What BOOK are you reading right now?

this is an excellent book which has "classic" written all over it. I loved it!

mags, I didn't get an opportunity to read more than a few pages last night (darn those other responsibilities) so I'm right in the middle.

I keep wanting to be able to get into Ma's mind, to think things through. I keep trying to re-grasp Jacks perception, his reality, and what that would be like. He's happy.

I mentioned this book to someone today, and she was all "Don't tell me about that!" I said "There are people in this exact situation right now."

I long to know what the "pre-Jack" years were like.

Jack is indeed happy with his world; he knows no other reality. As long as he has his mother and the routine she has brilliantly set up for him, that world is a fine place.

Msolga!! I'm up too late, having just yawningly checked into the New York Review of Books to see if there was anything of interest - and running into a review of Franzen's Freedom by an old favorite writer of mine, Tim Parks. I haven't read Parks in some years (he's English, has taught in Italy for a couple of decades now) so I stayed up and read the article. Ooooooh, I think you'll enjoy it.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/11/franzens-ugly-americans-abroad/

This looks interesting, osso!

I did!
Thank you very much for posting that, osso.

Just finished reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.

I'm puzzled by the ending.

The man had instilled in the boy that the boy would need to shot himself if something happened to the man.
Then, as the man died, he told his son to try to continue South.

The man knows that the overwhelming odds are that the boy will be quickly caught, raped, killed and eaten. They saw this time and again. Why would he have put the boy in that danger?

Yes, of course they had been followed by one of "the good guys", but the man didn't know that.
Overall, being dead was not a bad thing.

Why did the man tell his son to continue?

Looking for books to teach, I went to the local, long-standing, independently owned book store and spent about 40 minutes with the astute owner. I left with several books.

I'm half way through In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Muenuddin.

The book consists of several connected short stories set in contemporary Pakistan. One of the settings is the now familiar Abbottabad, which lends an immediacy to this brilliant collection.

Mueenuddin is the son of a Pakistani civil servant and his much younger American wife who wrote for the Washington Post. The family lived in Lahore, but he was sent to prep school in Massachusetts, then to Dartmouth and Yale Law School.

He is an amazing writer. His style is at once conversational and literary. I can not recommend this book highly enough.

And I, who pretty much enjoyed the book, see Tim Parks' point of view easily and now lean in that direction.

Two books by Parks (I think I read three but I forget the third) that I enjoyed:

http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Neighbors-Lapsed-Anglo-Saxon-Verona/dp/0449908186/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305561720&sr=1-8



http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Education-Tim-Parks/dp/0380727609/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305561901&sr=1-10



Sigh, I see he has written more books I'd like to read.

Enjoyable for an armchair traveller like me.

Thanks, I'll put it on my wish list.

Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind
~Margalit Fox

Ooh?

This is new to me, tell me about it...

edit: found this review, rings a bell. Never read the book though, interested in your take.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Cohen-t.html

I've just started, so not much to tell yet.

It's my "gym book." I always finish showering and changing well ahead of
my son Rhys, so I bring a book along to read while I wait. This one was a
gift from my other son Nigel (a psych major).

From the review it sounds like it mostly covers/gathers things that I've read about individually (the signers in Nicaragua, etc.) But let me know what you think.

I'm fascinated by the fact that there is a remote Bedouin village in what is
now Israel that has given rise to signed language that is used there and
nowhere else and that in that village it is practiced by the the majority of
the villagers both signed and hearing.

Finished reading Roberto Bolano's Amulet yesterday night. First book in a long time that I read in less then two days. Read most of it on picnic on Governor's Island and the five hour wait for the late screening of Tree of Life last Friday night.

A great existential 'horror' story.

Human Sacrifice by Nigel Davies. It shows how necessary Christianity was.

EAT LOVE PRAY -Elizabeth Gilbert

Presently listening to Alan Furst's WWII espionage thriller, Spies of the Balkans. Good stuff so far!

The Autobiography of MArk Twain. Its a compilqtion of the MArk Twain project. You can skip over the self congratulatory **** that the editors have added to dcument how they did it all, and the incessant interruptions theymake. The rest is vintage Twain and full of his sense of the incredulous
I heartily reccomend the chapter on how he became responsible for the publication of Gen Grants Autobiography