More nonfiction:
20th century
Melissa Faye Greene:
Praying for Sheetrock - racial politics in a microcosm
The Temple Bombing -
While the subject is the 1958 Temple bombing (You may recall that Miss Daisy's response was "But the Temple is Reform."), it's a bigger examination of the Other in the South.
Janisse Ray:
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
As a Vanderbilt grad, I'll put a word in for The Fugitives'
I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.
I think their basic tenet was wrong like a wrong thing, but they sure wrote pretty.
Civil War/Reconstruction
Albion Tourgée's
A Fool's Errand,
an 1878 memoir about Reconstruction by the man who later represented Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
(C. Vann Woodward, ed) - like almost any diary, it gets tedious at times, but it's a great contemporary source.
I second the recommendation of The Temple Bombing, and add And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank by Steve Oley. I've also heard good things about The Peddler's Grandson by Edward Cohen, but I've never read it.
So I've got a e-copy of
The Moonstone,
and this is a good book. Which I guess is why people still keep reading it.
It
is
a good book. Although my heart belongs to
The Woman In White,
if we're talking Wilkie Collins.
I freaking ADORE that one. Well, more specifically I adore the awesome female protagonist (not the romantic girl, but her fabulous friend), and the villainous fella who appreciates her. FABULOUS BOOK.
I'm thinking of getting a Kindle before our next vacation so I can download my reading and not carry half a dozen books on the plane.
Willkie Collins will be on that reading list. But, as much as I love both Moonstone and Woman in White, I'll probably go with something I haven't read before.
I'll add
Woman in White
to my list of books to load on my Palm. I'm surprised at how un-Victorian the language is in
Moonstone.
Some Victorian-era books are pretty stuffy, but this has a sense of humor--though I'm wondering how much of what I perceive as clever is intentional. Such as the butler's reliance on Robinson Crusoe as a source of wisdom.
Such as the butler's reliance on Robinson Crusoe as a source of wisdom.
I'm pretty sure that's intentional. Even Defoe was mocking Crusoe a lot of the time.
Naked Woman as Described in a Sci-Fi Novel
A very WTF excerpt from a sci-fi fantasy novel entitled “Silk and Steel.”
For the Sci-Fi fan who has (almost) everything and money to burn:
The Hugo Awards and the Nebula Awards are the traditional yardsticks for fantasy and science fiction writing and have been for decades. Winners are guaranteed a place in literary history and first editions of these acclaimed novels have become highly collectible.
If money was no object and you wanted to create the ultimate modern science fiction and fantasy rare book collection in a single swoop, then The Fine Books Company in Rochester, Michigan, is offering first editions of all the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novels for a cool $116,530.
[link]
A very WTF excerpt from a sci-fi fantasy novel entitled “Silk and Steel.”
shouldn't it be: "Her pubes
were
a field of wheat after the harvest."?
and might I add, ouch!
