Bob McConnaughey's 2009 reading

oops..holding on to Anathem to restart in the new year. Hope to pick up Ghosh's latest sometime soon. And maybe buy another copy of Max Picard's the world of silence as i can't find my copy anywhere.

Do you read much contemporary poetry, bob?

i guess i do - though i kind of read poetry in bits and pieces. There are a few poets (stafford, ammons, swir, nye, fargas) whom i read often - and then there are a lot of others that i read occasionally and usually in anthologies. Ummm..that's not quite right..i usually find out about poets whom i like via anthologies; my favorites include Milosz' A book of luminous things; this same sky ed. by Nye and Robt Hass' wonderful collection of short essays about specific poems that he published in the Washington Post during his stint as poet laureate,Now and Then: The Poet's Choice columns.

My dad read a LOT of poetry read to us kids in the 50s and, in turn, i read a LOT of poetry to our son practically from birth..i know Adam had Kubla Khan memorized by the time he was 3, for good or for ill...as well as most of aa milne. Just looking through what we own..almost all of what I've bought (as opposed to inherited) is contemporary; most of what we read and had read to us as kids were 19th C English romantics. Now..when i read "classic" poets..it's usually the metaphysical poets..or Hopkins.

When i lived on (and near) the UNC campus i'd spend a lot of time in the excellent campus bookstore browsing through collections ..but even living 20 miles away and having to struggle to find parking on / near campus has pretty much ended that enjoyable habit.

Hello Bob,

lovely to meet you here. The story of your son having Kubla Khan memorized by the time he was 3 reminds me of the first parent-teacher interview we had with our daughter's kindergarten teacher (that would make our daughter 4 or 5 at the time). The sweet lady turned to us in great perplexity and said, "Could you please explain to me about this "patient etherised upon a table" and "muttering retreats" which your daughter keeps going on about?"

I knew then we would be forever branded as difficult parents in that school.

:) that's a great story, polutropos! both you and bob obviously have book-nerd children...

and for our sins we have a son w/ an English degree from a small, liberal arts college..

And my daughter, god help me, is finishing her English degree at U. of Toronto and looking towards a Harvard (or perhaps another Ivy League) PhD.

. . . and for my sins (I'm the English major), I have two daughters with science degrees and a son who is a computer engineer. Not even a hint of literature.

And my parents thought I was so brilliant because I could recite "The Nght Before Christmas" from memory at three . . .

Good on your son. I wish I had more students who truly loved literature instead of falling into an English major because it has a low GPA requirement and they can't think of anything else they like.

I read a lot of then-contemporary poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. Not so much now, but I wish I had more time for it. I do like Robert Haas. Also Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Edward Hirsch, and Seamus Heaney among many others.

well..adam started out as a math and music composition person (he went the the NCSchool for science and math his jn/sn yrs of hs) ..decided he wasn't interested in maths other than discrete and combinatorics after his fresh. yr, and then, his last semester @ macalester, switched from music comp to english comp both because he really liked lit and had been writing a lot of poetry over the last couple of years, and because he was exhausted from the performance requirement portion of the music degree and wanted a semester where he didn't have to rehearse constantly. We don't have a clue as to what he'll do next. I do hope he resumes music comp. sometime. I shouldn't bitch..i had to transfer from William and Mary because they had a 10 sem. limit and i'd switched majors so many times that i couldn't graduate..if i wanted to switch again..which i did.

We keep our poetry (and graphic novels & patty keeps her Xwords) in our "nice" upstairs bathroom..conveniently located for reading a few stanzas every now and again.

I heart the kindergarten child flipping out her teacher whilst muttering about "muttering retreats"..Eliot would be proud.

and because he was exhausted from the performance requirement portion of the music degree and wanted a semester where he didn't have to rehearse constantly.
I hear that. On that count it's easier for music comp folks in grad school--performance reqs are generally dropped, though they'll usually encourage you to keep up your chops one way or another. (I found elective half-hour lessons to be a pleasant diversion during my master's program, as opposed to the full-hour lessons with recitals + 2-3 different ensembles in undergrad.) Hope he gets back to it--the Twin Cities is a great place to be a composer.

Good luck with Anathem. In theory, I love Stephenson, but this one puts me off.

Home with a cold, i've been reading Daniel Levitin's The world in six songs - his followup to this is your brain on music. As long as one skims over the repetitive and dubious couple of pages devoted to quasi-evolutionary "theorizing" in each chapter and the other two devoted to historical speculation, the specific examples of songs and musical encoding for specific social/cultural purposes are very interesting.

now half way through nazi literature in the americas; i get some of the points and the irony and some of the in jokes (though i'm sure i miss many more). Kind of heavy handed tho. To make, forinstance, the clique of American SF nazi authors SF writers. The mocking of academic criticism..yada yada..

But i am very wary when the review blurb on the cover goes (in part).

"politics and art are magnetic poles that create a field of stress, laying down an axis of disturbance along which the human protagonist quivers and then goes still." Siddhartha Deb, the Nation. I might have written a bs laden sentence like that for a lit/crit class..but yuck. When metaphor goes wrong. i feel like a negative clique of 1 in re Bolano, but there it is.

Re Bolano: It took me a long time to get though The Savage Detectives. I wanted to stop at many points but other LTers encouraged me to continue, and in the end I really liked it -- to the extent that I've bought 2666. But it was an effort.

the short section towards the end of Nazi Lit, on the "Boca soccer gang" poets, IS LOL funny. Easily my favorite portion. The diabolical plan to defeat the "total football" of the Dutch and German national teams is... diabolical.

Bolano is great--and Nazi literature is good and very imaginative but of all that's come out in translation it's the one I liked the least. In some respect rebeccanyc's struggling with The Savage Detectives is like I'm doing now with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which I've been reading for over a month. With maybe the exception of Tolstoy's War and Peace I don't think I've ever taken so much time with a book though I like it very much. The greatest writers have a distinct voice unique to themselves and I think both Bolano and Wallace have that quality. The thing with Nazi literature though is it seems unlike the rest of his work a little forced. It also feels incomplete or unfinished in some way.

i think your description of "forced" describes why i found Nazi Lit close to being a one trick pony of a book.

wizard of the Crow ? has anyone read this one? i've bought 3 copies - which haven't shown up yet. Two for fellow ex-geographers and one for me - the reviews have it sounding fascinating and at its length i hope i've made a good choice!! (Esp. given that for one friend i was deciding between AR Ammons very short poetry collection, a coast of trees. which i KNOW is fabulous and then this 700+ page E. African epic!

#19: I read it and loved it. One of my best reads from this year. It's long, but I never lost interest. I know from the Lit Snobs group that you like a good plot, and Ngugi handles this aspect quite while, IMHO. It's quite funny, too, and very smart, and I'm quite fond of some of the characters.

In case you didn't notice, I fully endorse this one. ;)

#19, I loved Wizard of the Crow -- it was one of my favorite books of last year. Don't worry if you can't figure out what's going on at first. Ngugi wa Thiong'o introduces all of the characters first, and after a while you begin to see how all the stories fit together. I can also recommend his Petals of Blood which is also satiric, but in a much, much darker way.

thanks folks! I feel a bit relieved, as this was what i ended up choosing w/out even glancing through, for a couple of local reading friends. I did ask a close friend who really is an expert in most things dealing w/ sub-Saharan Africa, and he's convinced that this is Thiong'o' s legit shot at a Nobel.

i have purchased Wizard of the Crow, but it has not yet made it off Mt. TBR.

OK...have to go to work today..but starting 2009 anyway..
First up: the alchemy of stone - i've misplaced my copy of The Wizard of the Crow..though i have the 2 copies i've purchased as gifts...Is it easier to lose books in a small house (ours) or a large house? i dunno.

ooops..found a stack of SF and poetry books over in our general store this afternoon..so need to enter them this evening.

Starting off the new year w/ the VanderMeers anthology, the new weird. I should have waited to finish the alchemy of stone so i'd have started off w/ an sure winner, rather than this VERY mixed bag of oddities.

Aren't anthologies always a mixed bag? Every time I buy a fantasy/interstitial/slipstream/whatever, I swear I will never purchase another. Usually, I really like a a quarter to a third of the stories - enough to keep the book sitting on my bookshelf for a while longer, but not enough to justify buying the book in the first place. This year, I'm swearing off all anthologies. I mean it!

>26 bobmcconnaughey:, 27 I have read far less anthologies than single author short fiction collections, but I find it pretty much the same for them, although perhaps I end up liking a greater percentage than you do, Mary. Bob, we have the New Weird anthology also, though neither one of us has dipped into yet (Michael believes he has read some of the stories in other anthologies, collections or magazines).

I should probably keep to single author collections. But w/ mixed collections there's some chance that i'll come across someone new that i'll like. And there ARE some v. good stories in the New Weird - and yup, i'm sure you've run across some of them before! But really liking

#s 27, 29: I'm quite keen on anthologies and literary magazines, especially those covering genres I like, because there's always that chance of finding one or two authors whose work really appeals, and who can then be explored in more depth. urania1, I see you have Interfictions in your library - have you got around to reading that yet?

>30 timjones: timjones: Thanks for reminding me that I have Interfictions. I was getting ready to post with great authority, went to the fantasy/interstitial section of my library, and discovered that I had not yet read a single story in the book. It has been a while since I've dipped into that genre. Perhaps I need to take a break. Sorry for hijacking your thread bob.

c'est la guerre. no problem - haven't read much so far this year anyway.

I've found anthologies--single or multi authors--a good way to decide if I want to read more of a writer/genre--or a way to dip into lit I feel I should know about but am not that interested in investing a lot of time in.

I bought one of Philip K. Dick's anthologies last year. They're dated, but psychologically interesting. I'm not going to be a fan, but I can pick up the book at random and enjoy one or two stories.

Only drawback is that I ordered it through Amazon, and now I am besieged with recommendations for Heinlein books. Gag-o-rama.

We have Interfictions also, so we'll be watching and listening.

haven't finished anything new; in the midst of:
White Apples - Jonathan Carroll;
the last 1/3 of the new weird;
and an oddity my sister gave me, novels in three lines.

Novels in Three Lines is one of the most peculiar and oddly engrossing book that's come my way in a while. My sister who's a Associated Press reporter gave this to me, appropriately enough, since the book contains brief fillers that Feneon slipped into the Paris newspaper Le Matin over the course of 1906. I had thought that a slight volume like this would go by very quickly; instead I find myself stopping often two or three times a page to regard what I've just read.

The motor age was upon France:"an automobile belonging to M.Olier-Larouse killed old M. Julliard, who was strolling in Charolles."

Disease took its toll: "a dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake." "On the bowling lawn of a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

Crimes of passion were all the rage: "Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hat pin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Château, who had underestimated her."

Ecclesiastical events, military and nautical accidents, repeated thefts of telegraph wire, striking workers, and death in forms both banal and strange all get their brief and elegant do.

Finished Johanthan Carroll's White Apples last night. While the story of death, life, redemption (personal and universal) through modern love is limpidly written, easy and enjoyable to read, i kept thinking that I'd read it before. And then it just hit me just now; (unintentionally i'm sure) the whole novel felt ripped/riffed from Gaiman's Sandman sequence. Back to work.

Just finished my favorite book of the year so far (three books in): Kelly Link's collection of short stories Pretty Monsters. Understated and unobtrusively written fantastic and fantasy stories; some set in totally imaginary locales, others set in mundane locations such as near Hatteras North Carolina. I happen to much prefer Kelly Link's approach to fantasy much more than say Jonathan Carroll's which insists on drawing attention to itself constantly.

Nine stories, two of which I'd read before, and eight of which I liked a great deal.

This is a mother and high school senior daughter , from a short story Called Pretty Monsters:

"I can do what I want to!" Said Clementine.

"Not in my house, you can't", her mother said. "And not anybody else's house either not unless you want to come after you with a 2 x 4. You are going to finish your senior year, graduate with honors, and go off to to Duke or Chapel Hill or Queens College or, God forbid, UNC Wilmington, and have a good life. Are we clear on that?" (This last is funnier if you know anything about North Carolina schools - UNC-W is a major party school on the beach)

*Mytle Beach is an hour away.
It was a little odd to see Magic For Beginners (the title story of a previous collection) in this set. But i think her previous 2 collections were from her and Grant's Small Beer Press and this was Viking so, presumably Viking cherry picked? I think there's only 1 new story (Pretty Monsters), but i really enjoyed that one.

>38 bobmcconnaughey: I read Pretty Monsters last year (a review copy). I was disappointed. For one, many of the stories had either appeared in her earlier short story collections or in other anthologies. The original pieces were not up to her usual standards. That said, I quite enjoy most of her work.

on to either Voices or Before the Frost; Iceland or Sweden?

I don't think the touchstone has the right Voices. But I've heard good things about Henning Mankell's work. And you don't have to stop reading to watch basketball until tomorrow!

I couldn't find the Indridason book as a touchstone - at the library they had it filed under the "A"s? Anyway, about half way through and am enjoying it very much. The first chapter was, i think, the first time any of the Erlendur books was almost LOL funny. And the tone, in general, seems more wry than bleak, a not unpleasant change!

The New York Times reviewed a new Jonathan Carroll just this past week - can't find the review now, though.

Finished "Voices" - my favorite of the Indridason series so far. The procedural is good, of course. But I really liked the growth and hesitating steps towards family between Erlendur and his daughter, Eva Lind. Probably all go to hell in a handbasket in the final volume..but i hope not..They're both becoming characters whom i both like and WANT to continue their slouching towards each other to be reborn. Being a mystery/procedural and all...spoilers omitted. The hesitating movements towards being "human" on the parts of many of the players, however, is GREATLY appreciated!

eeek..have some genuine "work-work" to do today. may not finish the Mankell; making graphs of exposure to UV and the incidence of rare auto-immune diseases instead. yuck.

I really liked the Mankell too; appreciated the father/daughter interplay in both detective novels.

Feeling peaked yesterday, i picked myself up a bit w/ Martin Millar's rather terrific Suzy, Led Zeppelin and me. He claims there is no resemblance to anyone real in the generic novel disclaimer..but i really hope it's strongly autobiographical. Being a music loving high school geek in Glasgow was, evidently, pretty much the same as being one anywhere else about the same time period. I loved his description (in the present time) of his agony over being required to judge a literary contest and he and his friend Manx working out the scoring algorithm. I hope Cherry really got to meet Led Zep, too.

Thinking about why i like Millar's books so much brought me round to my favorite book of all time, 1066 and all that; Millar writes w/ an eye to consoling the reader. I mean, it's kind of reassuring to know that there were high school pop music geeks/academic nerds in Glasgow who were about as totally clueless about the rest of the social universe as I was in high school in Northern Va. Told in both the past and present as the author relates the life changing event of Led Zep actually coming to Glasgow to play while the teenage protagonist and his best friend keep wondering what it is w/ girls (the beauteous neighbor Suzy in particular, her geeky friend Cherry) and what do they want anyway?

The Dancer and the Thief was last night's book (in translation). Swerves flagrantly between love, lust, broad comedy and tragedy in a story set in Santiago of non-violent convicts released from a Chilean prison (due to overcrowding) in the post pinochet era. Perhaps the reader was jerked around a bit much but the attempt to make one last great score for Chile's most respectable jewel thief for only the "best" of many reasons was surprisingly sweet.

>44 bobmcconnaughey: I haven't seen a 'final' volume in Indridason's series yet:-)

>43 dukedom_enough: Here's the review of the new Jonathan Carroll novel
http://boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/01/09/a_ghost_in_the_machine_of_living_...

The new Carroll looks like a book i'll enjoy; i'll have to see if our library plans to get it. Thanks!

Keeping my hopes up for Eva Lind and her dad!

finished jo walton's farthing as part of a group SF read. Struck me as a well written heir to the classic Brit cozy Xed w/ "V for Vendetta", complete w/ commentary on differences between class behaviors, set in a Europe where GB and Germany had drawn up a separate peace "with honor" and w/ GB treating Jewish citizens much the way the US treats citizens of middle eastern origins. Walton writes well, and the switching POV between the lead detective and the seemingly ditzy, bur really rather astute, daughter of privilege who's married a "Kahn" are nicely done. Looking forward to getting hold of the sequels.

This is more of a follow on the dismissal (in some cases, even by the authors themselves - cf Atwood) of sf/f. "High Fantasy" got killed at it's mid-century modern beginnings - first Peake and then on a larger scale, JRRT set sales and conceptual standards that more or less swept away the hordes of imitations that followed. Mieville might be thought of as an heir of Peake's.

there ARE genres of fantasy that have nothing to do w/ orcs/elves and quests... Robin McKinley has lovely reworkings of classic Grimm's tales; her husband, Peter Dickinson has done amazing stuff w/ Arthurian riffing (Merlin Dreams).

And then there are writers like Lisa Goldstein who is like a calmer, and thusly more surreal, Tim Powers or Patricia McKillip, who writes as well as any modern author, in the creation of her dream king/queendoms Alphabet of Thorn. Admittedly (having just gone to Borders last night) these aren't authors featured prominently in the SF/F shelves..but they ARE out there! And i guess as publishers continue to cut down their lists, writers like the aforementioned will become harder to find. sigh.

reading: v1-5 of Air G. Willow Wilson's vertigo series.
the secret pilgrim - lesser quality Le Carre but still fun.
Kennedy's brain - Mankell on a global conspiracy level as opposed to sticking in Sweden (well, he does have other books w/ African settings too; just that the last ones i read were Wallandar mysteries).

i am an N of 1 who seems to think that Bolano's books are primarily written to show off how smart and well read he is. A good friend w/ whom i swap (physical) copies of books told me i was surely wrong in my negative reaction to his Bolano- Time magazine had praised the savage detectives to the skies and i'd abandoned it mid-way. But then allowing the NYTimes review of nazi literature in the Americas The Sound and the Führer has intrinsic value.

Bob,

Regarding post 51, I love Robin McKinley. I knew she had married Peter Dickinson, but I wasn't aware he also wrote in the genre. I'm unfamiliar with Lisa Goldstein, but I just checked out her website. She looks promising. I must say, I think Patricia McKillop is overrated. She doesn't rise to the level of "literature" for me. A writer, I do really enjoy, who alas has writen far too little is Peter Beagle. Now there's a master storyteller.

#53 - forgot about Peter Beagle; i really like almost all of his stuff. The Innkeeper tales are first rate! I should say all of Beagle's material that i've read, i've liked. But i'm not sure if i've covered it all.

I like to think I'm a Lisa Goldstein fan but I've not kept up. Her first book, The Red Magician won the American Book Award, Mary. She writes now as Isabel Glass. Within the genre, I think she was often overlooked, certainly underappreciated, because her work often falls, like so many others, in some interstitial realm. Of course, not having read The Alchemist's Door and anything under the pseudonym, I may no longer be qualified to say so.

i think Tourists: A Novel is my favorite of all the Goldstein books i've read. Very deadpan which makes the surreal tale of a family getting lost in the bureaucracy and landscape of an imaginary middle eastern country believable.

Bob, do you read Graham Joyce? I'm an even more Joyce fan.

haven't yet - but will now! Just checked and i can get "Dark Sister" from our local library.

Hm, I think you would like his Tooth Fairy more. His books have become progressively more mainstream, with any fantasy elements pushed further into the background. Still, they are all good books, imo, though some better than others. The Tooth Fairy has stayed with me a long time. He seems to be writing YA at the moment.

Enjoyed Mankell's Kennedy's Brain a good deal. Setting the mystery/thriller in Greece, Sweden and Mozambique as the archeologist mother tries to discover the truth about her son's suicide provides a lot of well done local "color." The book IS rather similar to LeCarre's The Constant Gardener - both feature drug companies, exploitive clinical trials, AIDS, African poverty, diplomatic skulduggery. The title is something of a red herring (well, really a metaphor - but this isn't about US political assassination theories)

Regarding Graham Joyce, I quite enjoyed his book The Limits of Enchantment.

Finished Toyko Canceled. While the reader doesn't really learn anything about the 13 story tellers stranded in a Dehli (?)airport, there ARE a number of excellent short, surreal fables tucked among the stories. Set in different global locales (though all iirc are city based), one gets a very dislocated vision of things gone differently not always (but usually) wrong, but always differently. Glancing through various reviews, fews readers agreed on favorite stories: mine happened to be set among a smallpox epidemic in a near future Paris and a in Argentina, following the devotee of early Argentinean cinema. The 6 stories that were good, were v. good, but the others left me meh. That follows the pretty general reaction among readers, though few agreed on the good/bad stories. Worth checking out of a library or buying a remainder copy.

#61, urania1: I agree - I enjoyed The Limits of Enchantment a lot.

>60 bobmcconnaughey: Bob, good to know about the Mankell. He has another set in Africa that I have my sights on.

>61 urania1:, 63 agree on Limits of Enchantment. While I have read nearly all of his books, I think Limits and the Tooth Fairy his best. The latter is a coming-of-age novel with a twist. The young boy/man must tolerate unexpected visitations throughout his young life from a mischievous, slightly malevolent, trickster. I see Joyce has a new YA book out, but I think I'll pass on it. I read his T.W.O.C. which was quite good but geared, of course, for teens (not something I want a steady diet of).

Finished off a fair bit of quick/light books:
1. milk, sulphate and alby starvation - amusing mashup of lowlife/low scale drug dealing; the evil machinantions of the Brit. "Milk Marketing Council"; high and low rent killers for hire and (i guess) typical everyday life in Brixton. Maybe i read it too late at night - or early in the morning - but my least favorite of Millar's books.

2. Liquid City - fascinating anthology of comics/graphic stories of urban life by authors based in SE Asia (Singapore, Malasia, Thailand, Vietnam). Gorgeously put together. 25 authors and - except for city life being the theme - no other commonality except for region, so there's a huge variation in styles/content/appeal. Some are manga inflected; a few extruded from the Sandman; my favorites are odd vignettes of folks(or creatures) just getting by.

3.Gemma Bovery - witty and tragic followup. British couple moves to French village to escape ex-wife, step kids, London. Younger wife gets bored with inevitable sequelae. Surpisingly moving, thanks LolaWalser for pointing this book out.

4.The autograph man - Jewish blues in London and NYC. Life based on the detritus of fame is 3rd hand, at best, as we follow the quests of a dealer in autographs. But the book is first rate.

5. About to start In an Antique Land - as Amitav Ghosh has been a favorite author of mine ever since i read the Calcutta Chromosome years ago, i have very high hopes for this exploration of ancient India and modern Egypt. I've not been disappointed by any book of Ghosh's - though the glass palace is probably my favorite.

John le Carre's latest A Most Wanted Man. Back to Germany, the setting for some of his classic early novels, le Carre latest comes across as a depressing (albeit exciting and suspenseful) critique of "the war on terror." However the city is Hamburg (home to cells that birthed 9/11). The "most wanted man" of the title could be Issa, a Chechan refugee, heir to a bloodsoaked "new Russia" fortune who may be an innocent naif or an exceptional terrorist actor. Or, "he" could a prominent Imam suspected of funneling a portion of charity monies to terrorists, who, if successfully handled, could be key to forestalling future attacks.

A expat Brit banker whose father dirtied the family firm w/ laundering Russian mafia money and (especially) Annabell Richter, a young German immigration lawyer attempt to guide Issa through the financial/legal maze in which he's caught. Being a leCarre novel the immediate question is what players are going to be hurt - morally and/or physically by the unfolding of events that spiral out of anyone's control.

A Most Wanted Man also serves as a compare/contrast essay in approaches to intelligence gathering. On the one hand a small German team wants to turn create human intel sources; the Americans want to waterboard anyone suspected of being a terrorist. Some reviewers have criticized the book for portraying the American spooks as implausibly "bad;" I found the characterization and behavior of all the characters all too plausible. Very well written and very tense w/ the le Carre(tm) ratcheting sense of impending doom working @ top form.

A Most Wanted Man was one of my favorite books of last year. I hadn't read LeCarre in years, but was inspired by a rave review in the Times book review and the encouragement of the staff of my favorite bookstore. I was very impressed by the all-too-rare combination of depth of characterization with technical knowledge and terrific suspense.

i think i've read all le Carre & i've liked them all - except for the the mission song - the one just prior to a most wanted man - so instead of buying it (as i'd ordinarily do w/ le Carre) i put myself on the library wait list @ the end of November and finally got the book Saturday. I agree - it's a very good book, up w/ his best. And since i sympathize w/ his political POV, i don't have any issues there either. As with much le Carre, it has the potential to be a really good movie, too.

Finished the ministry of fear the other day. One of Greene's self-described early "entertainments" - back when there WAS a qualitative difference between his spy novels and his "literary" works. Not one of his better books - protagonist picks up the cake w/ the secrets baked in @ a war time London fundraiser; romance, murder and mayhem ensue. But still - enjoyable. Made me think of the TV series Lost which we're watching in batches as the Netflix dvds arrive.

I'm a huge fan of Le Carre. A Perfect Spy is a superb book, and one that deserves more serious critical attention. It's more than a genre book, imo. I didn't even know that he had a new book out. I must rush out and get it now.

Have you seen the old BBC series of Smiley's People, with Alec Guiness?

Graham Green and Le Carre, have lots in common, now that I think about it.

Later Greene seems like they were vital for Le Carre to drag "espionage" novels into a wider and muddier moral sphere. I've maintained for 20+ yrs that Greene was the most deserving English language novelist NOT to get a Nobel. But i have opinions pretty much set in stone on some matters.

One of the most certainly, yes, I would agree.

i rather hope you're backing Greene for the Nobel as opposed to the minimally important characteristic of my opinions tending to be fixed.

Of course I'm backing Green for the prize. I just wouldn't say he was the most or the only deserving non-winner. There are others I would include as well, Iris Murdoch, for example, and Lawrence Durrell. I also think Gore Vidal should get it, while he is still with us.

Hey Murr,

Why would you give the Nobel to Gore Vidal. Personally, I am backing Per Olov Enquist, but he's Swedish and will never get it.

Urania,

Gore Vidal is an amazingly versatile genius, and trenchant critic of American imperialism - which rules him out of the running for the Nobel, I guess.

If you haven't read his Narratives of Empire series, you are in for a real treat. And Myra Breckinridge is a work of outstanding originality and genius.

oh dear, I feel a blog post coming on....

oh dear, I feel a blog post coming on....

Uh oh, now you've done it!

I'm not sure who I would favor to win the Nobel Prize. If I had a vote, my shortlist would consist of Ian McEwan, Ha Jin or Salman Rushdie. I like what I've read by Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Mario Vargas Llosa, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kazuo Ishiguro, and about half a dozen others, but I haven't read the majority of their works. I've read most of Haruki Murakami's books, but I can't put him in the same elite status as I would the others.

After thinking it over, my single vote would go to Ha Jin.

Nobel? I'm voting for Assia Djebar to start with. She's already won the Neustadt.

Avaland, I am completely unfamiliar with Assia Djebar. Which books of hers do you like best? Which book(s) would you recommend starting first?

I'd enjoy a group discussion of Nobel favorites; should we start a separate thread?

http://www.librarything.com/topic/559

Sorry to hijack your thread, Bob.

as long as we can include dead favorites..

we (here in P'boro) are so boring--patty and i just spent an enjoyable 2 hours entering ~ 15 musicology/music history and just silly books into LT on a Friday night. for a good time, call 919-542-xxxx

>79 kidzdoc: honestly, kidzdoc, I would start early in her career with Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War with is a fairly straightforward novel of one day in one village during the Algerian War. She was 26 when she wrote it (and it wasn't her first novel either). I still need to read a few others to fill in some gaps and finish So Vast a Prison which I was reading and had to set aside, ironically, for an independent study of African literature:-)

Thanks, avaland. I've just ordered Children of the New World (along with The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review and Metropole) from Amazon.

Rereading a future of ice - hyper realistic poetry from a Japanese Buddhist agricultural extension agent ~ 1920-1930. Though Wallace Stevens never heard of him, i'm sure, one can find similarities pretty easily. Also with one of my favorite modern poets, Laura Fargas with his and her intense interest in observation of nature enchanted, but not betrayed, by their beliefs.

For an enjoyable, short, light fun knocked off The uncommon reader - the Queen accidently enters into a bookmobile thanks to her corgis and not wanting to embarrass anyone checks out a book..Her world changes, much to the dismay of most of the palace staff. But the opening page, in which she queries the French president about his opinion in re Genet was pretty hard to top.

Bob,

The Uncommon Reader is a delightful book to read on one of those terribly bad, no-good days.

Just finished in an antique land last night. Ghosh (one of my favorite writers) has created fascinating mashup of the history of a 12C Jewish merchant in Malabar and his anonymous slave coupled with Ghosh's initiation into anthropological field work in a poor Egyptian village in 1980 and his friendships with the villagers that took him far beyond a dissertation (and back into Egypt just in time for the first Gulf war). The master/slave relationships of the time and place were often, at least, far different from the "European" version; often serving as a way of integrating of foreigner into a family and/or business. Ghosh integrates two travelogues - his own with that of the Arabized(?) Jew, Abraham Ben Yiju, who himself moved in the opposite direction from Egypt to India and who, fortunately, loved to write letters. A good deal of conjecture in re the personal lives of Ben Yiju, Bomma (his slave) and the rest of his extended family; a good deal of history, too.

One constant was the villagers persistent attempts to convert him from the Hinduism, w/ its heathen mysteries, esp. cremation, to Islam. Could be anywhere...convert, marry a nice local girl, and settle down in rural Egypt.

Damn it all Bob,

I love Ghosh, but I haven't read this one. Do you think I'm made of money. My fingers can hardly keep up with my trips to Abes et al.

Hmm...I was going to add In an Antique Land to my Amazon wish list, but Amazon tells me that it is already there.

Bob, have you read AG's latest? I've read so many conflicting views on it, but I would like to hear yours, if you have.

i haven't - i'm pretty sure i'll buy it fairly soon however. Ever since i ran across the Calcutta Chromosome and had my jones for history of medicine/(alternative) epidemiology/ and SF in one well written package, both Patty and i have been major fans. The Glass Palace which i don't even own, is probably my absolute favorite so far.

#86 - re In an Antique Land - what an interesting sounding book. I have The Hungry Tideby Ghosh on my to-buy list, I'll have to keep this one in mind too.

just finished Peter Dickinson & Robin McKinley's collection of water themed short stories water: tales of elemental spirits. All are fantasy, all very well written. However some were far more predictable than others. Probably the two best were the last two: Dickinson's "Kraken" about what the creature from the deep REALLY wants and Mckinley's "Pool in the Desert" set in present day England and mythic Damar. The young protagonist, Hetta, abused psychologically by her father, finds solace and salvation in dreams of a desert realm. One has to not mind having fantasy creatures (mermen/women) feature prominently in order to enjoy these stories, but the best are very moving. I'd imagine the book was conceived as as YA collection.

Actually, Bob, there were supposed to be four collections, one for each element. The problem was, when McKinley addressed fire, she ended up with Sunshine instead of short stories. Which threw the whole thing off. I do enjoy both these authors a great deal.

BTW, Territory just came out in paperback so I picked it up. It'll go in the queue after The Fire Upon the Deep.

ETA correct touchstone for Territory.

finished a reread of vernor vinge's fire upon the deep for the group SF read.

FUtD IS a good, classic large scale SF space opera - too long as there was too much down time as the various groups sought to create alliances to kill all earthlings and their friends; save human lovers everywhere, if possible; save the intelligences that had come to inhere in various levels of the universe no matter what that cost to various societies.

I think Vinge's major achievements are his societal creations: esp. the tines* & the various levels of "machine society" (which is why I found the newsgroup posts interesting (if dated!)).
*tines are a doglike species that exist sentiently only in "group minds" consisting of 3-8 individuals. Living in a analog of European feudalism

I KNOW it's often required in SF for different species to communicate w/ a lingua franca of sorts; but i am always surprised at how easy it seems to be - the universe as one big mall. That's what made the Tines and humans kids, Jefri and Johanna, learning to communicate w/ each other one of the best done bits throughout the book. I liked the plotting and counterplotting w/in the Tines culture as they cope w/ the possibilities inherent in near instant techno-upgrades.

One group member Geneg, related an "aha" moment about the nature of interiority of characters' lives and action and interaction is a v. good one. That is genre fiction avoids self-reflection by its characters. Gene thought it obvious, but i hadn't really thought of the differences between "genre" and "literary" works in that way. As w/ all dichotomies there are going to be many exceptions, but as a general rule it seems awfully sensible - or at least a very good feature to keep in mind while reading anything.

As is all too often the case in SF, a dues ex machina device, in this case "GodShatter" - a transfer of incredibly advanced machine(?) intelligence to a human, saves the day in the nick of endless time.

Worth reading if one enjoys Space Opera.

bobmcconaughey,

I've had a couple of rather geeky questions about aFUtD since I read it back in the 1990s; maybe your recent reading can help.

SPOILER WARNING for A Fire Upon the Deep:

1) Pham Nuwen learns at the end that he really did live the life he remembers, 30,000 or so years earlier. Was that ever much in doubt, during the story? I didn't think so, and was surprised that I apparently was supposed to think so. Is it a major spoiler to say that he's real? If so, discussing this and A Deepness in the Sky together gets very tricky vis-a-vis spoilers.

2) During its last battle, the Aniara fleet is directed by Old One's godshatter to destroy those enemy vessels capable of ramscoop flight, thus in the end safeguarding the Tines' planet for some centuries. But the main goal here is to trigger the device on that planet, and the Aniara fleet really ought to be directed to reduce the likelihood of enemy arrival before that trigger - that tactic would outweigh preserving the planet after its act in the war. Doesn't the safeguarding of the planet's more distant future - delaying the last enemy arrival from years to centuries - accord more with Vinge's need for a happier ending than with making sense in light of what we know about the war?

#1 - i don't think we readers are supposed to be surprised that Pham reincarnation was based on one "person" - but it's a relief to him and Ravna. So i don't think mentioning that is a spoiler at all.

#2 - i'm not sure about the "logic" behind all the battles. I suppose there's something close to, if not, omniscience, behind "godshatter" - which is why i found it a cheesy device, as Vinge deployed it, so both the decision to have the Aniara/commercial fleet destroy the ramscooped ships and then put the remaining ships into slowtime more or less indefinitely (several 1000s of years) approach plotting predestination. Vinge defn. wanted the Tines to get w/ humanity and "uplift" themselves over the next few centuries~!

The Throne of Labdacus - terrific poem about the creation of Oedipus and the poetic voice story in its varied incarnations. Putting a note about no myself about it here, just to try to remember reading logging. Annoyed, just a little, because i was quite sure i owned Supernatural love, her prior book and couldn't find it.

Did not care for a person of interest - Choi's novel of the interior life and moral crimes of a math professor suspected of being the perp in a case very similar to the Unibomber. LT People who wrote reviews loved it so your mileage may far exceed mine.

Really, for a novel of academia, introspection and crime, i far preferred a self-published novel about a retired math prof. from UNM who falls, not quite inadvertently, into a life/spiral of escalating moral and criminal events which he keeps trying to "solve" as on would approach a math problem the golden years of Jess Martin.

I did ask the friend (who got all her degrees from BS to PhD in physics at UNM) who sent it to me what were the injokes - or at least characteristics of UNM that might escape those used to other Uni. settings. (she had referred to such in her gift note from Amazon) Part of her reply:

"So that is perhaps one of the "insider" aspects--the highly fluid ongoing set of UNM student-professor-community relationships that make up Jess Martin's world may seem pretty out there to anyone from a more standard academic background, but they are quite realistically depicted. Aside from the wholesale slaughter.

Though again, guns are so much a part of New Mexican culture that even that aspect isn't entirely far-fetched. Friends from other parts of the US are surprised to hear that in the 18 years I lived in ABQ I saw at least three separate traffic incidents in pleasant middle-class suburban neighborhoods in which guns were pulled, quite casually. Or how many of our (again, middle-class professional) social circle carried. Or that John was asked by a calculus student for an incomplete because, as was rationally explained, the student had to be in Mexico to sort out some issues in his drug-running business. That ended in an "F" a couple of desultory but sinister threats and a change of phone number to unlisted. "

how long to wait before giving up on a book - lost somewhere in your own house?
I've been looking for my old copy of Max Picard's the world of silence in a desultory fashion for ~ 5 yrs. It used to be in a shelf above our bed and some time ago we put all our Tolkien related and some other fantasy books there.
The cheapest copy i've been able to find is $25.00 (although it's not v. old and surely in much better condition than my 20+ yr old paperback).
I didn't get any diff. results from the various book search engines, so i'm giving in.

Maybe there will be a copy of The World of Silence at the Friends of the Library Sale on the 26th- 28th!

I'm going to be there first thing on the 26th.

I'll look for it for you if you won't be able to get there.

Karenmarie also from the Pitt

i doubt it - i've gotten an awful lot of good books there and tried to give them more than i return with. But miracles happen. The best stuff For me, w/a dust allergy) are McIntire's ARCs which sell for $2.00/$1.00 and then stuff 'em in a bag on Saturday since they are always in v. good shape.

But thanks..If you see it - pick it up! I'll probably leave work early Fri to see what's left towards the end of day 2.

well, the quickest way to find your missing copy is to buy a new one! It seems to always work for me. . .

#102 - defn. agree. We can't even find the shelf of books that we took off before Christmas to put up the creche. I think that's at least the 2nd time in the last 15 yrs that's happened. Fortunately (i guess) it's the smallest of a set of built in shelves underneath our stairway. Unfortunately, it's were i generally put new/library books before i start reading them. At least i moved the library books into a different location so i'm not faced w/ major replacement costs!

Just started things fall apart which is pretty inexcusable since i first had it recommended to me by my geography advisor ~ 1974.

Have you ever found Anathem, Bob?

Didn't someone (possibly me to myself to reduce my frustration while searching for a specific title) once say it's not the finding of a book that's important, it's the journey through other books while looking?

Love the quote jargoneer.

#103 - you've lost a shelf of books! That's impressive.

>105 Jargoneer: ditto, love that thought.

Great quote jargoneer.

At the moment it's 3 shelves of books and then a few misplaced volumes (Anathem still amongst them). But now that i've gone ahead ordered one of the missing books for way more than i paid originally - perhaps all 3 boxes will turn up. A total of ~ 8 linear feet of books - these WERE our smallest shelves. Since a couple of shelves worth had disappeared long before LT or other vague organizational schemes showed up, except for a few particular items i don't even really know what i'm missing. Cutting through spiritual materialism is one - more or less ironically. But not physical materialism.

I should engrave that quote in metal. In fact the son of one of my best friends operates the cutting robot in an "art" metal shop and I bet Kyle would do that for me out of scrap!

Just finished Paul Theroux's, the elephanta suite, an odd trio of novellas about American travelers in India. A middle aged, wealthy couple lose themselves in a luxury resort. A dynamic Boston lawyer finds himself in the slums of Mumbai. And, in my favorite story, "The Elephant God" a young college graduate both loses and finds herself and justice by way of the Hindu god, Ganesh. Meditations on the problems of rapid modernization; the preconceptions that tourists who think themselves prepared still hold. And, as much as anything, the workings of fate/karma, although the workings are more implicit than explicit.

I wasn't wild about Theroux's style, which surprised me a bit, as i've admired his writing in previous books i've read. The first two stories were very predictable; the last possesses an O'Henryesque (sic) ending that works very neatly.

Got my reserve copy of My Own Country in yesterday. Started upon waking up ~ 3:am. Not at all disappointed. But i was left wondering why (having just read Theroux on India) Verghese's approach seems far more humane than Theroux's - who seems far more interested in hitting the reader over the head w/ his moral fables of adventures gone right or wrong.

I did ask...I can't put a hold on a book before it's accessioned even though it's been purchased. So i'll just check daily and as soon as it's available put a hold on cutting for stone.

Finished my own country, albeit through tears. Verghese's story isn't JUST about discovering and attempting to cope with AIDS in rural east Tennessee, though that's the scaffolding the narrative is built upon. It's much more about the network of human relationships that get stressed and strained under the attack of something that's seemingly incomprehensible but deadly. Family, communities (and there are a multiplicity of subcommunities that Abe Verghese intersects with in a Johnson Ciity: the medical; the gay communities; the immigrant S. Asian community; the faith communities) none of which are monoliths - he and we come to know them through individuals - not as representatives, but as themselves.

Being a geographer, one of my favorite moments comes near the end, when Verghese, unable to sleep, and having been berated by a hospital CEO about the # of AIDs patients their hospital is treating, thinks about WHY so many of his patients have ended up in Johnson city and constructs a pair of maps that allows him to see the pattern of migration out of rural TN by alienated young closeted gay men into major urban havens (NY, SF, Atlanta) who then, for what ever reason, are drawn back home to place and family when stricken.* And then writes this up and sends it off to Jof Infectious Dis.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2584752?ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2....

But, as mentioned, there's the family toll - his Indian wife feels embraced by the sizable S. Asian community but increasingly distanced from her husband, who, admittedly, has become too personally involved w/ his patients' lives. For better or for worse I'd read his 2nd autobiographical/medical story the tennis partner first and knew the outcome of that lifeline.

Both the tennis partner and my own country are among the very best medical bios/autobiographies i've read. Tracy Kidder's bio of Paul Farmer's Mountains beyond Mountains efforts to bring health care to rural Haiti is the only other book that measures up in both the story and the telling, in this all too often "heroic" genre.

** back ~ 1987 patty and i were talking w/ a good friend/geographer who had, a few years before, begun the transformation of his career from rural development in Africa to AIDs intervention programs. He, too, used a simple map to show the public health authorities in Kenya how AIDs was been transmitted along the major trucking routes which afforded rest stop prostitution and then diffused through the road network into more rural and "tangential" towns as the sex workers themselves moved back to their villages.

Max Picard the world of silence.

The World of Silence is one of my favorite books. Written just after World War II by a Swiss Catholic theologian, the book explores what might be called the phenomenology of silence. Picard starts at the beginning - in the beginning was the word but the word came out of silence. And silence and its virtues have been losing ground ever since. A few of the chapter titles suffice to give a pretty fair idea of the thrust of Picard's pensees: "silence as the origin of speech"; man between silence and speech"; "the ego and silence";"knowledge in science";"love and silence"; "nature and silence"; "the plastic arts and silence"; and my two favorite chapters: "the noise of words", and "the radio."

Picard was well aware of the effective use that the Nazis had made of mass media, and his thoughts are deeply permeated with this recognition.

"radio is a machine producing absolute verbal noise. The content hardly matters any longer; the production of noise is the main concern. It is as though words were being ground down by radio, transformed into an amorphous mass.

There is no silence in radio or true words either, for situation has been created in which silence is no longer missed and words are no longer missed either, in which words are ground down to mere radio noise, in which everything is present at the same time nothing is present.

Radio has occupied the whole space of silence. There is no silence any longer. Even when the radio is turned off the radio noise still seems to go on an audibly. Radio noise is so amorphous that seems to have no beginning and no end; it is limitless. And the type of man formed by the constant influence of this noise is the same: formless, undecided inwardly and externally, with no definite limits and standards.

There is no longer any space in which it is possible to be silence,has all been occupied now in advance. It is as if men were afraid that silence might break out somewhere and destroy the noise the radio. And so all space is filled with noise, it dares not be silent, it's constantly on guard against silence."

>112 bobmcconnaughey: - it's interesting that he was discussing the radio in such terms as early as 1952 - before the plethora of pop music channels really did make the radio 'noise machines'. The advent of television has made the situation worse - it does feel like silence is one of the great fears of modern society.

Interesting review and excerpt. It leaves me wondering whether there really was silence before the radio...also I'm noticing that I have the TV on with basketball in the other room as I type this.

As mentioned in the poetry thread - I enjoyed "one above & one below" by Erin Belieu a good deal. Recently finished the sybil in her grave - an epistolary mystery by Sarah Caudwell. I very much enjoyed the first half of the book, reminded me of the Mortimer/Rumpole sensibility; but the guilty party was obvious and the humor repetitive and I ended up just rushing through to make sure I had guessed correctly. But i would like to try another Caudwell mystery that might be more consistently entertaining throughout.

reading on hiatus during the NCAAs, at least as long as UNC is still in.
Did buy two excellent collections of comix series: 1. Air vol. 1 - letters from lost countries - the first 6 installments of the peculiarly geographic and, yeah, magical realism in comic form, by G. Willow Wilson. 2. FreakAngels by Warren Ellis - a post apocolpytic London featuring the weird kids who brought the end to the world as they knew it.

You know that Freakangels is online? Updates Fridays.

#113
I loathe despise detest abhor abominate hate anathematize, contemn curse deprecate execrate scorn shun spit upon and spurn radio (and TV, but radio more) with a passion, and I am sooooo relieved to find that someone else has articulated just exactly what is so shudderingly awful about it. Thanks Bob, for making me aware of Picard's book.
Here, in the Kingdom of Noise (you have noooooo idea how noisy the Taiwanese are) it will be a solace to me.

Thanks! i'm pretty clueless, so i just go to our local comix store and leaf through and ask the owner, who's pretty knowledgeable. Since he knew i liked Sandman, Fables, Cairo, Air, he thought Freakangels would be a set i'd enjoy and he was right.

Being curious, because of the movie i've not seen, and because i enjoy his books, i also bought Millar's book Wanted which i didn't care for.
But i'll check Freakangels online regularly.

>113 bobmcconnaughey:, I loved the passage you cite.
>118 tomcatMurr: Murr, I agree, but I still listen to NPR. I kinda of have a thing for it, even though it buckled somewhat under pressure by the Republican party, which I do "loathe despise detest abhor abominate hate anathematize, contemn curse deprecate execrate scorn shun spit upon and spurn."

i got REALLY annoyed w/ NPR during the mid 80s when they started being "fair and balanced" by having one of the US generals who had been instrumental in supporting the Contras on the air as a Latin American specialist. And again, at the beginning of the Clinton era when it became obvious on inauguration day that their news readers were incredibly...jealous, maybe? of William Jefferson..How could someone who was clearly (on one level) be little more than PWT* and ooops be a Rhodes scholar and equally clearly smarter than anyone in the news game and..oops president? Danial Schorr was the most egregious offender in his summary, class based, dismissal of Clinton starting from day 1 of his first term.

*PWT = poor white trash ~ trailer trash - coming from the social class Altman made such mean spirited fun of in the movie Nashville. I found that movie offensive on so many levels that that, given Pauline Kael's fawning praise, i pretty much wrote her critical opinion off my mental map forever after.

I have always believed that you can pay attention, fairly seriously to the news 1day/month and really keep up with what's important - this is an area of disagreement w/ Patty who enjoys both morning edition and the afternoon news shows. Though i AM happier now that Bob Edwards is off the air. What i do enjoy are the odder programs: "wait wait don't tell me" and, sometimes, "this american life". I like Robt Reich's commentaries on the marketplace - i wish they were more frequent. And Diane Rehm is as good an interviewer as anyone. We more or less compromise by splitting commute listening to NPR half the time and then listening to course lectures or music the other half. When i'm commuting on my own (patty works 3 days/wk) i've been listening to various lecture series, the odder musics that i like, or sometimes i'll just try to watch the road and count my breaths for the duration. OR if UNC is playing bball i'll listen to the game broadcast.

But it's STILL much harder for me to be still for 10 minutes than to run/swim for an hour.

While i really love Pikard's analysis and, essentially, agree - i have a much harder time w/ tv than radio; on this Patty and i are in complete agreement.

"you know i hate tv/there's gotta be somebody other than me,
who's ready to write it off immediately/ i'm looking for a cynical girl"
Marshall Crenshaw.

I don't watch television. In grade school, middle school, and upper school, I was convinced I was the last child in America without a television in her house. Consequently, for some reason television never really took with me later in life.

#121 - I'm listening to NPR again, but I had a lot of trouble with it for several years after 9/11. I replaced it with Democracy Now! for awhile.

I used to listen to NPR and the Canadian equivalent Radio2 years ago. Stopped. Then recently a friend spoke most highly of NPR and I thought I'd give it a try on my long commute. Listened one morning. And thought "So talky. So inane." And that was that. I listen to my CDs, currently Italian opera. I listen to courses from The Teaching Company. I listen to audiobooks, currently Ovid.

And TV? In the last three months one show on PBS and one on Bravo, a Canadian cultural channel.

And I continue to have a huge TBR pile, ever-growing.

not watching TV puts one in an odd place, socially, at times. For maybe 3 yrs in the late 80s, iirc, we were part of a "community group" in Pittsboro; a small set of counter cult sort of folk into dogoodingness, liberal politics, group "soul searching" - uck, and other M. Scott Peck tripe. a AAA for liberals who wanted to stay liberal..but reach out to the "real" others. whatever. Anyway, every now and again people would start talking TV, iirc Cheers(?) was the biggie then? and there'd be a 90 minute discussion of the latest episode of a show neither of us had seen a single episode.

We ARE watching UNC games in the NCAA - there was one other couple of amongst the 12-15 people in this group who were tar heel bball groupies, Cheers was evidently much hipper than bball.

I am glad to know that I am not the only one who finds no interest in NPR. I have felt alone in this camp for some time now. Now, TV I watch mainly for sports and Family Guy. I suppose I should root for UNC for the rest of the tournament as they beat my beloved LSU. :)

Thanks to the internet, I listen almost exclusively to BBC Radio 4. When I'm stuck in the car without a CD I am always amazed at the poor quality of NPR.

Well, that came out a little harsher than I wanted it to!

not watching TV puts one in an odd place, socially, at times

I have been in that odd place socially all my life. When people around me start talking TV, i just prattle away about Dostoevsky or Auden or whoever I am reading at the time. As far as I'm concerned, it's the TV watchers who are odd and out of the loop, not me.

Glad to read about My Own Country - it's one of my bookclub's choices for this year. I've got it wishlisted on BookMooch, so hope to score.

I listen to NPR quite a bit, but am still peeved that they went all talk and got rid of the morning classical music on our local station WUNC.

Bob - why are you glad Bob Edwards is gone? I really liked him and don't like his replacements (can't for the life of me remember their names) nearly as much. Bland and boring.

Except for some DVDs, NCAA March Madness, and watching the Tennis Grand Slam events, I would be perfectly happy not even owning a TV. But I'm only one of three in the house, and my husband and daughter like TV more than reading (horrors!)

One of my favorite books of all time is Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander.

Golly, only four? I can think of at least a few hundred without even sitting down!

Today, day2 of the P'boro library booksale was MUCH saner than the madhouse w/ the Kiwanis building crammed w/ dealers scanning the tables and tossing books hither and thither (?).
Picked up some defn. promising books - tho i never heard of half the authors:
1.Montgomery, Alabama, Money, Mississippi, and Other Places Eve Merriam - collection of polemical civil rights poetry from 1956. Esp. relevant this week as John Hope Franklin just died.
2.the restraint of beasts - Magnus Mills - ooops 2 copies, anyone want one?
3. due preparations for the plague - Janette Hospital
4. bangkok 8 - nicer copy of a very nifty mystery set in Thailand.
5. the book of Irish weirdness - why not?
6. if you can't say something nice by one of my favorite humorists, Calvin Trillin.
7. from beowulf to virginia woolf - literary spoof (i think)
8. Oaxaca journal Oliver Sacks does Mexico
9. fault lines nancy huston
10. the lost glass plates of wilfred eng
11. mister touch Malcolm Bosse

and then for my sister in law/geologist who's coming w/ her younger daughter to check out a couple more schools - romance of geology - the only book that cost more than $1.00.

Bob, good bunch. I'm slightly jealous of your sister-in-law. The Cavlin Trillin sounds really nice. The Friends of Houston Public Library has their sale in three weeks. I'm already ridiculously excited.

>131 bobmcconnaughey: I loved Bangkok 8, have you read it? I didn't keep up with the series beyond book 2, but one was terrific. I've not heard of that Malcolm Bosse but I enjoyed his The Warlord and the sequel back in the 80s (?)

yeah, i'd read Bangkok 8 a few years ago and loved it. As we hadn't inventoried our mystery section, for the life of me i couldn't remember if i still had my original copy. The 2nd wasn't nearly as good - though maybe i'll see if the library can get the 3rd one in. As a friend just sent 5 s/f - regional SW books to me last week - i'm pretty well stocked for the nonce!

eek - i take a couple of days off to hang w/ visiting family and then UNC bball i find myself w/ dozens of posts i want to read.
Almost finished w/ child of a rainless year - one of the odd fantasies set in New Mexico that Mary sent me. A quiet book, about quiet ghosts and the power of family history, ley lines & color but i've found it .. soothing (i mean that in a good way). There's a quiet romance as well between the middle aged art teacher who inherited the peculiar family home and the long time caretaker.

There are some good arguments *against" the eliminiation of television, though:

1) Cricket
2) More cricket
3) Battlestar Galactica (modern version)

i have a similar lifelong draw to sports. One of my favorite memories is watching my first Olympics, Rome 1960, on our little 13" b&w tv and watching the swimming (a judges' decision really did screw American Lance Larson out of gold in the 100 m free, giving it to Aussie John Devitt (sic); Bikila (sp) running Rome barefoot in the marathon. When i was growing up PBS would broadcast Wimbledon and the wide world of sports showed major US swimming championships. World cup, Olympics (however commercialized) and UNC college bball are my downfalls. Since i haven't been able to play tennis for 15+yrs, i haven't watched it w/ avidity i once did.

One odd and rather pleasant trait both patty and i have picked up after many years of watching and then (mostly) listening to UNC bball on the radio as cable has sucked games off of free tv, is that UNC has had the same play by play announcer for 30+ yrs. He's both v. good AND (esp. as we've listened to Woody call games even when they're on TV) we can very easily visualize what's going on via listening to the broadcast. The few times i've tried to listen to games via an opposing school's announcer, i haven't been able to visualize it at all.

There are a few TV series that we've watched - but always on DVD long after the fact (Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, X-files). May have to rent Galactica.

But, all in all, i believe the world would probably be better off w/out TV and, perhaps radio as well. But since i like music/movies i doubt i could have technology that permits access to what i like and not have allied technologies. So..books/reading uber alles.

Music playing is weird - i'm easily the least talented of my sibs in re music - but since my sister played clarinet and my brother trumpet..and i played piano, i'm the only one who still plays for pleasure (my own!). My sister does sing in the NOrleans concert chorus, but my brother, who was the best of us thru high school hasn't touched his trumpet since ?? He fantasized about conservatory after med school - but that stayed a fantasy (not that he wasn't good enough). I played in bar bands and w/ friends. But before radio, in particular, took over - the big money in music was in sheet music publishing in the last half of the 19th, early 20th C - w/ piano playing being family entertainment. Of course Thomas Hardy deplored the advent of the harmonium and the demise of the local church orchestras in the mid 19th C so techno grumps are a given. Damn kids don't have to memorize anything any more what w/ that new fangled reading/writing providing easy access to our culture's classics w/out the "effort" it deserves. If scops had had a union, they'd doubtless have banned the book to save the bard.

I think people are being a little unfair to both radio and television here. I admit that the majority of things broadcast are garbage but then so are the majority of books published - it's finding the good stuff that can be a chore.

Television in the last decade has produced excellent shows like The West Wing, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayers, Cranford, The Office, etc; not to mention the sport, and decent documentaries.

I don't know much about NPR but BBC radio broadcasts lots of drama, original and adaptations, comedies, documentary series (there is an interesting one at present called Lost Voices about poets who have just disappeared off the literary, and sometimes physical, map). ABC in Australia has an excellent daily book show, a weekly philosophy show, etc. It's not all barren out there.

>135 timjones:: I've never seen a cricket match...TV or otherwise...so can't comment. However, I'd agree with you in principle because of lacrosse.

What did you think of the ending of Battlestar Galactica? I thought they did a rather good job of tying it all up, though I still think they haven't fully explained the origins of the Final Five nor Earth 1.

#138: I'm watching BSG on terrestrial TV here in New Zealand, so I am still part-way through Season 4. Once that's finished, I plan to take a journey from start to end of the series via DVD.

#137
The devil needs no advocate.
I agree, the West Wing and some other serial shows are great (The Golden Girls, anyone?) but sport, and documentaries? O puhlease.

Finished Nadeem Aslam's the wasted vigil over the last two evenings and am somewhat at a loss as to how to describe it fairly. First: i liked everything about the book: the gently sinister tone of loving/kindness hope and pervasive loss; The opening sentence "Her mind was a haunted house;" the complexity of relations interpersonal / international/ faith and unbelief; and the unremitting sense that "nobody's right when everybody's wrong." Even if some end up doing wrong inadvertently and only within the context of the book's setting.

An elderly English widower MD/perfumer lives in a once artistically graced home celebrating Allah and his works (albeit ironically). The Taliban have cutoff one of his hands and murdered his Afgani MD wife whose religion he adopted, with more faith than his wife, when they married decades earlier. During the Russian debacle his daughter Zameen was taken to a Russian prison camp. She may have escaped, she may have had a child. In the interim 9/11 happened.

His villa/hospital/hospice is not unknown. Over a few days strangers and old friends appear and reappear. Lara, a Russian widow, searching for evidence of her conscripted son's fate; David - a long term Afghani hand - an American gem dealer and former(?) CIA operative; Dumia - a young woman who's had the temerity to attempt to restart an elementary school; Christopher - US special forces dropped into the region to fk with "the bad guys" and, as interestingly as any, more so than most, Casa - a young, injured Jihadi who, for the first time comes into contact with (some) people who share some of his beliefs but, confusingly, can't take them to the same conclusions he's learnt in the Madrassa and Jihadist camps.

Marcus (the MD) seeks refuge in protecting art - both his wife's and a great head of the Buddha which was discovered in the building of the small perfume factory; and in providing , what he hopes, is a true safe house.

This is a story about faith, ideology and action; but far more it's a story about love and it's inadvertent failures and betrayals. I don't know the author's religion, though growing up in Pakistan he was immersed in Islam, but I'm very much reminded of Graham Greene's later "spy" novels where the Catholic faith of the protagonists is every bit as important as the actions that might be made into a movie. More than anything else it makes me want to read his earlier books.

Odd lines,ie "Duke Ellington played in Kabul in 1963" placed w/out fanfare reinforce the sense of displacement and surreality that post 9/11 and before that, the Taliban and Russian occupation incurred.

those post sherry posts early morning don't flow as easily as wine. Butwtf

"those post sherry posts early morning don't flow as easily as wine" :) But I even enjoyed your review before that reading that line.

I'm looking forward to The Wasted Vigil. Although it had some flaws, I think Maps for Lost Lovers was one of the most beautifully written books I've read in years. His prose is so lovely.

>141 bobmcconnaughey:: The Wasted Vigil is high on my TBR list after FlossieT's glowing reviews a while ago. It's good to know there are more recommending it.

dear me..the LT predictor thought i'd really dislike the wasted vigil - if it was in our own library, rather than a library book, i'd be torn between a 4.5 or a 5. Probably a 5, elegant, gorgeous prose and a rare ability to inhabit each of the characters and make them all understandable. Now on the lookout for Aslam's other novels.

re: television. We've been renting "30 Rock" and find it very, very funny. We got pretty hooked on "Scrubs" during the election season (a more physical kind of funny). We loved the first three seasons of BSG, but was disappointed thereafter (with some exceptions, of course). Tim, I'm sure Dukedom and I would be interested in your opinion on either ours or your thread (sorry, Bob!), at least as far as you have gotten with it.

i've not seen either - but we're defn. open to finding series to rent via Netflix. W/ an hour show lasting ~ 40min, when we find a series we like, we'll often go through 2-3 episodes an evening.

#146: BSG: I missed the mini-series, tried watching episode 1.01, couldn't make head nor tail of it, and didn't start watching regularly until about half-way through Season 2. Episode 4.09 aired here last Friday.

Broadly speaking, I find the political stories fascinating - the idea of the "good guys" as suicide bombers early in Season 3 being the apotheosis of this - and the religious stories (e.g. Baltar's cult) rather less so. Of course, the two often intertwine.

But I greatly admire the quality of the writing and plotting, and the commitment to showing how humans (and Cylons) holding view A are no less, or more, admirable than humans or Cylons holding diametrically opposed view B.

I do wonder about the Cylons' "plan", though - it often seems more like a couple of notes scribbled on the back of an envelope.

>141 bobmcconnaughey:, Bob, your first paragraph: First: i liked everything about the book: the gently sinister tone of loving/kindness hope and pervasive loss; The opening sentence "Her mind was a haunted house.... had me rushing to add this to my wishlist. And its on Kindle! Score!

#149 - well, i'm certainly on the lookout now for Aslam's other books. The best writing qua writing that i've come into for a good while.

Though, w/ budget cuts and all it's taking our local library a v. long time to get books they've already bought, accessioned and on the shelves. I've been keeping my eyes on the status of Cutting for Stone for ~ 2 months now.

I do feel the Lovecraftian pull of the Kindle.....

jeez - no time to waste being sick - i've gotten so far behind on reading threads i'm not sure where to jump back in.
For the record, details later..finished:
the gift of rain - terrific historical novel set in Malaya just before and during wwII. Culture synthesis/clash, family synthesis and clash, friends - the same. A first novel by Tan Twan Eng.
timbuktu - very sweet story/fable by Paul Auster about a burnt out poet/semi-saint and his very intelligent mutt, Mr. Bones.
the other side of silence - Bill Pronzini. OK mystery set in the American desert. Notable to me, mostly for the epigraph by George Eliot at the beginning:

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

Sorry to hear you were under the weather, Bob. Love George Eliot:-)

Bob, I don't know if you read Locus or not, but if you intend on reading the new Mieville, then I suggest you DON'T read Gary K. Wolfe's review which is laden with spoilers. Please take my word for it that he seemed to love it, and used phrases like "ingenious and often brilliant", "one of his most impressive achievements," "the novel turns into something quite unlike Mieville's earlier work, and for that matter quite unlike anything I've seen before at all." Dukedom & I both think the novel is experienced best if you don't know anything further about it than that it is in the form of a police procedural.

being home sick does have its consolations. Finished:
1. restraint of beasts by Magnus Mill. Sortof a rural and inadvertent variation on trainspotting. Quite funny in a droll, workerbee way, as a small team of Scots fencers (farm fencers their trade/fatal accidents their game) led by a naive English kid try to do their job, get to know the local talent, and generally fk up. 3/5

2. The Resurrectionist - Jack O'Connell. Attempts much - gets it all about half right. The Resurrectionist is a very simple story of a dad's quest for love and forgiveness vis a vis his son. But the story is told an a most baroque and gothic format. Sweeney, a pharmacist, has lost his son to a long term coma; his wife has killed herself - guilt/stress. He's told the best treatment possible is in a private clinic in a Lovecraftian small new England town where the best and most innovative approaches to reawakenings are practiced. But then the stories begin: 1. the tale of sweeney in the gothic hospital of hope and horror, working as the clinic pharmacy, and his attempts to understand the bizarre social/behavioral structure within. A "classic" mad? doctor is at the top - seeks to understand the nature of consciousness via his coma patients (lovely daughter doctor - natch) 2: his dealings with a nomadic biker gang whose persistent patriarch and sexy matriarch try to draw him into THEIR incomprehensible life style based on weird drugs and an normal concert of extended family; 3: the comic book world of Limbo in which his son had been heavily invested @ the time of his accident and whose story of a harrowing pilgrimage by a group of outcast circus freaks, again to the castle of the mad Dr. Flies who might, yet, cure them provides the framing story. The writing itself is often excellent and drew me in. But the attempt to conjoin the various stories was sometimes clunky - relied on some heavy/obvious symbolism and lacked the subtlety the novel demanded. All the same, O'Connell attempted a lot, accomplished a fair bit. 3.5/5 and worth reading if one likes gothic fantasies.

3. Due preparations for the Plague - very good contemporary novel by Janette Hospital. A terrorist plane hijacking in 1987 leaves untold amounts of psychic trauma among both the small group of kids who were spared 13 yrs ago and among family members who weren't on the flight. More late. 4.5/5. Up there w/ Le Carre.

just finished a short and very melancholy novel, a partisan's daughter - a novel based on story telling. A younger Yugoslavian woman and an older (40 something) Brit drugs sales rep, tell each other their lives. Takes place ~ a decade before the Balkans fell into chaos. Melancholy doesn't mean depressing - if i was more sure of my HSchool French, perhaps "triste" would be a better word? Delicately and quietly told, a rueful story of understandings and misunderstandings, desires and loss.

Also Mendel's dwarf - a brilliant dwarf geneticist seeks the origin of his deformity and (simultaneously) love, or at least lust, among the librarians. Back and forth in time via a bio of Gregor Mendel. Lots of basic genetics in passing.

Both worth reading, though a partisan's daughter was the more engrossing of the two.

Also began, and tossed aside, the memorist - i think it's a historical thriller - long but after 20 pages, its innate crappiness made it already seem interminable. NEVER even check a book out of the library on which the blurbs compare the novel to the DaVinci Code debacle.

LOL! I love the phrase "innate crappiness", I'll have to remember that for future use.

towards the end of the morning by michael frayn - It's original title "your fleet street novel" sums it up nicely. Very droll story of life and competition in the lower bowels of the London newspaper industry in the late 60s. The portrayal of the advent of the talking heads on TV "serious" issue shows is terrific. (The book was written ~ 1967 so it was defn. dealing w/ current trends that have morphed into god knows what all by now). Frayn had been working for the Manchester Guardian and then The Observer before he'd written Fleet Steet.

I really enjoyed Headlong and Spies, so I may just have to add this to my wishlist of books to read. He doesn't stick to one topic, does he?

finished Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge. Criminal punishment goes virtual as the protagonist finds herself spending 8 yrs in solitary over the course of a few months. Demonstrating how a "commercial" technology intended for entertainment becomes a tool for "justice." The protagonist, a young woman of privilege in a corporate island/state accidently kills hundreds and is tried as a terrorist. The novel is broken into 3 parts: description of life in the small corporate state (kind of an apotheosis of Hong Kong or Singapore) where the heroine is being trained as her county's representative in a new world govt.; then Ren Segura's experience in virtual punishment; and then her release/parole into a foreign country where she tries to put her pieces back together again. She's taken aback when it appears that criminals released from virtual confinement have become part of celebrity culture.

A well plotted and engrossing book; rather better than my synopsis makes it appear - possibly 4/5 stars? I'll think about it. Not unlike some of Bruce Sterling's recent satires of celebrity, Zeitgeist in particular (which i think is Sterling's best book - or at least my favorite).

and just finished the things they carried, Tim O'Briens memories of memories of his service as a grunt in Vietnam. The book is as much about the creation of one's most intimate personal history as it is a memoir about being surrounded/drowned by war. Very, very well done.

then went on to reread In the lake in the woods which is a creepier take on the lingering impact of Vietnam than O'Brien's other books. And now back to going after cacciato which i read a long time ago. In the lake in the woods really is one of the scarier books i've ever read as the lives of the protagonists remain permanently haunted by the buried VNam service history of an up and coming and now defunct political creature.

Probably look for july, july in our library next.

160,161 - I am interested to pick up In the Lake in the Woods now, and would love to hear what you think about July, July. I absolutely loved The Things They Carried - there were so many small things that would get stuck rolling around in my head for days. I read Going After Cacciato in a class about odysseys which was very interesting, but I have been wanting to go back to it on its own.

I'm a big fan of The Things They Carried and was very disappointed with July, July, which I found somewhat formulaic and obvious. But I definitely should read In the Lake of the Woods.

I think both The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods are great books, but found the other of O'Brien's books I've read, July, July and Tomcat in Love, to be mediocre at best.

i'm enjoying the everyday surreal context of Going After Cacciato a good deal, but while i might check out July, July i won't be making an effort to get it and will probably pass totally on tomcat, after both glancing through reviews and noting virtually total agreement here. In Cacciato, the titular character doesn't exactly desert - he lays out and begins to execute a "play" to walk out of the Vietnam war to Paris. The story deals more with the members of the platoon he left who go off, following him, ostensibly to bring him back.

I read an interesting chapter about the history behind In the Lake of the Woods in Novel History by Mark Carnes. I am going to read it immediately (or at least as soon as I've finished the books I'm currently reading)!

#162 Sorry for a slight hijack here, but I HAVE to ask Jane: "A class about odysseys"??? Really? I am impressed. Do you have the reading list still? As someone who has chosen Polutropos as his nom-de-plume, I am obviously keenly interested.

And now back to our regular programming, Bob :-)

167 - I am sure I have the syllabus somewhere in my insane organization of my school materials. Alas, they live at my parent's house so I don't have direct access to them. But from what I remember

The Odyssey
Going After Cacciato
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Cold Mountain
Huckleberry Finn

I think that was the extent of the major reading. There were a couple of short stories and essays as well I think. We also watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? which was an interesting addition.

Addendum: Since you got me thinking about it and through the beauty of the internet I found the current class's website. Not exactly the same as what I took, but interesting none the less. And good to see it has multiple sections now; it was a one class, spring only affair when I was there.

having just finished going after cacciato, to my tastes it's the best of a very good lot.. Vietnam turns into the war found inside the tunnels. chapters more or less alternate - O'Brien will write movingly of humping grunt materiel over hill and dale; the banality of war - the often actions of futile, killing despair and well as individual and platoon actions of hope.

In it's style, going after cacciato is more "modern" than Lake in the Woods/Things they carried" - though no more modern than Alice falling down the rabbit hole or Persephone doomed to 6 months underground. But the platoons real? metaphorical ? The chase of Cacciato's dream of Paris, guided by a young VM refugee is fascinating. The meta-real chapters were, I think, more moving to me than the bitter, bitter uber real chapters' truths which my bandmates, who'd all served in Nam too, would tell from time to time. Hell, i can't classify the book properly. war novel? war fantasy novel? Dreams of war and dreams of peace.

Maybe create a category for books heavily influenced by alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass. The "mundane" chapters - that is those that elegantly/plainly describe days and nights in and around the combat zone(s) and the "fantastic" chapters that describe the dream of a gloriously mundane "peace" are equally fascinating. All are equally grounded in the "land & minds" of the soldiers. But once the platoon has fallen into the warren of VC tunnels, elegantly maintained by an VC LT, equally unenthused about the war, the stories, while still strong with plot/character/ inhere moral/ethical quandaries, and defn. falls off the map - in order to follow the map that leads to Paris.

In college i lucked out..draft lottery#248, high enough that i could pretty much relax. But when i dropped out to join a band, for the first time in my experience, I was the only one who hadn't been in the field in VM - The guys were very matter of fact about what they did... Basically they were totally amoral. NOT immoral- amoral.. One friend lost his thumb; as a skilled machinist the thumb was key to doing his post war job. But he got no disability. So every now and again he'd rob a big box store. Or our bassist whow had the misfortune to get drafted into the marines the one year that happened. What he brought back was total loyalty to friends and if someone screwed him over, he'd chase him from city to city to get his Rickenbacker bass returned - hopefully w/out bloodshed, but if needs be, then needs be.

i'd love to get their opinions on the books.

While we're on the subject of Vietnam-era novels, there's also Robert Stone's remarkable Dog Soldiers. While most of it takes place in the US and involves drugs/drug dealing, it is is deeply connected to Vietnam, the war, and the era.

I would say Dog Soldiers was the most memorable book I read last year. I have forgotten most books I read in the last ten years. (It's that damn Alzheimer's again. What's my name, huh? What was I saying?...) But Dog Soldiers is vividly with me forever.

well, waiting on a couple of orders to show up:
the city & the city and cutting for stone should be showing up from Amazon soon, as our library system has no plans to acquire either. (btw, just found out - though i should've known, that "cutting for stone" was a late add on to the Hippocratic oath. Newly minted MDs promised that they wouldn't go after kidney stones and the like - leave that to the "barbers" - since stone removal almost invariably led to serious infection and often death. Maybe it's in the intro to the novel?).

Also Beggars in Spain and vol 10 of Mike Carey's lucifer: morningstar. Been anticipating "the city.." for a good long while now!

OK...a note on "War" by Todd Komarnicki - finished a couple of weeks back. A spare, terse novel from the POV of an anonymous soldier in an anonymous war in an anonymous city. The narrator enlists as an alternative to jail and finds himself bunked up in an abandoned hotel in w/ a group of nameless compatriots. The book flips back and forth between the narrator's memories of family - a brutal father, protective mother, dead brother and a failed marriage (his ex is one of the few characters who retains a name) and a burnt out present. Literally - the hotel in which his squad is bivouacked is bombed and he sets out on a journey through the metaphorically hellish land (see Dante).

War sounds bleak, and so it is; but it's also surprisingly thoughtful. The blurb on the back compares his writing to Auster - having only read two of Auster's books and the one by Komarnicki (his previous, surely upbeat, book is titled famine ) the comparison seems fair, but my grounds for evaluation are slight. But having just gone through three of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novels, "War" fit in nicely with those books for reading company.

I hope you enjoy Cutting for Stone. It's one of my top reads so far this year.

i can't imagine not liking it. I heard an excellent interview w/ Verghese on the Diane Rhem show; i've thought his previous two medical/personal memoirs were both medically astute and deeply moving personal stories.

Finished on odd,little SFish book, the stone gods by Jeanette Winterson. Multiple post apocalyptic themes in which the current residents both "east" & "west" - on planet Orbus have managed to fk up the mother planet quite thoroughly in the course of the ultimate consumer society; yet a modicum of hope survives.--even if surviving only means the discovery of love before dying. Three linked novellas in one short novel. In the first, the corp. which controls post-everything "euro-sector" makes plans to settle the first human friendly planet found and to hell w/ everyone "left behind." In the second, Billie, a seaman on capt cooks crew gets left behind on Easter Island and leaves a journal of love and despond. In the third the Orbus is REALLY post-apocalyptic as the east/west nuclear war has occurred. All three feature "every-scientist" Billie and one version or another of Spike - the robo-sentiens - self evolving robot, out for self discovery.

There's much to like - the human factor is well done; world building nicely accomplished and (under the strained circumstances, rather believable main characters). I have a major caveat - that doesn't put the book out of the realm of the readable - but could have been avoided. Throughout much of the book Winterson does a fine job of showing and implying via conversation rather than telling; but, esp. in the 3rd section, she goes overboard into well meaning polemical speeches which is both obvious and unneeded as she's demonstrated in the first two novellas that she CAN write movingly, gracefully and subtlety - even in very "non-subtle" satirical settings. It's disconcerting to find beautifully written paragraphs/meditations abutted by talky exposition. I found this one in the YA section...even I wouldn't put it there - defn. an adult book w/ graphic (albeit illustrative, not extensive) scenes of weird sex.
3.5 stars

just started Mieville's noir detective novel, the city & the city as well as Verghese's cutting for stone. The books are different enough that i think i'll settle into reading the Mieville and then get back to Cutting for Stone. So far The city & the city is very different from anything he's done before. His writing style is far more pared down, as befits this noir-ish mystery set in a nonexistent former Soviet bloc country. I like it!

I rated The Stone Gods a half-star lower than you did, and thought I might be a bit generous at that. I was also turned off by the overly didactic dialogue, and overall I just felt that she's one literary author who has no business venturing into SF. Most of the writing was gorgeous, though, which is always the case with Winterson, and she certainly carries off style and structure better than most genre writers. I enjoyed Sexing the Cherry and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit much, much more than The Stone Gods. You might want to check out Sexing the Cherry.

Thanks - i certainly was impressed enough by Winterson's writing to want to try other books of hers. I really liked the first 2 sections (esp. the 2nd) and then the whole thing went downhill.

well. I REALLY liked Mieville's latest the city and the city - prose far more spare than his prior New Crobuzon steampunk fantasies, as befits a novel which draws upon noir urban settings for police procedurals. It MUCH more than an procedural set in a vaguely familiar alternate near history, but i think i'm going to have to reread it after i finish cutting for stone before i can think intelligently about "the cities." But readers who have been put off by Mieville's baroque tendencies might appreciate the very different style that sets off this last novel. The basic commonality between this and his prior novels is that "place" is as much a character as the actors.

Reading Cutting for Stone far more slowly and carefully than i read most non-fiction. Given the vast amount of cross cultural behaviors/information that inform the book and Verghese's style, which is worth attending to, I think this is about the slowest reading pace for me, given that this IS a book I like a great deal. Haven't gotten out of Ethiopia yet; the twined brothers are barely in their teens, and the politics/economics of early cold war NGOs, the mix of Indian, Ethiopian, Italian mores and just an introduction to the Horn of Africa which i'd really only known as a political/geographic entity.* So far the best book of a very good reading year.

*except for stories related by a long time friend who's spent most of his life doing first rural village development and then 20+ yrs of AIDs intervention prgms throughout Africa. Alan was stuck in an rural landing strip in the disputed zone between Eritrea and Ethiopia w/ only his backpack and birding guide waiting for a plane to show up. Suddenly a platoon of soldiers w/ AK47s runs up out of nowhere and Alan figures that's that - he should have listened to Sally and not gone north of Kenya. But then someone notices his bird guide and between Alan's Swahili and the soldier's own pidgin and both their bird call imitations, he ended up getting along famously for the next few hrs in the middle of nowhere.

OK - finally finished Cutting for Stone. While not quite as gracefully written as Verghese's previous non-fiction book the tennis partner, CfStone is, non the less a terrific "modern historical" novel. The stories follow the interlocking lives of two twined Indian brothers, and their family (which extends into the hospital and local community) born in an Ethiopian mission hospital in the 1950s. The novel IS long, filled with detours and details both about medical history and practice as well as Ethiopian history and all the expat communities who've lived there. But the details are generally engrossing, rather than superfluous. As a sequelae of my particular, odd educational background (cultural geography/history of medicine) i knew something both of the history of the Horn of Africa as well as a reasonable amount of the history of medicine and found the details both new and generally fascinating. (There is a nice, relatively short, discussion of source material and references @ the end).

And the family story, too, increasingly sucked me in. In some ways i guess one could say this is a book about karma and family. Every action has its impact/reaction, usually in totally unexpected ways. The narrator flees Ethiopia, in the wake of a Eritrean hijacking in which suspicion falls his way (at the time, post Selassie, Ethiopia was in the grip of the Mengistu dictatorship); he flees and we suffer with him as he winds up in the halls of "Our Lady of Perpetual Succour" - one of the many urban hospitals that have been more or less abandoned to "Foreign Medical Graduates" as a default means for last ditch care for America's urban poor. But as he finds himself immersed in this mashup of multiple cultures in America (his skill in cricket is most imp. to his fellow residents), he's still linked by family/karma/history to Ethiopia and family. I don't usually spend a week reading one book, but i don't begrudge Cutting for Stone a minute of time spent. Very highly recommended - 4 1/2 or 5 stars. Maybe down half a star for minor flaws in style/structure - esp. since i've read Verghese's previous two non-fiction books - but, i'll give that star back because the story and book were so absorbing in all regards.

Sounds fascinating, Bob. Maybe I'll have to find a copy to read this summer.

I thought our library was about to get it, as it kept showing up in its system, but not on the shelves. And then it just disappeared. So I bought the hardback (heavily discounted @ Amazon). No regrets. Also the box of 8 books from Small Beer Press just showed up so i am defn. set for reading for a while!

Started mothers and other monsters late last night, a collection of (so far) rather whimsical and poignant short stories set in various fantastic/fantasy settings.

Bob, I am very interested by the city and the city. I have never read Mieville but the descriptions you are putting up here are very intriguing, I think I will add this to my post exile TBR pile.

Have you read Cities of the Red Night? The Meiville sounds rather in the same vein, would you say?

i haven't read that one - although i suspect that Mieville is quite a bit less transgressive! I think Lois/Avaland and her husband also liked the city and the city a lot but they've limited what they've said to avoid spoilers. With many books spoilers don't matter, but i think i agree that w/ this one you kind of need to sink into the book and figure out what's going on in its own terms. But this one is both a classic mystery and a mystery of time & space.

Actually the book is a lot less weird in its overt format/characterization/plot than Mieville's earlier "new weird" novels. But, really, when i thought about it, TCandTC is "intellectually" (cause i can't think of the right word in my dotage) more adventuresome than his earlier work despite being more low key on the surface. Defn. a noir sensibility - i was reminded more of some movies (LA Confidential, Dead Again by way of Hitchcock than of other books.

i've found it intriguing and heartening that our fairly small county library system (chatham county, NCarolina) has been regularly featuring books by middle eastern authors in the new books shelves recently. Esp. since the # of new books available has decreased w/ the local budget cuts.

Nice to read your positive comments on Cutting for Stone. I read it earlier this year and found it totally absorbing--but I had the same "slow reading" experience that you note.

For the nonce I am going to be using this thread mostly just to keep track of reading before I forget that I've read the books, rather than going into a slight detail about the books. That caveat aside, recent books include:
Mockingbird - a lovely and affectionate story of family, family secrets , voodoo, sibling love and rivalry set in the city which zoning forgot, Houston Texas. The mater familias (sic) has died, and her gift of being ridden by the voodoo gods has passed on to her "good" actuary daughter, Toni. Who would like nothing more than to have magic disappear totally from her life; while passing over her younger sister Candy who would like nothing more than to inherit her mother's burdens and talents. But it's really not so much a story about magic as it is about a family being able to pull themselves together when all of their lives seem to be flying apart when the emotional maternal black hole that has more or less kept everyone in thrall has dissipated. Humor, affection, fairness, love and just plain old good writing permeate this gorgeous short novel. (working hard at trying to dictate rather than to type these brief summaries).

Stalin's ghost By Martin Cruz. Another one of his Moscow detective novels, rich in setting, past, vodka and then new generation of Russian "Mafia." If one has read the other Arkady detective stories and enjoyed them, I suspect this one will be enjoyed too (I liked it). Nice convoluted plot full of betrayals, support from surprising people, a classical musician-harpist/pole dancer/garrotte expert is about par for the course for a typical character. And of course chess.

also gone through a graphic novel binge, Bayou set in the American South in the 1930s (on line here: http://www.zudacomics.com/bayou) dealing with racism, Jim Crow, American folklore, justice, is up there with Satrapi's memoirs of post revolutionary Iran and Sfar's the Rabbi's cat as an exemplar of the appropriation of the "silly" genre for profound art.

next up, Notes from the underground having been convinced by tomcat ( and others) that I really do need to fill a gaping hole in my reading history.

looking forward to your thoughts on that!

sigh>
not much posting for a couple of weeks as i won't be reading for the duration, letting my left eye recover from a detached vitreous. Not serious at all unless it leads to a detached retina. Since i read w/ my left eye and it moves rapidly about the page from about 4-5" away, i'll be taking a hiatus. Actually chatting w/ a opthomologist friend he noted that tv/movies were good since one's eyes were generally focused straight ahead. So catch up on some dvd viewing. But this will be about the longest i've ever gone w/out reading since gods knows when. To bad we don't watch tv. sigh

Don't forget about the possibility of audiobooks!

Bob, how absolutely awful for you.

BUT, the idea above is excellent. In fact, I have a specific recommendation: I am currently listening to Mark Doty reading his own memoir, called Dog Years. It is about dogs and people and life and death and primarily grief and funny and wise and very sad. On Friday I was weeping in the car going through heavy traffic, not recommended. In any case, I think you'd really like it. Doty is a major poet; I think you said you know him. And Dog Years IS available on CD. I have listened to a large number of wonderful books on CD in the last few years, so you may not be stuck just with TV.

yeah..i'm defn. going to see what our library has in the way of audiobooks on CD. Also see if the learning company has a course or two that could occupy my time. We actually don't get TV channels except for free tv - but i did watch an Eddie Izzard performance this evening which put me in good spirits. I also found i could read comix! since i dont have to move my eyes across the page the way i do w/ regular text. Not really a big deal, just a couple of weeks that'll be spent differently from my accustomed manner. The odds of the vitreous detachment leading to retinal detachment are pretty slim so it's just that i'll kill a couple weeks not doing a lot of what i normally do - reading, being an aging jock, etc. minimizing that possibility. Just that i'm easily irritated when knocked out of my regular routine/habits. I easily qualify as one of the world's worst "sick" persons and crappiest Buddhists and am most certainly a creature of habit and custom.

But much thanks indeed!
bob

take care bob. I think you need to get stuck into a really good TV show such as Weeds, The West Wing, or the Sopranos.

On the other hand you have probably already seen all those?

they'd all be new. I think Weeds sounds like one to get from Netflix!

Hi Bob - I've been quietly following along here. I just wanted to wish you well and hope you fully recover. Cheers.

thanks all. The odds are VERY strongly in my favor. At least as long as an airbag doesn't blow up in my face or i really go round the bend and take up cage fighting sometime in the next couple of weeks. Barring really stupid events along those lines i ought to be left w/ not much more than a surfeit of floaters. I just get grumpy when i can't read or exercise.

I think i'm gonna look for an audiobook of notes from the underground so i'll have listened to it before i read it in a few weeks.

Bob, here's to a rapid recovery.

I'll recommend '30 Rock,' a smart, topical, and very funny show that has won a rack of Emmys.

I listen to audiobooks in my travels and during workouts. Right now I'm listening to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, read by Peter Firth. It's wonderful. The first book focuses on Siegfried Sassoon's stay in a mental hospital during World War I; he has been put there as a result of his anti-war statement. It's the hospital or a court martial, and the doctors are claiming that the statement was caused by a 'breakdown' due to battle fatigue.

Here is wishing you well and hoping that you don't take up cage fighting now or ever. 30 Rock is a good TV suggestion...one of the few things I watch other than sports. Thanks for the link to Bayou. I really enjoyed it and may go pick up a hard copy next time I pass by the comic store.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Bob. Who knows a break in the routine may open up some new discoveries.;-}

Good luck on your recuperation, Bob. I was going to suggest catching up on reruns of UNC basketball, but the Heels are so fast, you may suffer more eye trauma watching them run up and down the court! Pitt basketball reruns would be much more therapeutic.

listening to Notes from underground driving back and forth to work to my job as a government contractor... I am obviously going to have to listen to it more than once since themes keep on repeating themselves recursively with slight variations. I hope I'm not totally out to lunch finding a lot of it quite ( intentionally ) humorous? Did later existentialists totally lose their sense of humor?

I am afraid the Tar Heels aren't going to be quite as fast as usual this coming year!

Bob, I'm just stopping in to catch up. I hope your eye recovers as well as possible! Don't read this until you are better!

Glad you liked the Miéville. It was a terrific read, wasn't it? I believe he cites Raymond Chandler as one of his influences for this one. He says he comes up with the city first and works the story around that. Interesting approach but that does fall true with what you said about his cities being as much a character as any of the beings, human or otherwise.

I'm glad you're finding the humour in the Underground Man. Of course it's meant to be funny! Dostoevsky is darkly comic. Like Kafka, as Polutropos will tell you.

And Chekhov, in a rather gentler vein....

Resuming reading books (as opposed to comix).
1. rereading the supper of the lamb Robert Capon.

Good humor, meditations on food and faith, and, oh yeah, some very, very good recipes, or, really, Meals. And yes, there are recipes for lamb - but the first assumes you're having good friends over for dinner as well - "Lamb for 8 times 4".

Wash hands after prep, (author and reader) and now it's time to let him introduce himself and his qualifications.
1. He's an amateur (go back to Latin,) "the world may not need more cookbook, but it needs all the lovers it can get....to look the world back to grace...Or peel an orange. Do it lovingly-in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one ling spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind; but as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.

2. "I like food".

3. "I like drink. W.out any exceptions of time, place or circumstance, man and boy, I have never tasted wine or spirit for which i could not find a kind word or at least an hour's culinary employment." (as much garlick as needed in those instance when the bottle is not to taste)

Anyway, Robt Capon is an Episcopal priest - preparing, dining and fellowship are participating in God's grace inherent in the world. If this up front (but very weill written Christian exegesis on the nature of dining seems likely to offend - do at least flip though the book @ the library or bookstore. The 2 serious cooks I know who loved the book were Jews: my mom and a long time good friend who whenever we can weasel our way over to his home, usually provides Thanksgiving meals that, for which we are most thankful. This isn't "faith based cooking" - you're not hit over the head w/ exhortations to pray; it's cooking grounded in the belief that cooking and eating are yet another of the ways to appreciate the world (whether or not one believes that "god Classic, west variations, created the world.
--
The last king's song - Geoff Ryman. Another of his excellent novels set in Cambodia. Going back and forth in time, the book tells two linked tales. The first is the opening up and progress in working an archeological dig in the post Kymer Rouge era and the discovery of a hitherto unknown text by a (the diggers hope) a famed Buddhist king of the 12th C. And, then, the story/backstory of the king's life.
-------------------

"She is at the brink of never being hurt again
but pauses to say, All of us. Every blade of grass."
from Kuan Yin, Laura Fargas

Be still my beating heart! Another Small Beer Press Fan. I loved Mockingbird.

bob vs Anathem, the sequel. Having given up after 50 pages the first time round.

I've loved almost all the small beer press books i've run across.

reading Khrushchev's cold war today - though taking frequent breaks to rest my left eye which was dilated ~ noon. Also reading Midnight's children which Patty got me for my bday and was worried that i'd buy it for myself before my bday arrived.

Lovers of poetry might be interested in the Seifert poem newly posted on my thread.

2/3 through the age of wonder a fascinating examination of the intersection of the romantic sensibility in literature and science in British culture from the late 18th - early 19th century. Best quote so far: "I shall attack chemistry like a Shark" - ST Coleridge having been inspired by Humphry Davy and nitreous oxide inhalations.
(Jos. Bank's excursion to Tahiti w/ Cook to observe the transit of Venus - the Herschel astronomical sibs - Mungo Park - Davy - the argument over mechanism/vitalism/Shelley , galvanism and Frankenstein )

>212 bobmcconnaughey:, Bob, I feel like I just read a review of this book and thought it sounded quite intriguing, although not my usual fare at all. Looking forward to more thoughts from you on this.

Oh yes, that looks very interesting!!! Do tell us more. Also, Bobee Sahib, are you going to share your thoughts on Midnight's Children?

as soon as i finish Rushdie! I've been reading 4 books in parallel, sort of. I've liked the first third of midnight's childrena great deal.

#212 - echoing fannyprice and Murr, I'd like to hear more of your thoughts, the New York Times having wet my appetite this past Sunday.

Okay - finished the age of wonder while reading through a fit of insomnia early this morning. Richard Holmes' background is that of a literary historian/critic specializing in the romantic poets in particular. His approach works very well in this biographically grounded history of a distinct period in British cultural history. This age celebrated "the heroic" - whatever the field. And many of the major players, whether in science or literature or the battlefield, accepted this role, some far more avidly than others.

Astronomy, chemistry, scientific expedition , and, to a lesser extent, geology and electromagnetism are the featured sciences. The Herschel's astronomical ventures and Lyalls geologic forays into deep space and deep time respectively required educated Britons to rethink their place in the universe. The stories of the great natural history treks both created public heroes and a fascination with the world that seemed stranger than fiction. The British chemists, with Sir Humphrey Davy the lionized public face of British science at the fore, conclusively demonstrated that the "sensible interpretation" of the physical world was wrong. (ie fire was not an element but rather a chemical process). Additionally the chemists proved their social utility by making life safer and more convenient - perhaps the most dramatic example being Davy, with the aid of his assistant Michael Faraday, developing the Davy safety lamp for coal miners, based on his understanding of the principles of combustion, that made an incredibly hazardous occupation significantly safer.

British writers and scientists mixed both socially and "philosophically" - with Davy's friendship with the Lake poets being again the leading example. Holmes discusses the odd phenomenon of poets footnoting their verse with scientific asides - a practice begun by Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, and continued on through Shelley and Queen Mab! Davy wrote verse throughout his life (Southey was his initial poetic mentor) - and there are many examples of his poetry inspired both by nature, science and love.

The book closes with Darwin and the Beagle - signifying both a satisfying end to one era and the beginning of another even more contentious, arguably more productive, era in which science became increasingly more specialized and "professionalized."

The book is very nicely written, drawing heavily upon letters, memoirs and public writings of the protagonists. It is not so much a history of science as it is a history of an age in which science and society melded together more or less successfully, as demonstrated by the intertwined biographies of his main subjects.

(still trying to learn how to "write" via dictation instead of typing)

Sounds absolutely fascinating, thanks for the review!

yes, sounds remarkably interesting. One for the TBR.

what is Davy's poetry like? How does it compare with other Romantic poets, iyo, bob?

I just saw a review of this book, bob, here.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222360/pagenum/all

well - despite the opinions of a couple of rather famous poetic contemporaries, and advice and criticism from some rather eminent Brit poets, i think that as a poet he was a great chemist. (to paraphrase an oft used critique). I AM interested in digging up a copy of his penultimate book, a philosophical update of Walton's the compleat angler to get for my brother in law.

Patty had heard a review on NPR, i hadn't been aware of the book until i got it, and suddenly a host of reviews in major venues appeared!

A nice side effect of the book is that it reminded me that I DO like some of Byron's poetry, despite his life as a total pillpot. And the careful pointing out of references to scientific knowledge of the time in poems that I knew and liked but obviously hadn't caught all the references (eg "the Rime of the Ancient Mariner").

>217 bobmcconnaughey:, Murr, that sounds simply lovely. Thanks for posting your thoughts.

err..i think(?) 217 was me - Murr posted the slate review??

Back to attempting Anathem again. The other night i fell asleep shortly upon restart and then, again, after waking up ~ 2:am. Not altogether fair to NS as I was pretty physically tired as well. I THINK I was enjoying the book a good bit more the 2nd time round, but can't be positive.

About to start on stars in my pockets like grains of sand for the SF group read. Finished off Gene Wolfe's SF short story collection Starwater Strains - which, once again, showed that I just don't get the Wolfe oeuvre. Maybe 3 or 4 of the stories were interesting. A lot were rather precious - esp. when he falls into regional (human or animal) dialect/POV. I DID like "Pulp Cover" and "the Seraph from the Sepulcher" a good deal. Several of the others i'd read in magazines previously, as one would expect.

Thanks to a mention by Lola Walser i've become a big Posy Simmonds fan - picked up Tamara Drewe @ the UNC book store last fri along w/ several other 20% of comix stories, and enjoyed it every bit as much as Gemma Bovery. The Army@War volumes are bitterly hysterical. At the comic's core, lies a sharp attack on the commodification of war - but the way there lies through a very 21st C update of Strangelove via a mashup of classic War and Romance comics that is LOL at places.

Last night i fell asleep shortly upon {Anathem restart and then, again, after waking up ~ 2:am. I STILL THINK I was enjoying the book a good bit more the 2nd time round, but can't be positive.
(this could get pretty recursive)

>223 bobmcconnaughey: Stop trying to take the credit for my hard work, bobee sahib, you bounder!

I still haven't decided whether to give Anthem a try or not. I really liked Diamond Age and snow crash was quite fun, but I just hated every single word of quicksilver than I'm reluctent to spend even just a few minutes on Stephenson again. Which of his previous books is Anthem most like?

well - i'm only 120 pages into Anathem - i like it a LOT better than the Baroque Trilogy - which includes Quicksilver. And it does seem to get better as it goes along. But it is awfully wordy. Seems like after Diamond Age Stephenson was successful enough that no editor was allowed to touch his words. (I also liked Cryptonomicon good deal but the numerous puzzles were worked engagingly, for me, into the over long text. Maybe try a library copy of Anathem. I gave up half way through the Baroque cycle.

I'll second Cryptonomicon, long but fast-paced throughout. I'll strongly third Snow Crash, which I consider a classic of sorts. I'm not familiar with Diamond Age. I think I'll let Quicksilver linger on the book shelf a bit longer. Definitely interested in your take on Anathem.

i think if you liked both Snow Crash and Crypto, you'd like the ingenious (and relatively concise) world building and interesting characters in Diamond Age. I'd certainly go with that before Anathem. Which i continue to read in 30-40 page chunks before i end up asleep. But which still intrigues me. go figure.

Anathem strikes me as a very unusual direction for NS. Both in style and substance it's almost an inverse function applied to snow crash. Where "Snow Crash" rock and rolled through your mind, "Anathem" is smooth and reflective. (Well, so far ~ 300 pages in) Even when the topics (discovery of potentially threatening alien ships; conflict between the producers and consumers of knowledge/science; romance) could be played at a fevered pitch, "Anathem" moves along calmly and discursively. The discursiveness hasn't bugged me, in sharp contrast to the Baroque Cycle novels' intrusively excessive wordiness.

well, it took me a LOT longer than most, i'd guess, to finish "Anathem" - i've had
the book since Christmas, and made a couple of false starts. BUT I am
very glad i persevered - and ended up savoring the book, reading it in
50-75 page chunks. NS is far more concerned with his
characters and makes them complex and interesting in their own right -
not merely as spear bearers for the plots (and there ARE several plot
lines and world lines going on simultaneously). I can't pretend to up
up on cosmology - but fortunately the "many worlds" hypothesis - first
developed by the father of Mark E(verett), leader of the band, Eels,
back in the 50s however complex mathematically, is conceptually easy
to use in SF though i have nil understanding of quantum mechanics!
And basing a SF novel, in large part, on Husserl's phenomenology
worked well too - i even managed to recognize what NS was doing about
half way through.

It all worked because I cared about the characters who are drawn with
affection - with their flaws and virtues wrapped up within their
personalities. Though the themes (first contact; the the uneasy fit
between science and society; proof and "truth" and religion;) are
"big" - and never set aside, the characters come first. I worried
about the young proto-savant/saunt Erasmus's love for the prickly Ala
AND for his ongoing fond, but conflicted, relationship with his
sister, Cord - who lives out in the "world" as opposed to the
cloistered scholarly orders that Erasmus inhabits. Esp. when he
nervously realizes that not only is Cord his loving and bright
sister..but that, gulp, guys find her attractive. When one of his
mates refers to her as "the exquisite Cord" he's forced to see his
sister, who he knows as a skilled machinist, a familiar family member,
as - oops oyeah..sexual being too despite being his sister.

Usually novels that flout the oft invoked rule "show don't tell" flop
- Anathem works because the telling is interesting in itself and the
telling and the POVs are integral to the characters. There IS
action, there IS conflict, there ARE super weapons that can evaporate
a planet; Anathem IS a SF novel. But it is also a talky, academic
sendup - but without the snideness of most conventional academic
satires. Anyway, it took me a long time - but in the end i liked
Anathem a great deal.
- Show quoted text -

Okay,

You've convinced me. Just consulted with Baron von Kindle. The deed is done. Anathem is purchased.

oops - my bad - i didn't intend to add to the Baron's already heavy burden! He does work hard for his living!

Yes. It's a good thing he's hard ;-)

Bob - great review.
Mary - um, glad to see the Baron is can multitask.

You had me at "talky, academic". Anathem goes on the ever growing wishlist.

>235 dchaikin: Isn't multitasking great ;-)

Dog Years read by Mark Doty was a wonderful audiobook!

oddly a good friend who's a prof. physicist completed anathem more or less simultaneously w/ me and she posted the following to an "occasional" reading listserv that's a subset of an on line running club that's been active since....1991.
------------
mary z fuka

I just finished "Anathem" yesterday, sitting in the sun by the Mistaya River at our campsite in the Canadian Rockies. It was just the right accompaniment to the first several days of our travels. It surprised me, too--it's pretty much a straight speculative fiction adventure in the grand traditions of the old masters. And that's a very good thing.

This is to my mind the first novel where Neal Stephenson manages to fully integrate his disparate didactic and storyteller selves. His plot and (again, to me surprising) truly affecting character development finally keep up with his urge to demonstrate how very capable he is of educating himself on a broad variety of intellectual topics.

Not that there isn't plenty of the latter, but it's interwoven more seamlessly than in his past work, most of which I enjoy. The novel's a fun romp through a lot of the current (and not-so-current--his fascination with Penrose's quantum consciousness is a tad dated) fads in philosophy of science and cosmology with a broad spectrum of witty science and mathematics not-entirely-in-jokes. The sort of wry observations and rib-nudges that aren't as inaccessible as the humor in the average theoretical physics colloquium but make one feel pleasantly well-informed for getting them. The observation of society and human interaction is far more finely wrought than his past efforts, too, much warmer and more sympathetic to what makes humans, well, human.

If you keep up with Scientific American or the NYTimes science sections, you won't feel lost and you'll have an extra-good time. But it's not essential to enjoying the story, which steadily gains momentum into a rip-roaring first-rate sci-fi political-historical thriller with pleasant leavening of good old-fashioned romance.

Completely satisfying, I highly recommend it. But now I'm running out of time on my wi-fi access in the Jasper Snowdome laundromat, so ta-ta and back to the boonies!

Just finished Pandora in the Congo by Abert Pinol, translated from the Catalan; quite a peculiar mash-up of genres. Looked at from a distance, as it were, it's a meta-meta-fiction - a ripping tale inside a prisoner's plaint inside a courtroom case in GB circa WWI as told to a ghostwriter's ghostwriter. But - mostly it's a sendup of the white mans burden genre of African adventure. The prisoner, Marcus Garvey, has washed back up on British shores, the sole survivor of a disastrous expedition into the Congo led by two wastrel scions of Brit. aristocracy, planning to recoup all their prior failures through the mineral wealth of the Congo. He's jailed for suspected murder of the brothers for the two enormous diamonds that are all he has upon his return.

The expedition turns immediately into a horror story as the brothers treat one and all w/ a malicious abandon, marching into the heart beyond the heart of darkness. For not only do they find gold - they find humanoid aliens - who initially appear as white natives emerging from the gold mine, but who turn into ever more effective opponents. Of course a love story emerges - Marcus and an alien lady fall for each other, to the disgust of the brothers. Battles and batterings occur. And, most of all, stories under, through and within stories emerge.

If you are willing to totally suspend belief (and ignore errors of fact - as ripping yarns were wont to do) there IS an oddly exciting adventure story here (translated from the Catalan) that bogs down a bit every now and again in its own cleverness and perverseness. But - hey - despite knowing the tricksy nature of the beast in advance, i still got well taken in. So, that's good - I think.
3.5 stars - if you like this sort of thing.

Not sure I'd want to read the book, but that was certainly an entertaining review.

Ditto to what solla said.

well i didn't want to whole heartedly recommend the book by any means- i'm unsettled in my own mind about it. I'm passing it on to a local reading friend and i'll be curious as to his opinion - as well as that of the woman who passed it my way. After i finished, i went and read a bunch of reviews, and they, too, are all over the place.

Over a dampish weekend i read 2 Laurie King/Mary Russell-Holmes novels, the moor and locked rooms and an up to the minute interagency spy novel the Tourist. Of the two Mary Russell stories i much preferred The Moor - mostly for its recreation of the intertwined social and physical environments of Dartmoor (home of a famous prison). locked rooms is notable mostly for a somewhat awkward attempt to bring Dashiell Hammett into the Russell/Holmes mix on a trip back to her San Fransisco properties as well as getting in a few jibes at Conan Doyle's well known spiritualism. In neither case was the mystery the thing - or at least much of a thing.

The Tourist follows a few days in the life of a former CIA field agent, licensed to do about anything, having settled back in the office, abruptly called back into the field in the post 9/11 era while all the various and sundry agencies charged w/ handling "terror" appear equally obsessed with manipulating each other. Interesting largely because the books DOES spend much time examining empathetically the impact of a life led in secret; the field agents as intelligent pawns jerked over a board that has no obvious set of legal moves, on the agents' families and friends as well as the agents themselves. And for detailing the inter-agency turf wars. A good book to read on a plane, i'd think. I enjoyed this - but any ranking would be strictly w/in genre (ie Ludlum not Le Carre)- but w/in genre 4 stars.

That was more or less the feeling I had about The Tourist; I found it disappointing after le Carre, and I thought it was confused and too obviously political.

Thanks for the Anthem updates. I guess I'll try this from the library sometime, and then buy it if I do end up liking it. You've at least persueded me it's worth trying!

#245 - well, you're right - the really good writers in the field (or desk ;-) generally include politics - but it's politics that extends beyond internal interdepartmental bickering over lines of authority etc. So while i gave Tourists points for the family, family history, the story lacked any genuinely larger context. As often as not it's the contextual gestalt as much as the straight story, that elevates a genre novel to something "bigger."

back to poetry and translation. I'm about 2/3 through John Crowley's The Translator - a book that i'm VERY much enjoying, although i'm not a particular fan of the other Crowley books i've tried. 1961 - the Cold War is turning colder and more dangerous. Kit Malone goes off to a midwestern land grant U - not exactly at loose ends - she has worked @ poetry and words during the whole of her articulateness. But still, of course, unsure of what to do with these words. By happenstance she signs up for an intensive "reading poems" seminar, taught by a recently exiled Soviet poet whose personal life has always been tucked away from even those few who know and admire him and his work. Bespelled by Falin's words, entrapped by his gravitas, Kit becomes Falin's amanuensis/gateway into the intricacies of English while he enlists her into the project of mutating his Russian poems into their English correlatives.

And then there's the cold war, engulfing all the characters. Kit's father has been putting together an prototype DARPA like network; her beloved older brother enlists in the Green Berets and dies, the family is told, "just" a fatal accident in the Philippines - although Kit comes to believe he died in the expanding conflict in SE Asia; Kit comes to the attention of the CIA both through her close involvement w/ Falin - and anyone like him might be, could be, ergo probably is a spy - and her immersion in Russian language courses.

The prose is lovely; rather stately and grounded in melancholy, mirroring the various versions of the relationships between Falin and Kit. The descriptions of the process of translation are fascinating. The poetry itself is nothing special, unfortunately, but that is a surprisingly minor flaw.

well, 249 seems like a good place to end on desultory list of the yr's readings. Should soon receive:
MUSIC: I-LXXIV by August Kleinzahler - poet does music criticism.

THE BLAFT ANTHOLOGY OF TAMIL PULP FICTION by Rakesh Khanna, Ed.: "Mad scientists! Hard-boiled detectives! Vengeful goddesses! Murderous robots! Scandalous starlets! Drug-fuelled love affairs! This anthology features seventeen stories by ten best-selling authors of Tamil crime, romance, science fiction, and detective stories, none of them ever before translated into English, along with reproductions of wacky cover art and question-and-answer sessions with some of the authors. Grab a masala vadai, sit back and enjoy!" sounds terrific.

1 ATOMIK AZTEX by Sesshu Foster: VERY weird alternative history.

That sounds incredible! (the Tamil pulp fiction). How on earth did you get hold of a copy of that?

If you enjoy it you should try and get hold of a fantastic film called Quick Gun Murugan, which is a sort of stringhopper Western, if you will. Its main character is a 1970s Tamil vegetarian cowboy catapulted forward into the modern-day, where he has to battle the evil mastermind, a fast-food magnate who is trying to turn Indians into meat-eaters so he can sell more ready meals (and who, when some part of his plan is foiled by Murugan, swears 'That pumpkin-eating veg cowboy!!'). I won't try and summarise the plot any further. But it's brilliant.

i started out looking for the Kleinzahler, and when it turned up at small press distributors in SFran, i started browsing a lot of their other offerings. It was very hard to stop at my self imposed limit of ~ $50.00

Bob, why don't you post your review of Pandora in the Congo on the book's page--I'd love to give it a thumbs up and think it would be great to have it accessible to others.

Also very much enjoyed your friend's review of Anathem. I keep seeing it in the library, but may have to wait for retirement next year to tackle it--it is BIG!

How are your eyes doing? Well on the way to recovery?

>248 bobmcconnaughey: Loved The Translator, thanks for the refresher! It's been a few years, and there has been several Crowley's since.

currently sucked in by the quality of the live video stream of the US Open. Go Gael Monfils! (up a set against Nadal!) - reading on abeyance. Enjoyed Julie and Julia - and was pleased to find that my copy (via my mom) of mastering the art v2 is a first.

Our local library's fall sale today (started yesterday, but the crowd was just too damn big to fight. $19.50, 17 books (as a member of FoTL get a $3.00 discount.) 1st ed, w/ dust jacket of Auster's In the country of last things, poetry chapbooks by James Merrill, Donald Hall and someone new to me, Mona Van Duyn, vol that won the Pulitzer in 1991. a good day to die - Jim Harrison, the rebel angels, the pianist, thriller rose by Cruz, some books i've read lib. copies of - shadow of the silk road, the history of love - a second copy to give to a friend, a philosophical investigation , Carroll After silence, lux the poet by one of my favorite authors of light pleasure reading, Millar, Cracking India by a Pakistani author i was unfamiliar with, Bapsi Sidwa, and some other odds and ends (eg - Scandinavian Proverbs to give to our close Swedish friend who provides us w/ our fix of Danish wedding cookies (and much more) each holiday season..).

The dealers took ALL the SF/Fantasy yesterday and i was a bit disappointed in the amount of poetry, but wtf, will keep me going for a good while, and can't beat the price. It's a grocery bag for $5.00 tomorrow, but this is defn. enough till i donate our next set of books for the next sale.

And today, on the bag of books for $5.00 Saturday, picked up another 17 or so. Mostly trade ARC's but the one that, in some wise, looks to be the most interesting, is the 1936 volume of Eliot's collected verse 1909-1935. The book had belonged to an English prof. Many poems are very heavily annotated. Inserted was a lengthy set of typed notes for a lecture on the Wasteland, and...dated 1950, was a student essay, marked down substantially, awarded a 70. I can understand the person who gave the book to the booksale (probably one the prof's kids) carefully cutting out the teacher's name, but not having it there IS a shame. Some better poetry was out today, too: Donald Hall, James Merrill, Mona van Duyn near changes won the 1991 Pulitzer and i'm quite sure i'd never heard of her.

Bob,

Vis a vis Bapsi Sidwa, I have seen a book in some bookstore somewhere by Bapsi. I confess I cannot bring myself to buy a book by someone named Bapsi. The name sounds too much like Bambi. Would you by a book by someone named Bambi Jones? I realize this is a perfectly frivolous, arbitrary, and uninformed comment about Bapsi. Bapsi - if you are out there somewhere reading this forum, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. If Bob says the book is good or if someone sends me a copy in revenge, I will read it. Somewhere, there is probably a hell for persons of uninformed opinions. I am sure I will be condemned to live there (along with Geoge Bush) when I depart this existence or else I will come back as mosquito and be thawked.

Well, I was thinking it might mean something entirely different in her native language, but I found an interview question asking about what her name meant, with this response:

My grandmother doted on the British, and she thought she gave me an English name. Ironically an English woman asked me: ‘You’re quite dignified; how come you have a name like Bapsy or Popsy?’ They said it was definitely not an English name. I would have preferred to have a poetic Persian name, but I’m reconciled to it now – It’s short and easy to remember in the US.

I did read Cracking India and liked it very much--it's told from the pov of a
Parsi child as her quiet, innocent world is invaded by the turbulence of the partition. Like Solla, I thought her name was an ethnic name. I guess we can't blame her for the pretensions of her mother.

Just wanted to let you know that, inspired by your mention of it, a copy of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction has just made its way into my library. I'm looking forward to it!

one of the nifty features of tamil pulp fiction is the selection of cover art that's included. The stories are just fun and I found the concept enjoyable - presenting stories that make no pretense towards literary standing. It's one of those books that i might give to our town library to give others a chance @ it. Defn. low art (including the cover art).