What BOOK are you reading right now?

Butrflynet has been sick in bed for a week with a very bad cold. So I got her two easy reading books while she recovers.

The Hidden Life of Dogs and the Social Lives of Dogs, both by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

BTW, Butrflynet got the cold from very sick people standing at the counter of the pharmacy. I wish sick people would have a well person pick up their prescriptions and stay home so they don't give other people their illness.

BBB

Give my regards to Butrflynet! Get well soon.

I found my MP3 player yesterday night! Finished listening to The Girl Who Played With Fire this afternoon. Just downloaded the final book of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and I will start it tomorrow at work.

That's if I can figure how to delete all of the redundant files and start over from scratch and open up some space on the player.

I just finished From the Nuthouse to Castle.
First an aside.
A few years ago, my husband was getting a shave and a haircut. He keeps his hair short, a buzz cut. He had been going to his ex-mother in law but when we met, he decided to take a chance on the local barber shop. The barber, an old man, welcomes him in and while he cuts Romeo's hair, tells him the story of his life. He starts with the shave, but first he puts a hot towel around the face. As he begins to shave my husband's throat, using a strait razor, he says, at that precise moment... I once held the Canadian Embassy in Lebanon hostage.
Now the rest of the story..

From Nuthouse to Castle is his autobiography of a man, a terrorist?, a young canadian immigrant who came here with nothing in his pockets and builds a mini empire with a pair of scissors. A man who took the Canadian Embassy staff in Lebanon hostage in 197?.
Eddy Haymour proudly became a canadian, built a small fortune from hard work and ingenuity and then bought and attempted to build an arabic theme park on the only island in the Okanagan Lake, Rattlesnake Island.
The BC government stopped him, jailed him, threw him into Riverdale mental institution in Vancouver for almost a year. They bankrupted him, prevented him from seeing his children for 7 years and may have burned down his house. And in the end... He took the government to court in the mid 80's and won. He still lives on the lake. Runs a bed and breakfast over looking his island. He comes back to Edmonton every few months and cuts hair.
The book wasn't well written but the story is unbelievable yet true.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson.

A lengthy but relatvely quick read, it's a must have on any book listing.

The migration to America, or from the east to the west coast? Give us a precis, please...

I'm going to assume from South to North in the post Civil War Reconstruction days.

Which is partially correct after Googling it. I was only off by 40 or so years.

The PEnelopiad by Margaret Atwood.

I needed a break from reading stuff for my classes. This is the Odyssey told (briefly) from Penelope's point of view. It's sharp, sarcastic and funny, like most of Atwood's writing. If I teach ENG 101 again, this may be a choice.

I've given up for now on Castiglione's courtier book, however much it was a set piece for follow up practice in european courts.
The print is too small - for me - to overwhelm the tidbittian exchanges, which tend to annoy me in the first place, but that I can learn from. I've used it as a soporific for about a week.

I love Margaret Atwood's short novel, Penelopiad! It's a great change of pace.

I bought it and let it sit on my book case for months. Finally got around to reading it and kicking myself for waiting so long for diving into it.

Oh, there's a time and place for everything. I had looked at the book's cover before and read about the project, The Cannongate Myth Series, but for whatever reason, hadn't picked up Atwood's book.

I think the book is fun. I took the opportunity of reading some of the criticism of the Penelopiad just now, including the remarks made that it was "vintage Atwood feminist writing." Atwood herself says that it is not feminist. I say that Atwood writes like Atwood.

Sometimes, people get carried away with the criticism that all authors write the same novel or all actors play the same role. I'm guilty of the first myself but in a different way: I acknowledge that some authors have only one book in them and that they rewrite that same book throughout the rest of their careers. But, let's face it, what a person writes comes from their thought processes and writers write the way they speak, just as the combination of muscle, age, and personality determines how an actor tackles a role. As the reader/watcher, you simply read the books of and see the plays/movies of people who charm you.

I identified with Atwood. She had been asked to contribute to the series by the publisher, a young man who wanted to create a series of novels based on traditional myths. The publisher came to several famous authors and told them to pick the myth of their choice. In an interview, she said she struggled with a Native American myth and with the Norse creation myth (humanity was created by the gods from two logs. Atwood said she couldn't animate the logs, and, that remark really sounds like Atwood!). She asked her agent's advice on getting out of her contract because she was failing in the project when the agent suggested Greek myths. Atwood, who had read the Odyssey as a teenager, had always been bothered by the hanged maids.

I can identify with being haunted by a theme or character or incident. I decided to read the book because the cover blurb mentioned how Penelope ran the kingdom while Odysseus fought in the war to free her cousin Helen then dallied with goddesses on his slow way home. Yep, and all those Medieval ladies ran estates and grew crops and managed serfs while their husbands played soldier and slept with servant girls and other lonely wives managing other estates!

I'm reading Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone." It begins well.

I read his "My Own Country" years ago. He's an extraordinary person. That book was about his experiences as a doctor in an AIDs clinic not long after he arrived in the US. This new book is fiction.

Hi, all. I'm in a stuck place - have History of Rome waiting for me again (I dropped it for a rest with the bright pink student highlighting, though past that I found it fascinating), and Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park; gave up on Castiglione and his ideal Courtier, at least for now. I've been reading the New Yorker - something in there will interest me every week.

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize.
Anyone else familiar with his works?
I think it was long overdue. Vargas Llosa is a great writer. A giant.

I've only read one of his novels, unfortunately, fbaezer.
And a long time ago, at that. Aunt Julia and The Script Writer. I really enjoyed it.
Which are your favourites?

Osso, agree with you about The New Yorker. LOVE that magazine.

I happen to like everything I've read from Vargas Llosa.

Strangely enough, when he was young, he wrote more technically complex novels, and when he got older, many of them became more farsical.

I've read:
Los Jefes (1959), a book of short stories written when he was very young, and Los Cachorros (1967), an unforgettable long short story about Pichula Cuéllar, a child in a rich kids school whose life changes after he's bitten by a dog. Those two books, in English come under the title The Cubs and Other Stories.

Vargas Llosa's first novel, La Ciudad y Los Perros (1962) is partly autobiographical, about the life of kids in a military school, a bullying murder and an oppressive society. Vargas Llosa was sent to that school by his very strict father, who though writing "was a thing of faggots". Since Vargas Llosa made the mistake of naming the true military school, his novel was burned in the premises by the military... helping to his fame. The Time of the Hero is the name in English, and there's a good Peruvian movie about it. Great novel.

La Casa Verde (1966), The Green House is set partly in the Amazonian region of Peru and partly in Piura, right next to the desert, where sand rains every night. Several stories intertwine, and there's this unforgettable character, Fushía, a mean bucanneer of the sea-river of the Amazons. I remember I loved The Green House better than The Time of the Hero when I read it, but now I can only remember the atmosphere. Vargas Llosa wrote, in a book about that novel, that Fushía was the only character he ever had nightmares about, the character that had become really alive and independent from his author.

"When did Peru ****-up?" is the main question behind Conversación en La Catedral(1969), Conversation in the Cathedral . The Cathedral is really a bar and it centers on politics: left wing activists against a military dictator, Odría. The main character is the son of a member of the dictator's cabinet who becomes a leftist rebel. He's having a few beers with his father's chauffeur. On a recent interview, Vargas Llosa declared that if there was only one of his works that he would rescue, it would be this novel. I also liked it very much.

Pantaleón y las Visitadoras (1973) or Captain Pantoja and the Special Service is a farcical story about a military man who's called to organize a prostitution service for the military hamlets in the Amazonian region of Peru. Pantaleón Pantoja is a family man, with a loving wife who yearns for Lima, but he's also a disciplined member of the army. The language is tremendously comic, and rich.

La Guerra del Fin del Mundo (1981) or The War of the End of the World is, in my opinion, the best novel I've read from Vargas Llosa. It's also his first historical novel. It's based on the true story of Antonio Conselheiro and the War of Canudos, a war between a group of religious fanatics and the Brazilian army in the turn of the XX Century. Its characters are possessed by a messianic political passion and are phychologically complex. It's a study on political extremism and human passion. Some critics say it's good for understanding what may be inside the head of today's islamic terrorists. An epic story, told by many voices. A masterpiece.

Historia de Mayta (1984), probably a minor novel, is about the real life of a Communist militant. Has great moments, because it is realistic, funny and tragic at the same time. Made many a Latin American leftist militant look at the mirror and find a person both heroic and ridiculous (but mostly ridiculours).

La Fiesta del Chivo (2000), The Feast of the Goat is the second of Vargas Llosa's novels I like best. Another historical novel. This time, about Dominican dictator Leónidas Trujillo, in the 1950's. It tells about the fate of Urania Cabral, the beautiful teenage daughter of a member of Trujillo's inner circle (the dictator craves for young flesh), a few plots to murder the dictator and the atrocities of absolute power.

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This means I haven't read 8 of Vargas Llosa's published novels (another one is on the presses right now) and none but one of his 20 books of essays , nor I have seen any of his 9 plays or read his autobiography.
Vargas Llosa has been called a "beast of writing", for being so prolific.
At the same time he managed to run for president of Peru for a conservative coalition (lost against Fujimori, who later forced him into exile in Spain). He now says politics are evil.

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If I were to recommend a novel of his, I'd go for "The Feast of the Goat", unless you like something more complex like "The War of the End of the World". Both are equally rewarding.

Thx for the heads-up on that, fbaezer. I am woefully unfamiliar with Vargas Llosa. Gotta get over to the library.

Thanks for this. I have just learned of this writer and I really appreciate the info.