Agreed. I just finished "Breathing In" and "Hell Sucks." This isn't the type of thing that I usually read, but since January '08 I've been reading Everyman's Library hardcovers with the idea that I'd like to re-read some old favorites, some "classics" that are of interest, and some things outside my usual areas. These little hardcovers have great introductions and a really good feel. Dispatches was released in Everyman's Library just last month. It's a great, disturbing read thus far. Last January I was about to have my first kid and about to turn 40, so reading a couple of books in this series every month was a project I set for myself to refresh my mind a bit. Here's what I've read in the series since 1/08 -- it's quite a hodge-podge, but I've really enjoyed it. Animal Farm by George Orwell The Warden by Anthony Trollope The Stranger by Albert Camus Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh The Awakening by Kate Chopin The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope Utopia by Thomas More The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh The Collected Stories by Ernest Hemingway The Princess Casamassima by Henry James The Iliad by Homer Typhoon and Other Stories by Joseph Conrad Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Reef by Edith Wharton Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad Dubliners by James Joyce Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Romances (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) by William Shakespeare Full lists of what's in the series here: http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/ ...and here: http://sevenroads.org/Everyman/Serial.html I'm always appreciative of suggestions, although I've got the next 15 or so stacked up and waiting for me already (including Thomas Paine, Nikolai Gogol, Saul Bellow, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Hardy, Jorge Luis Borges, Jonathan Swift, Sylvia Plath, J.S. Mill, Dashiell Hammett, and more Shakespeare, Orwell, Trollope, Camus, and Austen) .
Read Charlie Huston's Already Dead yesterday. Good, tight crime novel. With vampires, but don't let that turn you off. Twilight this is not.
Saturday Rules, by Austin Murphy A chronicle of the 2006 college football season, with emphasis on the USC and ND seasons therein, as well as stories on the biggest games throughout the year. Good read, some funny stuff as well.
A few months ago I googled my mother's mother for grins. This is one of the items I found. It turns out that my little Jewish grandmother was a firebrand radical back in the day. My mother adopted the crazy right wing politics of my father when they married, so I never found out about things like Emma Goldman being a family friend until a few years ago. Ah! The wonders of modern technology!
Pretty interesting stuff so far. Ginsberg's letters aren't as interesting as Jack Kerouac's, but they got more interesting once he started to get around a bit more. Snyder's aren't too bad. Happy Jack Kerouac's birthday, to anyone who cares.
Just finished this trilogy. First fantasy I've enjoyed in some time. It's nice to read a story like this that doesn't involve the same old elves and orcs.
Not much time to read lately, so I've gone the short story collection route. My favorite stories from the past couple of weeks: "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove, about an alien invasion but with a Napoleonic twist; "The Tunnel under the World" by Frederik Pohl, about a man who pursues incongruities about his city and does not like what he finds; "A Work of Art" by James Blish, about a composer brought to life in the future, with a twist on who the artist is; "A Saucer of Loneliness" by Theodore Sturgeon, wherein 'first contact' is from someone tossing messages into the 'sea' of space.
Right now I am reading the "Collected Poems of Joyce Kilmer". It also includes a memoir written by his friend and literary executor soon after Kilmer was killed. Unfortunately, the book is very short (Kilmer died at 31) but contains most if not all of his extent poems. Somewhere I understand there is a volume put together by the same editor of Kilmer's essays and prose, which I need to track down. I guess I am on a Catholic authors kick of late, having read two of Ron Hansen's novels, rereading Brideshead Revisited and also ordering a biography of Flannery O'Connor, as well as reading Kilmer.
With a couple of days off and my name finally percolating to the top of the wait list at the library, I am reading this, which is terrific early on if for nothing else than its wonderful depiction of the Trujillo years:
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Bowls-Polls-Tattered-Souls-Controversy/dp/0470049170"]Amazon.com: Bowls, Polls, and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy that Reign Over College Football: Stewart Mandel: Books[/ame]
I'm curious about this, Atouk: does this book mention Lombard College, which was founded in the 1850s and which closed during the great depression? If you can let me know, I'd appreciate it, and I'll definately put this book on my list.
Not yet. The only mention of Universalist colleges thus far is in the opening 44-page "brief historical sketch" that is a short history of Universalism from the beginnings of the church in the US through the 1961 merger with the Unitarians. p. 33 After the opening historical sketch, the rest of the book is made up of selections from original sources (with brief commentary for context) broken into sections on: - Forerunners and Founders - Universalism of the Enlightenment - Universalism on the Frontier - Divisions Within - The Conscience of Universalism - The Challenge of Modernism - The Old and the New Universalism - The Larger Faith. I'm just over halfway through the book, but the section titles of the parts I haven't yet read don't seem to indicate further discussion of Universalist-founded universities. I'll provide an update if something pops up.
Acts of Worship by Yukio Mishima I'm going to try to read everything by Mishima that I haven't read yet by the end of '09.
I spend so much time reading history and theory during school that I immediately turn to genre fiction during breaks. At the moment, I'm re-reading Dune.
Democracy: The God that Failed. The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order.