What BOOK are you reading right now?

I'm most of the way through Welty's "Optimist's Daughter" now, and I was surprised at how touching it becomes toward the end. From sly satire to poignancy. Remarkable range, Welty has...

One of the things I love about Welty is that she was considered "ugly," and "klutzy," and because unmarried a bit of a loser. Like a nun, Welty wasn't expected to have much of an emotional range, no Real Understanding of the human experience of a Real Woman. If you follow my drift. But she had some of the most acute and important insights into human behavior and emotions of any writer. I remember a story which I'll now ruin because I don't entirely remember it! Henry James was asked how, in the life he led, he was able to get inside a character such as X, someone so different from himself, so far outside of his world. James said something like, "Well, I was going down some stairs and across a landing and there was a door ajar and I could just see a man inside and I KNEW who he was from one glance."

(D'art, if you remember this Jamesian comment and remember it accurately, kindly correct me, fill in the blanks...!)

Reminds me of James' short story/novella, "Beast in the Jungle," which knocked me over when I read it in school. Seemed to me to be one of the most fearful glimpses into adult life I could imagine then. Still does. I reread it not too long ago and was surprised at my earlier reaction.

I've been reading a little pile of Sebastian Faulks books, not in the right order as it turns out. So far, The Girl at the Lion D'or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray.

Events in the books aren't news to me, but I like the well developed sense of place in each that I read so far. Saying that, I prefer the shortest and first I read, the Girl at the Lion D'Or. I suppose I will end up reading A Fool's Alphabet and The English Patient at some point.

I don't know the James quote, Tartarin, but I appreciate his point. One doesn't need to be in the middle of things to understand them. In fact, speaking from experience, when I'm in the middle of that action I'm least able to understand it. Only later, when I'm alone, does anything start to make sense. I'm sure the same is true for these writers.

I finished "The Optimist's Daughter" last night. I thought it was marvelous. Hard to believe so much emotion can be contained in a 180-page novel. It's all about love and loss; I'll leave it at that...

I'm not familiar with Sebastian Faulk (or is it Faulks), ossobuco. What can you tell us about him?

Ain't Google wonderful!!

..I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but the moment was experience. She had got her direct personal impression, and she had turned out her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give an inch it takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education...
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no1/james.html

Wow, Tartarin! A wonderful statement!

Tartarin, I too was impressed by "Beast In The Jungle", and still feel the terror of "Never been there, never did that."

On the other hand am now reading The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry"s latest. It's no Lonesome Dove, but it's fun to read. Like the inclusion of real people, Kit Carson, George Catlin, and the action is non-stop.

I've never read McMurtry fiction but am sore tempted. Love his essays.

Ian McEwan: Atonement (Dutch translation: Boetekleed)

If you can get your hands on them, Tartarin, McMurtry's early novels are classics, IMHO. "Leaving Cheyenne" and "Horseman, Pass By" and "The Last Picture Show". I read 'em when I was a lot younger, so I wonder how they hold up...

I started re-reading the Earthsea series after suggesting it to many over the last few years. I haven't read it since high school and I really like it even now. I bought the series (or most of it) in Seattle where the author, Ursela K LeGuin lives.

I started my vacation with Barbara Kingsolver's latest collection - can't remember the title of that one right now. It was amazing.

On Sebastian Faulks, I will quote the not very long piece preceding the novel, The Girl at the Lion D'or:

"Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist for fourteen years before taking up writing full time in 1991. In 1995, he was voted Author of the Year by the British Book Awards for Birdsong, his fourth novel and his second, following A Fool's Alphabet, to be published in the United States. He lives in London with his wife and two children."

The books of his I have read so far have a central romance, which does or doesn't work out, set in a time of stress in England or France. One starts around 1907, another in 1938, another in 1942. As I posted earlier, the history of those times and places is not news to me, but I got fully involved
in the quotidian days of the lives in these books.

I haven't seen the movie the English Patient, but now plan to read the book, which he also wrote.

Hmm, wish I were at home, because then I would run and get me book group's reading list for next year!

Well, post it when you do get home!

Im rereading Hero in the Shadows by David Gemmel, it's heroic fantasy so lots of senseless violence 8) It's very good actually

The Ends of the Earth (A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy), by Robert D. Kaplan.

I was prejudiced against the book (because of what I heard of his _Balkan Ghosts_), so I postponed reading it for, err, a few years after I was given it for my birthday - but now I'm reading it after all.

Its actually quite thought-provoking, as well as an interesting and enjoyable read. He is a studious traveller, which makes this book more essayism than travel writing.

There is indeed plenty to criticize about it, for sure. About his style, which makes him seem like a perennially-grumpy, slightly spoiled, gentleman, and about his, what I would call, 'culturalist' worldview, in which the ills or imperfections he observes are always at least partly explained in terms of superior/inferior (highly developed/backward) cultures - up into the near-ridiculous.

But lots of fascinating knowledge as well, interspersed with analyses that go beyond the preoccupation of the day. Thought-provoking is the way he keeps bringing back the role of ecology (and the risks involved in impending ecological degradation) into his observations on the political/economic/cultural state of affairs of the countries he passes through.

"Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History" by James A. Morone. Traces our national obsession with sin beginning with the Puritans. I'm about halfway through--up to the temperance campaign that led to Prohibition.

Anyone who wants to understand how Ashcroft operates ought to read this book! Morone is a political scientist and he writes clearly. He's particularly good on how women have been treated (and mistreated) throughout our history as pawns in the use of Sin as a political theme...

Oh dear, oh dear. Bad news that I've been waiting for, dreading. Carol Shields has died (she'd been very ill with cancer for some time). Anyone here who hasn't read The Stone Diaries (or just about anything else she's written) really should. She was a wonderful writer and an interesting person.

Today is indoor chore day and I'm just NOT in the mood to absorb anymore information about the White House via radio, so turned the radio off and plugged in Proulx's "That Old Ace in the Hole" Cassette 1, Side A, and am finding the work I have to do positively enjoyable. There will come a time when I finish listening and will be prepared to give away the tapes. Wasn't there someone looking for a copy of that book? Can you remember who it was? Maybe he/she would settle for tapes? Would be glad to send...

Spent the weekend in Portland where I had the good fortune, among other things, to make several visits to Powell's. The largest bookstore, by far, in the region, and a real treat, especially for those who seek an author's backlist.

I was in search of novels by Nicola Barker, few of whose works have been published in the US. I found two, plus a British hard cover of "Wide Open", which I already owned in paperback. It was a remainder, so I didn't feel like the purchase was a splurge. And now I can give the paperback to a friend! I've really fallen for Nicola...