Random thoughts about Books

KCRW's Bookworm is a show I've listened to and more often than not and enjoyed.

But host Michael Silverblatt....he actually beats Charlie Rose for the award for most tortured path to a question. Odd voice for a radio host.

 

Gotta be better than Diane Reams (sp?).

 

I finally listened to my first audiobook by listening to Earth which is Jon Stewart's new book. It helped that he narrated it himself with the help of Samantha Bee, Wyatt Cynack and John Oliver.

I think I am going to give some more a try. I can listen to a book a day at work so it may be a way to knock a few out that I want to read.

 

So, when you have completed an audiobook, do you say that you have read that book or listened to that book?

 

That's guy's an underrated novelist, IMO. Here's his daughter's article from HuffPo on the same thing:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/red-room/my-father-james-jones-and_b_847145.html

Another scene the publisher objected to was one in which a soldier has a wet dream. My father wrote, "I want that to stay in. I saw that, with my own eyes, and--with very little variation--I saw it a great many times. If it is illegal as written, then maybe I can cut it inside, a word or two here and there, to make it a little more palatable, but I want it in. Christ, Mitch, the people of this country don't know what the hell goes on in it. Maybe that's why they're such sanctimonious bastards. But if Joyce can have Molly Bloom remember how she tossed him off into a handkerchief, then I can have that about Red's wet dream."

The wet dream was cut.

A few months later, my father wrote to his brother, Jeff, that his lawyer, Horace Manges, "had a 'score sheet' he had kept while reading, and there were 259 ********s, 92 shits, and 5 pricks. He did not count the pisses for some reason. Well, Mitch [Burroughs Mitchell] and I went through later, working in the Scribner office, and cut the ********s to 146, the shits to 45 . . . Manges wanted, Mitch wrote me, to cut the ********s to 25 or 6. . . ." ​

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Kaylie wrote a pretty decent fictionalized autobiographical novel callee A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries that was made into a decent Merchant/Ivory movie starring Kris Kristoferson

 

Books that changed my life:

Les miserables, crime and punishment, on the road.

 

fiction: I didn't think this year was that bad.

Drama: heard an interview with the author. Not bad.

History: damn shame Marable is'nt around to enjoy it.

Biography: Got that one for my brother in law. Said it was damn good work. Next up for him will be volume 48 of Robert Caro's LBJ bio.

Poetry: As far as I'm concerned, American poetry is in filibuster mode, biding time until someone figures out how to matter.

Opera: Silent Night is in Philly next year. My wife and I are already planning a roadtrip.

 

Be careful Felix.
I had a long trip to Oregon to do, so picked up one of Bernard Cornwells' trilogy about King Arthur. If you haven't read them, they're down and dirty, hard core, post Roman era Britain stories. The 'narator' was someone who'd be more at home doing the gay (Not that there's anything wrong in that!) version of Alice in Wonderland. It totally destroyed the book for me, it was just awful.

Big girt buggers dressing in skins. Hacking at each other with great war axes and swords and made to sound like it was a couple of guys dressed in ballet tutus watzing together.....Arrrgh!

 

Wikipedia to Philip Roth: Sorry, but We Don't Consider You an Authority on Your Novel

“I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”​

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And The Nobel Prize For Literature Goes To...

Mo Yan from China. At least I've heard of a book that was made from a movie.

Mo Yan, a Chinese novelist sometimes compared by American critics to William Faulkner, became the second Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this morning. He is the first Chinese winner of any Nobel Prize who has remained in the country and is not in prison there. In 2000, Gao Xingjian received the award; he has lived in France since 1987 and his work is banned in his native country. In 2010, the poet and critic Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize, but his award was criticized by the Chinese government, which has imprisoned Liu for "inciting subversion to state power." A handful of Chinese-born American and British physicists have also won Nobel Prizes.

Mo Yan is a pen name for Guan Moye, who was born in 1955; he was tapped early on as a favorite this year by Nobel watchers. Some his writing—such as his novel The Garlic Ballads—has been banned in his home country, but much of it has official recognition; he is not, according to the New York Times, considered a dissident. His novel Red Sorghum was made into an internationally acclaimed film directed by Zhang Yimou, who also based his film Happy Times on one of Mo's short stories. The most recent of Mo's novels to appear in English are Big Breasts & Wide Hips and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.​

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Interesting that The Garlic Ballads is banned but he's free to move about. I read it a long time ago, but I can't imagine that one went over well at all in China.

 

Joe Queenan: My 6,128 Favorite Books

I do not speed-read books; it seems to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, much like speed-eating a Porterhouse steak or applying the two-minute drill to sex. I almost never read biographies or memoirs, except if they involve quirky loners like George Armstrong Custer or Attila the Hun, neither of them avid readers.
I avoid inspirational and self-actualization books; if I wanted to read a self-improvement manual, I would try the Bible. Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or politicians; these books are interchangeably cretinous and they all sound exactly the same: inspiring, sincere, flatulent, deadly. Reviewing them is like reviewing brake fluid: They get the job done, but who cares?

I do not accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt collars are a dramatically different color from the main portion of the garment. I am particularly averse to being lent or given books by people I may like personally but whose taste in literature I have reason to suspect, and perhaps even fear.

I dread that awkward moment when a friend hands you the book that changed his or her life, and it is a book that you have despised since you were 11 years old. Yes, "Atlas Shrugged." Or worse, "The Fountainhead." No, actually, let's stick with "Atlas Shrugged." People fixated on a particular book cannot get it through their heads that, no matter how much this book might mean to them, it is impossible to make someone else enjoy "A Fan's Notes" or "The Little Prince" or "Dune," much less "One Thousand and One Places You Must Visit Before You Meet the Six People You Would Least Expect to Run Into in Heaven." Not unless you get the Stasi involved.​

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David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer

 

Heard an interview with himo on NPR. I started to think, "I hope I'm that sharp if I make it to 97." Then I thought, "hell, I wish I was that sharp now."

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...s_with_frank_sinatra_steve_jobs_vladimir.html

Posting this in a couple of Random thoughts threads. Slate.com has links to 6 excellent Playboy interviews. For this forum, the Vladimir Nabakov one is good for those who like literary fiction.

 

I would have said Herman Wouk had died twenty years ago. Glad to hear he is still kicking.

 

The NY Times 100 notable books of 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2012.html