What BOOK are you reading right now?

Thanks for the links. I hope you have a great read, osso.
Interesting that I wrote that Vargas Llosa deserved the Nobel prize but would never get it because of his political views.

My top ten Mexican novels, on this link:
http://panchobaez.blogspot.com/2006/11/diez-novelas-mexicanas.html

Nearly done, page 200 something, and I'm still enjoying it. Whatta book! I try to say something more useful later.

I finished reading "The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." It was recommended by a friend, and my wife just happened to have a loan from a friend, so I was able to read it.

Anyone pay attention to Joe McGuinness and some of his book writing history? I'll have to look back and review what I'd ever read, but he has been controversial.
Only thing I've read of his was a book on soccer/calcio set in southern italy, which I enjoyed at the time.

Now he's in hot or tepid water re an accusation by another author re Sarah Palin -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/21/frank-bailey-sarah-palin-book_n_826262.html

Finished listening to Animal Farm yesterday. Can't remember when the last time I read the book. Probably high school.

Just curious: If Napolean was Stalin, Snowball was Trotsky, and Old Major was Lenin:
Did Benjamin, Moses, and Squeeker have their real world counterparts or were they hybrid characters (little bit of this historical person and little bit of that)?

Now? I revisiting Heart of Darkness today (via audiobook of course).

I continue to read multiple books, but the main focus is Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner's prequel to the Ringworld books; Destroyer of Worlds. It's good to be back in Known Space.

Just finished The Death Instinct by Jeb Rubenfeld. It's a novel about the bombing of Wall Street in 1920, and its talk of terrorists, economics and war reminds me that history repeats itself. Good read blending fact and fiction.

I'm finished reading The Edge of the Storm. It's now on my mental list of favorite books. At the least it is a complex look at the nature of small village life, with some prismatic moments that give a larger sense of place and time - just a tiny example, the priest taking down the picture of Benito Juarez. There are some culminating scenes of great beauty, for example, the one describing Gabriele ringing the bells. The characters are well developed, never just cutout representives of points of view.

I couldn't recommend this more, at the same time I know the book wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.

I'm going to do some reading about the mexican revolution. I read about it at some length when I was first learning about Mexico, but that was now a long time ago.

My Edge of the Storm book is now a mess (well, it was quite weathered in the first place when I got it from Amazon), since I managed to fully disengage the front cover. So, I tied string around it, with a bow, as it's a keeper; the only other book I've done that with is Claudio Magris' Danube. They're both paperbacks.

Meantime, I'm just starting in on Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, in translation.
Fbaezer, I have no gripes at all about the translation of Al Filo del Agua. Ms. Picky found only one typo and has no complaints about succinctness, word choices, or the power of sentences/phrases.

Just finished "Love in the Time of Cholera" for my book group.

Not what I expected at ALL.

This book has become canonical, masterpiece, cap L Literature, all that.

It had occasional moments of gorgeous prose interspersed amongst a whole lot of sloppy, self-indulgent, macho twaddle.

I did like that gorgeous prose when it turned up. And I liked the general evocation of place.

And I like the concept of having a humanly flawed, relatable hero rather than some blandly perfect Fabio.

But Florentino was contemptible. The pedophilia was disgusting in and of itself, but the way the author glossed over it -- and made the gorgeous 12-year-old victim fall madly in love with toothless, 70+, constipated [when he doesn't have explosive "accidents"] blood relative -- was also a skin-crawler.

The plot was all over the place, inconsistencies everywhere, central character traits (like Fermina Daza's sense of smell) completely ignored for hundreds of pages until they suddenly were needed for a new wrinkle in the plot. I'd say it was an unreliable narrator if the narrator was a character for whom that would be interesting, but there wasn't really a narrator character, just the omniscient author.

I really have a lot of tolerance for ambiguity in fiction -- I love big sloppy novels -- but this book just never connected with me.

To the point where I was really baffled how it has earned its place in the canon.

I read the original NYT review by Thomas Pynchon (glowing) and agreed with very little.

Was it that new and different in 1988? Maybe. Now it seems cliched where it's not just banal.

With occasional oases of true inspiration. So I do get that. But the oases were way too few and far between IMO.

Alas, I don't have much patience for full streaming of surrealism. I had to put aside Pedro Paramo at page sixty.

Picked up my copy of The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes instead. Well then, that's more to my liking right away. I've read Fuentes before, but in magazine (or were they newspaper) articles, not a novel; have an art book by him on Jose Luis Cuevas that I bought in Mexico City, probably in the late sixties.

Replying to self - I just read up on Pedro Paramo (I had skimmed the pages I didn't read), and the link didn't pull me in more, even with the link's comparisons to Dante Alighieri's famed comedy that I once read most of including some in plodding italian, and treasure - but clues me in to what I may face with the Artemio Cruz book. We'll see.

http://legacy.lclark.edu/~woodrich/SPAN230/seligmanparamo.html

Now I have my iPod Touch, I can resume listening to the great science fiction novel, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I started over from the beginning and its worth returning to.

I never read the book although my former book group did. I loved 100 Years of Solitude. As for Thomas Pynchon's review, I have never been able to read Pynchon.

nice, the Audible app is pretty good

the Marvel, DC and Comixology app's are pretty cool too, and they have free samples

Outcasts United - Warren St John

http://www.outcastsunited.com/

I just finished an old yellowed paperback. the Saint in Miami...

it was interesting mostly because it involved American Nazi sympathizers in the plot. and the language coupled with the treatment of negroes was markedly different than modern spy novels. many words I was only vaguely familiar with...

it was printed in 1940.

Downloaded a bunch of classics on my Kindle yesterday. I don't have to worry about reading material for the rest of this year; I'm reading three books now that's not in my Kindle.

My sister has an iPAd and a Kindle. Even so, she snatched a paper and ink book from me to read on her recent vacation.

Bought Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.

I'm trying audiobooks for the first time....so cool to be able browse and download late on a Sunday night all from the comfort of home!

I think there must be a trick to it, though. I find my mind wandering and I don't seem to concentrate the same as when I'm actually reading the book. Maybe it just takes practice.

I find it difficult as well!