Well, there goes my winter reading!
So, Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on OJ. How will the literary world ever recover? But take heart! Maybe Anna Nicole will scramble to learn the alphabet super-quick and fill the void created by this tragic loss. But speaking of that void, let's hope Nicole Richie doesn't fall into it.
No, no, don't worry about me. I'll be okay.
The holidays are already starting to crunch a good portion of my precious reading time not already taken up with other work-related projects and/or personal vendettas. That translates to not an awful lot of books read over the past week, but I do have at least two to report on:
The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin - "Medium" in this case is as in "one who is a liaison between this world and the world of the dead," though the character in question also uses this as a double-entendre meaning he thinks he's perhaps not as slim as he could be. Well, alright, but he's not the main character, so we're not as concerned with him now are we. The main character is a lovely woman with an incredible talent that's a blessing and a curse. She has the ability to speak with the dead, and relay their messages to the living, but it shouldn't surprise you to know that's not all fun and games. After all, we have seen The Sixth Sense, now, haven't we? It's Slavin's style that's exceptional in this book, though the plot has its clever points. She writes in such a flowing, often humorous way it's a pleasure to read.
The Third Miss Symons by F.M. Mayor - If you haven't discovered some of the positively wonderful, and often woefully forgotten, early 20th century female writers of the sort published by Virago and Persephone you're really missing a huge treat. The Third Miss Symons would be case in point. Henrietta Symons is the third daughter in a Victorian family with a bevy of beautiful daughters. The problem is, Henrietta isn't one of them. She's the ugly duckling, with an often ugly personality to boot. She's petty, small-minded and oblivious to the feelings of others. One by one her sisters marry, and Henrietta becomes more and more redundant. Mayor did a brilliant job portraying the superfluous situation of the spinster in Victorian society, as well as the terrible pain of loneliness.
As you'll see, I'm keeping myself busy even without OJ. It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it.
Happy Turkey Day, all.
- Lisa Guidarini/Bluestalking Reader
11/8/06
Mid-Week Reading Update
Lots of restless reading this week, resulting in an above-average number of books being tossed aside with great force. Part of it is a personal general malaise, so keep that in mind if you find the list somewhat shocking. I can't guarantee I'd feel differently about any of these books when my mood is better, but I'm keeping the door open on that idea.
First up in the reject category, Stephen King's Lisey's Story. As a teenager I was addicted to this man's books and kept them on the bookshelf with my well-worn Bantam and Signet classics. I wanted to read his latest partly because the cover really caught my eye, and the size of it made it look like a potentially satisfying book to really fall into. But after getting about 50 pp. in I realized I had no idea what on earth was going on, and that seemed enough of a time investment to me. Sorry, Stephen, it's not you, it's me.
Tossed aside with greater force is Sena Jeter Naslund's Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. I got irritated with this one pretty much immediately. The prose glows purple, and I knew it was a bad sign when I was subjected to the image of a very young Marie Antoinette contemplating her nipples and waxing dramatic about her toenail being the last part of her body to touch silk from Austria. Spare me the melodrama, please.
A book I'm planning to restart is Heidi Julavits's The Uses of Enchantment. I think I just got a bad start with it, as I was reading it in the car (not while I was driving, I rush to assure you) and there were lots of shiny objects distracting me. The prose is a cut above the other two I gave up on, and the story is compelling. I think I'll try this one again and see how I do with it.
Finally, the books I'm actively reading currently:
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (re-read several times over)
King Dork by Frank Portman (watch out for this one; it's amazingly fresh and powerful)
Katherine by Anya Seton (yes, technically a romance, but one packed full with authentic historical detail, including lots of info about a young Geoffrey Chaucer)
Despite fighting a reading malaise, I think I'm having a decent reading week after all.
- Lisa Guidarini - Bluestalking Reader
First up in the reject category, Stephen King's Lisey's Story. As a teenager I was addicted to this man's books and kept them on the bookshelf with my well-worn Bantam and Signet classics. I wanted to read his latest partly because the cover really caught my eye, and the size of it made it look like a potentially satisfying book to really fall into. But after getting about 50 pp. in I realized I had no idea what on earth was going on, and that seemed enough of a time investment to me. Sorry, Stephen, it's not you, it's me.
Tossed aside with greater force is Sena Jeter Naslund's Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. I got irritated with this one pretty much immediately. The prose glows purple, and I knew it was a bad sign when I was subjected to the image of a very young Marie Antoinette contemplating her nipples and waxing dramatic about her toenail being the last part of her body to touch silk from Austria. Spare me the melodrama, please.
A book I'm planning to restart is Heidi Julavits's The Uses of Enchantment. I think I just got a bad start with it, as I was reading it in the car (not while I was driving, I rush to assure you) and there were lots of shiny objects distracting me. The prose is a cut above the other two I gave up on, and the story is compelling. I think I'll try this one again and see how I do with it.
Finally, the books I'm actively reading currently:
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (re-read several times over)
King Dork by Frank Portman (watch out for this one; it's amazingly fresh and powerful)
Katherine by Anya Seton (yes, technically a romance, but one packed full with authentic historical detail, including lots of info about a young Geoffrey Chaucer)
Despite fighting a reading malaise, I think I'm having a decent reading week after all.
- Lisa Guidarini - Bluestalking Reader
time keeps on slipping
Once or twice a week my husband makes evening plans with friends. I'm almost always invited and I almost always decline. In fact, I feel a bit guilty because sometimes I actually like it when he's out of the house in the evening, even though he's already at work all day. You see, the evenings are my only free time, and free time is reading time.
So, what have I been reading during those rare times of solitude, you ask? Well, I finished reading Alice and The Girl with the Gallery, and I've started reading The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (the author of Everything Bad is Good for You). I haven't read his previous books since in-your-face bestsellers turn me off, but I may reconsider as The Ghost Map has most of the elements that I look for in non-fiction: logical thought, good writing, interesting subject matter, and educational content. The key here is the good writing. So many people hate reading history, and while I'm not one of those people, I prefer a compelling read to a dry one.
I also read an Unbridled Books manuscript by Timothy Schaffert called Devils in the Sugar Shop. Even though it was work-related reading, it didn't feel like work. I have yet to read Schaffert's The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, but hopefully it's as good as Devils (which will be out next year).
And what might I be reading the next evening I'm alone? One of these: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice by Allen Ginsburg, Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America by Mark Ehrman, The Book as Art by Krystyna Wasserman, Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome by Leonard Barkan, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, or another Unbridled manuscript. Or maybe one of the 11 issues of The New Yorker that a friend brought by this past weekend.
- Rachel J. K. Grace
So, what have I been reading during those rare times of solitude, you ask? Well, I finished reading Alice and The Girl with the Gallery, and I've started reading The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (the author of Everything Bad is Good for You). I haven't read his previous books since in-your-face bestsellers turn me off, but I may reconsider as The Ghost Map has most of the elements that I look for in non-fiction: logical thought, good writing, interesting subject matter, and educational content. The key here is the good writing. So many people hate reading history, and while I'm not one of those people, I prefer a compelling read to a dry one.
I also read an Unbridled Books manuscript by Timothy Schaffert called Devils in the Sugar Shop. Even though it was work-related reading, it didn't feel like work. I have yet to read Schaffert's The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, but hopefully it's as good as Devils (which will be out next year).
And what might I be reading the next evening I'm alone? One of these: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice by Allen Ginsburg, Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America by Mark Ehrman, The Book as Art by Krystyna Wasserman, Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome by Leonard Barkan, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, or another Unbridled manuscript. Or maybe one of the 11 issues of The New Yorker that a friend brought by this past weekend.
- Rachel J. K. Grace
11/2/06
w.w. reading / november
MATT BORONDY:
i'm aiming to read these six (at least) in november: "static" by amy goodman, "the book that changed my life" ed. by roxanne coady (that's the one i'm most looking forward to), "drawing dead to a gutshot" by brant janeway, "uncivilized beasts and shameless hellions" by john f. burnett, "tyrants: the world's 20 worst living dictators" by david wallechinsky, and "ghostly ruins: america's forgotten architecture" by harry skrdla (another winner from princeton architectural press). but mainly i'm reading magazines and websites these days.
ROBERT BIRNBAUM:
I'm reading Chas Pierce's witty book Moving the Chains which is a non hagiographic look at NE Patriot QB Tom Brady and
although I have managed to stock my book shelf with most of Richard Powers's oeuvre, I am finally getting around to reading him, mainly his newest opus, The Echomaker, and
Heidi Julavits' third novel, The Rules of Enchantment and
as the topic of memory and history has become increasingly interesting to me I am reading Jay Winters's Remembering War and also his book on minor utopian movements of the 20th century, Dreams of Peace and Freedom and
I loved The 6th Lamentation by Wm Broderick, so despite my aversion to series I am reading his In The Gardens of The Dead and
same goes for Mike Connelly regarding his new tome, Echo Park,
For those of you unfamiliar with Tom Englehardt's dispatches, they are well worth reading.
There was also the Ian Parker profile of Chris Hitchens in a recent New Yorker as well as Robert Stone's remembrance of his stint as a schlock journalist.
Ivan Brunnetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction is a great compendium and in fact the folks at Yale U press could keep me occupied indefinitely with their Yale Book of Quotations and same with the Oxford University Press with the New Book of Literary Anecdotes.
DREW MCNAUGHTON:
Platte River - Rick Bass
Ravens In Winter - Bernd Heinrich
Micro Fiction - Jerome Stern
I can't Go on, I'll Go on - Sam Beckett
REEM ABU-LIBDEH:
I'm reading
Mountains beyond Mountains (still) by Tracy Kidder
and
The Family That Couldn't Sleep by D. T. Max
MARA NASELLI:
I have a stack of borrowed books on my bedside table, and I'm afraid I'm mostly reading their spines these days. William Cronon's Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, though, prompted me to make my own purchase. I also plan to crack my new copy of A William Maxwell Portrait, ed. Charles Baxter et al. Judging by its discounted price, I take it this book didn't do terribly well, which is a shame. It's a collected volume of essays commemorating the life and work of Maxwell, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Angel Child" is a sensitive and smart inquiry into Maxwell's mastery of syntax and the careful art of making a sentence. Just the other evening browsing my own dusty shelves, I found a 1981 interview with Maxwell from the Writers at Work series, so I'll be reading that too.
ALEXANDRA TURSI:
I've actually jumped into a bit of nonfiction lately. "My Love Affair with Modern Art" is the memoir of Katherine Kuh (edited by Avis Berman) recounting the life of the the first curator of modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, an art editor of the Saturday Review (as well as the first woman to take on such a role in art criticism and curating). I really enjoyed this book not only because it is a vividly written personal account of the creative activity taking place, but an intimate look at some of the most influential artists of the contemporary era. Kuh had the ear of artists such as Rotkko, Klee, Noguchi, Van der Rohe among others (the book is split into chapters on each artist).
Right now I'm plugging away at "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe" by Katrina Firlik, the first woman to be in the neorsurgery program of UPMC. The book is written in a conversational style and is pretty palatable to the layman...lots of interesting anecdotes and stories about her experiences. A bit dry in a couple parts but as far as science for the masses books go, pretty good.
CHRISTIAN BAUMAN:
Having finished a good quota of zombie reading last month, I've moved on to Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. A friend gave this to me a year or more ago, but things came up (as things do) and I never got there. So much so that in fact Robinson's Gilead came out during this time, and I read that first. Gilead was stunning, one of the finest books I've read perhaps ever. Which truly primed me for Housekeeping. But I didn't want to go into it right after Gilead. Appropriate pause now done, I'm under way. And finding that it is everything everyone said it was. It's not as appealing to me as Gilead, but no less of a fine read.
On the heels of Housekeeping I plan on opening Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookstore (from one elder lady author of slim, beautful volumes to another). I am a great admirer of the late Ms. Fitzgerald, so am looking forward to this one. I believe it was her first (although I could have that wrong).
ALI SALERNO:
I am about to finish Jennifer Haigh's Baker Towers, about a family in a small, western Pennsylvania coal-mining town around the 1940's. I went to college in western PA, and I love the time period. I also just finished J. Robert Lennon's Happyland, serialized in Harper's. For the future, there's a bio of Wiliam Carlos Williams sitting on my bedside table that I may decide to start. Or, I could go outside, play a sport, build a model airplane; you know, that kind of thing.
i'm aiming to read these six (at least) in november: "static" by amy goodman, "the book that changed my life" ed. by roxanne coady (that's the one i'm most looking forward to), "drawing dead to a gutshot" by brant janeway, "uncivilized beasts and shameless hellions" by john f. burnett, "tyrants: the world's 20 worst living dictators" by david wallechinsky, and "ghostly ruins: america's forgotten architecture" by harry skrdla (another winner from princeton architectural press). but mainly i'm reading magazines and websites these days.
ROBERT BIRNBAUM:
I'm reading Chas Pierce's witty book Moving the Chains which is a non hagiographic look at NE Patriot QB Tom Brady and
although I have managed to stock my book shelf with most of Richard Powers's oeuvre, I am finally getting around to reading him, mainly his newest opus, The Echomaker, and
Heidi Julavits' third novel, The Rules of Enchantment and
as the topic of memory and history has become increasingly interesting to me I am reading Jay Winters's Remembering War and also his book on minor utopian movements of the 20th century, Dreams of Peace and Freedom and
I loved The 6th Lamentation by Wm Broderick, so despite my aversion to series I am reading his In The Gardens of The Dead and
same goes for Mike Connelly regarding his new tome, Echo Park,
For those of you unfamiliar with Tom Englehardt's dispatches, they are well worth reading.
There was also the Ian Parker profile of Chris Hitchens in a recent New Yorker as well as Robert Stone's remembrance of his stint as a schlock journalist.
Ivan Brunnetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction is a great compendium and in fact the folks at Yale U press could keep me occupied indefinitely with their Yale Book of Quotations and same with the Oxford University Press with the New Book of Literary Anecdotes.
DREW MCNAUGHTON:
Platte River - Rick Bass
Ravens In Winter - Bernd Heinrich
Micro Fiction - Jerome Stern
I can't Go on, I'll Go on - Sam Beckett
REEM ABU-LIBDEH:
I'm reading
Mountains beyond Mountains (still) by Tracy Kidder
and
The Family That Couldn't Sleep by D. T. Max
MARA NASELLI:
I have a stack of borrowed books on my bedside table, and I'm afraid I'm mostly reading their spines these days. William Cronon's Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, though, prompted me to make my own purchase. I also plan to crack my new copy of A William Maxwell Portrait, ed. Charles Baxter et al. Judging by its discounted price, I take it this book didn't do terribly well, which is a shame. It's a collected volume of essays commemorating the life and work of Maxwell, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Angel Child" is a sensitive and smart inquiry into Maxwell's mastery of syntax and the careful art of making a sentence. Just the other evening browsing my own dusty shelves, I found a 1981 interview with Maxwell from the Writers at Work series, so I'll be reading that too.
ALEXANDRA TURSI:
I've actually jumped into a bit of nonfiction lately. "My Love Affair with Modern Art" is the memoir of Katherine Kuh (edited by Avis Berman) recounting the life of the the first curator of modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, an art editor of the Saturday Review (as well as the first woman to take on such a role in art criticism and curating). I really enjoyed this book not only because it is a vividly written personal account of the creative activity taking place, but an intimate look at some of the most influential artists of the contemporary era. Kuh had the ear of artists such as Rotkko, Klee, Noguchi, Van der Rohe among others (the book is split into chapters on each artist).
Right now I'm plugging away at "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe" by Katrina Firlik, the first woman to be in the neorsurgery program of UPMC. The book is written in a conversational style and is pretty palatable to the layman...lots of interesting anecdotes and stories about her experiences. A bit dry in a couple parts but as far as science for the masses books go, pretty good.
CHRISTIAN BAUMAN:
Having finished a good quota of zombie reading last month, I've moved on to Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. A friend gave this to me a year or more ago, but things came up (as things do) and I never got there. So much so that in fact Robinson's Gilead came out during this time, and I read that first. Gilead was stunning, one of the finest books I've read perhaps ever. Which truly primed me for Housekeeping. But I didn't want to go into it right after Gilead. Appropriate pause now done, I'm under way. And finding that it is everything everyone said it was. It's not as appealing to me as Gilead, but no less of a fine read.
On the heels of Housekeeping I plan on opening Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookstore (from one elder lady author of slim, beautful volumes to another). I am a great admirer of the late Ms. Fitzgerald, so am looking forward to this one. I believe it was her first (although I could have that wrong).
ALI SALERNO:
I am about to finish Jennifer Haigh's Baker Towers, about a family in a small, western Pennsylvania coal-mining town around the 1940's. I went to college in western PA, and I love the time period. I also just finished J. Robert Lennon's Happyland, serialized in Harper's. For the future, there's a bio of Wiliam Carlos Williams sitting on my bedside table that I may decide to start. Or, I could go outside, play a sport, build a model airplane; you know, that kind of thing.
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