We're Literary 2: To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
P-C, I appreciated it as an exercise in narrator voice and as a study of Ausberger's (which, according to my father, it's pretty accurate as), but I didn't enjoy it, per se.
Yeah, I agree. Although the exercise wore thin for me after a while, especially when the actual plot kicked in. It just irked me that interesting things were happening and the narrator didn't even realize it. And I know that's not the author's fault, but yeah. Kind of like with
Moby Dick,
I enjoyed the asides more than the story itself.
Yeah, I'm with Debet. I appreciated it, but I didn't enjoy it. And I usually do like to enjoy books.
Hi literary peeps! I don’t frequent this thread because, well so many threads, so little time. So I am popping in at the end to request suggestions.
Next month my neighborhood book group meets at my house, so when we meet this Thursday I have to announce my book choice. The primary objective is to pick something that will generate discussion because we actually discuss the book while consuming vast quantities of wine.
I’d like to move in a different direction than the last 2 books for the sake of variety. The last one was “How to be good” by Nick Hornby. A rather fun book for generating conversation. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it hadn’t been assigned. I haven’t finished it yet, so nothing else to add. The read before that was “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini. It was terribly disturbing, but the writing style itself was very interesting. Again, not something I would have picked myself. Yet, it did spur conversation.
So what might be totally different and worthy of discussion? I prefer fiction, but it can be non-fiction. I’ll need to bring a few suggestions because we like to pick something none of us has read yet. Ideas?
Ooh! Ooh! Let me think, now... I like Book by Robert Grudin -- it's funny and every chapter is written in a different literary style (yeah, it sounds pretentious, but I really enjoy it). Also The Bone People by Keri Hulme (about -- if I'm remembering correctly -- a Maori writer who lives in a tower and the man and his deaf foster son she meets). It's kind of depressing, actually, but, again, I liked it. Or Terry Pratchett for big fun.
ETA: Or for talking-inspiring, Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, with the immortal opening sentence, "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler." Or Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.
ETA2: The last two are books I used in my senior thesis, It's All a Big Lie: Authorial Presence from the 18th Century to the Present. Which reminds me to recommend Tristram Shandy as well.
For a non-fiction book,
The Devil in the White City >[link]
is a great, lively, thought-provoking read and my mom's book club read it and it inspired a lot of good discussion.
Nick was the country-to-city character I was thinking of in Gatsby. Well, not so much country-to-city as wholesome-midwest-to-corrupt-east, but they're variations on a theme.
Also, for US as country and Europe as city, see, famously, Henry James.
I'll second the rec for "The Devil in the White City." There were several places where I wanted to tell the author to go back and tone things down a touch, but overall, it was well-written, and well-constructed.
Lost my connection for a bit.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll be looking at them. I have until Thursday to make my picks.
I just got done reading this anthology called "The Cocaine Chronicles". Amazon picked it for me because I like "The Wire".
I enjoyed it a lot.
I just finished Maggie Helwig's Where She Was Standing, which was fantastic. She's a Canadian novelist and poet, and sometime human rights activist. The novel concerns the (fictional) massacre of protestors in East Timor by the Indonesian military in the mid-1990s. A Canadian film student is caught up in the massacre, and the novel asks and answers questions about what happens to her, her film, her family, and the Timorese people she met while she was there.
The prose is brilliant, the story gripping and meaningful and very important. It's one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. It's also a love story of sorts, and a meditation on working in the public interest, and the cost that entails.
I really liked it a lot. Sadly, she's not really in print in the US and you have to order her stuff from Canada.
(And yes, former X-Philes: this is the Maggie Helwig you're thinking of.)
