, which he read in a political philosophy class. And from one of my brothers I’ve received Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Aleksander Hemon’s The Lazarus Project.

Thank God (or Whomever) for books - and for being surrounded by others who love them, too.

[HarrietMWelsch]

epistrophy, Happy Birthday to you, and thanks for all your interesting, thought-provoking posts. Can’t send you a book, but if I could I’d give you Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. I think you’d like it.

[Jolynne_Smyth]

What thoughtful presents, epistrophy! How nice for you.

I’m reading “Speaking of Faith” by Krista Tippett (NPR host). It’s very intelligently written–she discusses the dichotomy between (as well as the complementary aspects of) intellectual rationalism/science and faith. Thought-provoking.

[musmom2]

Hi to all you fellow booklovers! Some day soon I promise to sit and read this thread!
Just finished “the Road” by Cormack McCarthy. While very difficult subject material at times, it is beautifully written and there is a sense of redemption at the end when you don’t think there is any hope left. Sorry if others have already touched on this tale of the end of the world as we know it. It is my book club’s selection for this month.

[Rachacha]

Home sick with strep - read John Grogan’s “The Longest Trip Home” yesterday, you go from laughing out loud to crying your eyes out in just a few chapters (just like I did reading his other book Marley and Me). Can’t wait to joke about it with my very Catholic friends…

[epistrophy]

HMW:

Thanks much for the thought. Not only would I like the Fadiman book; I have liked it. And I got my copy as a gift - from the brother mentioned above.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this lovely little collection of essays, here’s a line from the preface, a description of what Fadiman calls the “heart of reading”:

. . . how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for years, the ones whose textures and colors and smells have become as familiar to us as our children’s skin.

[Amazon.com:</a> Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader: Anne Fadiman: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Ex-Libris-Confessions-Common-Reader/dp/0374527229/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225836417&sr=1-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Ex-Libris-Confessions-Common-Reader/dp/0374527229/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225836417&sr=1-1)

<hr>

MMom: Like a lot of folks, I, too, found The Road enthralling - at once lyrical and bleak. What I find utterly baffling, however, is that it has now been made into a movie:

<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html&lt;/a&gt;

[Faline2]

epistophy how lovely to get gifts with so much thought and intention from your children. My son gave me the book about the Alcotts last Christmas called “Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father.” I guess he noticed I kept the postcard of her study on my bulletin board all those years…good read for anyone who still remembers her work with fondness. Her parents and their friends were truly part of an American ideal unique to their own time.

[epistrophy]

Faline2:

Have you read Geraldine Brooks’ novel March? (I haven’t but my wife has.)

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Brooks’s luminous second novel, after 2001’s acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or “contraband.” His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. . . .

[Amazon.com:</a> March: Geraldine Brooks: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/March-Geraldine-Brooks/dp/0143036661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225841088&sr=1-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/March-Geraldine-Brooks/dp/0143036661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225841088&sr=1-1)

[musmom2]

Epistrophpy: I am not sure either that I can imagine “the Road” as a movie, I just found out that it is being made into one today when I was searching for some book reviews. I will, however, greatly anticipate it, as I think Viggo Mortenson is terrific (he also grew up near where I live, so is a bit of a local “star”). The young boy actor sounds fabulous too. Thanks for the link to the NYT review- I will share it with the book club!

[transferkid21]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra- Nietzsche …best book I’ve read in my life.

[mafool]

Happy Happy Day, Epistrophy!

And many happy and healthy returns of the day.

[Faline2]

thanks for the cool March by Geraldine Brooks lead…will take a gander at that one…and agre that Mortenson could make The Road really work on screen. I made it a point to watch Oprah interview Cormac McCarthy since he is so intensely media adversive, I had seen so little of him re interviews and I think he is such an absolute original voice/brilliant writer. Anyone else see it? The man truly hates the camera and cannot suffer fools well. He struggled with the parameters of the TV interview the whole time, even though Oprah tried to rein it in and to hold back. I did enjoy what nuggets I could grasp in his answers but he clearly has no desire to “talk” to the public except through his art form. Well…if being picked by Oprah helped him pay his bills, I am all for it. He said he was glad that his success would be helpful to his son, who was very young, and not much younger than the son in The Road. It seems he spent a lot of his adulthood in lousy motel rooms typing with no prospect of a paycheck much even after his early acclaim. If my son did such a thing for a decade, I would have a stroke.
Thank God he followed his own muse instead of caving into what society expects.

[epistrophy]

More re Cormac McCarthy (and the many years before he enjoyed any commercial success), from a 1992 article:

For many years he had no walls to hang anything on. When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb in a lens case to assure better illumination for reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn’t take me inside. Renovation, which began a few years ago, has stopped for lack of funds. “It’s barely habitable,” he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.

McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. “He has more intellectual interests than anyone I’ve ever met,” says the director Richard Pearce, who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one of his few “artistic” friends. Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for “The Gardener’s Son,” a television drama about the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870’s by a disturbed boy with a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the amputation of the boy’s leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind.

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. “We lived in total poverty,” says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. “We were bathing in the lake,” she says with some nostalgia. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html&lt;/a&gt;

[OaksMom]

Snowflower and the Secret Fan.

[musmom2]

epistrophy:interesting insights into McCormack, will have to do a little more reading about him.
OaksMom: loved “Snowflower”! Have been on a china-related book jag lately, as I am going on a trip there next spring. Have “Peony in Love”, also by Lisa See, but haven’t gotten to it yet. Am forcing myself to do some non-fiction!

[epistrophy]

“Remembering John Leonard”

“The books we love, love us back,” wrote the great critic, editor and reader, who died Wednesday. . . .

[Remembering</a> John Leonard | Salon Books](<a href=“http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/11/07/john_leonard/]Remembering”>http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/11/07/john_leonard/)