Now reading...

[Brad]

[B. Goren.]

[jazzbo]

[jlhoots]

Jo Nesbo: The Phantom

[ejp626]

Close to wrapping up The Mill on the Floss. My initial impression still holds -- a novel that you sort of admire but don't actually enjoy that much. Tom is still such an insufferable prat, and the father is, to his dying day, a man determined to make the wrong choice from what life has to offer him. I just want it to be over at this point.

I happened to grab the graphic novel version of J.B. Priestly's An Inspector Calls (with the full text, they declare proudly). Boy, am I glad that I read this in this format, rather than paying to watch it on stage. For me, time has done it no favors. The speeches are so over the top. Look, look at the uncaring industrialist. Step right this way to see the selfish children of the rich. Look at the charity society woman who has no "soul." And so on. G.B. Shaw and Brecht can sometimes pull off the trick of writing politicial or politicized speech without seeming like they are pulling pages out of a sociology textbook, but Priestly sure can't.

And then the "twist" or rather double-twist at the end is, to me, an infuriating cheat straight out of the pages of G.K. Chesterton, maybe copped directly from The Man Who Was Thursday. I certainly know people who love the Father Brown stories, but I found them unbearable (atheists who kill simply to make The Church look bad, I mean really). I'll be steering clear away from this in the future and probably all of Priestly's work.

Edited November 24, 2012 by ejp626

[BruceH]

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance - Lois McMaster Bujold. Best new Miles novel in many a year, and Miles isn't even in it.

[aparxa]

Joseph Kessel - La passante du Sans Souci

[ejp626]

Really disappointed in the last 100 or so pages of Mill on the Floss. I particularly disliked the actual ending. It seemed like it was heading to a downbeat but "organically consistent" ending, i.e. one that made sense given what had happened before. The actual ending is almost totally random and stupid.

I am totally showing my age, but one of the newsmagazines (probably Time) ran little inserts on how to improve one's writing as well as reading comprehension. I think there was Bill Cosby discussing speed reading and so on. Anyway, some comic writer decided to give some advice and said that endings were easy: Everyone got run over by a bus. And if you wanted to change it up a bit, you could use Everyone was run over by a truck.

That's kind of how I felt at the end of this novel -- I honestly feel cheated -- it's such a long book for such a terrible payoff.

All that said, there is one semi-brilliant passage in the novel, which I will copy out gratis to spare you from making my mistake.

For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character’ — says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms — ‘character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

[Christiern]

Amazingly good read. What a character !

Does not surprise me. I used to work with him.

[jlhoots]

Larry McMurtry: Custer

[A Lark Ascending]

First read this 35+ years ago. Still holds up.

[BillF]

First read this 35+ years ago. Still holds up.

My experience, too. Have read it three times - first at the age of 15 and last about 5 years ago. One of the truly great books for me.

Amazingly good read. What a character !

Does not surprise me. I used to work with him.

Did you! Any stories to tell?

[A Lark Ascending]

My experience, too. Have read it three times - first at the age of 15 and last about 5 years ago. One of the truly great books for me.

Orwell was the first 'proper' writer I got obsessed with whilst reading 'Animal Farm' for 'O' Level.

[BillF]

[B. Goren.]

The biography of Lee Iacocca.

[BillF]

Edited December 8, 2012 by BillF

[jazzbo]

[Matthew]

I've been debating with myself about getting this one, how is it?

[jazzbo]

It's entertaining and at times insightful. It's very much a baby boomer book in that there are lots of cultural references that a middle-age white goy would know. I have been sharing a lot of books on these matters with my Dad but didn't this one as these references would have less meaning to him.

At its core it's a bit too much about John Coats and less about interpretation of Genesis. I enjoyed it but not as much as other books about Paul, Abram et al that I've read lately.

[Matthew]

It's entertaining and at times insightful. It's very much a baby boomer book in that there are lots of cultural references that a middle-age white goy would know. I have been sharing a lot of books on these matters with my Dad but didn't this one as these references would have less meaning to him.

At its core it's a bit too much about John Coats and less about interpretation of Genesis. I enjoyed it but not as much as other books about Paul, Abram et al that I've read lately.

Thanks for the info.

[Stefan Wood]

Barry Malzberg - On a Planet Alien

[ejp626]

Finally done with a lot of books that didn't do much for me, I can read a few more purely entertaining books. I decided on the theme of road trip, so I am reading Faulkner's The Reivers. A little bit down the road, I will reread Handling Sin by Michael Malone (and while I don't know this, I certainly suspect that Malone was inspired at least a bit by The Reivers). Then Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie and Greene's Travels with My Aunt.

Faulkner can certainly be quite funny when you get past some of the "difficult," even baroque passages. The Reivers has a bit of the convoluted writing of his mid-career novels, but is generally a simpler read. Faulkner's ear for dialect is amazing, and when you read all the back-and-forth in the bordello kitchen for instance, it is flat-out hilarious. I am really enjoying it.

I was wondering why it hadn't been made into a movie, and apparently it was (in 1969 with Steve McQueen). I wonder how much they had to tone it down back then. Anyway, I guess I'll see about scoring a copy, since it eventually did make it to DVD. (As far as I know, no one has made Handling Sin into a movie. Apparently, Malone actually delivered a script to some studio but it never went anywhere.)

[A Lark Ascending]

Can't believe that UK TV had nothing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Very impressed so far - pacey narrative with lots of worm's eye views.

Edited December 15, 2012 by A Lark Ascending

[BillF]

[Matthew]

L. A. Noir: The Struggle For The Soul Of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin. Story of Mickey Cohen, who was the king mobster in LA, and William Parker, the famous LA Chief of Police. Very good so far, but the whole "struggle for the soul of LA" is, of course, complete bs, but a writer does need a hook to sell a book. It would be nice if LA was not always examined through the glasses of Raymond Chandler.