What BOOK are you reading right now?

Just finished "Mr. Shivers" by Robert Jackson.

Too readily comparable to Stephan King because of its genre.

Jackson cites Cormac McCarthy as one of his inspirations and while this book doesn't rise at all to Cormac's works, it's far more comparable to them than King's

With one major exception: Jackson uses the same Magic Negro character device that King loves.

I'm grateful though that he didn't use King's other favorite, the Magic Retard.

In any case, the setting in the US midlands during the Great Depression, and the focus on Hobo culture is very interesting.

The character development is pretty good and for the most part the plot is not predictable.

You can probably expect to see this book on several top ten lists (sci-fi - which it isn't- and horror)

It won't make any non-genre lists, but Jackson clearly was trying and that' s always good to see.

c.i., where are you going in India? Are you going on your own or with a group? On your own, I guess....don't you always? I am beyond envious. That is the most terrifyingly wonderful country I've ever visited, and I am no sooner out of the environs before I long to be there again. It has enormous and seemingly unsurmountable problems, but so do we.

Just finished Bryson's A Walk in the Woods.

I clearly don't "get" Bryson. I'm in good company. My best friend and Set also don't get him.

Decent enough streetcar reading, but I wouldn't be upset if I lost one of his books in transit.

Geez, that was the only one I was ok with, at all.

This is a group tour with Overseas Adventure Travel to South India for 24-days. This will be my third visit to India, but my first to the south. I don't look forward to the non-roads they have, but everything else is fascinating. We have two internal flights, but the rest by bus - which will shake and rock my body around with abandon. My last visit to India was to the north-east India to visit Kaziranga National Park. Our accommodations at an English resort hotel not far from the park was very nice, and the service fantastic!

I presume you mean you took advantage of cheap coolie labour grovelling and greasing your $$$$$ ego.

What would similar services have cost in Manhattan? Is that why you avoid Manhattan.

No, spendi, most are happy to have jobs. Unlike your measly life base on the local pub, some people must work to survive.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. He's from Iowa so I'm supposed to like him. I've tried.

I first heard of OAT from you, quite a few years ago.

On my second trip to India, three years ago, I went with a group of nine people to the southern part of the country. Although every day of the three weeks was memorable, I recall most vividly the stone-cut temples. There are many in India...we saw Mamallapuram. People were not in a hurry in the 6th and 7th centuries, I guess, because these temples must have taken decades to carve out of solid stone cliffs.

I liked Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything...the audiobook got me through an eight-hour drive very quickly.

I thought that was a good read - but that's all I've ever sampled.

I'm like a pig in a fresh wallow...glorying in some good reads and listens. I just finished reading Cutting for Stone by Verghese, which was brilliant. I hated to turn the last page. Now I am beginning on Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, which was longlisted for this year's Booker. It begins well.

I'm also listening on my iPod to The Graveyard of Empires, by Seth Jones, a well reviewed story and history of the various conquerings (and not so's....) of Afghanistan, focusing on the current conflict there. It is well written and fascinating; I listen on long walks and in the car.

But I'm also listening in the car to an audiobook that was suggested here a while back, The English Passengers by Kneale. I finally found a cheap copy on cassette (it has never been on CD, apparently) that had been bought from a library but was being sold on Amazon as in Very Good condition. It is long, maybe 18 hours of listening, but is great fun with different voices and wonderful bizarre characters.

Back to wallowing.....

I recently nabbed about 15 - 20 Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries at a thrift shop.

I'm currently reading

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/p/iain-pears/last-judgement.htm





Very good streetcar reading.

I'm 50 pages into reading Patti Smith's ****NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNING**** memoir, Just Kids.

It's all over twitter that she just won the award minutes ago.
I got the book last Friday when I walked into Shakespeare's and Company just a minute after the store had opened up. On a lark, I asked the clerk about recommending me a memoir for me to read as a complete change of pace.

Patti Smith's book just came out in paperback and that's what I got.

I'm not a fan of her music but her writing is a marvelous thing of beauty.

Ooh, thanks for the reccomendation Stepan. I saw a little interview with her when it was released and I remember her recalling the consternation she felt when she was lionised as uber cool after Horses, and two months later punk broke out and she was classed as a dinosaur.

A quote from her guitarist Lenny Kaye has stuck with me since the 70s, something about playing in tune being irrelevant to rock music.

I am reading Revolution in world missions by KP Yahannan.
I am also reding A time for Transformation byDiana Cooper

Kara, Have you visited my travelogues on travelpod.com?

Here's a book I'm not reading yet - it just came out. Just reading the review of “An Object of Beauty,” written by Steve Martin, makes me glad I saved a lot of my art books, so far anyway, though I'm eventually going to sell a lot of them. Which ones, there's the thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/books/18martin.html?hpw


photo credit - Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Steve Martin, right, with William Acquavella, the owner of Acquavella Galleries in Manhattan.

Listen to her some more. "Land" is a double LP anthology that gives you a taste of the breadth of her songwriting.

I started that one too. The story of Lillian captivated me. For those who haven't read the book yet: Lillian is a concert pianist with a degenerative disease in her visual cortex. The story follows her as the disease increasingly impairs her life, and as she finds ever new ways to cope with it. Lillian gradually loses her ability to read music; so she plays from memory and learns new music by listening. Then she unlearns how to read anything else, but has no trouble writing. Finally, she can't find her way around her own apartment anymore. But once she finds her piano, she can still play it wonderfully. I found the end of her story very moving. Is the rest of the book equally good?