Summer Reading List
Read anything good lately?
I just finished Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. It's about the 1893 Chicago World Fair - lots of names, dates, facts and details. I like dates, but the rest I could have done without.
I just started The Sex Lives of Cannibals : Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific about a young man who, to avoid seeking gainful employment, packs up & moves to a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific. I'm only on Chapter 2 - in which the Author reveals the Fruit of his Research into the Strange Island Nation he has declared his new Home (which leaves much unknown), compensates for his Ignorance with his Lively Imagination (which is inadequate) and Packs (inappropriately) – and already I love it!
posted by K @ 3:18 PM
6 Comments:
The Sex Lives of Cannibals sounds interesting! Brian read Devil in a White City - I tried to give it a whirl, but didn't find it very appealing.
I am currently reading two books, both collections of short stories.
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (I love her stories - she is definately one of my favorite writers)
Adverbs by Daniel Handler (he wrote the Lemony Snicket books, among other things)
I have also been trying for awhile now to get through Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach. She wrote Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which was much more interesting (to me anyway).
I loved The Devil in the White City...but I tend to like quirky historical stuff.
Currently I'm reading A Confederacy of Dunces, which I was slow to warm up to but now has me laughing out loud.
The last book I finshed was The Double by Jose Saramago. Good, but not great.
Lately, I've been getting into Tom Robbins...Another Roadside Attraction, Skinny Legs and All, and (especially) Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates are all very good.
I am also reading (well, by "reading" I mean it is sitting on my nightstand - I've made it 80% through but just can't seem to finish it) All the Names by Jose Saramago. Wow! That is one wordy book. Maybe it is just the translation from Portuguese that makes it so verbous. It's a great story by I can't read more than three pages a night. Was The Double the same way?
Yeah, all of Saramago's books are like that. Dense, verbose, prose, sentences that run on for paragraphs, paragraphs that run on for pages...
All the Names is actually my least favorite book by him that I've read, so if you like that, you will almost certainly like his other stuff. My fav is Blindness.
I just finished Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Very weird at first and took some figuring out, but I hadn't finished a book in a while so I decided to persevere and in then end I think I enjoyed it, not sure though. I can't really say what it is about, love, lack of love, WWII, Nazis, being Jewish, being Ukrainian, being lonely...overall I give it a "pretty good." Now I'm deciding what to read next, I've always got the McSweeney's (see sidebar for link to thier site) but these are mostly short stories so I'm picking something else, maybe Augusten Burroughs or maybe Moorcycle Diaries (Che)
Did I really describe a book as "wordy"?
Post a Comment
<< Home