The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer For an escape from current events, you can't get much further in the English language than Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. Read so far -- General Prologue and first five tales. "This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrimes passinge to and fro."
Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, a thirty year correspondance of an American poet and a Swedish counterpart who eventually won the Nobel Prize in literature.
I read this last year. The frequency and degree of casual violence towards women really threw me. Not that there was some, but that there was so much.
"Casual" is the right word for this world. And it.throws me, too. I gave up on this midway about 6 years for the same reason.
Jack Schaefer -- Shane ...in anticipation of this LOA volume, scheduled for release in May. I read a bunch of westerns, but haven't previously read any of these four.
Long Story Short: The Only Storytelling Guide You'll Ever Need which I saw at my college's library and which I read for reasons mysterious to me, but which has at least had the benefit of explaining to me why I find NPR-y things like The Moth Storytelling show and certain stretches of This American Life to be rather, well, irritating. By Margo Leitman
The Canterbury Tales is too much to read straight through, so I am alternating with my second project -- reading Jack Kerouac’s "The Duluoz Legend" in chronological order. "In my old age I intend to collect all my work and re-insert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy. The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweeness seen through the keyhole of his eye." The second book is -- Doctor Sax – Jack Kerouac “Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe.” The memory parts were excellent, but some of the dreams “sounded delirious and incoherent even to me.”
Very interesting that you posted this, because this is specifically why I came here. I have posted many, many of the books that I read alongside my kids over the years, and with the kids finally out of the house, I thought my read-along days were over. But, for the third time in 10 years, we are trying to adopt/gain guardianship of my god daughter. She's been with us for a month now, and this was the first thing we read together. Shane is just so stark, it's an easy book to introduce the concepts of plot, characterization, foreshadowing, metaphor, and the three-act structure. The first time I read Shane, I probably did it in a single setting so I had no time to think about the book, but man is it easy to predict what is going to happen. I'm pretty sure I haven't read any other western ever, so I don't know if the transparency is a genre convention or if it is unique to this work, but a fun read nevertheless. While looking for a copy in the library for Nasia to read, I did discover that Norton has a 350-page critical edition for this 110 page story. I think I'm going to order that.
If Shea & Williams' Illuminatus! trilogy had a baby with GG Allen's provocation for provocation's sake, you'd end up with this book. A little too much pedophilia and gratuitous murder for my taste.
Local Lives: Poems About the Pennsylvania Dutch, a 500 page collection that is basically Spoon River Anthology meets post-modern American epics published in 1975 by an under-looked poets (even by the standards of American poets being underlooked) Millen Brand.
Maggie Cassidy - Jack Kerouac "Maggie Cassidy—that in its time must have been Casa d'Oro—sweet, dark, rich as peaches—dim to the senses like a great sad dream—"
As much about behavioral addiction as anything, it's a solid read that really went quickly for 320+ pages. Alter touches on some of the known items about when and how much time should be spent with devices, especially for children, while also going much deeper into the addiction side than I expected.
The Captive Mind, which is in fact a solid report on "the position of the intellectual, artist and writer behind the Iron Curtain" which profiles for men Milosz grew up with who found themselves working for the Stalinoid post-WWII Soviet-dominated Polish government, which the author Czeslaw Milosz represented for five years represented as an Ambassador, mostly stationed in DC. Third or fourth time I've made a run at it. I sure A.F. didn't know enough when I tried when I was 20, or even 30, but I think I have it now. Pretty harrowing. And darkly funny at times.
Zlata's Diary-Which was written by a Bosnian girl is a good read. Spoiler: She survives and also wrote the foreword.
Just finished this one: Not sure when I will get to Whirlwind, but my ranking of Asian Saga novels is as follows: 1. Shogun 2. King Rat 3. Noble House (barely ahead of...) 4. Tai-Pan and in a distant 5th place....Gai-Jin