What BOOK are you reading right now?

Nimh -- The funny thing is that I always used hue and cry, but, a few years ago, someone did a piece somewhere (when you read a great deal and have a good memory, you end up with snippets of information) on how people use this phrase incorrectly. That made me think that it should be "hew," as in chopping to pieces.

Anyway, the memory about an article about hue and cry, made me think that perhaps hue referred to color. Actually, its hutesium et clamor.

Spendius -- Your Dylan quotes are apt!

I've just finished reading Clerical Errors by Alan Isler. It's a tad hard to explain the storyline and to do so would be a potential "spoiler". Read this link if you don't mind too much information..
A2K Amazon link

I enjoyed it from the first sentence on.
"Sipping a Calvados in a bar in the rue de Manlengin and reading an English newspaper left on the seat by its previous occupant, I discovered to my surprise that I had just died."
I got impatient for the book to end at some point about three quarters of the way through, but the impatience passed. I'd recommend it selectively to others.

I was reading



at the hamburgers. Need to pick up another copy at the library here.

My favourite line in the book, so far, described Christianity as a Jewish sect

Found an old magazine from Jan. 2005 today which reports a conference on the place of humanities. Two of the featured professors occupy endowed chairs. One spoke as a "'negatively charged particle,'" pointing out "some of the pitfalls the humanities are presently following."

Those weaknesses include prominent academics, barn-burners in their prime, who now form a kind of "'greatest generation'" and resist further change; what he calls "'Turk death,'" which is related to the above as the aging former young Turks fade into oblivion, and "'paradigm fatigue'" or "a sense that many academics become one-trick ponies in their work."

I was particularly tickled by paradigm fatigue which I feel relates to my statement that far too many writers have only one book in them which they rewrite ad nauseum.

However, I also thought this is a bone, tossed to the bombastic would-be classicists among us.

What's that about?

That was a Johnny Carson* line, a not-meant-to-be-very-insulting riposte when words fail one. (Wherever I said that I probably shouldn't have.)


*One of the long time US late night talk show hosts

Plain Ol Me listed "On the Road" as required reading for High Schoolers.

The biggest piece of trash ever written. A book for morons to peruse.

But the witty Truman Capote put the book in its place. When someone asked him about Kerouac's "masterpiece" he said:

THAT'S NOT WRITING, THAT'S TYPEWRITING!!!

Anyone that reads two pages of that crap will agree with Capote!!

What are the teachers of today thinking when they assign such garbage?

Are they so lacking in leadership and authority that they must pander?

What a boring Puritan you are, BernardR.

Again I DARE you to make a pointed, articulate critique instead of tossing around superlatives. Otherwise, you come off as a bit, well, callow.

I finished Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version with a sigh. After some snippet reading…a few false starts, I finally paid it some respect and spent several hours, several times, immersed. I felt…satisfied…with the end. I liked it.

Presently chipping away at John Irving's Until I find You. 16 chapters...one after the other... after the other...of the sexualisation of a little boy …I about threw it at the wall…enough! but I was otherwise bookless…

At about that point, finally, a shift. Whether it is necessary groundwork remains to be seen. It seems to be coming together and I'm interested enough that I'll keep reading. It's lengthy.

Not one I'd recommend…yet.

John Irving can be very interesting. However, sometimes he is merely idiosyncratic and can turn readers off (in my opinion). I guess I am saying that Irving is uneven.

I am currently reading Chesapeake by James Michner. What an interesting saga of the Bay.

While I am still reading both La Morte D'Arthur and Bleak House -- I can only stand so much of either book -- I have taken to reading The Normans in Europe, a book of primary sources on the Normans that I like very much. It's a good companion for Morte, which I began because of my background in Celtic Studies. There is very little of the Celtic in Morte but a great deal of the Norman.

I started White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Can't read it past page 12. I've never seen so many similes packed in per page.

This didn't bother any of the reviewers at Amazon though -
White Oleander link

What book are you reading?
Reading for the second time The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears (published 2002). Exquisite. What we could know about what questions to ask, what answers to seek.

It actually follows An Instance of the Fingerpost, about which NYT says, "..."Successful literary thrillers in the mold of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose are the stuff of publishers' dreams, and in Pears' novel they may have found a near-perfect example of the genre." Can't wait to find this one, used I hope.

I've read The Dream of Scipio and enjoyed it.

Right now I'm reading Shake Hands with the Devil, Dallaire's account of his UN mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.

The problem is that Dallaire is a military man, not an author, so it greatly lacks in art. Despite that, it's a bone-chilling indictment of the United Nations, international crises response, first world nations in general and Belgium in particular (How does it feel, he asks a Belgian military observer, to stand here unarmed when you know that your country is supplying the extremists you are facing?).

Gargamel wrote:

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What a boring Puritan you are, BernardR.

Again I DARE you to make a pointed, articulate critique instead of tossing around superlatives. Otherwise, you come off as a bit, well, callow.
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BernardR wrote:
Plain Ol Me listed "On the Road" as required reading for High Schoolers.

The biggest piece of trash ever written. A book for morons to peruse.

But the witty Truman Capote put the book in its place. When someone asked him about Kerouac's "masterpiece" he said:

THAT'S NOT WRITING, THAT'S TYPEWRITING!!!

Anyone that reads two pages of that crap will agree with Capote!!

What are the teachers of today thinking when they assign such garbage?

Are they so lacking in leadership and authority that they must pander?
********************************************************
Very well, Gargamel----

On the Road--

P. 112

"We arrived in Washington at dawn, It was the day of Harry Truman's inaguration for his second term. Great displays of war might were lined along Pennsylvania Avenue as we rolled by in our battered boat. There were B-29's, PT boats, artillery, all kinds of war material that looked murderous in the snowy grass; the last thing was a regular small ordinary lifeboat that looked pitiful and foolish. Dean slowed down to look at it, He kept shaking his head in awe. "What are these people up to? Harry's sleeping somewhere in this town...Good old Harry...Man from Missouri as I am...This must be his own boat>'

end of quote
I am sure that you will agree, Gargamel that the paragraph above shows a mastery of the language and the incredibly detailed and inventive description of surroundings. Kerouac obviously avoids cliches and astonishes with his felicitous phrasing------"looked murderous in the snowy grass"


You may like it, Gargamel, but I agree with Capote-

That's not writing--that's typewriting!!!

Thank you!

And I'd say that passage supports your point.

Kerouac's more in his element when he's not poking around the political, and actually describing "the mad ones." And particularly those passages in which he's describing music, and the rhythms of his prose mime those of improvisational jazz. In hindsight that may not seem so great, but it had never been seen in a novel before.

So I think you're wrong. On the Road is a great book.

wandel, I've enjoyed a number of Irving's books over the years, though I admit I've been less than delighted with the last few... I'll try to post a comment when I'm finished.