Book Lovers Club
Comments
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soooo remember Pip and Miss Haversham.. Estella..?
i am caught in the middle (well the beginning) of Great Expectations.. it is fantastic this time around.
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I remember Great Expectations being required reading in high school and I loved it. I also liked David Copperfield.0
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I read Rule of Civility and liked it. I thought the author captured the time period very well.
I also liked State of Wonder. I have her book Run in my TBR pile right now. I agree with VR and Mac about the committee.
I did not like A Reliable Wife. I thought the story had promise and I do think he had a way with words.
I think I'm reading the wrong Seamstress. I know there was some discussion several pages back. The one I'm reading is about 2 sisters in Brazil. One marries into a family above her and the other sets off with a band of thugs. It's keeping my attention but I don't think it was the one that was recommended.
Laurie - did you see that Chris Bohhalian has a new book coming out in July? The Sandcastle Girls. I have it on hold at the library.
I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend! Gina
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Read anything by Vince Flynn or David Baldacci - CIA kind of book plots.
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wrsmith....there are lots of Vince Flynn and David Baldacci lovers here. Welcome! I also sleep with one! Just finished the newest Baldacci book! Lee Child fan too!
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hi all, thanks for the rec, I will put State of Wonder on my to-read list.
Read Janet Evanovich's 16 & 17 and went looking for 18 but it was checked out, so I picked two non-Plum novels from the stacks. Wicked Appetite (2010) was just OK. She tried to ride the paranormal wave but it's been done, and better. Love in a Nutshell (2011) co-written with Dorien Kelly, was enjoyable. Light & fluffy girl meets boy story, think Nora Roberts without the smut.
Next up is Proof of Heaven by Mary Curran Hackett. It's about a boy's search for his father, and heaven.
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Voracious, I agree with your outrage about the Pulitzer not being awarded. A slap in the face to authors. I read "State of Wonder" and thought it was terrific. I don't care who won the award, as long as it was awarded.
I was a Pulitzer juror for several years, but not in the fiction category. I can tell you that politics and all sorts of maneuvering takes place behind the scenes. I was the chair of judging for one category. We spent 2 days reading all the voluminous entries and came up with 3 finalists. The entries of all 3 finalists were superb. We turned our list of finalists over to the Pulitzer board. When the winner was announced, we all were shocked that the board has chosen ANOTHER nominee, rejecting all 3 of our finalists.
I have no idea what went on this year with the fiction category, but the outcome was outrageous.
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Wow, that is disturbing!
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Wave....I am not surprised by your experience on the Pulitzer committee, AT.ALL. Have you seen what goes on in recent years with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? If I had to pinpoint when the responsibility of that group's opinion fell apart, I would have to say it began with the Weinstein brothers and their publicity machine. IMHO, I think nowadays the general public is sold short on what a "great" film is or worse, what it should be....thanks in part to, like you mention, the politics and maneuvering behind the scenes....And it's a slap in the face, like you say, to filmmakers, as well. The only difference that I can see between the two, is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in front of an audience in the millions, wouldn't dream of NOT giving out an Oscar! And recall, twice...there was a tie for Oscar and MULTIPLE awards were given!
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WRSmithx2, yes, I'm one of those who has read every book by Vince Flynn and David Baldacci. And I've read almost all the Lee Child ones, too. If you like spy novels, you might also try ones by Robert Littell. And the best CIA book of all time, I believe, was "The Company."0
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Stanzie, I loved "Rules of Civility" and have recommended it to many friends. I enjoyed "Paris Wife" far more than "Tiger's Wife."
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I read Isaac's Storm years ago and loved it. It was fascinating how the science of hurricanes evolved from a couple sailors in a bar talking about an awful storm with winds from the east. The other guy was only a few miles away in the same storm, but the winds were from the west. Started as a hmmm (scratch your beard) and became a science. Isaac was arrogant. He refused to learn from the Cubans who had more experience than he did. Racism has always been with us, even at the risk to many lives.
Read mostly nonfiction (I escape in different ways), but occasionally will read ficion. I'm also a writer (1200 journalism credits) and have worked for both a book publisher and many newspapers and magazines (I travelled so much, being a stringer is how I've supported myself until I moved to France.). It's interesting to know how books and stories get published and I love being on deadline.
Another book I really liked was Seabiscuit, which while about a race horse (a really good one) was also about the three men who changed his life and theirs. I tend to read about my current obsession. Right now, I'm reading Quiet, In Our Prime, Enslaved by Ducks, The Great Aridness, The Rescue of Belle and Sundance, books on Lemuria (I'm working on a project), Camino de Santiago books and Martin Sheen's autobiography with his son Emilio. I recently finished Wishes Fulfilled. No fiction at this time.
I bought a Kindle last year and I'm rarely without it now, especially while travelling. It's like having my own mobile library. And it does have a couple fiction books on it.
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Ahhhh, Maya... Another non fiction lover! Yipppee!
Speaking of arrogance, I read most of engineer, Dr. Henry Petroski's new book, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. In discussing the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, arrogance on the part of management was mostly responsible. I always knew what caused both disasters, but his explanation was fascinating. Despite the engineers knowledge of the failing parts, it was the managements disrespect for the engineers opinions that led to the disaster. They all knew about the o rings and the loss of insulation, but the managers were taking for granted that these parts would still function because they had done so in the past. Dr. Petroski eloquently explains that failure of parts goes hand in hand with the functioning of those parts. But good engineers will know a part's limits BEFORE a failure occurs, so a disaster can be avoided. In defending their work, Dr. Petroski said it was management's fault that the disasters occurred. I guess it's harder to figure out how to measure, monitor and correct the failures of human decision making than it is to decide when a part can no longer function.
And believe me Maya... whenever there is a hurricane approaching the Atlantic coast, Galveston and New Orleans, now, are never far from my thoughts....0 -
Here's an old non-fiction book. Reading Steinbeck's A Russian Journal written in 1948. He decided to meet the everyday people out in the country and see how they were living & what they thought. Lots of great photos by Robert Capa (his travelling partner) included in the journal. They decided on several things before they left. "We should not go in with chips on our shoulders and we should try to be neither critical or favorable. We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard about things..." Amazing descriptions that take me right back to the cold war days. We really had bomb drills in elementary school when we had to get under our desks. And next everyone started building bomb shelters.
He had an interesting discussion w/a Soviet Union writer, where writers were really important (venerated). "We explained to him that writers in America have quite a different standing, that they are considered just below acrobats and just above seals.....We believe that the rough-and-tumble critical life an American writer is subject to is very healthy for him in the long run."
Maya: I loved Seabiscuit. My grandpa had the great good fortune to meet that horse.
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MinusTwo....Speaking of Russian writers.... Here's a non-fiction book, published in 2010, that discusses Russian Literature. I've always wondered about the facination that people have towards Russian Literature. I have a friend who, when you rave to him about an American author will say, "How can you THINK they are great? They don't compare to the Russians..." In this book, Elif Batuman talks about her love! If you read any list of the best literature, Russians will usually pack the top ten! Here's a great review of the book....and I had to chuckle because I remember hiding under my desk too!
Janet Potter
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
My ability to write about The Possessed is seriously hampered by the big crush I developed on Elif Batuman while reading it. My reasons are twofold. Firstly, there is nothing, just absolutely nothing, more contagious than genuine enthusiasm. Secondly -- the more self-involved reason -- I was a Russian literature major in college, and reading Batuman's account of her life as a student of that most dazzling literature and most dizzying language sent me rushing back to my own days in the throes of Russophilia.
This book -- a collection of essays about her experiences as a graduate student in comparative literature -- is, first and foremost, a love letter to the Russians. Starting with her first reading of War and Peace as a teenager, Batuman has been smitten with and shaped by Russian literature. It is a fringe calling, to be sure, one that has taken her to an Uzbek university, a palace made of ice, and the house of Chekhov. What gives this memoir its endearing sincerity is how keenly Batuman chases her Slavic muse out to the fringe, almost as if she has no control over where it will lead her next, but eager to learn. This sets her apart from many of her fellow memoirists, who give their muses a job description before following them into the world.
The burgeoning genre of willed self-discovery -- memoir, personal essay, literary narrative, whatever you want to call it -- is not one that thrills me. Those books, where the authors sense something lacking in their worldview and force themselves out on a journey to amend it, feel to me just that: forced. They choose new enlightening, immersive experiences as if from brochures, and set the egg timer to go off when they can return to their real lives.
But this is Batuman's real life, and it's hard not to fall for her witty, insightful accounts of the things she'll do for Russian literature. As she says, "I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things -- and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there." (The fact that she characterizes learning Russian as "a little extra work" should be proof enough for you of her devotion.) It was love, therefore, not literary curiosity, that led her to help plan an Isaac Babel conference, ride a ferris wheel in Samarkand, and try to solve the mystery of Tolstoy's death.
She has devoted years, both as an undergraduate and graduate student, to the study of Russian literature, and is as comfortable telling you about Dostoevsky's personal life as that of her language instructors. The cast of characters in The Possessed is populated almost equally by dead authors and Batuman's classmates and professors. The ease with which they intermingle -- both in the book and in Batuman's life -- is telling. She, full of self-deprecation, would call it the evidence of how consuming her studies were. While this is true in part, it's also true that she has a novelist's eye for the salient detail that will bring a character to life. Take, for example, the exchange she has with a fellow conference attendee:
"Do you have any cats or dogs?" she asked finally.
"No," I said. "And you?"
"In Moscow, I have a marvelous cat."
Or her account of Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Courland, who traveled to Russia to marry the tsar's niece:
On the way back to Courland, the teenage duke died, of alcohol poisoning. On his last night in Petersburg, he had engaged -- rashly, one feels -- in a drinking contest with Peter the Great.
It's remarkable how often Russians talk and act exactly like characters from Russian novels. I once had a Russian professor who -- maybe because she was fuzzy on the word's exact connotation -- constantly asked me if I was demoralized. Batuman captures this duality perfectly, describing the people she meets with curiosity and perception, but without hiding her bemusement at how quintessentially Russian they are. When she spends a summer in Samarkand, she sees her host's friend sweeping: "Bent double, she swept the entire courtyard and all the steps using a little whisk broom with no handle. Why didn't she have a normal broom? Probably the same reason Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying."
The same duality is present in Batuman's depiction of herself in the book, where she comes across both as a bright, passionate, talented traveler and writer, and as a prototypical grad student, caught up in love, cheap apartments, and departmental politics. Her immersion in literature studies, she says in the introduction, is meant to serve her goal of writing novels of her own. In this way, the adventures she describes are the beginning, middle, and end of her grad student days, but only the prologue of her career as a writer.
Batuman shies away from overtly calling The Possessed a journey of self-discovery. She would admit that some self-discovery took place along the way, but maybe only the inevitable kind. Early in the book, she abandons the study of linguistics because of its objectless central search for "what it is that we know when we know a language." Perhaps the question she ends up going after is: What is it that we love when we love literature? As with all love, it seems that as Batuman seeks after the answer, she may not come to understand it, but she loves it all the more..
Her ultimate attitude towards her experiences strikes me as essentially Russian: engaged and observant, but never too quick to assign meaning. The Russians, after all, will spend hundreds of pages agonizing over the meaning of life, and then shrug and go home for a drink, leaving the beauty and tragedy of life to fight it out by themselves. Batuman, for all she has learned, also leaves the enigmas unresolved and, as she says, "still life goes on in Chekhov's garden, where it's always a fine day for hanging yourself, and somebody somewhere is playing the guitar."
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374532184
304 Pages0 -
I just finished "Paris Wife". I recently broke up with my boyfriend so it made me cry but still glad I read it...
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Currently going through Dana Stabenow mystery/crime books that take place in Alaska. Reminds me a bit of Nevada Barr series which I enjoyed. I confess I finally read the "Twilight" books early this year (where have I been?) and enjoyed the escape and fantasy of the books. Actually now very motivated to visit Olympia Park and hike the trails along the coast.
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I too remember "hiding" under my desk in drills at school. Like that would have done any good. Ah, the Cold War era.
Read most of Nevada Barr's books. Enjoyed those in the Southwest, but it was Liberty Falling that became my favourite. Used to write book reviews for newspapers. Also enjoyed J A Jance, Edna Buchanan and Lia Matera.
MinusTwo: I'm envious of your grandfather. I'd have loved to meet Seabiscuit--and the other great, Secretariat. I used to compete in 3-day eventing as a young adult.
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Maya - My soul horse is a TB g-gson to Bold Ruler who sired Secretariat. I traced his lineage and way back he also has Brown Biscuit who was half-sister to Seabiscuit. He is now age 23 with soundness issues and hanging out in this hot weather in front of his fan.
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I just finished The Weird Sisters and really liked it, I was actually sad the book ended I could have had it go on and follow their lives for a bit more.
Now to start Caleb's Crossing.
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Laurie, I think you'll like "Caleb's Crossing." At least, I did.
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Another good book by same author Geraldine Brooks is "People of the Book".
Enjoyed the "Orchid House". http://www.amazon.com/The-Orchid-House-A-Novel/dp/1451655789/ref=pd_sim_b_6
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Voracious - The Possessed... sounds great. I'll put it on my list. I was an English major who was hung up on Russian writers. Hmmmm.
cpr418 & Maya - glad you found Dana Stabelow. I've enjoyed Nevada Barr & J.A. Jance. I'll hve to look for Lia Matera.
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Bump
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Anna Quindlen's new book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. Is there such a thing as a perfect book? Most sentences worth reading over and over again. A national treasure.
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Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit). As the cover says, "A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". It is just an amazing, amazing book. I could not put it down!0
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Really liked Proof of Heaven, it entertained and made me think, always a good combo.
Read V is for Vengeance last weekend and will start Explosive Eighteen tonight.
State of Wonder is in at the library and I will pick that up tomorrow.
Yes, I like fiction... I get enough reality in my day job!
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ruthbru: I read Unbroken earlier this year and absolutely LOVED it. It was one of the best books I've read in while. In fact, tonight at dinner I reminded my grandmother to pick it up at the library. It's been months and I'm still raving about it; it's that good!0
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omy gosh.. just catching up on this thread... I am still engrossed in Great Expectations.. should be for a while. it's tooooooooooooo long. but fascinating.
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Voracious, I just finished "Lots of Candles..." So much I could relate to, and she expressed all of it so perfectly. I think I want to go back with a marker and pinpoint all those lovely passages.
Ruthbru, wasn't "Unbroken" compelling? Such a testament to the human spirit. I had no idea those men suffered like that.
It's such a joy to read gems such as those two.
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