What BOOK are you reading right now?

Just finished White Teeth by Zadie SMith and am reading (after three false starts .. can not explain) How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life. Am also reading In the French Kitchen Garden.

Funny, plainoldme, I read "How Reading Proust..." and enjoyed it, but it didn't change my life...

How was "White Teeth"? It's on my shelf at the moment.

PlainOld -- Sounds like we have the same bookshelf! D'art -- White Teeth is a wonderful, nutty romp. And a bit of a braindump. Pure pleasure, hanging out with Zadie Smith is. One wants her as a friend and weekly lunch date.

Re Zadie--I know I'd love to share a pint with her! I saw her when she read here not too long ago. It was a treat!

I know her story is largely about north London and I lived in SW 10, but the reason I read the book is because it's written about a place I miss, badly...

Tartarin,
What's a braindump?

A friend of mine, a botanist and landscape architect, used to get asked for free advice about people's gardens. She'd say, wearily, I've just come from so-and-so's house where I did a braindump about their darn garden.

In other words, telling everything you know. Zadie, who was young when she wrote that book and fresh out of Cambridge (as I remember) was obviously full of ideas and characters and did an enthusiastic braindump into that book!

Hi, POMe, and I have wanted to read Zadie too. You have a landarch friend, Tartarin? I sympathize with her on brain dumps.

Travel books, tis my weakness. I read them anyway, and then I got interested, as most of you know, in italy, and all went haywire. I read, lessee, William Dean Howells, and Henry james, and Goethe, and Montaigne, and Augustus Hare, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Mary Taylor Simeti, and many whathisnames; and Harold Acton, Dickens, Timothy Parks; well, let me not dig out the list; many of those wrote in the state of travelling.

Bill Bryson, I keep changing my mind about him. Liked the first book I read, about walking the appalachian trail, mostly. Hated, hated, the book written when he arrived back in the US after decades in england. Too easy, full of cheap shots that didn't land, didn't begin to describe. Now reading something on his trip to Europe in the early nineties, so far ok. I agree with many of his tucked in comments on urban planning, land use in general, which is why I bother to keep reading him. I am not as enamored as most readers though, except for that.

Hey Osso. Also Iris Origo.

Osso, I agree with you about Bryson. Some of his stuff is pretty damn funny, but there's also some pretty tedious writing there. How about T.C. Boyle? What's your opinion of him, if any?

Tartarin,
That's what I thought you meant by braindump. Zadie seems to have a large brain to dump. She was on Charlie Rose just before the adaptation (which wasn't very good) aired on public tv, but for some reason, I couldn't watch that day.

Ossobucco,
You ought to read the book. It's quite funny and you'll be impressed by how much this young lady knows. Most of all, it is a book about people like Ms. Smith, young mixed-ancestry folks living in England. Notice the younger generation characters were all born in 1975: the same year as Zadie, a half-English, half-Jamaican girl.

I started one of those "Wish List" thingies on Amazon the moment Amazon got up and running. So it's a huge list (all videos, books, music) , dating back to god knows when. I went in there this morning to edit out stuff I no longer want and had to look up various items just to see what they were. Here's one, and I suspect it would be a terrific read, a terrific summer read:

David Thomson, "Suspects"

And here's what one reviewer writes about it:

""Suspects" is a must-read for any film buff. Thomson goes back into movie history and writes short biographies of various film characters, starting early in their life and usually ending with their deaths. These extrapolated bios are fascinating alternative histories of the sort of movie characters whom you want to continue to get to know even outside the scope of the pictures they appear in.

"So the book is vastly entertaining if you're the sort of person who wonders what "Chinatown"'s Jake Gittes' childhood was like, or whatever happened to George Bailey after "It's a Wonderful Life" ended.

"But there's more going on in this book than the fantastical and fully imagined bios. Soon various characters from different movies begin appearing in other characters' bios, and the real-life bios of producers and actors and directors start to seamlessly creep into the text.

"At some point you realize that the narrator is not Thomson but rather a famous movie character (I won't reveal who it is here). This narrator's presence ties the seemingly disconnected vignettes together, and gives the book a darker feel as it progresses.

"In the end, you realize this is not just a whimsical book about the love of movie characters. It's ultimately an examination on how movies affect the way we think and how film not only shapes our perceptions and our memories but in some ways comes to stand in for them, both for the good and for the bad.

"And that's why I love this book -- you can read it as an unsettling examination of identity and the construction of self through the medium of narratives, or you can read it simply as a fascinating take on movie fandom. Either way, it's fabulous."

PS, PlainOldMe: I think of dissertations, by the time you get them done, as being brain dumps. After which you go out into the world brainless and start life...!

Sister Carrie....rereading after forty years.

Have been housebound, past two weeks, no library visits, so turned to "the piles". Before SC reread The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Oh man, Dreiser, a great read. And I keep remembering Dos Passos (about whom a LOT could be said!) and how addicted I was once to his books. Read everything backwards and forwards several times.

I was addicted to Dos Passos, too. The USA Trilogy was his magnum opus, no? Man, I don't think I could wade through it now. I also had a Dreiser period, as well as a Sinclair Lewis phase. I especially enjoyed Lewis for his satire of middle class behavior. Made me feel so superior, though I was right in the middle of the middle...

Me too. Did you read Lewis when you were a kid? I did. I found it (and myself) very, very important!! I think we might indulge in a little oneupmanship here, D'art (where's Larry when we need him?), about the awful, funny seriousness of the heavy-reading adolescent. Tell me, did you read Botteghe Oscure at 15? Ohmigod...

OR, we might consider a discussion of books one JUST LOVED and then went out and read everything the author wrote, and then, many years later, stumbled on the author again and said to oneself, I LIKED THIS????!!!

Sounds like a great idea for a thread, Tartarin! Let's see, I did read Lewis as a teenager, and, yes, it made me feel like I saw through all the adults who surrounded me. Of course, Salinger was unbeatable in that department. But I didn't read Botteghe Oscure--in fact, I draw a blank on that one!

As far as who I don't think I could wade through again, it would have to be Kerouac. I read everything I could back then. Tried to read "Dr. Sax" more recently and made little headway. And I felt a sense of loss...

Remain blank. It is madly unimportant. An international literary journal with lots of weird, weird stuff that I pretended to understand ("brilliant! brilliant"!) printed on a cross between blotting paper and sandpaper. But I have some respect for the kid who tried, who even pretended affection and understanding, as I suspect you once did too!

Yes, the sense of loss is there. It's not that one had lousy taste then, or that one is losing one's marbles now, it's the recognition that we are different people at different stages of our lives. That in itself is a very exciting realization, full of possibilities. One of the interesting thing about aging is that you're not sorry as you do it. Tastes change. But if you'd said that to me when I was fifteen, I would have spat back at you, NO WAY! I LOVE (Kerouac, Lewis, strange Italian literature, whatever) and I ALWAYS WILL!!

Too true re how our tastes change. One thing I'm finding is that I read more closely now. Can't have any distractions--even music. I wonder if it's because I'm focusing better. Or worse. Whatever.

But it's certainly true that there's a real disconnect between what I was reading then and now. I recovered a file of index cards recently that I used to write capsule reviews of what I was reading back then (mid-'60s). I gave each author a grade for his/her efforts. What a little snot I was!

That's a riot, D'art! I was no less snotty, but it took other forms. I'm more relaxed when I read and find a kind of continuum of interests that makes me linger over tiny goodies or a particularly good piece of writing. I can't listen to music at the same time, partly because I love them both and want to give each total attention. Still underline and write things in the margin (if it was my own book), only now it's a sign of genuine appreciation, a conversation with the writer. In the old days my margin notes were meant to be discovered -- "Oh my, what an intelligent reader," someone else reading the book was supposed to exclaim! See? I was a little snot too!