This thread is a focused discussion group. Please see the first post below for the current topic and upcoming book discussions. While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit.
By consensus, this thread is reopened specifically to discuss Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will be closed again once that discussion has run its course.
***SPOILER ALERT***
- **Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows lie here. Read at your own risk***
Okay, here we go at last.
Small World by David Lodge is my pick for book #3.
Recommended originally by David S., who said
Not only one of the funniest books I've ever read, but also (a) a neat structural parody of Medieval romances - so a history lesson tossed in, (b) a satire of academia and specifically deconstruction jargon. But don't worry - it's incredibly fun and absorbing, the kind of book you can't wait to pick up again.
A brief intro, cobbled from amazon and a couple of others:
Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a "delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance".
The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledygook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny roman a' English department. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humor and spoofiness: it's an insider's view of things -- always the best kind -- and it takes its old-fashioned time telling a story, complete with reasonable digressions about the state of literary criticism and what may or may not be a realistic view of the academic life.
I debated with myself a lot about which of the many fascinating suggestions to go with. This seemed so very apropos considering how we got here, as well as a quite different kind of novel from the first two we're reading. Yay variety and all that. The reviews and excerpts I've seen all seem to back up Hec's description very nicely, so I'm really looking forward to diving in to this one.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled
Asher Lev.
Small World by David Lodge is my pick for book #3.
Woo hoo! I guarantee fun. And, as Brenda notes, it will have interesting resonance after our discussion of
The Intuitionist.
Huh. I've just realized I've never typed proper whitefont...I don't krow what I do, but it has never come out successfully whited...maybe too many spaces? It could really hinder my ability to babble on endlessly...um, participate in the thread.
You just put an "s" at the beginning of the line, as you would for a quick edit "i" for italics or "b" for bold.
And
Small World
is at my local library!
I just got
Asher Lev
from my library.
I'm 80 pages in and resentful that I have to stop reading so I can work! What's up with that?
I think it's great. But I keep being seduced by shiny objects.
I'm almost done with
Asher Lev.
It's taking me longer than the other Potok books, but that's probably due to not being able to spend as much concentrated time on it,
and I'm still really enjoying it. Asher is an interesting character. He's not as sympathetic to me as some of
Potok's other characters,
but he's still very compelling.
In some ways, child!Asher reminds me of me as a kid. Well, the intensity, anyway. And the urge to do something the family didn't understand very much(writing, of course, in my case)
