Book a Week in 2013 - week forty one

[trinchick]

I just finished The Distant Hours by Kate Morton and have started Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel. I liked the Gothic feel of The Distant Hours. I read a lot of books like that in my teens and 20's.

 

 

I'm listening to The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton right now, and it is fantastic! This is the first time I've tried one of her novels, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The reader on the audio version is exceptional and really adds to my enjoyment of the book. I've already reserved a couple more Kate Morton audiobooks at the library.

 

Finished one this week:

 

41. The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes - This is the memoir of novelist A.M. Homes, in which she explores her adoption and attempts to meet and consider having relationships with her birth parents. Sadly, there are many unfulfilled fantasies and unmet expectations, and she finds she doesn't actually like either of her birth parents, leading her to a long and laboriously documented study of her ancestry concluded by a lengthy diatribe against her birth father in a pseudo-cross examination style. There is so much anger and sadness here, but it doesn't make for good reading. Not a book I'd recommend.

[Stacia]

Yitzchak (dh) and I saw a dynamite (*giggle*) production of this

 

:lol:

 

 

While looking for something else the other week on our poetry bookshelf, I encountered Marina Tsvetaena's collected poems, and, realizing that I had never gone through the whole volume, I pulled it out.  ...and was blown away. ...no, swept away by a turbulent series of oceanic waves, waves of emotion, of words, of images. 

 

Gosh, you make poetry actually sound like a *good* thing!  ;) (I say that completely mocking myself since I just don't know enough about poetry to fully appreciate it.  :tongue_smilie:  I try, though, sometimes, & eventually I hope that the plugging away will help me improve. I do know that when I read Altazor by V. Huidobro earlier this year, I loved it.)

 

 

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut: dd#2 read this the other week, and pressed it upon me.  I was a little reluctant, I haven't read Vonnegut's novels since I was about her age, and never this one, and I remembered them as so discouraging and depressing.  Although this is quite dystopian, I did not find it depressing - in fact, I enjoyed it very much, and find myself sorting through thoughts and reactions... and coming back again and again to the scene with the literal player piano, relatively early in the novel, that manages to crystallize the poignancy of the overall situation.  This deserves more notice than I have seen it get....

 

Ohhh, I love Vonnegut. (I have never read Player Piano, though.) I think he's is truly one of the greatest writers of the 20th century & should be required reading for everyone.

 

Lastly, but far from least, I read Kundera's The Curtain.  [thank you, Jane!]  I have so much I want to say, so many thoughts triggered by this amazing little book that I am speechless.  I think half the book is marked to copy down in my notebook (some ruthlessness is clearly going to necessary), and I have put it on my 'must purchase' list...  If you love novels, and literature, and talking about great books, go read this, right away!

 

With both you & Jane recommending Kundera, I really must read him.

 

It was a magical, slightly surrealistic week of reading in which all these seemingly unconnected pieces wove together, like the streams of consciousness in Woolf's novel, into a beautiful, organic whole.  It makes me wish I had, or were making, the time to write more about what I am reading, to take more notes, to engage more actively... but there is also something amazing about riding these waves and letting them sweep me along....

 

I love this imagery. Beautiful.

[mumto2]

 

I'm listening to The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton right now, and it is fantastic! This is the first time I've tried one of her novels, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The reader on the audio version is exceptional and really adds to my enjoyment of the book.

I loved this book! One of my favorites this year.

[Tress]

Hi Tress, this is dd. The Grimm's fairy tales you need are linked to in the course syllabus, along with most of the other readings in the course. The book is called Household tales, but I think you want the edition they linked to,since I think the stories included varies between editions.They just posted the videos an hour ago, so if you go back on you should be able to get them. I hope you have a good time!

Thank you! I can now access the videos! (That's a relief, I thought I was doing something wrong.)

 

So we are going to read *all* Grimm's fairy tales? I had assumed we would only read a selection.

 

I did follow the link, but it took me to a site where you had to pay to download the book. And since I already own a perfectly fine Dutch translation, I have been reading aloud from it for years, I'm not so interested in an English translation of a German book :). For the other books, Dracula etc, I did order English copies. I hope they will arrive in time.

 

Good luck with the course!

[Stacia]

It has some nice imagery and I like the rhythm and energy of the language, but it isn't Shakespeare (or Pushkin, or Hugo, or anything spectacular)

 

I have to admit that I read Facing Nature: Poems by John Updike not out of a pressing feeling of lack that I had neglected this modern author, but because I was looking for a "u" for my alphabet challenge and my husband (who has read more modern poetry than I have) urged this upon me...

 

I found some of the same effective, often surprising imagery, a vitality with an underlying rhythm that was often compelling... it was a fascinating, experience (I flew the volume in one sitting, so the poems became an extended experience, in contrast, in dialogue, in collusion with each other) with a few stand-out pieces. 

 

I am very glad I read it (and, as always, my husband has stretched my poetry comfort zone and in this, as in so many other ways, expanded my horizons), and I need to add this to our collection at some point, but Updike is unlikely to ever be a favorite.

Haven't tried any of Updike's poetry, but I did try his novel The Witches of Eastwick & just couldn't get into it. I ended up ditching it pretty quickly & haven't felt a desire to try other Updike works. I know he's a celebrated author, but I personally haven't seen or felt the appeal yet...

[Jane in NC]

 

 

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut: dd#2 read this the other week, and pressed it upon me.  I was a little reluctant, I haven't read Vonnegut's novels since I was about her age, and never this one, and I remembered them as so discouraging and depressing.  Although this is quite dystopian, I did not find it depressing - in fact, I enjoyed it very much, and find myself sorting through thoughts and reactions... and coming back again and again to the scene with the literal player piano, relatively early in the novel, that manages to crystallize the poignancy of the overall situation.  This deserves more notice than I have seen it get....

 

<snip>

 

Lastly, but far from least, I read Kundera's The Curtain.  [thank you, Jane!]  I have so much I want to say, so many thoughts triggered by this amazing little book that I am speechless.  I think half the book is marked to copy down in my notebook (some ruthlessness is clearly going to necessary), and I have put it on my 'must purchase' list...  If you love novels, and literature, and talking about great books, go read this, right away!

 

 

Well I read Player Piano in high school and quite honestly I have compartmentalized it in my brain with Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Perhaps it is time to reread some Vonnegut.

 

I am so glad that you enjoyed The Curtain, Eliana!  One could glean a long list of "to-be-reads" from Kundera's work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mumto2]

Hi Tress, it's dd again. One of the links does lead to a paid thing, but there is a free link if you go into the couse syllabus tab and scroll down, there should be free links to all but two of the books. Somebody has posted a list of all the stories you need somewhere in the discussion forums, but I can type it out here if you can't find it. I think there's about fifty to read.

[Stacia]

Ok, BaW pals, I need to clear my bookshelves a bit. If you would like any of the following books, let me know (through a PM) & I can mail it/them to you. Please let me know in the next few days or I'll take them to my local used bookstore or donate them to the library in about a week.

 

Soulless by Gail Carriger (paperback)

Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood (paperback)

Remainder: A Novel by Tom McCarthy (paperback)

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks (hardcover)

Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy (paperback)

The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid (paperback)

[laughing lioness]

I actually finished 2 books this week: Packing Light by Allison Vesterfelt and Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt.

 

The first one is a "year in the life" genre. A millenial lite faith perspective (which is what the author is claiming).

 

The second is a sociological look at the effects of birth control on our society;men, women and children - and addresses the new "sexless marriage," porn, poverty, too much sex and too little romance and much, much more. Eberstadt is brilliant. A must read for anyone interested in Christiainity and reproductive rights and what's going on in society as a result of birth control.

[Stacia]

And, a couple of books for the little ones for Halloween... (if anyone wants them)

 

Boola's Secrets by Pamela Bradbury (paperback)

Happy Halloween! Things to Make and Do by Robyn Supraner (old paperback)

[LostSurprise]

I'm back after a few months of medical nonsense.  Not much going on here but I did finish The Hustler and Alice on the Line from last time.

 

The Hustler was really good and well worth the read. I enjoyed it as much as The Queen's Gambit, even if I didn't identify with it as much. Short. DH loved it and finished it before I did and he's not much of a reader usually. Tevis does an interesting thing by making the story essentially about talent and how people self-handicap themselves. I didn't always agree with his assessment, but I did find the prose crisp, the action tense, the characters interesting, and the psychology plausible. Not to mention the female love interest is a PhD student in economics. In the late '50s. Well played, Mr. Tevis. 

 

I listened to the Dick Van Dyke and Bob Newhart memoirs on audio. They were okay. 

 

I'm finally caught up with my older boys Harry Potter reading. I finished Order of the Phoenix and Goblet of Fire. They are getting better...finally. I had the funniest discussion with the doctor in charge of pediatrics. She really likes all the books so I had to nod and smile a bit when she started contradicting my opinion so forcefully.  :laugh:

 

Reading The Chronoliths with dh. Probably the first book of Wilson's that I've stuck with (I've tried Darwinia and Spin). I'm enjoying the very human experience of a slowly accelerating apocalyptic event. I like the use of moving objects through time in order to influence history. I think the psychology of people reading whatever they want or need into a situation of unknown context is pretty true. We hope. We fill in the context when we don't see (or believe) the context that is there. Its very believable for an apocalyptic novel. 

 

And I'm finishing The Big Year, a book about competitive bird-watching. Its amusing. 

 

Top Ten *
Best of the Year **

69. My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke~non-fiction, memoir, television. 

68. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling~fantasy, wizards, series. *

67. I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This by Bob Newhart~non-fiction, memoir, comedy.

66. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling~fantasy, wizards, series. 

65. Alice on the Line by Doris and Douglas Lockwood~non-fiction, memoir, central Australia, early 20th century. 

64. The Hustler by Walter Tevis~pool sharks, winners vs. losers, testing your gift. **

63. Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford~fiction, English lords and ladies, love affairs. (Finally Finished challenge)

62. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford~fiction, English lords and ladies, '30s, hidden autobiography. (Finally Finished challenge)

61. The Postal Confessions by Max Garland~poetry, small towns 

60. Archipelago: a Novel by Monique Roffey~fiction, sailing, the Carribean, grief (Fiction Genre challenge: New books shelf)

59. Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene~fiction, '60s, travel, eccentric people

55. Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card~time travel, history correction, New World. 

54. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling~youth fiction, fantasy, wizards. 

53. The Adderall Diaries: a Memoir by Stephen Elliot~memoir, murder, dysfunction. 

50. The House by the Sea by May Sarton~journal, old age.  (Dewey Decimal challenge: 800s)

47. Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriquez~memoir, Afganistan, women. *

39. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King (Fiction Genre challenge: Mystery)

38  The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn~non-fiction, cooking, teaching, how people eat.

37. The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan~fiction, France, ballet, Degas.*

35. The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig~non-fiction, WWII, Siberia. * 

34. Old Man's War by John Scalzi~science fiction, war, future. 

32. Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger~youth fiction, steampunk, school for female assassins.

28. Benediction by Kent Haruf~small town, characterization, cancer. *

21. Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz~supernatural thriller, ghosts *
20. The Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang~science fiction, short stories (Fiction genre challenge: short stories) **
19. Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols~memoir, gardening, humor (Dewey Decimal Challenge, 600s)
17. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout~fiction, short stories, aging. 
14. The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis~fiction, coming of age, chess *
11. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish~autobiography, Depression, family (Dewey Decimal Challenge, 900s) *
9. The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman~fiction, family drama, Australia, miscarriage. (Continental Challenge: Australia) 
7. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson~satire, American dream, drug trip. (Dewey Decimal Challenge, 000s)
6. Soulless by Gail Carriger~steampunk, vampires, werewolves, Victoriana. (Fiction genre challenge: Fantasy)
5. Away by Jane Urquhart~Ireland, Canada, emigration, magical realism, family saga. (Continental Challenge: North America/Canada) 
4. Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim~autobiography, Germany pre-WWI, gardening, women's roles
 

Working on: 

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and a Fowl Obsession (Obmascik)

The Chronoliths (Wilson)

The French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles)

Saving Daylight (Harrison)~my husband just found this one in the sofa

 

[Paisley Hedgehog]

. 

 

[Storm Bay]

Wow, I thought I'd missed a week, but it's been nearly 4! I just have been so bad with my online social life, etc.

 

I've only finished 2 books since my last post, at least that I've recorded:

 

83, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

84. The Final Hour Andrew Klavan

 

I hated that last HP book, couldn't bear the fifth one, so read the end of it & the end of the seventh. Honestly, I don't understand the draw, and yet my eldest read the entire series twice.

 

Right now I'm absorbed in a slower going nonfiction read (well, more than one book) and am trying feebly and unsuccessfully to do some seasonal reading. Harry Potter really got me to the point of fiction oversaturation as I was already getting to the point of being very difficult to please with it. Ironically, I'm now reading about all the fighting & violence involved in the history of the Christian church in the 4th century (When Jesus Became God) a book i've tried to read more than once before, but this time I'm hooked. Once I read the last chapter (this week), I also have one I heard about here once on the 5th century (The Jesus Wars.) While I was in the library today I went ahead & put holds on a number of books on this topic at various times, but will probably reach oversaturation before I read them all (or even all the ones I actually choose from them.)

 

I'm trying to read The House of the Seven Gables for 1001 Books, but never get past the first page (trying to read it while waiting in the van when picking up my kids) and have a few other fiction book in my van (am working on organizing my house, so they can't all come in now).

 

Quick, Boil Some Water:The Story of Childbirth in Our Grandmother's Day by Yvonne Barlow.  This is a compilation of birth stories told by British women during the 1930s to 1960s with some social history in between decades.  Fascinating but..yikes! I'm glad I wasn't giving birth back  then.

 

This sounds interesting. My dad once told a story of his first house call for a delivery. It was on the local reserve c. 1960, but not a first birth for the family. When he got there he asked the father to put some water on to boil, and the father said, "Why?" My dad said, "I don't know" or something close to that. I have forgotten the rest of the story, but the baby was fine (told years later with no names mentioned.)

 

Started Reading:
Nothing new because I just started two books over the weekend. But when I finish one of them I will be done with the Dewey decimal challenge!!

 

 

 

Congratulations! I keep ending up with nonfiction books in the same groups of numbers--I've tried reading a cookbook, but can't read them cover to cover or even all of any cookbook,

 

 

I'm back after a few months of medical nonsense.  Not much going on here but I did finish The Hustler and Alice on the Line from last time.

 

 

I hope all is well.

[Storm Bay]

What an interesting pairing! 

 

I have some other Vonnegut books on hold at the library - not the two that I remember as so grim (no Slaughterhouse Five or Cat's Cradle for me right now!), but I want to revisit some of his other works, and try some new ones, now that I am not quite so young. 

 

I read Vonnegut in high school (personal reading), but after looking at one in the past year realized that that time has come & gone for me.

[Jane in NC]

What an interesting pairing! 

 

I have some other Vonnegut books on hold at the library - not the two that I remember as so grim (no Slaughterhouse Five or Cat's Cradle for me right now!), but I want to revisit some of his other works, and try some new ones, now that I am not quite so young. 

 

I need to go back through The Curtain and make some lists!  What entranced me most is the connections amongst various works - and tracing of influences and derivations that I had not considered or been aware of. 

 

...a side fascination is the feeling of connection between... well, I now no longer know what to call it.  Eastern Europe is the absurd over-simplification I was using before I read this.  Anyway, that region and Latin America.  A connection reinforced by the Neruda prose I've been ambling through. 

 

...and then the intersections, that shouldn't have surprised me, between this and Madeline Albright's Prague Winter - of course the shadow of the 1930's and '40s looms large.

 

And I'm thinking about how much I have missed.  No, more than that, how much we all have missed.  How much world literature has missed by the narrowness of our "Great Books" lists... and I wish I could find the page where Kundera comments that if Kavka hadn't written in German, he wouldn't be so well known now. 

 

Is there such a thing as a history of this-part-of-Europe's literatures?  I am craving a *framework*... I at least had some sense of where to start and how some of the pieces fit together with Latin America, though a framework would have been nice there too.  (Something akin to my beloved Adventures in English Literature... a very rudimentary introduction with some historical context.  (Unfortunately their World Lit is wildly inadequate.  It semi-covers Western Europe, Russia, and Classical Greece & Rome, & has cursory sections for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, Persian, & Hebrew (mostly "old testament" selections), I think it might have the Epic of Gilgamesh and , perhaps an Egyptian hymn or two,)

Regarding the bold:  In The Curtain, Kundera makes the case for the Middle European literature missing from the mainstream canon.  Prior to reading this book, I would have referred to this literature as "Eastern European".  Kundera's case for Middle Europe makes sense.  What we in the "West" call the "East" was a 20th century political division--not a cultural one.

 

That said, I cannot offer a frame work.  I will say again though that the Penguin series on "Writers from the Other Europe" (introduced by  Philip Roth) led me to Kundera as well as a number of other interesting writers.  Did you see the link that Stacia gave last week to the publisher Archipelago?  I am quite thrilled to have ordered two books by the Polish author WiesÅ‚aw MyÅ›liwski.  Frame work is one thing.  Availability of titles in translation is another!

 

About the Player Piano/Canticle for Leibowitz pairing: these two books were among my intro to Dystopian literature and science fiction.  I think that C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy also lives in that mental compartment!  Dystopian lit and sci fi are just not my thing but I did have a brief phase with these books. 

 

 

[Jane in NC]

I read Vonnegut in high school (personal reading), but after looking at one in the past year realized that that time has come & gone for me.

 

Yup, high school is when I too read Vonnegut.  But I think I should give him another look--maybe his essays.

[Storm Bay]

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:   Wishing you health/healing, peace, and joy.

 

 

I do the over-saturation thing too.  I get so caught up in a topic, and so excited about the dozens of titles I've found... but I fizzle out before I get through even half of them!  I need to start keeping lists of the books I abandon b/c of over-saturation, ones I would probably love to come back too later...

 

Hawthorne, as I've discovered of Woolf, is an author I can't read in bits and snatches.  I need to give them large blocks of time.  Time for me to enter their atmosphere, to start feeling the rhythm of the prose, the flavor of the world, the heart of the characters. 

 

That makes a lot of sense. I liked The Scarlet Letter, but was done with him at that time for some reason, so I may need to read him one book at a time. However, I'm not sure if now is the time for me to read him as I'm just not getting excited about fiction. It did take time to get into it, but I also didn't care for the first part of that book.

[mumto2]

I plan to just read and listen too. :) I am pretty sure that is fine. I know in other courses you grade only if you are participating in the writing portion. I still need to do my download -- dd has made a list of exactly which ones I need to read.

 

 

The videos were not uploaded this morning when I checked, but came online around lunchtime (my local time).  I did find most of the books for free download linked in the Course Syllabus.

 

I'm all ready to go :)    I had the Grimm's book from my library but it didn't have all the beautiful illustrations of the freebie so I was pleased to find the Open Library one.

 

Something that does concern me is that the instructor says we are asked to "grade" other students' work.  As I don't plan to write any of the essays, I really don't care to critique other people's essays.  I thought we could just audit the course.  Does anyone know?  It is kind of late to be asking this since I've already signed up, so  :blush:

[LostSurprise]

 

I hope all is well.

 

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:   Wishing you health/healing, peace, and joy.

 

 

Thank you both. Hopefully all will be well.

[Jane in NC]

I have been following a rabbit trail, courtesy of writer Peter Robinson.  He sends fictional detective Alan Banks off to Tallinn, Estonian, carrying a copy of a novel by a real Estonian (well, Finnish/Estonian) author, Sofi Oksanen.  Despite its dark theme, I think I will add Purge to my list.  The Baltic States have been occupied and influenced by so many outside forces.  I can't say that I know much about Estonian culture.

 

Robinson also mentions the Niguliste Danse Macabre in Tallinn. Just in time for your Halloween/Day of the Dead festivities?

 

 

 

Now I don't do horror but I love medieval Danse Macabre or Totentanz paintings. Is it any surprise that I fell in love with comic artist Dylan Meconis' modern update?

 

 

 

[Jane in NC]

Thank you both. Hopefully all will be well.

 

Sending best wishes and hugs your way.

 

Jane

[Stacia]

Jane & Eliana, you may want to check out a series that Dalkey Archive Press published -- the Eastern European Literature Series. I think it's a series they did in the past (don't see a link on their current website, but maybe I'm just missing it). Last year, I read the book Chinese Letter by Serbian author Svetislav Basara from that series.

[ErinE]

Inspired by spooky reads, I re-read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot and Misery. Having read nearly all of King's work, it was enlightening to go back and read 'Salem's Lot before King became enamored of villains with catch phrases and torturously helpless heroes/heroines. The book was obviously inspired by Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, but I think the "evil house" setting was forced and didn't fit with the vampire theme.

 

Misery was still scary though I think the Annie character has been recycled in multiple King novels (Rose Madder comes to mind).

 

I also read for the first time Dean Koontz's The Bad Place (another spooky read). Perhaps I've become jaded by the horror/thriller genre, but it was okay. I found the rapture book Koontz wrote a few years ago far more creepy.

 

I tried to read Poppy Brite's Lost Souls, but it's extremely repetitive: vampire scene, s*x scene, vampire partying, s*x scene, vampire attack, etc. I could see it "speaking" to a hormonal teenager filed with angst and misunderstanding, but I doubt I'll read anymore from this author.

 

No nightmares yet, so perhaps I'll try a few more top 100 horror books.

[JennW in SoCal]

Don't mind me.  Just posting so the thread appears in "My Content".

 

Carry on with the conversation and I'll catch up later, though y'all are very loquacious this week. It's only Monday night and there are 81 posts!!

[Stacia]

LostSurprise, :grouphug: :grouphug: .

 

Hope all is well with you (or at least improving).

 

 

[mlbuchina]

I have been following a rabbit trail, courtesy of writer Peter Robinson.  He sends fictional detective Alan Banks off to Tallinn, Estonian, carrying a copy of a novel by a real Estonian (well, Finnish/Estonian) author, Sofi Oksanen.  Despite its dark theme, I think I will add Purge to my list.  The Baltic States have been occupied and influenced by so many outside forces.  I can't say that I know much about Estonian culture.

 

Robinson also mentions the Niguliste Danse Macabre in Tallinn. Just in time for your Halloween/Day of the Dead festivities?

 

 

 

Now I don't do horror but I love medieval Danse Macabre or Totentanz paintings. Is it any surprise that I fell in love with comic artist Dylan Meconis' modern update?

 

Well, it isn't medieval, but it is Danse Macabre.   :D

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8gJw5sAqw

[Negin]

I need a South American author to complete my author-from-every-continent challenge. Any suggestions?

Heather, Isabel Allende - her first book, House of Spirits is one of my all-time favorites, although I love them all. 

[mumto2]

I finished "W is for Wasted" by Sue Grafton. It is the latest in the Kinsey Millhone series and quite a good addition to it.

 

I couldn't resist starting "The Quick Bite" the first of he Lyndsay Sands vampire series that I discovered yesterday. So far it is of the fun/light/romatic catagory for vampire fiction. Pretty much just what I needed! :lol:

 

Eliana, Thank you for the "Sunshine" recommendation. The library has it and it is hopefully on its way!

 

LostSurprise, I hope all is well! :grouphug:

[Jane in NC]

Jane & Eliana, you may want to check out a series that Dalkey Archive Press published -- the Eastern European Literature Series. I think it's a series they did in the past (don't see a link on their current website, but maybe I'm just missing it). Last year, I read the book Chinese Letter by Serbian author Svetislav Basara from that series.

Several of the books in the Dalkey Archive Press originally were published in Penguin's Writers from the Other Europe. I have not looked closely to see if they are the same translations.

 

Glad to see that these authors and titles are staying in print in English.

[Just Robyn]

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut: dd#2 read this the other week, and pressed it upon me.  I was a little reluctant, I haven't read Vonnegut's novels since I was about her age, and never this one, and I remembered them as so discouraging and depressing.  Although this is quite dystopian, I did not find it depressing - in fact, I enjoyed it very much, and find myself sorting through thoughts and reactions... and coming back again and again to the scene with the literal player piano, relatively early in the novel, that manages to crystallize the poignancy of the overall situation.  This deserves more notice than I have seen it get....

 

Love this quote from the Wikipedia page for that novel:

 

In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."

[Onceuponatime]

 

2) Sunshine by Robin McKinley;  I bought this new the day it came out in stores.  It was two firsts at once.  I'd never bought a full-price new book before, and I had never even looked at the shelves in the horror section of a store before.  This has some moments that are on the edge of my comfort zone, but my horror comfort zone is really non-existent... I am irrationally fond of this book.  It is just about perfect, and its grim world is perfectly realized, and has a glimmer of gold-sparkled rays of hope and belief in even the darkest corners.  Unfortunately the descriptions I'm seeing are rife with spoilers...

 

 

 

Since you are a horror wimp but liked this book, I will try it. I've been tiptoeing around the horror genre trying to find things not too horrible but just spooky enough to qualify. It is now on hold.

[LostSurprise]

Heather, Isabel Allende - her first book, House of Spirits is one of my all-time favorites, although I love them all. 

 

 

I really like The Stories of Eva Luna (even more than the mother novel Eva Luna) by Allende. 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much. 

[Tress]

Thank you! I can now access the videos! (That's a relief, I thought I was doing something wrong.)

 

So we are going to read *all* Grimm's fairy tales? I had assumed we would only read a selection.

 

I did follow the link, but it took me to a site where you had to pay to download the book. And since I already own a perfectly fine Dutch translation, I have been reading aloud from it for years, I'm not so interested in an English translation of a German book :). For the other books, Dracula etc, I did order English copies. I hope they will arrive in time.

 

Quoting myself :)

 

This Course set up is messing with my head :D. First the trouble with the videos, now the linked books. I am *certain* that at first the links were *all* to a site where you needed to pay to download the books. Now, I only see free downloads. Hmmmmm.

 

I just downloaded the Grimm's Fairy Tales, 300+ pages. Riiiiight. I'm really familiar with the fairy tales, but on the other hand if we are going to do much analysis like on the unit 0 video (food / generations and s&x / Genesis, the Fall....in an Aesop's Fable ...seriously that's the kind of analysis where all us engineering types are starting to despair :blink: ) I might need to read it much more closely.

[Tress]

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much. 

 

:grouphug: :grouphug:

[Paisley Hedgehog]

. 

 

[ErinE]

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much.

:Hugs:

[Kareni]

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week.

 

Sending positive thoughts your way.

 

Regards,

Kareni

[Mom-ninja.]

LostSurprise, I hope things are now on the getting better side.

 

 

 

 

Oh, yes we wondered. The animals were astounding. The amount of things they got off the ship was pretty spectacular (and convenient) too. No one ever got sick, either.

I was surprised by the end; who stayed and who left.

But the enterprise, ingenuity, hard work, family loyalty, and trust in Providence were great for our kiddos to hear.

My boys liked the building stuff in the book but that was it. They were horrified that the family basically went around killing any animal they wanted, where they wanted, when they wanted, for their own personal desires. We had a great discussion about differing attitudes regarding animals and humans.

[aggieamy]

. I was also wondering if The Woman in White would qualify as a scary read - looks like it might by the description.

 

This was one of my favorite books of 2010.  It wasn't scary but highly suspenseful and a little spooky with some of the things that happened.  I can't recommend it enough.

 

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much. 

 

((HUGS))

 

 

DH and I woke to a horrible surprise the other morning.  My hard drive on my computer just failed. Done.  It is also my work computer.  Ugh.  We have a backup but it's from May.  (WARNING - If you haven't backed up your computers recently - GO DO IT NOW!)  So after a few days of rebuilding my computer and getting as much working as possible I'm back ... but without about four months of my life.  We're sending our hard drive off to California to see if someone can extract the data from it.  *sigh* 

 

Until then I don't have my old lists to post so I'll just update what I've got going on right now.

 

Finished Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers.  I'm so glad I continued this series like you guys suggested.  I love these books.  ****

 

Working on:

 

You've Got a Book in You by Elizabeth Sims

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy

[Onceuponatime]

Currently abandoning Galileo's daughter because it has become redundant after reading about Newton and Copernicus. Plus, it seems to be more about Galileo than his daughter and I've been down that road before. Besides, Spook is much more diverting.

[Tress]

Pffst! How he got Snake tail + cave opening = Sex from an Aesop fable made me :rofl: .

 

Don't despair! Some literary analysis is meaningful and insightful, some is a reach but ultimately believable, some is total carp. ;) (this is from someone with a degree in English literature fwiw)

Thank you! It's good to read that you were laughing too at that analysis. Seriously, if you ask a group of engineering types what they don't like about lit analysis....this would be it ;).

 

Let's hope we will get lots of meaningful and insightful analysis :).

[Robin M]

Oy! My brain simple can't handle The Historian right now so switching to something light and fluffy - Robyn Carr's The Hero in her Thunder Point series.  Hubby really tortured me Sunday night flipping between Forrest Gump and Bar Rescue while I was trying to read The Historian. I didn't retain much of the story.  :lol:  We are going to be audited in a couple weeks because, get this, our small business did too well for 2011 versus other small businesses.  So I'm going through all and making sure everything adds up to the gnats ass for the auditor, organizing all our paperwork,  since we operate on a cash basis versus an accrual basis. So my mind is full of numbers and James is sick and I'm fighting getting his cold.  As my technician would say - it's a whine and cheese day.

[Robin M]

 

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much. 

 Hugs and good thoughts winging your way!

 

 

 

DH and I woke to a horrible surprise the other morning.  My hard drive on my computer just failed. Done.  It is also my work computer.  Ugh.  We have a backup but it's from May.  (WARNING - If you haven't backed up your computers recently - GO DO IT NOW!)  So after a few days of rebuilding my computer and getting as much working as possible I'm back ... but without about four months of my life.  We're sending our hard drive off to California to see if someone can extract the data from it.  *sigh* 

 

Until then I don't have my old lists to post so I'll just update what I've got going on right now.

 

Oh no! That happened to us a couple years back and hadn't backedup in a while so know what you are going through.   Yes, Back Up your files folks - at least once a week.

[Stacia]

What an interesting pairing! 

 

I have some other Vonnegut books on hold at the library - not the two that I remember as so grim (no Slaughterhouse Five or Cat's Cradle for me right now!), but I want to revisit some of his other works, and try some new ones, now that I am not quite so young. 

 

I need to go back through The Curtain and make some lists!  What entranced me most is the connections amongst various works - and tracing of influences and derivations that I had not considered or been aware of. 

 

...a side fascination is the feeling of connection between... well, I now no longer know what to call it.  Eastern Europe is the absurd over-simplification I was using before I read this.  Anyway, that region and Latin America.  A connection reinforced by the Neruda prose I've been ambling through. 

 

...and then the intersections, that shouldn't have surprised me, between this and Madeline Albright's Prague Winter - of course the shadow of the 1930's and '40s looms large.

 

And I'm thinking about how much I have missed.  No, more than that, how much we all have missed.  How much world literature has missed by the narrowness of our "Great Books" lists... and I wish I could find the page where Kundera comments that if Kavka hadn't written in German, he wouldn't be so well known now. 

 

Is there such a thing as a history of this-part-of-Europe's literatures?  I am craving a *framework*... I at least had some sense of where to start and how some of the pieces fit together with Latin America, though a framework would have been nice there too.  (Something akin to my beloved Adventures in English Literature... a very rudimentary introduction with some historical context.  (Unfortunately their World Lit is wildly inadequate.  It semi-covers Western Europe, Russia, and Classical Greece & Rome, & has cursory sections for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, Persian, & Hebrew (mostly "old testament" selections), I think it might have the Epic of Gilgamesh and , perhaps an Egyptian hymn or two,)

 

I'm finding all the comments on Vonnegut fascinating. I never read him in high school; I've read him only during my adult life. I love (most of) his work & that he is a (the?) master of succint, ironic understatement. He has profound observations, delivered with razor-sharp satire. Because he tackles the deepest of subjects with almost carefree ease, I find him more refreshing than bleak/depressing for most of his topics.

 

I, too, would love to have a better framework for literature traditions (many) of which I have little to no background. Let me know if you find a great source, please!

 

Regarding the bold:  In The Curtain, Kundera makes the case for the Middle European literature missing from the mainstream canon.  Prior to reading this book, I would have referred to this literature as "Eastern European".  Kundera's case for Middle Europe makes sense.  What we in the "West" call the "East" was a 20th century political division--not a cultural one.

 

That said, I cannot offer a frame work.  I will say again though that the Penguin series on "Writers from the Other Europe" (introduced by  Philip Roth) led me to Kundera as well as a number of other interesting writers.  Did you see the link that Stacia gave last week to the publisher Archipelago?  I am quite thrilled to have ordered two books by the Polish author WiesÅ‚aw MyÅ›liwski.  Frame work is one thing.  Availability of titles in translation is another!

 

Yes, indeed. Not just framework, but translation. And, I have to wonder with the scarcity of translations, how good are the ones that are available? Hopefully we're getting a real feel for the authors & the messages, at least most of the time.

 

Yup, high school is when I too read Vonnegut.  But I think I should give him another look--maybe his essays.

 

I need to check out some of his essays too.

 

I do the over-saturation thing too.  I get so caught up in a topic, and so excited about the dozens of titles I've found... but I fizzle out before I get through even half of them!  I need to start keeping lists of the books I abandon b/c of over-saturation, ones I would probably love to come back too later...

 

Hawthorne, as I've discovered of Woolf, is an author I can't read in bits and snatches.  I need to give them large blocks of time.  Time for me to enter their atmosphere, to start feeling the rhythm of the prose, the flavor of the world, the heart of the characters. 

 

I decided to track my DD#s more precisely, so it would feel less redundant - the preponderance of 800's would be a little absurd!

 

I was just looking at my 800's today, and finding the coverage patterns interesting.  I have almost all the 820's (non-American English lit) & the 870's (Latin), lots of the 810's (American), a few of each of the others, except the 850's (Italian) where I have nothing at all.  I put them in a little chart - so , reading across one column: 812, 822, 832, 842, 882, 892.  The '90's throw things off, but the others have "2" for drama, so I can see that I've done more drama and poetry than other things, and my only "5" (speeches) is British (825).

 

I'm almost wishing I'd waited until the end of the year to collate those numbers, because I know there's a piece of my mind that will now want to get to work on Italian literature... I'll wait to break out my 900's now!  If I keep tracking these, I can get a nifty snapshot of my reading patterns.

 

Since my library sometimes baffles me with its DD# choices, I was excited to find OCLC's Classify - you can see the most common classification (for the databases it has), as well as the other ways it has been classified.

 

Thanks for the link. I may have to plug some 'numbers' into my list & see what kind of disbursement I have.

 

Yes, it was so discouraging to read about key Latin American poets only to find so few of them translated into English! 

 

I saw the link, and started to head over, but decided browsing a bookstore without a book budget for the moment would be foolish thing to do!  Though I do browse Amazon regularly without breaking budgetary resolves... I guess I could try placing some purchase requests with our library...  and garnering some ideas for my birthday  (my amazing in-laws give Amazon gift certificates for birthdays!)

 

Thank you!  I'll stop wishing for the moon, and just dive in!  (what a dreadfully mixed metaphor!)

I am spoiled.  I've spent most of my adult life reading literatures whose frameworks I'd either studied or intuited before I was 20, most of them before I was 16.  So, when I start on a new area, I want everything all at once, yesterday.  The historical and cultural background, the politics, a smidgen at least of the language(s), a literary history, ties to other literatures/countries/cultures.  This is a challenge I hadn't known I had.  I wouldn't have guessed that I'd find situations where being used to having a so-called comprehensive background would be a serious disadvantage. 

 

I'm humbled by all of this.  By how very much more there is to discover than I had realized.  No.  It isn't that, and that isn't the most humiliating piece.  it is that I have, unintentionally, disparaged these literatures, thinking there wasn't much I would want to discover.  All of these amazing writers and literary cultures that have been not just ignored by me, but their interconnectedness with what I do know has been invisible.  ...and then when these other pieces get brought into the picture, everything shifts, there is more to see in Cervantes (I think I need to reread Don Quixote now), in Fielding, in Kafka,  in Tolstoy, in Flaubert... and those I thought I knew fairly well. 

 

Well, many of the Archipelago books are available through amazon. :laugh:

 

As someone famous probably has said, "The more I learn, the more I know how much I have yet to learn."

 

You gals are making me want to go off on tangets to Eastern Europe & South America (again).....

[Stacia]

I have been following a rabbit trail, courtesy of writer Peter Robinson. He sends fictional detective Alan Banks off to Tallinn, Estonian, carrying a copy of a novel by a real Estonian (well, Finnish/Estonian) author, Sofi Oksanen. Despite its dark theme, I think I will add Purge to my list. The Baltic States have been occupied and influenced by so many outside forces. I can't say that I know much about Estonian culture.

 

Robinson also mentions the Niguliste Danse Macabre in Tallinn. Just in time for your Halloween/Day of the Dead festivities?

 

Very nice. Purge sounds quite good (if harrowing). May have to try it....

I tried to read Poppy Brite's Lost Souls, but it's extremely repetitive: vampire scene, s*x scene, vampire partying, s*x scene, vampire attack, etc. I could see it "speaking" to a hormonal teenager filed with angst and misunderstanding, but I doubt I'll read anymore from this author.

 

No nightmares yet, so perhaps I'll try a few more top 100 horror books.

LOL. Yeah, I agree w/ you -- I like my vampires more 'real' than 'hormonal teenager'.

 

Speaking of that, in The Finno-Ugrian Vampire (my current read), I enjoyed this passage. The main character's grandmother is a vampire (200+ years old) & she is looking around at her grandmother's book collection...

I settled down by the banana crate and began to poke around among the books. It was possibly quite a valuable collection; I'm really no expert. There were a number of first editions but the majority was what one might call trash. The original, 1897 edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, read to shreds: Grandma always laughed herself silly at the idea that this single, not even very professional vampire aroused such unremitting horror. And about the end of the novel she would always remark that that was how 'some lousy band of ghostbusters' had taken her father out of action. So: it happens that thanks to my peculiar background I can read a classic horror story as documentation of my family history. Though, I have to admit this kind of thing is hardly rare.

 

Naturally, there were other standard texts in the collection: Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, the collected poems of Coleridge, including 'Christabel', as well as Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sands Merci' in an anthology; Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles -- all of them character-forming staples of my childhood. But also strewn about were piles of vampire books in Latin, a publication in Gothic type about the horrific wolf-man of Bavaria (illustrated with woodcuts), as well as a number of scholarly treatises on Moldavian, Hungarian, and Bohemian bloodsuckers. On the other hand it was really a shame to have wiped out forests of trees for the countless kilograms of books of terror and horror with scantily-clad, whip-wielding sluttish creatures on their covers. I could not explain the purchase of these in any other way except as the blind passion of the collector, otherwise it was unforgivable to defile with pornographic elements a living tradition so seriously grounded in scholarship.

:lol:

Several of the books in the Dalkey Archive Press originally were published in Penguin's Writers from the Other Europe. I have not looked closely to see if they are the same translations.

 

Glad to see that these authors and titles are staying in print in English.

Hmm. That is neat. I wonder if they are the 'same' ones???

Love this quote from the Wikipedia page for that novel:

 

In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."

We has been on my to-read list for a good while now...

Oy! My brain simple can't handle The Historian right now so switching to something light and fluffy - Robyn Carr's The Hero in her Thunder Point series. Hubby really tortured me Sunday night flipping between Forrest Gump and Bar Rescue while I was trying to read The Historian. I didn't retain much of the story. :lol: We are going to be audited in a couple weeks because, get this, our small business did too well for 2011 versus other small businesses. So I'm going through all and making sure everything adds up to the gnats ass for the auditor, organizing all our paperwork, since we operate on a cash basis versus an accrual basis. So my mind is full of numbers and James is sick and I'm fighting getting his cold. As my technician would say - it's a whine and cheese day.

Ah, sorry to hear of your irritations! No fun. Hope you don't get the cold yourself & hope James feels better quickly. The Historian does take a bit of concentration to get through the historical parts....

 

Aggieamy, sorry to hear about the computer woes. That's never fun either. Yikes.

[Stacia]

Thank you all for your kind thoughts. My youngest has some medical issues and we were in the hospital getting a g-tube last week. The situation gives us some hope for a lot of the frustrations we've had over the last 3 years, but its definitely something you just have to get through and make it out on the other side. Lots of reading blocks because of stress this year, but last week I got a chance to focus and hopefully I can get back into it. Reading gives me a lot of comfort, so its difficult and frustrating to be blocked so much. 

 

:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:  while you all walk through the hospital & healing roads....

 

[SorrelZG]

I finished Dracula last night. On to Frankenstein today ...

[Robin M]

 It makes me wish I had, or were making, the time to write more about what I am reading, to take more notes, to engage more actively... 

 

Welcome to the forums and our little corner of the world,  The wish fairy has just granted your wish.  So? What are you reading right now?

[Robin M]

I finished Dracula last night. On to Frankenstein today ...

Yeah!  I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Frankenstein....

[SorrelZG]

Yeah!  I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Frankenstein....

 

I'm still digesting my thoughts on Dracula. It expanded my mind and has given me much to ponder - not about vampires but about humanity, faith, and the world we inhabit. That's not quite what I was expecting from the book.