Yes she has. I think I have read all of her books. They are all entertaining. Her first few books were addictive and that's what got me hooked on her. I hope you enjoy her books!
The Grand Piano: An Experiment With Collective Autobigraphy by Ten Poets who used to gather at poetry readings held at The Grand Piano Cafe. Ten Volumes (each revolving arond a theme, and each featuring individual contributions by all ten of the poets). And while it's 10 volumes, they're not that large and in terms of total word count the whole thing is probably shorter than David Peace's Red or Dead. I've met four of the poets in real life, and three others in cyberspace. The ones who came across as assholes are comporting themselves better here, which is okay with me.
Tom Sawyer Abroad - by Huck Finn edited by Mark Twain Some of this is very funny, some is tedious, but overall worth reading.
I'm putting together a world literature class and I'm trying to decide on a novel to fit in after a few Jorge Luis Borges stories. Since I have no papers to grade nor, for that matter, no prepping to do until after Thanksvining, I'm having a Read Off. The winner makes the syllabus. The Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavic. I'm kinda hoping Pavic wins, but he's up against brutal competition. I've taught this before, and it has never let me down. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
I went through a spell of reading those Russian books some 35 years back. They made you feel so good when you'd finished them you just wanted to take a nice warm bath and take a razor to your wrists. The Brothers Karamazov. Sheesh! That was the last. Now I only read for fun and information, or both
hmmm... it's been so long since I read the Idiot, and I read the Gambler from a particular angle, but both C&P and Brothers finish on a note of great humanity and hope. likewise I find the major works of Céline, for all their frothing vitriol, have an undercurrent of tenderness that is their real leitmotif and message. contrarywise, under all of proust's elegance and wit there lies a ferociousness as hard as stainless steel.
So, what do you do with Khazars? I own it (BTW, it was one of the wonderful QPBC versions I mentioned earlier in this thread) and I guess I don't get it. What kind of assignments do you give???
Three posts about Dostoevsky, and no Nicephorus yet? There is a new translation by the team of Peaver and Volokhonksy entitled Notes From a Dead House. But the Garnett translation was fine by me. I read that one when I was reading a lot of books that were later turned into operas. I don't know what I'd do because Nabokov won on TKO. Basically, I couldn't figure out a way to get through the Khazars in a lower level class, which is too bad because I liked it quite a bit, but there was so much esoterica, both real and imagined, that it would be too much to ask even after a couple weeks of Borges. Back to the Grand Piano: finished volume 6 at the local cafe this morning. Halfway done or thereabouts in terms of page counts.
History of the United States of America During the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson – Henry Adams My new project. The inside-baseball party politics is kind of boring, but all the diplomacy surrounding the Louisiana Purchase is first-rate.
Elmore Leonard -- City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit I read LaBrava back in April. I'm reading City Primeval now and will mix the final two in with other reading during the holiday period.
actually i'm reading it in french, translated by the vicomte E.M. de Vogüé, who also wrote an interesting preface. it was done when D was still contemporary and quite shocking to many.
Did you write my name correctly three times in a mirror? Otherwise I won't appear. Also Fyodor blows. (The Idiot is pretty good though.)
I have so little time for reading books these days. The book I'm having the most progress with is in the bathroom. It's Winfred P. Lehmann's "A Gothic etymological dictionary".
I've just finished the latest Daniel Silver book. "The English Spy" Same formula but he manages to keep me reading his books. He had a hard time ending this one though. Just when you thought the climax was coming, you realized you had another hundred pages to read. All in all a good read.
I am not entirely sure of what to make of my current endeavor, Steven Toltz's Quicksand. Totlz had his first book shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize (I did not read it) and I both enjoy and am perplexed by this one. It's funny in places and the protagonists . . . well, they deserve each other? I can't say I'd recommend it but I wouldn't not, if that makes any sense. EDIT: Here's a review from The Telegraph which describes Quicksand as alienating and too pleased with itself. I agree. ALSO: does it bug anyone else when you can't find an image for a book that is the same as the version you've read? This one bugs me because it looks so little like the cover I have.
Sometimes. But when I'm reading a book that was originally published in the 40s through the 60s, and was at some point in its paperback history jacketed and sold as a pulp, I'll go with that one. I mean, why use this one ... when there's...
extra credit for the three and six. i love old paperback covers - whenever i'm at a thrift store i always go through the books to find old livre de poche editions. the artwork and layout vary from topnotch to clumsy but always faithful to the style of the era they were printed in. for a few favorite books i have 2-3 versions from the 50's to the 80's. the older editions have the added attraction of colored edges:
I don't know what I like better, the Ann Frank, or Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. And I can smell those books on the bottom. This here is the first grown-up book I read, over the summer between second and third grade. It had green edges, though red may have been more apt... I'm in DC right now, and as soon as I discharge my duties at this conference, I am bee-lining to a nearby bookstore to see if they still have the pulps I came across just before closing on my last night here a month ago: fiction, reprints of Philip Wylie novels. Mostly because I'm curious: he's most famous for When Worlds Collide and a volume of cultural criticism called Generation of Vipers, which has not aged well, even by the standards of that genre. They also had a Kerouac, but I'm not paying $50 for something I'm obliged to keep in plastic.
Oh: but right now, I'm reading ... Human Landscapes From My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse by Nazim Hikmet. I'm assigning it in an intro to world lit class I'm teaching in the spring (Hikmet is a Turkish poet who wrote this 460 page book while serving time as a political prisoner in Turkey from the late 30s into the 50s. I'll have to figure out a way to help students keep track of the dozens of different threads that pop up and re-emerge later, but this should work...
i read that book to when i was a little tiger! the name wylie says nothing to me but i read when worlds collide and after worlds collide. i think they're still at my mom's house somewhere. i was going to mention the way those books smell. not (always) musty like books dredged up from cellars, but still with the heady bouquet of age on them. the downside is that the glue on those "perfect" bindings often gets hard and cracks, leaving you with a few pieces and several single pages inside the cover. strangely (or not) the oldest ones tend to hold up very well, it's the ones from the late 60's to early 80's that are the most fragile.
James Baldwin -- Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone from this new (Sept. 2015 release) LOA collection.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami An interesting novel, but one that I found a bit tiresome after a while.
Iterating Grace. Anonymously authored, 32 pages, only about 10 of typeset text with tweets rendered in crude calligraphy. Navel gazing at its finest in that this 'book' has inspired an avalanche of blog posts and speculations about whom the author may be. Whatever. Save your money, here's a link to a PDF scan of one of the originally distributed 140 copies. https://fusiondotnet.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/iterating-grace_digitized_small.pdf Here's a link to two pages that will (probably) exhaust your curiosity. http://www.wired.com/2015/12/iterating-grace-anonymous-satire/ http://jusido.com/2015/09/24/iterating-grace-ex-post-factoid-part-ii/ I'd say "Enjoy!" But, I'm not sure that's correct, but it's not suffering, either. Mildly amusing, yes, that's it.
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne Very uneven, alternating between brilliant and boring