What BOOK are you reading right now?

Janet Evanovich's Hard Eight -- the eighth (duh) in a very funny series of novels starring Stephanie Plum...

I know, it's only rock and roll, but I like it!

I am now reading I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. It is for my English class, and it is not as stupid as it sounds.

I've just discovered the work of Walter Mosley, an African American novelist who writes powerfully, about how race and poverty make life such a struggle. He also has a great series of detective novels with Easy Rawlins, an ex-con who is a janitor at a junior high, who solves complicated murder mysteries. Mosley's books are hard to put down. The last one i read was Outgunned and Outnumbered (or something like that)

I read a bunch of Mosley's but not that one. He is the Guest Editor this year for the Best Short Stories of the Year series too. (I've just started in on those...)

Mosley's stories are good. I can never remember titles (or, usually, authors) but I always look to see if there's something new by him at my library (also the Kellermans, Bill Bryson, Stephen King, and several other names...) I wish Earl Emerson would come out with a new one...

I hadn't heard of Lethem -- well, barely -- when his name came up a while back. But I've been dipping into the latest Paris Review (166) and the interview with Lethem who's quite an interesting, eccentric guy with a former profession that reminded me of this thread. Here's an excerpt from the interviewer's intro:

"After high school he attended Bennington College, briefly -- making him the one novelist of that group [Wallace, Eugenides, Chabon inter alia] never to get a college degree -- then eventually moved to the Bay Area, where he lived until 1998. During these years he supplemented his income as a writer by working in used bookstores. It's the only job he's ever had, and it has given him an erudition peculiar to antiquarians, a knowledge of books that is precise, catholic, and bibiographical, with particular concentrations in the underdog and outsider. A conversation with Lethem usually renews the cheerful conviction that some of the best books you will ever read are books you haven't heard of yet.."

Lethem says he suspects "that the government is television, that George Bush is the star of a rotton soap opera."

(Which, if you think about it, means "self-government" has come down to deciding when to turn the TV on and off...)

That sends a shudder down my back, considering how many otherwise good folks (such as I) can get sucked into TV. I am happy to say ours is off, but it is a flip of the button away. Remember the parents in Clockwork Orange? I think I'd really like Lethem and I think he might like the book I'm reading, a 1936 printing of Dark of the Moon, by Sara Teasdale. Her real name was Sarah, (doncha know?) but she changed it for literary purposes. Here's pg. 67... I can't remember if I ever knew the word "samite" <shaking head> but will look it up for all of us.

Winter Sun (Lenox)
There was a bush with scarlet berries
And a hemlock heaped with snow.;
With a sound like surf on long sea-beaches
They took the wind and let it go.

The hills were shining in their samite,
Fold after fold they flowed away ---
"Let come what may," your eyes were saying,
"At least we two have had to-day."





"I want some," she said with a covetous voice.

Well that's a new one on me.

I have learned one of the rules of A2K, to wit: if you follow a post by Piffka, you are sure to learn something interesting.

I am reading The Spectator magazine at the moment, and there is a remarkably good account by Matthew Parris about a holiday period spent in a hut built on a rocky ridge overlooking the veldt in Limpopo Province, South Africa.

It's an astonishingly sensitive piece of writing.

I looked it up and found it online: check it out.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=back&issue=2003-11-01&id=3688

The "green, greasy Limpopo River"....

Its also "great"

Right! Sluggish brain. Limpopo brain.

I looked up the Spectator online, and located the article; have a read, and see if you agree with me

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=back&issue=2003-11-01&id=3688

You can follow the links to the current edition, if you like. I think some of you will like the contributions of Dot Wordsworth, lexicographer.

I did go to Spectator -- not via your link so I saw McMahon on vino. But I curse you for reminding me that the Spectator is online -- more to read, more to read. Damn!

I read White Oleander and loved it. It was the first book I ever read from Oprah's Book List and I've been going back to the list ever since. Can't really speak for any others on the list, but White Oleander is definitely worth reading.

Well pardon me I'm sure.



But it is good, isn't it? And varied.

McTag... The Spectator looks good to me, too.

I just started reading Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography, Interesting Times. Indeed, they were. He's a wonderful writer with a rare point of view as a Marxist historian. Lived through the build-up to Hitler in Germany, managed to flee with his sister (they were Jewish orphans) to England. The cover of the book includes photos of Hitler, Stalin, Che Guevera and Bertrand Russell.

For some reason I recently embarked on a forensic anthropology fiction orgy. . . I'm up to Bare Bones on Kathy Reichs's Tempe Brennan series. . .

D'art -- Did you ever read "Encounter," now no longer published? I think that's where I first came across Hobsbawm. One of the things hardest for me to take, moving back to the US, has been the ever-narrowing political spectrum here.

Hey has anyone read that essay yet?

Now listen here, wall......