What BOOK are you reading right now?

Have about a half dozen Sebastian Faulks novels in the TBR list. Finished A Week in December, now about 50% through Birdsong. Next up. his Human Traces.

the BBC is showing an adaptation of Birdsong, Part 1 is out and about on the intertubes

Thank you, that's wonderful!! My sleuthing tells me it won't be available here until April (on PBS Masterpiece)...may have to go to the dark side

Birdsong - I thought it was very good.

I have both the ebook and the audiobook versions, so I'm alternating between reading and listening. The narration is excellent...just the right pace and a most delightful British accent...my favorite. It's not, I'm guessing, heading for what I'd think of as a 'happy' ending. We'll see.

Just finished "Bossypants." Good! Very good!

Saw that when I was stuck during a layover... May have to get it from the library.

Just started reading this, last night:



So far so good!
Will head off to bed soon & read a few more chapters before sleeping.

Damaged beast of the antipodes:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/sep/13/fiction.petercarey

Thanks spendius. yes good old Flaubert. He had some useful advice for writers. He was one of the most persistent and obsessive writers I know about. I wrote the following piece about him several years ago and I post it here for your possible reading pleasure.-Ron
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In the case of a very few, people like the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the preservation of documents about the self has been carried to the point of mania. With Flaubert, the student of the individual creative process has a microscopic view for perhaps the first time in history of the development of the creative process in one individual. My own particular poetic narrative presents what I am to myself, how I see myself and how I have lived with this self for sixty-five years. I go about this exercise with a certain style. Style to me was what it was to Flaubert "the rendering of content in a form in which both style and content would be one."(1) Style is the filter, the means, of rendering externality. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Benjamin F. Bart, Flaubert, Syracuse UP, 1967, Preface and p.340.

Style is, ultimately, a matter of the precise
words used and their arrangement in some
structure, some form, some continuous,
composite whole, a physiological-anatomy,
in the cultural repository of history.1

Content, the work, came to me insensibly
over several years so that, now, it is the work
of my whole life. It is always on my mind.
I am always preparing for it. Even my rests
are rests for the work ahead down the road.

1 Some of Flaubert's view of 'style'

Ron Price
13 April 2002

I just completed the ANNOTATED WIND IN THE WILLOWS A. Auger. I thought it quite fascinating to take my mind back to a more Edwardian reference and to see some of the issues of the day that Graham wished to hint at in his book. I do have a few annoying bits that I was concerned eg: the overall accuracy and scholarship in the biology. One is that the author , in discussing "Ratty" treats ratty like a sewer rat whereas he is a noble WATER RAT, a separate and quite distinct species. Hes as different from the brown rat as a beaver is from a capybara. Cf also the badger She needs to do a more "cleaned up "second ed because I think that several people are gonna bug her about her poor depth of reference regarding Linnean nomenclature.

The many drawings and photos of Graham and his family are quite good and the many editions and illustrators (including Disneys crew) are covered in enough detail to satisfy a "Wind-o-phile" like myself.
The"Annotated" book is being used as text in an elective course that a friend of mine teaches at a well known Philly University

I just finished, "Mrs. Shakespeare the Complete Works," by Robert Nye.

I have mixed feelings about the book and can not recommend it. It is clever. Nye is a poet and there is some poetic writing in this little volume. Anne SHakespeare speaks directly to the reader and clicks her tongue at her errant husband, bewails her younger daughter's husband and obviously relies on her more clever daughter Susanna. She is just a little too folksy.

Nye gives the reader his view on the identity of the Dark Lady and the relationship between "Mr. Shakespeare" and Henry Wriothesley. I just don't like reading about anal sex.

Thanks for the review. I never read The Wind in the Willows. Had a paperback edition that I kept in the first floor bathroom of this house back when I had the notion that I could live a life so filled with intellectual pursuits that I would leave different books in the two bathrooms. Make of you what you will of that. Anyway, something tragic happened to the book . . . not certain what but I had to toss it. Sigh. I will try again. always wanted to read it.

Book of the Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Jon Han-Sun translation, kindle edition. It's actually beautiful.

Welcome to a2k, Monty.

I'm reading a book I started once before, and stopped because the book is so heavy. Would make a good door stop. This is probably because it is printed on excellent paper. Title: A History of Private Life, Volume I; From Pagan Rome to Byzantium; Philippe Aries and Georges Dubry, General Editors; Paul Veyne, Editor; Arthur Goldhammer, Translator.

Iago which is about Iago. Reads like alternate history.

The villain in Othello, or the parrot in Disney's Aladdin?

I am reading series of books "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King
Now I am ending the 6th book (The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah)

The parrot from Aladdin couldn't get a job after the cancellation of the Alladin TV cartoon 17 years ago. The lack of anything to do (unemployment) plus the A bankful of royalties from the original film just fueled his epic meth habit. Poor thing.