Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law
and
The King of Torts - John Grisham
i'm saving all the books I have for reading until the power goes off.
Finished reading The Sea Road last weekend. It was absolutely marvellous.
Picked up A Woman Unknown, which I'd started once before ... and this time I couldn't put it down until I finished it this past Saturday.
A Woman Unknown, Lucia Graves ... Google Print beta link
then I started High Seas: Stories of Battle and Adventure from the Age of Sail, from the Adrenaline series edited by Clint Willis - great fun!
Barnes and Noble link
Finally finished Ms. Fonda's story this afternoon (Onyxelle, the lights went out
) and starting All Gods Children Need Travelin' Shoes, the 5th installment of Maya Angelous's autobiography. I'd purchased installment six and realized that I'd never read this one so first this and then onto "A Song Flung Up to Heaven", the sixth book. And then after that, Goldie Hawn's new book.
Oops. Still perusing "According to the Rolling Stones" too. But that's more coffee table tome and doesn't require a steady read. I'll peek at that for years to come.
"The Greek Treasure" by Irving Stone
Just started Dead as a Doornail, the 5th installment in a hilarious series about vampires and shape shifters in Louisiana! The vampires have come out to the world thanks to the development of synthetic blood. Most of the series has been sexy, scary and hilarious and it's surprisingly well-written.
Also reading the latest Steven Saylor Roman series (it's summer-nothing deep until September!), A Gladiator Dies Only Once from his Roman Mystery series. These are short stories and make great "just before bedtime" reading.
Just started Dead as a Doornail, the 5th installment in a hilarious series about vampires and shape shifters in Louisiana! The vampires have come out to the world thanks to the development of synthetic blood. Most of the series has been sexy, scary and hilarious and it's surprisingly well-written.
Also reading the latest Steven Saylor Roman series (it's summer-nothing deep until September!), A Gladiator Dies Only Once from his Roman Mystery series. These are short stories and make great "just before bedtime" reading.
Sam Giancana -Mafia Princess by By Antoinette Giancana & Thomas C. Renner
Most readers will enjoy the following article.
July 14, 2005
A Royal Odd Couple on a Bizarre Quest
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Once upon a time, in a kingdom by the sea, there dwelled an unhappy royal couple. They lived in splendiferous palaces and majestic, mullioned estates, but they were, alas, as mismatched a pair as Laurel and Hardy, Felix and Oscar.
He was the jug-eared heir to the throne, the man who would be king, the bumbling, beleaguered royal who talked to plants, loved polo and old buildings, and romanced his longtime mistress with talk of being a tampon. She was an iconic blond, who eclipsed her fuddy-duddy in-laws with her jet-set Hollywood style and romanced the tabloids with her love of pricey frocks, wacky New Age therapies and photogenic charitable causes.
These star-crossed royals are not Prince Charles and Princess Diana, but Freddy and Fredericka, the title characters of Mark Helprin's entertaining new novel - a rollicking picaresque saga that reads as though Evelyn Waugh had put the movies "Roman Holiday" and "Duck Soup" into a blender along with some old copies of People magazine and a couple of Mark Twain's travelogues, and seasoned the resulting confection with generous helpings of his own black comedy.
Marking a complete turnaround from the sanctimonious, self-important tales in Mr. Helprin's last book, "The Pacific and Other Stories," this novel is great silly fun - a rowdy, rambunctious read that's part acid farce, part bittersweet fairy tale. It's a book that skates merrily and improbably along on the author's bravura storytelling talents and love of verbal high jinks, a novel as funny and antic and purely escapist as his recent stories have been preachy, pretentious and glum.
Although the reader will instantly recognize the real-life templates for this novel's title characters, nothing in Mr. Helprin's fable is quite what it seems. In fact, his narrator suggests, British history has been predicated upon a series of secrets and misapprehensions. King Edward didn't abdicate because of his love for Mrs. Simpson, but because he botched a traditional test of kingship: he failed to persuade a certain royal and clairvoyant falcon to take flight from his arm. The British Empire didn't advance across the globe because of political or economic ambitions, but because a series of disgraced royals were sent to conquer faraway lands in an effort to redeem their reputations. And Winston Churchill was not Winston Churchill, but a reincarnation of King Arthur, who returns every thousand years or so to aid Britain in her time of need.
As the British tabloids feast upon Freddy and Fredericka's antics, the royal family - egged on by a mysterious interloper named Mr. Neil (hint: his name is an anagram of Merlin) - decides to pack the pair off to America. In order to become king, the disgraced Freddy must pass a simple test: he must conquer the former colonies and return home in glory. It's a quest that he and Fredericka must embark upon incognito: they are to parachute into New Jersey with neither money nor clothes, and there they are to assume the identities of Desi and Popeel Moffat, husband-and-wife dentists from Alabama.
In the course of their peregrinations across America, from New Jersey to Washington to Chicago to California, Desi and Popeel hitch rides on freight trains, concoct get-rich schemes and shiver together in tiny, underheated flats. They meet bikers and car thieves. They lose and acquire a new pair of front teeth, and get themselves committed to an asylum for the insane. They take jobs washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, loading trucks, fighting fires and, yes, fixing teeth - most notably the teeth of a knowledge-challenged Republican presidential candidate named Dewey Knott, who becomes desperate to persuade Desi - er, Freddy - to ghostwrite his speeches. Freddy's turn as Dewey's Cyrano will have startling consequences for both his own fortunes and the future of the free world.
Needless to say, Freddy and Fredericka's adventures are completely preposterous, and they're recounted with a pitch-perfect sense of the absurd. Their utterly daft exchanges with each other; their longing for ordinary, anonymous lives combined with their total ignorance of the real world; their vacillation between heartfelt populism and reflexive royal prerogative - all make for lots of zany comedy, heightened by Mr. Helprin's delight in using puns, homonyms and the differences between British and American English to compound his characters' woes.
Though the novel has its occasional longueurs (and could have used a brisk edit) and Mr. Helprin oversentimentalizes the lessons Freddy and Fredericka learn in the course of their American sojourn, the story remains so inventively wacky that the reader never really minds. As for the title characters, they emerge both as eccentric royal cartoons - she thinks Cervantes is a dip for prawns, he thriftily uses the same tennis balls for decades - and as oddly touching figures, trapped by duty and tradition and yearning for the ordinariness that will always elude them.
With "Freddy and Fredericka," Mr. Helprin has constructed a perfect showcase for his heretofore underused gift of humor, and in doing so he has produced a delightful romp of a book.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
English Dept of San Jose State University, wherein one writes only
the first line of a bad novel:
10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break
wind in the echo chamber he would never hear the end of it."
9) "Just beyond the Narrows the river widens."
8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned,
unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep
azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied
for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that
defied description."
7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept
along the East wall: 'Andre creep ... Andre creep ... Andre creep.'"
6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism,
was about to give his body and soul to a back-alley sex-change surgeon
to become the woman he loved."
5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her
from eking out a living at a local pet store."
4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins
often do."
3) "Like an overripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the
corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor."
2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the
meaning of the word 'fear,' a man who could laugh in the face of danger
and spit in the eye of death - in short, a moron with suicidal
tendencies."
1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along
the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle
window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder,
gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside
her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming
madly, 'You lied!'"
Okay, guys, beat these with your own writing skills.
I'm reading the Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. I'm actually pretty angry, because I'm over a hundred pages into the damn thing and they've barely even mentioned the grapes at all! It's all this crap about this freakin' Joad family leaving to go to California...jeez, shouldn't these grapes of wrath have already taken over a few towns and killed some people by now? When does all the action start in this damn book anyway???!!!
lol, you'll find that there isn't a whole lot of action in the Grapes of Wrath (there is some.) The Grapes of Wrath are metaphorical and are mentioned towards the end of the book in one of the inter-chapter (the short ones that are interspersed with the Joad chapters - they outline abstract themes, but you can't found a plot on such abstractions as "the man", "the family", "the migrants" - the Joads act as the concrete vehicle for the plot.) I don't remember the chapter, but its towards the end. It's a fantastic book. I don't want to ruin it in advance by telling you what they are. Would be up to discuss after you've read it though, of course.
right now im reading Angels and demons by Dan brown
"Bridget Jones, the Edge of reason"
"Harry Potter and the half blood prince"
Ok, I know, I should read more serious books...
I plan to read "through the looking glass"
What? Not serious enough?
Hmm... too bad...
Radical Edward wrote:Ok, I know, I should read more serious books....
Who said? Knock yourself out.
Through the looking glass can be serious if you read into the political culture of england at the time Carrols wrote it.
Most of the way through "So long ........ and thanks for the fish"
I'm reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince..and that's as serious as I wanna be right now ;0)
