Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days
Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
Category Archives: Currently Reading & TBR
“Good books” and Sept/Oct TBR
I’ve had too many books that I adored while reading them which now carry with them nothing better than that awful, says-nothing, lazy accolade: I enjoyed these books, sure I did! They were good books.
Good books, huh? Well, gee…
I don’t doubt there were a great many good books. But why they were any good escapes me now. You’d think it would be easy to remember the good ones.
Currently reading…
That yellow rain slicker, the gray rapids of a flooded street…the little newspaper boat that floats toward the stormdrain…and then the carnival smell of popcorn and the shining silver eyes of Pennywise the Clown as he offers up a balloon to young Georgie Denbrough.
The first scene in Stephen King’s IT is one of my favorite openers of any novel. It’s been probably two years since I last read any King. A new IT movie comes out September 8th though, and the novel is out in a great new edition from Scribner, so…I’m getting back into it! Truth be told, I left this one 70 pages to the end last time I read it (really, 94% through the book and I left off!) I remember the story slowing considerably toward the end, but from what I’ve heard I was at the edge of something good.
Kurt Vonnegut who, when reading him is to do mental gymnastics, is hit-or-miss for me. Slaughter-house Five is a great book and Sirens of Titan amused me last summer, but this one – Deadeye Dick – is so far just a jumble of stuff that is kind of a chore to read. I’m only about a fifth of the way into it, and I hope he’ll come around to please me with the usual zaniness.
I’m nearly finished with E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View and want to publish the review by end of week. Forster was a bit like an English Edith Wharton: wry, compassionate and, at times, acerbic.
What are you reading?
Currently reading/Up next
Even as Frodo and company are only leaving Tom Bombadil’s at sun up, I’ve already started thinking about my next reads.
Currently reading:
The Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien
Snow – Orhan Pamuk
Up next?
The Godfather – Mario Puzo (re-read)
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski
But THIS is what I’m really excited about:
Colm Tóibín, House of Names
May 9, 2017
Scribner, 278 pages (hardcover)
The story of Clytemnestra:
[…] how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her because that is what he was told would make the winds blow in his favor and take him to Troy; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus, who shared her bed in the dark and could kill; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child.”
— summary from Goodreads
Sounds so good! I saw a review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune shortly before its release and continue to *almost* pick it up – only scared it will fall short (I’ve not read Tóibín before so I really shouldn’t have this fear.)
A peek into this week’s reviews
It’s a little sad to leave Leskov behind…the cozy samovar-on-the table/bast-shoes-under-the-bed kind of feeling he gives….Leskov wrote most of the stories in this collection as anecdotes, apropos of something said between travelers at an inn, among passengers on a boat or just so: he created characters and scenes for the purpose of introducing his stories, and he provided these characters with listeners (who sometimes interrupt, only making that cozy, chummy feeling cozier and chummier). The copy I have is from my favorite translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and is one for which I’ve already reviewed the title story, The Enchanted Wanderer, as it’s own piece).
Also publishing a review for the classic teleplay Twelve Angry Men. Disconcerting to read how cavalierly a jury could play with a man’s life. Rose wrote the play in 1954, when the Civil Rights movement was just barely starting to simmer. The way he slowly skins his characters down to their bones is masterful. Seventy-three pages, one setting (a drab jury room), no physical action…but the psychology of it is beautifully done that it hardly matters; its theatrical plainness is to its credit.
Estimated publishing dates are Thursday and Saturday (May 18th and 20th).
Mahfouz, Chabon and new books
I’m shooting to have the review up by mid-week for Autumn Quail and am working on a series recap to come shortly afterward that compares the three novellas. Mahfouz was a tremendous writer and keenly aware of the lifeblood of Cairo’s every corner. He did win the Nobel prize for literature.
My introduction to Mahfouz was through his Cairo trilogy a few years ago. The way he wrote about the British occupation and then of Egyptian independence through one merchant-class family showed all the glamour, richness, decrepitude, sadness; showed all…everything…that was alive in Cairo through the first half of the twentieth century. He gave this same attention to his writings of the ’52 revolution that I am now reviewing.
♠ Also reading…
I’m halfway through Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I’d been meaning to get to his work for a while and started in on this one per the recommendation of books n’at.
I might also pick up Julius Caesar once I finish Mahfouz – we’re near the storied Ides of March after all, and I haven’t read Shakespeare in years – but a couple of other books are also pulling me into their orbits. Read on.
Five tough books on the TBR
I didn’t read War and Peace for the purpose of saying that I’ve read it. I read it because I fell in love with Anna Karenina. I’ve since read as much Tolstoy as I can get my hands on.
But there are books I want to read, if not because I think I “should” (though there are these, too), then because they intimidate and frustrate and confuse and disarm, and, and…and?
And allure me.
A peek at five of the books staring me down:
The Masthead 