What Are You Reading

[Patrick Murtha]

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

Meant to read it for some time, and I'm just finally getting around to it.

Oh geez, Dicken's bores the nonsense out of me. Too much detail!

Tolstoy isn't detailed?

 

[Smuterella]

flowers for Algernon

:cry:

 

[Joli7211]

Le Compte de Monte Cristo I - in french.

 

[Sunny]

Time to Depart, seventh in the Marcus Didius Falco series, a private eye in ancient Rome. :eusa_clap

 

[zaika]

Metro Stop Dostoevsky by Ingrid Bengis. I'm not much for reading fiction, but non fiction is especially fascinating to me. This book is about the author's stay in Leningrad before/during the coup in Russia (what was that? 1990? 91?). I was in Russia in '93, so a lot of what Bengis writes about I could picture and relate to. She expresses clearly and profoundly how I feel about the country as an American (although she has closer ties, her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants).

A fiction book that I actually finished recently was Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos. It was okay. [huh]

I'm trying to go for the classics these days but I choose unwisely. To beef up my Russian I'm trying Crime and Punishment. I'm reading the English with it so I can learn some vocab...but the English is no easier. Blast that Constance Garrett! I'll be procuring the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation in the future. They did a bang up job with Master and Margerita.

 

[classyguy]

I am not reading anything spectacular at this point, however, I have been reading about a book that I cannot wait to read. Its called 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' by Jean-Dominique Bauby. If you've never heard of it you should check it out. It was written completely with his left eye.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor in chief for Elle magazine in France...he was rich and successful until he had a stroke that left him completely paralyzed except for his left eye. He accepted his fate and would use his immagination to do everything he every wanted to do. A speech expert would call out letters of the alphabet and he would blink when he wanted a letter and she would write it down and the whole book was written like that (app. 200,000 blinks). Two days after the book was published Bauby died. Its a true story of an amazing and insirational man. It was also made into a movie that I will be seeing at my local art gallery in april. The movie got 94% on Rotten Tomatoes which is pretty amazing for any movie. It also won best director at Canne Film festival.

Check out the book or the movie. (the movie is in french by the way).

 

[jayem]

Tolstoy isn't detailed?

Oh, he is, but about details that matter. He won't take up a page describing the color of the sky a la Dickens. Getting through Hard Times was certainly just as the title says... for me.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Oh, he is, but about details that matter. He won't take up a page describing the color of the sky a la Dickens. Getting through Hard Times was certainly just as the title says... for me.

And Hard Times is, by a very wide margin, Dickens at his most concise, so you should avoid the rest at all costs!

 

[Dr Doran]

Oh, he is, but about details that matter. He won't take up a page describing the color of the sky a la Dickens. Getting through Hard Times was certainly just as the title says... for me.

Jayem, I agree with you.

 

[Miss Crisplock]

Georgette Heyer's novels.

 

[Sunny]

And Hard Times is, by a very wide margin, Dickens at his most concise, so you should avoid the rest at all costs!

I've read a lot of Dickens, and Hard Times is high up there on my LEAST favorite list. Concise? Maybe; I don't recall. But it was very depressing, the whole way through. I have no desire to ever read it again.

Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby are my current favorites. And for "most concise," I nominate A Tale of Two Cities. I resisted reading it for a long time; but when I finally did, I was astonished. It's concise and there's a whole lot that happens. It's definitely an outlier for Dickens, and a very good one.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I've read a lot of Dickens, and Hard Times is high up there on my LEAST favorite list. Concise? Maybe; I don't recall. But it was very depressing, the whole way through. I have no desire to ever read it again.

Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby are my current favorites. And for "most concise," I nominate A Tale of Two Cities. I resisted reading it for a long time; but when I finally did, I was astonished. It's concise and there's a whole lot that happens. It's definitely an outlier for Dickens, and a very good one.

By "concise," I meant not just that Hard Times is short (although I believe it is the shortest completed Dickens novel), but also that its prose is unusually tight for CD. It is depressing in its subject matter (by intent), angry in its force, and a definite "outlier," as you say of A Tale of Two Cities. I believe Hard Times is a very great book, but it is not in the least a comfy read. There is a wonderful film version by the distinguished Portuguese director Joao Botelho, made in the late Eighties.

 

[Dr Doran]

By "concise," I meant not just that Hard Times is short (although I believe it is the shortest completed Dickens novel), but also that its prose is unusually tight for CD. It is depressing in its subject matter (by intent), angry in its force, and a definite "outlier," as you say of A Tale of Two Cities. I believe Hard Times is a very great book, but it is not in the least a comfy read. There is a wonderful film version by the distinguished Portuguese director Joao Botelho, made in the late Eighties.

I keep telling myself I gots to give Chuck D* another chance. He is my father's favorite after Shakespeare and my father is heartbroken that I hate him (C.D., not my father). My father offered me $10 to read Oliver Twist when I was 10 and I had to reject the money because I didn't like it. I have only met one person who hates him besides myself. This is Professor Andrew Stewart at my university, a renowned art historian. He said that he cannot stand C.D. because he (C.D., not Professor Stewart) writes prose in iambic pentameter rhythm.

I do possess a copy of Hard Times as well as a big hardbound that has Bleak House and Christmas Carol. I guess I hated the book that begins with Gradgrind denigrating a fact-based education because I personally strongly believe in a fact-based education. But then again, I probably believe this because I also believe that education today has gotten too far away from facts.

*Sorry about calling Dickens Chuck D. That was completely inexcusable. You can call MY favorites Eskie** and Da Thooksta*** as a revenge if you like.

**Aeschylus

***Thucydides

 

[TessTrueheart]

Maisie Dobbs by Jaqueline Winspear, about a young woman who works as a private eye in England, 1929. An ok read so far.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

I do possess a copy of Hard Times as well as a big hardbound that has Bleak House and Christmas Carol. I guess I hated the book that begins with Gradgrind denigrating a fact-based education because I personally strongly believe in a fact-based education. But then again, I probably believe this because I also believe that education today has gotten too far away from facts.

Actually, Gradgrind is promoting an education based on facts. But although Gradgrind is clearly an object of angry satire to Dickens, I don't think that means Dickens is against fact-based education, only a certain extreme version of it. For a nuanced study of Dickens's attitudes on the subject, see Philip Collins's excellent study Dickens and Education. Colins also wrote the fascinating Dickens and Crime.

 

[Mike1939]

Murder and the Married Virgin, Brett Halliday

 

[Caleb Moore]

I just finished a book called "Hollywood's Hellfire Club". It is about the wild and crazy antics of John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, W.C. Fields and a group of other men known as the Bundy Drive Boys. The cover says "they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts" and it's so true. These guys were self-destruction personified.

The book was interesting, though not terribly well written. I enjoyed it, overall.

 

[Sunny]

Murder and the Married Virgin, Brett Halliday

How's that going? Is it a Mike Shayne? I've read some, and had mixed reactions to them.

 

[Mike1939]

How's that going? Is it a Mike Shayne? I've read some, and had mixed reactions to them.

Yes it's a Michael Shayne story published in 1944. I'm really enjoying it, Shayne's a classic 1940's fedora and trench coat wearing detective with a down to earth working class style about him. I also enjoy the films with Lloyd Nolan made in the early 40's.

 

[Sunny]

Yes it's a Michael Shayne story published in 1944. I'm really enjoying it, Shayne's a classic 1940's fedora and trench coat wearing detective with a down to earth working class style about him. I also enjoy the films with Lloyd Nolan made in the early 40's.

Ah, from the 1940s! I've read and enjoyed the very first one (from 1939?), but all the others I've found are from the late 1950s and 1960s. Didn't like them so much. I've heard the movies are very good, though. I'll have to move them up in my To Buy list.