Botany of Desire sounds really interesting - I ordered it.
I like autobiographies and am currently on a roll reading books of former polygamist wives and children. Shattered Dreams by Irene Spencer was an interesting read - boy, does her life make mine feel like a piece of cake! I am just finishing up His Favorite Wife - Trapped in Polygamy. Same family, different wife.
I wish Wally Lamb would write something else! I loved She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, even if it took Oprah to point them out to me.
I’m in the middle of a ‘collection of short stories’ of “Chester Himes”. It’s not a newly published book (but I bought it new from Amazon), most of the stories were written in the 30s, 40s, 50s, but they’re interesting nonetheless and I find the racial perspective he presents in his stories interesting.
Speaking of the Booker Prize (which Anne Enright’s The Gathering won this year), I just started Kiran Desai’s *The Inheritance of Loss<a href=“which%20won%20the%20award%20last%20year”>/i</a> and, 100 pages into it, am totally enthralled. This novel seems to have many of the old-fashioned virtues - a richly rendered sense of time and place (mainly India, but also New York City [so far]), finely drawn characters (a retired Indian judge, his teenaged granddaughter, his cook, the cook’s 20-something son, who has left to make his way in New York, et al.]), pathos, humor, etc. - coupled with a very contemporary take on issues of identity, home, security, future, etc.
If anyone’s interested, the book that started this thread, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, just received a major literary award in France - the Prix Medicis for a foreign work.
Epistrophy, I just finished The Lost on account of your recommendation. It was a magnificent book and I thank you for calling it to my attention. I’ve now loaned it to my friend who is going to use it in her temple’s book club.
Coincidentally, my younger daughter plans to study classics and is very interested in Bard!
P.S. Re your daughter’s interest in classics and Bard: I happened to hear Mendelsohn speak a few months ago at the University of Chicago, as part of a symposium on nonfiction writing, and while one might expect that an author of a big book relating to the Holocaust would be a bit grim, solemn, humorless, etc., he was anything but that. Instead, he was extremely lively, witty, full of references to pop culture (TV shows, etc.), etc. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was a really terrific, and very popular, professor at Bard.
Thank you Epistrophy and others for all your great book ideas.
Pursuant to recommendations in this thread, I recently finished The Thirteenth Tale and Three Cups of Tea. Both great books in their own way.
The Thirteenth Tale was (as I believe someone here has said) a delicious escape…It was so fun to read late at night when everyone else was fast asleep! What great descriptive prose!!
Three Cups of Tea is not great writing but the message of peace through education should be heard by everyone. While I was reading it, I thought of mini and of his work in India (although this book unfolds in Pakistan and Afghanistan)…mini, isn’t time to write a book?
Epistrophy, I think Bard is going to end up high in her consideration because of Dr. Mendelsohn. His likability just shone through in the entire book, and the biblical and linguistic references were fascinating. The book wouldn’t have crossed my path without your recommendation, so I again thank you. It’s awfully nice to have a forum where others take the time to share good things that they’ve come across.
I haven’t read like anything recently, besides books for AP Lang. just way too much work. but there are a bunch I want to
The Kite Runner (and his new book)
Atonement (want to see the movie too!)
Love in the Time of Cholera (and this movie!)
The Other Boleyn Girl (movie comes out in Feb! so excited, this gives me motivation since I’ve wanted to read this forever, haha)
The Professor and the Madman
I’m kind of stalled in Eat,Pray,Love. I can’t identify with the author. I guess it’s just that I come from a different place. She seems pretty egocentric. Anyone else have trouble, since most of us are parents?
yes, I agree. I am on page 81 of Eat, Prey, Love and I am preying that it will get better. She is a competent writer but really abnoxiously self absorbed. I felt the same way about David Horowitz (The End of Time). I have a hard time identifying with people like that. I think that there is really a very big gap between people who raise (or have raised) children and people who have never had to think about anyone else’s needs other than their own. I have little patience for selfish people.
I recommend The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. He is a young “serial entrepreneur and ultravagabond.” It is humorous and a good reminder to enjoy life. S1 loved it and H is reading it now. I am ready to re-read it as I skipped some of the exercises.
I enjoyed Water for Elephants and The Thirteenth Tale on the advice of this thread and will try some of the other recommendations. I just finished Hometown by Tracy Kidder and found it to be disappointing. S1 (age 20) is working on Atlas Shrugged now, also on the advice of cc, and just finished Pillars of the Earth, which he loved (and I second).
Seiclan,
I was told that the “pray” part was better. I’m planning to buy a couple of others before we leave for our holiday on Tuesday. I’m going to try Water for Elephants and Lost.
I’m also making my way through “Eat, Pray, Love”. I agree with not being able to identify with the author, but it does help me understand people I know who have the same priorities she does.
She’s a good writer, although some of the coincidences seem a bit contrived. I just finished the Italy part, so I’ll see how it progresses.
With the books I previously mentioned on this thread, I assumed that, as much as I may have liked them myself, their appeal would be far from universal. But with this latest book, *The Inheritance of Loss<a href=“see%20#83”>/i</a>, which won the Booker Prize last year and which I just finished, it’s hard for me to imagine that too many people who love good novels would fail to find pleasure in it.
It works marvelously on so many different levels: the places (rural India and NYC) are richly and colorfully evoked, as are the characters (mentioned previously at #83); the author writes wonderfully well, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence; and there’s much to engage both the heart and the mind.
Here, if you need more persuading, is the beginning of the rave review that appeared in the Sunday New York Times:
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill. True story, sad, funny, and heartwarming. The author was a college classmate of mine but not someone I know well. His book tells what happened after he lost his high level corporaste job, his wife, and his health (don’t worry, I am not spoiling the plot, this all happens early on) – how Starbucks saved him and allowed him to find out what really counted in his life. I’m not a book club member and the protagonist of this book is a man, but this would be a GREAT book club selection.
The movie just out reminded me of a real nail bitter from Cormac McCarthy “No Country for Old Men”. The novel’s anti-hero is presented as a mysterious figure with Cormac offering no description whatsoever and even giving him a nondescript name, Chigurh.
If the movies is anywhere near a good as the novel it should be a must see. And who doesnt like the Coen brothers films.
