Whatcha readin'?

[Hayduke]

Also working on Moonwalking with Einstein.

I read that, but I don't remember what it was about.

I'm sweeping my reading stack to the side to re-read The Hobbit so I can better appreciate Keith Norris's A Hobbit’s Holiday Nov. 29, 7-8 p.m., in the Clayton Performing Arts Center at the Pellissippi Hardin Valley Campus (which is somewhere the other side of East Nashville as I understand it). Eunice has read it 19-20 times. Kieth reads it once a year. I read it once, many decades ago.



Interrupted books include:
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Author), Alexander O. Smith (Translator)
Sorry Please Thank You, a collection of short stories by Charles Yu, who wrote How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The Defence of Duffer's Drift by Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, as a precursor to its modern remake:
The Defense of Hill 781 by James R. McDonough. Not sure how much I'll like either one of them, but I'll probably learn some military tactics that Bilbo could have used.

[binR Bishop]

I read that, but I don't remember what it was about.

[edens]

At first glance, I read that as Chuck Norris. Which would be kinda awesome.

[jfm]

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. A friend in New York gave this to me several years ago and I've had it kicking around and dipped into it a few times, but this week I just picked it up and read straight through. (Not that it took long -- 11 short stories/chapters, totaling about 160 pages.)

I saw the movie back when it came out and liked it, and in retrospect it's a pretty faithful adaptation. But the quasi-hallucinatory writing is something you couldn't possibly get on screen. There are paragraphs scattered through the whole book that can stand alone as prose poems. Really gorgeous stuff, even when (or especially when) it's drawing from grim, grimy subject matter. Tho there's a lot of humor, too.

It makes me want to read more by him, but also a little leery. The writing works so well in these concise little stories that I wonder how it would hold up in more extended form. Has anyone read Tree of Smoke or Train Dreams?

[Lee G]

It makes me want to read more by him, but also a little leery. The writing works so well in these concise little stories that I wonder how it would hold up in more extended form. Has anyone read Tree of Smoke or Train Dreams?

I read Tree of Smoke, and I enjoyed it, and still think about it sometimes, but it was a bit of a slog. After a while, I took its winding mysteries as a metaphor for the Vietnam conflict itself, which maybe wasn't the point.

[Lee G]

And I finished Bouvard and Pecuchet, which was good. I didn't enjoy it as much as Salammbo, but I can totally buy the arguments for B&P as one of the roots of modern/postmodern fiction. And plus the writing is just so great.

And now I'm on to this,



in which Madison Smartt Bell takes on another ornery Southerner with three names, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

[jfm]

I read Tree of Smoke, and I enjoyed it, and still think about it sometimes, but it was a bit of a slog. After a while, I took its winding mysteries as a metaphor for the Vietnam conflict itself, which maybe wasn't the point.

Yeah I've heard similar things about its ungainliness. Train Dreams sounds more promising. And short! (I liked this essay by Ian McEwan in the New Yorker the other week, about how the novella is "the perfect form of prose fiction.")

[Hayduke]

Really digging Killed at the Whim of a Hat (the title is from a George W. Bush quote) by Colin Cotterill. I would have read this sooner but for some reason I thought I already had. I suppose I don't like it quite as much as The Coroner's Lunch, but that still leaves room for an awful lot of like.

Oh, and The Hobbit was a lot shorter and funnier than I'd remembered.

[Hayduke]

And while I'm on things bookish, our own Adrienne Martini got a shout out in this week's Time's Book Review. Top of paragraph 2 in the "Inside the List" column:

[Lois McMaster] Bujold wasn’t always sure this day would come. Discussing her awards in 2005, she told the book blogger Adrienne Martini: “They can give a writer a welcome sense of validation, if only on the ‘Somebody liked it! Somebody really liked it!’ level. . . . Becoming a big-list (i.e., New York Times and that ilk) best seller would do as well, but that seems to be much harder to achieve.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/bo...-the-list.html

[jfm]

Just Kids, the Patti Smith memoir. Good stuff. Sometimes overblown and self-consciously poetic, in that Patti Smith way, but mostly likable and down to earth. It has this nicely wide-eyed evocation of bohemian New York in the late '60s and early '70s, which makes all the name-dropping seem magical instead of irritating. And her candor and affection about Mapplethorpe and their relationship -- as it evolved from lovers to friends and back and forth several times -- holds it all together. It's a portrait of a deep, abiding friendship as much as it is of an era.