I have another book to lend you. It's called "A Walking New Yorker's Guide to Soju". Comes out next month from the acclaimed publisher, Simon & Sh!tfaced.
New to the thread ..... I am currently reading Louise de la Valliere by Alexandre Dumas On a Dumas kick recently ... Read The Count of Monte Cristo (which is my favorite book of all time), then The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, then Vitcomme de Braglione ... and will read The Man in the Iron Mask if I ever get through Louise de la Valliere (kind of having a hard time picking the book up, fourth book with the same characters and the writing really is not as smart or sharp as in The Three Musketeers) I am also in the middle of The Miracle of Castel di Sangro and plan on finishing that when I leave for the Bahamas on Saturday. I am also bringing Playing the Moldovans at Tennis with me ... seems like a vacation book.
Finished Tad Willams' "War Of The Flowers". Now reading Stephen Baxter's "Moonseed" and Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears."
I returned the two previous books and picked up A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler. Read some on the way home, good stuff.
Just started a re-read of William Gibson's Virtual Light. Just finished Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing.
While The Good Soldier is very well written, I could not get into the story. So I started on A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines.
Currently reading French Revolutions - cycling the Tour de France by Tim Moore. It's this chap who gets to his mid 30s then decided to cylce the route of the Tour de France - despite never eally having ridden a bike all that much previously. Very funny in places. Moreso if you've actually done the whole cycling tour thing. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099433826/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/026-7727664-0435636
Even thought it was well written, I could not get into A Lesson Before Dying. So today I will start Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which I picked-up a library spring book sale.
I bought it used a few years ago and had a very similar response. It flows along well enough, but I didn't feel like it was really going anywhere interesting. I just started Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? by David Fromkin. As noted in the prologue, a great many elements of the modern world came into being as immediate or long term consequenses of WWI, and there's apparently been a lot of new research in recent decades.
I just read a great non-fiction book called "Rats". I heard the author interviewed on NPR...he hung out in an alley off of Fulton Street in NYC (pretty close to where the WTC was), and observed rats for a year...he goes off on tangents, ie: how rats arrived to America, the plague, trapping rats... he interviews exterminators...it's really a good book. The author doesn't particularly like rats, he's just interested in their impact and just how many of them there are around. He's got a dry sense of humor ("if you are in New York... you are within close proximity to one or more rats having sex")...I never thought I'd like a book about rats so much! http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1582343853.01._PE30_PI_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Someone earlier mentioned reading more than one book at once? Last summer, I finaly got around to reading Dubliners by James Joyce. After finishing each story, I'd go back to reading one of the Ian Rankin mysteries. Black & Blue I think. It helped getting through a very hot spell in July to read stories where the weather was either feckin cauld or the rain was pishin ' doon. I'm in re-reading mode. I'm more than halfway through The Rugby War, by Peter FitzSimmons. a former Australian Team second row forward who writes for the Sydney Morning Herald. His book details the professionalization of Rugby Union, and involves a struggle between Rupert Murdoch's allies and Kerry Packer's. I just got in "Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays OF Evidence For Making Decisions" be Edward Tufte, an excerpt from his book Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narration If all this heavyweight stuff doesn't drive me to a Kinky Friedman novel, I think I want to re-read The Myth of The Paperless Office Damn, forgot the author's name. btw. Has anyone read a book called The Star Spangled Mirror by Richard J. Kerry? Yes he is the Senator's dad, and was a foreign service officer.
I just picked up the The Confusion, the second volume of Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" from the library. I enjoyed Quicksilver quite a bit, although some parts much more than others. It will be interesting to see how all the different stories continue on in this one.
I have enjoyed what I have read so far (I am on page 166). I do agree that it will be interesting to see how the different stories continue in the second and third volumes of the Baroque cycle. Let me also mention that while reading Quicksilver I keep thinking of Carl Sandburg's Remembrance Rock because both books are historical fiction and have a somewhat similar style.
Started The Mansion over the weekend. It's the finale of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy and the 2nd to last novel he wrote.
I've been doing a bunch of heavy slow reading for a class that I might be teaching next year. First, The Pound Era by major literary scholar Hugh Kenner, about the influence of Ezra Pound on modern poetry, and in line with that, some of Pound's translations, and chunks of his Cantos. And while I thought that his Iron John was quite possibly the dumbest book I've ever tried to read, Robert Bly is a good translator and a great anthologist, so I've been reading the poems he put in his Sierra Club anthology called News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. After a semester of reading half-assed freshman essays, I think I would even enjoy a volume or two of Hegel right about now.
I thought "Middlesex" was very good...I had heard it reviewed a long time ago, and bought it this winter...it's a good story, pretty easy to read & follow, you get to know the characters pretty well, and there aren't sooo many characters that it becomes complex. There is a lot of factual information presented, so you can learn a bit from it as well.