What Are You Reading

[Mid-fogey]

What's wrong...

...with Jane Austin?

 

[Harp]

Jane

...with Jane Austin?

absolutely nothing, I adore her. I just wish I had known about that book sale.

Have you seen Becoming Jane?

 

[Mid-fogey]

Not yet...

absolutely nothing, I adore her. I just wish I had known about that book sale.

Have you seen Becoming Jane?

...I usually wait until things come out on DVD. We have a home theater system and I like to sit in my man chair and enjoy.

 

[CanadaDoll]

Textbooks, textbooks, and more textbooks, and then for a change of pace their corresponding readers, and glossaries.:eusa_doh: lol

My beautiful shiny new copy of Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets is pining away on my nightstand for the end of term

 

[dhermann1]

I just started reading "The Proteus Operation", by James P Hogan, another $1 find at my local bookstore. It's another novelization of the WW II period, (like "2 O'Clock Eastern Wartime", which I just finished, which I highly recommend). This time it's a fantasy based on the premise that the Nazis won WW II, and in 1975 only the US, Australia and New Zealand are not under Nazi domination. Some very special operators do a little time travel back to 1939 to try to change history. Having been up to my ears in the actual history of the era for several years now, and knowing all the principals (Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Professor Lindemann) almost intimately, I expect this to be a lot of fun. I'm already making mental notes of the little technical errors, e.g. Churchill was not 65 in early 1939, his birthday was not until Nov 30. But this looks like it will be a lot of fun. Maybe a touch of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well?

 

[Harp]

Tartan n' Tudor

I stole Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles by Margaret George
from my sister in grad school; reading for October's release of Elizabeth.

O 'tis not spanish, but 'tis heaven she speaks!
'Tis heav'n that lyes in ambush there, and breaks
From thence into the wondering reader's brest...

Richard Crashaw, Apologie for the Fore-going Hymne

Mary and Liz, two fascinating ladies.

 

[Kishtu]

Harp, do you get on with Margaret George's writing style?

We had that and (I think) "The Memoirs of Cleopatra" and I really struggled with the way she writes. I'm going to have to go home tonight and read it again now!

Now Rosalind Miles and "I, Elizabeth" - that grabbed me by the scruff and shook me like a rat.

 

[Harp]

Harp, do you get on with Margaret George's writing style?

We had that and (I think) "The Memoirs of Cleopatra" and I really struggled with the way she writes. I'm going to have to go home tonight and read it again now!

Now Rosalind Miles and "I, Elizabeth" - that grabbed me by the scruff and shook me like a rat.

Her style is a bit the "acquired taste," but she's a poet, I suspect.
I haven't read Miles' I, Elizabeth, but will grab it on such strong recommend.

 

[vonwotan]

Recently, I have been re-reading several of the books from my boarding school and college days. At the moment its Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

 

[Mr. Lucky]

William Kennedy - Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed and, my personal fave - and for the fifth time - Roscoe. Great period work with such reverence for his subject matter: fringe dwellers in the city of Albany. Gamblers, pimps, drunks, writers and politicians; my kind of people!

If you haven't read him, please, do yourself the favor.

 

[Dr Doran]

William Kennedy - Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed and, my personal fave - and for the fifth time - Roscoe. Great period work with such reverence for his subject matter: fringe dwellers in the city of Albany. Gamblers, pimps, drunks and politicians; my kind of people!

If you haven't read him, please, do yourself the favor.

Did Ironweed get made into a film, perhaps with Meryl Streep or Sissy Spacek? Or am I thinking of something else?

 

[Mr. Lucky]

Did Ironweed get made into a film, perhaps with Meryl Streep or Sissy Spacek? Or am I thinking of something else?

Yeah, it did. Nicholson and Streep. And it did not do the novel justice, not at all.

Edited to add: I should qualify this by saying I haven't seen this in a long time and should give it another viewing before I stick to my guns in the above opine.

 

[Harp]

William Kennedy - Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed...

Ironweed initially had been turned down by its publisher until
Saul Bellow championed Kennedy's manuscript. Great writing.

 

[Dr Doran]

Edited to add: I should qualify this by saying I haven't seen this in a long time and should give it another viewing before I stick to my guns in the above opine.

we all do it from time to time my good chap

 

[dhermann1]

Ironweed

Yeah, it did. Nicholson and Streep. And it did not do the novel justice, not at all.

Edited to add: I should qualify this by saying I haven't seen this in a long time and should give it another viewing before I stick to my guns in the above opine.

But they did do the amazingly innovative thing of actually filming a movie about Albany NY in Albany NY. That part they certainly did justice to.

 

[Fleur De Guerre]

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch. Really great so far!

 

[Harp]

Blue Arabesque, a search for the sublime by Patricia Hampl.

Hampl's chance encounter with Matisse's Woman Before an Aquarium
leads to the Odalisques and a fascination with the Ottoman influence.
Delacroix, Ingres, Anais Nin, fellow St Paul native, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the
tragic Katherine Mansfield, and perhaps equally so Virginia Woolf, and a most
intriguing episode inside East Jerusalem's souk are featured, as is the 13th C
poet, Rumi in her quest for the languid sublime Orient. Hampl teaches at MN,
and has a collection of poetry. Worth a look.

 

[Harp]

Wooden on Leadership by Coach John Wooden & Steve Jamison.

 

[katylouise]

I'm one of those people who have several books going at once.

Currently on my nightstand:

Some Clarifications y otros poemas Javier O. Huerta

Trouble In Mind (poems) Lucie Brock-Broido

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline George Saunders

Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers & The Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism Eric Burns

A Benjamin Franklin Reader edited by Walter Isaacson

Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller

 

[vonwotan]

Baudolino by Umberto Eco. I really enjoy Eco's novells and have read The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum several times.