What BOOK are you reading right now?

i read The Second Sex when I was 16 and again in my late 40s when I went on a Simone kick. I wanted my grand daughter to named Simone. They have French names but not Simone.

Well, I've been reading pulse stuff for a while, a result of my foray to Good Will, and also my avoidance of actual thinking on purpose, at least for a time.

I read some damn thing that I luckily forget the name of and the author. Utter trash, that I quick read and finished, while being both offput and wondering about the ending. Too much cruelty in it, I tossed it instead of putting in the revolving piles that are "charity" place books. It was both cruel and beset with primary characters who seemed made up by a lame screenwriter. Double sin, in my view.

This week I read Carcaterra's Apaches. I've only read two books by him, Sleepers being the first, but think he is a sharp writer. The two books I've read have some hard to read scenes, but this is not a cold writer.
http://www.lorenzocarcaterra.com/biography.htm

Next, I read Dennis Lehane's A Drink Before the War. I read him as much for a sense of Boston (however good or poor the depiction) as I do for the stories, but he's pretty good at stories. (He wrote the Mystic River book).

Tami Hoag's Still Water was next. I think she works hard as a writer.

I'm 1/3 the way through Greg Iles True Evil. I remember liking some Greg Iles book before, and I near remember not liking one. There is a plot device in the book that I recognize, and don't think I first saw it by Iles, who I know I haven't read since late 2005, and this is a 2006 book. But maybe my memory did a snap on it from Iles somewhere along the line.

Joe, I must find that one now - The Lunatic and the Lords. I have "Innocent" by Turow downloaded to my iPod, and the two books would be good companions.

POM, I found that one at my local bookshop. Hadn't heard of the author or title but couldn't put it down from the first page. As you did, I found the writing excellent.

I posted a long comment on Facebook about it. I am going to give this book to my daughter when I finish it, which will probably be today (I started it last night).

Thank you so much for sending it to me!

still not finished reading " paris 1919 " - reading this book is hard but enjoyable work .
just picked up ' tom jones " for one dollar . a real bargain : 700 pages for a buck !

HburgBoy, I loved Tom Jones but I wonder if anyone, even myself, would have the time/attitude to read that sort of work in these busily distracted times.

a one word response tells all : RETIRED !

I read Tom Jones sometime in the '80s when my project was to read all those first novels.

Hmmmph. After Himself retired, I became busier than ever...he seems to need a PA, a nurse, a keeper, a techie, etc. Now I know to what end he might need those services...he's reading! If only he were...when I catch a glimpse of his computer screen, there seems to be a Solitaire game up....

"Utopia" is a comic book crossover story arc published by Marvel Comics. Taking place in Marvel's main shared universe, the Marvel Universe, the series is written by Matt Fraction. The first issue of the crossover was released in June 2009.

After a mutant riot and an anti-mutant riot in San Francisco, Norman Osborn tries to enforce peace by creating his own team of Dark X-Men to serve in much the same way the Dark Avengers did, and using both his teams to bring down the real X-Men.

That's why I am looking for a doctor who will always maintain a small practice or a professor who will always teach one class or some sort of writer, designer, or scientist who tinkers in his own studio.

Grinning, Kara.

POM and Osso

Nodding....

I'm getting 'into' PETER GAY. Here is a recent prose-poem to place this "getting into" process in perspective.-Ron Price, Australia
---------------------------
Peter Gay(born 1923) is a prolific historian with more than twenty-five books under his literary belt as he heads to his 90th year. He retired in 1993 at the age of 70 as Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. I retired at the age of 55 in 1999 as a lecturer at the Swan College of Technical and Further Education, a post-secondary training college in Perth Western Australia. He published Voltaire's Politics in 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15. This book examined Voltaire as a politician and how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire had championed in his writings. I did not read any of Gay’s books until some time in the 1970s and 1980s; firstly The Enlightenment: An Interpretation in 3 volumes from 1966 to 1970; and secondly, his massive The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud in 5 volumes published from 1984 to 1998 including, as it did, The Education of the Senses, The Cultivation of Hatred and The Pleasure Wars. The final volume of the set was published just months before I retired from a thirty year career as a teacher and lecturer.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 July 2010.

I’ll work on your books, Peter,
in these years of my retirement
from FT, PT and casual work..(1)

I am not in your reading league.
I’ve had my nose to many a set
of grindstones over the years…(2)

Now, though, with most of those
grindstones behind me I can give
a much fuller concentration to….

1. reading and the cultural attainments
of the literary and scholarly mind,
2. focusing on special writing projects
not as extensive as yours on the story
of humankind before modern history.
3. focusing on the more recent years
of our modern age which began for
you in the 1890s & which you wrote
about in your books of psychohistory.

I like that, Peter, yes the 1890s—the real
beginning when our world was energized(3)
to a degree greater than those Victorian or
Enlightenment years which you studied and
wrote about to humankind’s great benefit!!!

(1) my full retirement began in 2005.
(2) my grindstones were not all grinding, but my full, my more complete, intellectual and literary development had to wait until my retirement in the first decade of this 3rd millennium.
(3) See Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.244.

Ron Price
11 July 2010

continuing my delayed adolescence


X-Men: Nation X

collected comics dealing with the aftermath of the Utopia Storyline

Welcome to the thread, Ron. What ae you reading?

Currently reading Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin. I've noticed that Baldwin is a writer of moments. His stories are comprised of extended moments in which his characters go back in time, or in which the present is detailed at length. This as opposed to, say, Hemingway, who might begin, after a page break, with "The next day," covering a lot of time in a single sentence.

There's a burning intensity to writing, if done well, condensed into seconds--appropos to Baldwin's world in this novel, where a soul can be saved in such little time. Whereas Hemingway's breezier depiction of time suits a certain nihilism lacing his work.

I'm reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum. Enjoyable book. If you are interested in academia or in Shakespeare, this is the book for you. Rosenbaum is something of a soul mate to me and I enjoy that aspect of him. he has a rather nice way of disagreeing with people, however, I am a tad uncomfortable with some of his disagreements but not sure why.

He has also written on Hitler, an exercise that left him thoroughly depressed. I am not certain that I could have pursued that project but it is something that needs to be pursued.