What BOOK are you reading right now?

I've been thinking about doing so for a couple of years. But, I had an idea for a writing project and I need to read some of Shakespeare, starting with Hamlet.

Oh, I seldom go to the beach. Really don't like being tanned.

I don't like finding of soiled hypodermic needles or the possibility of drowning associated with the beaches surrounding the NYC areas.

I just finished reading "Mudbound" by Hillary Jordan, which won the Bellwether prize for Fiction (whatever that is...)
The jacket blurb says it is a portrait of two families caught up in the blind hatred of a small Southern town. Prejudice takes many forms...some subtle, some ruthless. the McAllan family and the Jacksons, their black sharecroppers. Some of it is hard to credit but one knows from reading the race history of the South in the 1950's that the events are true. Sad, gripping, good characterization. Really well written.

POM, I wouldn't think sand and the Bard would go together. I'd probably reread Macbeth first, then Lear, reclining in some cozy retreat with coffee and a fridge of snacks nearby.

Ugh! When we went to Martha's Vinyard nearly 20 years ago, I remember seeing lots of tampon applicators.

I'll do MacB but I am concentrating on the plays with married women in them.

BTW, the book about the sharecroppers that you wrote about sounds interesting.

"Post War" by Tony Judt. An excellent history of Post WWII Europe.

I could do 1,000 pages on the history of my pub George. No wonder you have a simple answer to everything if that's the sort of stuff you read.

Sweeping one's hand over the globe only works with a cigarette between the long and tapered fingers and a glass of brandy in the other hand.

Try Tristram Shandy old boy.

I bet Mr Judt doesn't deal with the women getting on top.

I tried it once long ago, and, after 100 or so pages, found it very tedious and dropped it - almost as bad as Thomas Hardy's stuff .

It doesn't look like it so far. However one doesn't need a book for that.

Try it now George. You might have been a bit impatient in your youth.



There's thousands of books on the matter. From Homer onwards. Herrin morale Spengler called it.

getting ready to start


Secrets of the Fire Sea
(The fourth book in the Jackelian series)

A tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style world as the acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Rise of the Iron Moon. The isolated island of Jago is the only place Hannah Conquest has ever known as home. Encircled by the magma ocean of the Fire Sea, it was once the last bastion of freedom when the world struggled under the tyranny of the Chimecan Empire during the age-long winter of the cold-time. But now this once-shining jewel of civilization faces an uncertain future as its inhabitants emigrate to greener climes, leaving the basalt plains and raging steam storms far behind them. For Hannah and her few friends, the streets of the island's last occupied underground city form a vast, near-deserted playground. But Hannah's carefree existence comes to an abrupt halt when her guardian, Archbishop Alice Gray, is brutally murdered in her own cathedral. Someone desperately wants to suppress a secret kept by the archbishop, and if the attempts on Hannah's own life are any indication, the killer believes that Alice passed the knowledge of it onto her ward before her saintly head was separated from her neck. But it soon becomes clear that there is more at stake than the life of one orphan. A deadly power struggle is brewing on Jago, involving rival factions in the senate and the island's most powerful trading partner. And it's beginning to look as if the deaths of Hannah's archaeologist parents shortly after her birth were very far from accidental. Soon the race is on for Hannah and her friends to unravel a chain of hidden riddles and follow them back to their source to save not just her own life, but her island home itself.

Finished reading Maelstrom by Peter Watts last week. I wonder if the chaotic and frontier nature of the internet overflowing with roaming self aware viruses as depicted in the 2001 published work of science fiction will come true.

The wildly vast and dangerous majority of the internet was called maelstrom hence the title of the book.


~~~
Now I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates massive collection of short stories titled High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories, 1966 - 2006.

If and when I finish it, at 662, it will be the largest book I have read in years. Wish me good luck and I hope I don't drop it on my foot!

Ah, memories of my husband and I, after a very long day of walking in Rome, going back to the albergo in late afternoon, tromping across the grass in the circo massimo (circus maximus) and my just exhaustedly lying down on the slope nearest the palatine hill, he still walking and looking. Well, damn, what did I see all around me but spent condoms..

I'm about to start ....

by the author of Bitter is the New Black ...



I think it will be a good subway book - if only to create a bit of whiplash

I want to be seen reading this on the subway

The beach is a great place to leave behind some Shakespeare.

Finally we disagree. I wouldn't read that book if you tied me to a stake while waving your torch..

I'm trying to think of a whiplash moment in Shakespeare.

Yeah, I did get a little spooked (maybe a lot?), then I actually got frightened and wanted to toss it. I don't like horror. But, then it got silly.

Now, I'm bookless. My son suggested I read Stieg Larsson's trilogy, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Anybody read that?