January 2007 - Your current reading. Confess here.

titus alone - mervyn peake
sunday suppers at lucques - suzanne goin
another bullshit night in suck city - nick flynn
revolting youth - c.d. payne
perlandia - c.s. lewis
the moonstone - wilkie collins
painted veil - w. somerset maugham

Also I have discovered a list of all virago modern classics (around six hundred) and am going to read them ALL this year - which i've been saying I'd do for as long as I've known VMCs exiisted, but, no, for real this time - so I should probably make a start on those while the month is young.

I've got my eye on that new Thomas Hardy biography.

Navek: What's 'World War Z' like?

Me, I finished Gerald Woodward's brilliant funny/miserable 'August', but before I tackle the sequel ('I'll Go To Bed At Noon') I need something a smidge more relaxing, so I'm on the new Jon Ronson.

Still reading Sontag's book on photography as well as that Stitch'n'Bitch book.

There's some podcast versions of the chapters on the World War Z site if you want to check it out without purchasing.

I finished John McGahern's Amongst Women today and fell in love. It's entrancing the way he can encouch the familial brutality in such piercing, delicate, careful prose. Pornographer will be the next one in the TBR pile from him.

Still on My Name is Red by Pamuk. I'll take a look at my TBR stacks later on today and decide which other book to read. The Vonnegut, Abani or Ronald Firbank? Hmm.

There needs to be a Greek figure-of-speech term for the sort of redundant repetition one does in a more or less scholarly work that one expects to be excerpted.

just finished Hello Americans the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles biography. A worthy follow-up as they say, though the series is now projected to be three volumes. #1 covered childhood thru Citizen Kane, #2 picks up w/The Magnioficent Ambersons and ends with Welles' euro exile in the late 40s. Callow has a sharp writing style and his experience as actor and director illuminates the discussion of Welles' work. Maybe the scene by scene analysis of The Lady From Shanghai geeked out a bit but on the whole this is excellent. Looking forward to Volume 3 but it could take another ten years.

now i am deep into Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future, which is a public policy-oriented memoir by janice mackinnon, who was saskatchewan's NDP finance minister from 1993-1997. it's really fantastic.

I was on this board quite a while back, much enjoyed it and now am back. Hope I can play in the sandbox with you all for a while.

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys right now. And I'm glad to say I'm liking it after being a little disappointed with American Gods when it came out.

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Nature Of Mass Poverty".

Hi Julie! Welcome to the board.

I'm just about to start American Gods after being a little disappointed with Anansi Boys.

Just finished Pratchett's Thud which was Sam Vimes By Numbers while being very short on laughs and very long on unsubtle analogies to current racial and religious tensions.

I'm reading too many novels, I need to read some non-fic.

So I read the first page of Cat's Cradle and...I think I'll have to try that one a bit later. In its place I've started Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot which attains heights of absurdity hitherto unimagined.

I've read 'Fade to Blonde' in the Hard Case Crime, by otherwise literary novelist Max Phillips, and that was excellent.

Now I'm reading 'Into the Forest' by Jean Hegland - not sure yet whether it's good or not.

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma.
Looking for Mr Nobody by Sue Rann, which is 00s paranoiapulp
Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem Wetering which is 70s cop pulp

In all good faith I could only really recommend the first, which I do, and even that has its frustrations.

Then I had some fun with a Flann O'Brien book I'd failed to come across before, "The Hair of the Dogma".

Now I'm reading "Dreams of Speaking" by Gail Jones, which is an Australian novel set (so far) largely in Paris. It's a wistful affair and one of those novels which periodically tips into prose poetry, not necessarily a bad thing.

So far we have read to Alice: Where The Wild Things Are and Dogger. She's already had two trips to the library, but at this stage literature is not quite as compelling to her as milk, milk and more milk.

John Steinbeck- Grapes of Wrath
Daniel Silva- The Kill Artist
Martin Cruz Smith- December 6th
Anne Tyler- If Morning Ever Comes
William Styron- Sophie’s Choice
Stuart Woods- Palindrome
John Steinbeck East of Eden
Robert Tanenbaum- Absolute Rage
Edith Wharton- Glimpses of the Moon
Virginia Woolf- To the Lighthouse
Paul Theroux- Hotel Honolulu
Bob Perelman- The Marginalization of Poetry
John Steinbeck- In Dubious Battle
PG Wodehouse- Mating Season
Richard Stark- The Score
John Steinbeck- Cannery Row
Georges Simenon- Maigret & the Killer
Zadie Smith- The Autograph Man
Muriel Spark- Reality & Dream

I leaped on to The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer and am being rewarded by an incredible story. I have to rip myself away from the thing.

Woha! I don't even read that in... *sigh* a year. :-( Knitting and a baby doesn't enable me to read much. :-( I really do need to learn how to knit and read, it seems to be possible.

I shall be selecting my next lucky book quite soon and my library shelves are agog with anticipation. You will see it here first.

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_01_25.html

Me too. I miss them so much.

So far we have read to Alice: Where The Wild Things Are and Dogger.
Great choice Archel, I love Dogger. I bought my 6 months old niece a collection of Shirley Hughes books for Christmas.
My brother has taken to reading aloud the Harry Potter books while his daughter has her night time feed. I'm very impressed with him as at 35 this is probably the first book he's read other than the odd Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Today, I finished Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food. I really enjoyed his Culture of Fear and found it both well-researched and straightforward. The same with this one, except the man obviously loves to eat (to which I fully relate), and this may have tainted his objectivity somewhat :)

Just finished J Meade Falkner's 'The Lost Stradivarius' (entertaining but sometimes stodgy late-Victorian supernatural novel, and too cagey about the awful wickedness of the villain - it's hard to dislike him if you never have any idea of ANYTHING he did that was actually bad), and am now partway through 'Uncle', which is absurdist children's fiction, and very fun.

I'm not very far into it, but I am very much enjoying what little I've read. It's a bit all over the place, and it's taking a while to form a coherent plot, but that's okay.

Am now reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter.

Now I'm readling X20 by Richard Beard, as (sort of) recommended upthread (I think) and it's OK, OK to good I'd say. The scaffolding's a bit obvious.

Just finished Dostoyevsky's 'The Gambler' and 'A Nasty Story', which was brilliant - suprisingly gossipy and funny. Great stuff.

Carol Shields- Unless
Evelyn Waugh- Brideshead Revisited
Patrick Cockburn- The Occupation
Jane Smiley- Moo
John Steinbeck- Tortilla Flat

paradise lost.* henry louis gates, 'loose canons'. nicholas meyer, 'the seven-per-cent solution.'**

*fantastic.
**disappointing.

The Murder of Charles the Good by Galbert of Bruges. Kinda fantastic, so far! Consiprators murder the pious count in 1127, and our on-the-scene reporter tells us how it all plays out. He's got a zippy writing style.

I'm having a look at "The Map Is Not The Territory", Alan Woods's book about (with?) Ralph Rumney, the first British situationist, abstract painter, interesting cove.

This isn't a read-from-cover-to-cover kind of affair but I like RR a great deal and am enjoying it so far.

(I read the book in January, though.)