What Are You Reading

[Tenuki]

Tenuki, I love Margaret Atwood! What else of hers have you read?

Hi SayCici. I've read The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Edible Woman, Selected Poems. In the queue are Wilderness Tips and Alias Grace. I haven't yet picked After The Flood, but I loved Oryx and Crake.

Which of Miss Atwood's have you read?

 

[Harp]

Last Saturday's Financial Times House & Home section which
features an article on Emily Dickinson titled Poetic Nature,
by Robert Lane Fox, whom cannot stand her "dire grammar and her violent
abuse of prepositions, verbs, and apparently hanging subjects."

Emily is quite the radical.

 

[StetsonHomburg]

I am half way through The Golden Horseshoe: Wartime Career of Otto Kretschmer by Terence Robertson amazingly good book, very descriptive!

 

[The Lonely Navigator]

Re StetsonHomburg - I too began to read that book until I came across the author's description of Prien. After that I pretty much shut it and took it back to the library. This isn't to say there weren't some good parts where it concerns interaction between Prien and Kretschmer though.

 

[Mr E Train]

Lanark by Alasdair Gray. LANARK, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow...a profound message about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. Compared with...Dante, Blake, Joyce, Orwell Kafka, Huxley and Lewis Carroll
'Tis pretty good so far.

I read that one a couple of months ago. It was quite a terrific book.

I just started Moby Dick. It seems kind of late to be reading it now, but it was never part of my required reading in school for some reason, and I found a nice leatherbound copy at an antique shop and figured "better late than never."

 

["Skeet" McD]

I read that one a couple of months ago. It was quite a terrific book.

I just started Moby Dick. It seems kind of late to be reading it now, but it was never part of my required reading in school for some reason, and I found a nice leatherbound copy at an antique shop and figured "better late than never."

Indeed! You won't be disappointed. Some folks love it from the Title-page; others find it grows on them. Let's just say that....the tempo picks up. But: the journey is the thing. One of the most remarkable books ever written...and, as you probably know....a complete dud when first published.

Let us know what you think!

"Skeet"

 

[BinkieBaumont]

"On Friday I started "Mad World" - Evelyn Waugh and the secrets of Brideshead, its rather good, I'm already 1/4 through it!"

 

[Mav]

Mav,

Do hope you update us on how you like Hamlet's Mill. I think this is an under-appreciated, almost lost, work on monomyth. I also recall respecting Santillana's general theme that intelligent civilizations existed much longer than is now commonly accepted.

Excellent read; finished it while camping this weekend.

Its a very scholarly work, and you almost have to be hip to the whole monomyth idea, as well as have a pretty firm grasp of astronomical observation as a basis of that myth. It's a tough concept for most modern folk.

I found it somewhat startling that someone had been seriously looking at this back in '69, however, as much of this has only been approached by those considered "occult" or esoteric writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anything else I've seen currently on this subject jumps whole- heartedly into the "aliens as our ancestors" thing, which just needs to go away. The astronomical observation explanation makes more sense. I think I'm going to read Santillana's previous work- the title escapes me right now.

 

[Foofoogal]

Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. There are even meetup groups for this.

Every woman everywhere should read this book even if their mom is still alive.

I lost my mom when I was 27 years old and it is like looking in a gigantic mirror. Unbelievable.

This book definitely concretes for me why I do vintage selling.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Lately I've been on a Raymond Chandler kick and by far The Long Goodbye is in my opinion his best work. Philip Marlowe's discourse on blondes in the book is classic Chandlerian prose as its best:

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points. except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde that cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde that gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that ********* headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as a bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençale. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemuth she can tell you which of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa in Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

 

[Sarge]

About half way through "You Can't Get Much Closer Than This: Combat with Company H, 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Division" by A.Z. Adkins, Jr. and Andrew Z. Adkins III

 

[Feraud]

In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin.
Anyone who is a fan of the film should read this book. It is informative and dispels certain myths that grew around the film.
An engrossing read.

 

[Mr Vim]

Rocket Men
by Craig Nelson

Focusing on Apollo 11, well written very approachable in the more scientific aspects of space travel but what gets my goat is the candid look at Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin.

 

[Mario]

I just finished reading the second book of a new series of thriller novels set in Berlin in the 1930's (with the first book taking off in 1929).
It focuses on inspector Gereon Rath, who was forced to leave his native Cologne and go to Berlin after killing the son of a powerful media mogul in self defense.
A member of the homicide squad, he's a rather egocentric character and not a team player at all, which brings him a lot of trouble with his superiors - among others.
As the stories evolve, the books also touch some of the political things that happened at the time, like the rising power of the nazis, the riots between communists, the police and the SA, the killing of soon-to-be iconographic Horst Wessel and so on. It paints a very detailed, intricate picture of Berlin in the Weimar Republic, a city swept away in a frenzy of music, nightclubs, cocaine, unemployment, social tensions and political riots.
There are by now two books out with six more to come. The author is Volker Kutscher. The first book is called 'Der naße Fisch', which translates to 'the wet fish', a term coined by homicide investigators to denote an unsolved murder case. It deals with a great amount of russian gold that had been smuggled to Berlin and the struggle of different groups tryoing to get hold of it (communists, tsarists, German nationalists and the mob). The second book, 'Der stumme Tod (The silent death)' is set in the Berlin film business that is just making the transition from silent to sound films.

The books have not (yet?) been translated into English.

 

[AmateisGal]

I just finished reading the second book of a new series of thriller novels set in Berlin in the 1930's (with the first book taking off in 1929).
It focuses on inspector Gereon Rath, who was forced to leave his native Cologne and go to Berlin after killing the son of a powerful media mogul in self defense.
A member of the homicide squad, he's a rather egocentric character and not a team player at all, which brings him a lot of trouble with his superiors - among others.
As the stories evolve, the books also touch some of the political things that happened at the time, like the rising power of the nazis, the riots between communists, the police and the SA, the killing of soon-to-be iconographic Horst Wessel and so on. It paints a very detailed, intricate picture of Berlin in the Weimarer Republic, a city swept away in a frenzy of music, nightclubs, cocaine, unemployment, social tensions and political riots.
There are by now two books out with six more to come. The author is Volker Kutscher. The first book is called 'Der naße Fisch', which translates to 'the wet fish', a term coined by homicide investigators to denote an unsolved murder case. It deals with a great amount of russian gold that had been smuggled to Berlin and the struggle of different groups tryoing to get hold of it (communists, tsarists, German nationalists and the mob). The second book, 'Der stumme Tod (The silent death)' is set in the Berlin film business that is just making the transition from silent to sound films.

The books have not (yet?) been translated into English.

Mario, these sound absolutely fascinating. I hope they are eventually translated into English - I'd love to read them.

 

[Touchofevil]

I am a huge fan of Raymond Chandler. He was the impetus behind my thirst for pulp and mystery writers of yesteryear. It is because of Chandler that I found Ross MacDonald, Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and so many others.

I am currently reading "Doorway to Death" by Dan Marlowe.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Swap Meet Find!

I picked this up at the local swap meet yesterday:

Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918-1939 by Harriet Sergeant
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1990)

From the dustjacket:

In the 1920s and 1930s no world cruise was complete without a visit to Shanghai. Its name alone conjured images of mystery and adventure. Passengers on ships sailing to the Far East were regaled with stories of "The Whore of the Orient" and enthralled by tales of gangsters and warlords, of nightclubs that never closed and hotels that supplied heroin on room service. Shanghai became the epitome of glamor, immortalized in books and films. With its bustling polyglot population of British, Chinese, Americans, French, and White Russian inhabitants, its extremes of poverty and wealth, it appeared to straddle East and West. By the time the Japanese invasion of 1937 destroyed the illusion, Shanghai had passed into legend.

Shanghai in the 1930s was the Berlin of the 1920s: a city where cultures and politics collided; where refugees from the Russian Revolution rubbed shoulders with proper British colonialists and American missionaries; where cabarets, theaters, and prostitution all thrived. Now, in Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918-1939, Harriet Sergeant recreates the years of the city's brief but brilliant heyday. Her book is an intriguing combination of firsthand accounts (she tracked down former residents, many [were] now in their eighties [at the time of writing] and scattered across the world), vigorous research, and imaginative reconstruction. It is a fascinating analysis of the factors that make a city great -- and a sobering illustration of the forces that can make a great city fall.

 

[Atinkerer]

I'm reading Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile.

 

[Harp]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43 and Anne Bradstreet's similar
17th Century ode, To My Dear and Loving Husband; while waiting for
the Chicago Black Hawks to skate in the second game of the Stanley Cup.
Two wonderful ladies whose poetry is as timeless as love.
.

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished reading the last installment of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Amazing trilogy, and highly recommended.