Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant (love this author!)
Herland and With Her In Ourland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My life as a male anorexic Michael Krasnow
Ethan of Athos / Lois McMaster Bujold.
Glory season / David Brin.
Maximum light / Nancy Kress
Also, highly recommend anything by Greg Iles
Children’s Books that were also enjoyable to me:
Little Lord Fauntleroy
Little David (very old book, I loved it)
The Empty Pot
The Crane’s Wife
More TLS picks of the “best” books of the year:
–fiction:
[The</a> Times Christmas choice: fiction - Times Online](<a href=“TLS - Times Literary Supplement”>TLS - Times Literary Supplement)
–history:
[The</a> Times Christmas choice: history - Times Online](<a href=“TLS - Times Literary Supplement”>TLS - Times Literary Supplement)
–photography
[Best</a> photography books of 2007](<a href=“TLS - Times Literary Supplement”>TLS - Times Literary Supplement)
To those who enjoyed, Eat, Love, Pray, you will like
Tales of a Female Nomad, by Rita Gelman Gilman.
I buy that as a gift for many people. Paul Theroux
is also a wonderful travel writer. My most recent read of his is Dark Star.
I love travel writing- I usually read essays by mountaineers, like David Roberts, but Tales of a Female Nomad, by Rita Gelman Gilman, is so fun and inspiring.
( also read Pico Iyer, Bill Bryson & Tim Cahill- )
Kitty, there is a wonderful book about women climbing Annapurna(sp?) that I read years ago. I don’t remember the author, but Annapurna is in the title.
I think I have that one-Annapurna: A Womans Place by Arlene Blum-
[Reed</a> Magazine: Reaching the summit (1/4)](<a href=“http://web.reed.edu/reed_magazine/feb2004/features/reaching_the_summit/index.html]Reed”>Reed Magazine: Reaching the summit (1/4))
Interesting link Kitty. Yes, that is the book.
And here’s the Atlantic Monthly’s “end-of-the-year book round-up”:
<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/preview/[/url]”>http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/preview/</a>
In Larry McMurtry’s novel Duane’s Depressed, the lead character sees a psychiatrist who recommends (among other things) that he read 15 pages of Proust a day. Having been swimming through Proust’s epic, multi-volume work In Search of Lost Time myself for several months now (I’m currently in midst of the third volume, The Guermantes Way), at the rate of a few pages a day (usually between 5 and 20), I wholeheartedly concur with that advice - whether you’re depressed or not.
Without a doubt, reading Proust has been one of the highlights of my life. Poetic, philosophical, poignant, funny: his writing has all of these qualities (and more) - sometimes all of them at once. After reading Proust, I invariably find that I feel more alive.
So if you’ve been tempted by these works but also a bit leery (intimidated, perhaps, by their length, or whatever), I’m one reader who says, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”
(P.S. If anyone’s interested, I’m reading the new [and generally acclaimed] Viking/Penguin translations. For reasons having to do with complicated copyright stuff, only the first few volumes of these translations are presently available in the U.S.; however, the later volumes can be obtained from Amazon UK [among other places].)
The best book I read in the last six months is The Power of One, written by Bryce Courtenay. I never imagined I would enjoy a book with a major theme of boxing. I learned a ton about South Africa. I just got two more by him.
i have really been wanting to read that book, bugmom. i saw the movie but i have heard that the book is much better.
Epistrophy, if you love Proust, you might find this review interesting. I did.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Max-t.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Max-t.html</a>
Marcel Proust’s “Swann in Love” was one of the few I kept from one of my lit classes. There was something so timeless about his infatuation with Odette.
And I read the Annapurna book earlier this year. It gives a great perspective on what it takes to organize an expedition, and also the leadership skills required to manage the varied strong personalities.
I read *Du C
mathmom:
I obviously don’t know how you would respond to Proust now, but I seriously doubt that I would have “warmed up” to his writing while in college, either (though I would love to be able, as you did, to read him in French). For many (perhaps most) books, I think that timing can be critical, even decisive, to one’s response. In my late teens or early twenties, I don’t think that I would have lived enough, or would have had enough of a feel for the role of memory in life, for the effects of the passage of time, for the relationship between desire and illusion for Proust’s writing to resonate with me. (I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the patience for Proust at that age, either.) Now that I’m a few decades older, Proust’s world - and, more importantly, his way of looking at the world - appears very, very different to me, I’m sure, than it would have back then.
Oh, and janey, thanks for the link: that does look like a fascinating book.
epistrophy, you’ve convinced me to take the plunge!
For the Proustians among you:
Alain de Botton, How Proust can save your life.
Not many French people read Proust nowadays. Back in the 70s, he was turned into a pop song, titled–what else?–"Du c
More on reading Proust (or not):
[Reading</a> “In Search of Lost Time” - Salon.com](<a href=“http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/08/28/proust/]Reading”>http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/08/28/proust/)
[quote]
For 80 years, with the honourable exceptions of Terence Kilmartin, Alain de Botton and Michael Portillo, we have been meaning to read Proust but not quite managing it. We know it is important; we know that the way he treats time, cuts between past and present, and replicates the workings of the mind changed the art of novel-writing forever; we know his baroque style, those endless, loopingly lyrical sentences, piling metaphor upon metaphor, going on for page after page, losing themselves in the folds of his boundless imagination, one sub-clause giving way to another like endless waves breaking on a beach beneath a lowering November sky, the peeling paint on the neat row of beach huts redolent of a lost innocence that somehow… sorry; we know his style is extraordinary, enveloping, captivating. Yet still we do not read him; or, rather, we try and, more often that not, we fail.
That may now be set to change; there are signs that this is Marcel’s moment. The catalyst is Raul Ruiz’s film of the last part of the novel, Le Temps Retrouv
Love this bit! I’m afraid that is a pretty widely shared sentiment.
This time from The Economist:
[Books</a> of the year 2007 | Pick of the bunch | Economist.com](<a href=“http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10249833]Books”>Pick of the bunch)