labwriter: 2011, thread 2

Cardinals in Missouri, winter 2011. By my count, I see six males and five little females.

Here's my thread 1

My profile is here.




Books read so far in 2011:

January

1) Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. 4 stars
2) A Fountain Filled With Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3 stars
3) An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum. 5 stars
4) A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. 4 stars
5) Seeing Mary Plain, by Frances Kiernan. 5 Stars
6) Out of the Deep I Cry, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3.5 stars
7) Walking the Bible, by Bruce Feiler. 4 stars
8) To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3 stars
9) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. 125th Anniversary Ed. by Fischer and Salamo. 5 stars
10) Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn by Tom Quirk. 4 stars
11) Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell. 4 stars
12) City Room, by Arthur Gelb. 3.5 stars

February

13) Finn, by Jon Clinch. 5 stars
14) O: A Presidential Novel, by anonymous. 1/2 star, only because LT doesn't allow for negative stars
15) The Kingdom and the Power, by Gay Talese. 3.5 stars
16) Faceless Killers, by Henning Mankell. 3 stars
17) The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell. 5 stars
18) True Grit, by Charles Portis. 4 stars, leaning towards 5
19) Jar City, by Arnalder Indridason. 3.5 stars
20) Silence of the Grave, by Arnalder Indridason. 3 stars
Abandoned: The Windows of Brimnes, by Bill Holm.
21) The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey through the Archives of The New York Times, by Richard F. Shepard. 4 stars

So many beautiful cardinals! I only have one pair who live on my property.

Hi Becky, so glad to hear you woke up with power and not a ton of snow! Also, congratulations on reading (or finishing) 12 books in January. That's pretty impressive.

Becky, I'm glad to hear that you kept both your power and your trees - I was worried for you yesterday. I love the picture of the cardinals, and chuckled at the description of your dog sliding on his belly.

Storm's over - get back to your books!

Hi All, thanks for visiting and for your kind words. Yes, Sandy, you're right--I went back to the books today. Also, I received in the mail a biog I'm dying to start right now, but I won't let myself until I get through this Gay Talese book about The NYT. The biography is The Sisters The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell, published in 2001. This is a companion book to the equally huge volume of correspondence among the six sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley.

No reading in anything today but the Gay Talese book. Wonderful stuff, but no particularly memorable quotes to put here. It's about time to put dinner on. I'm so happy I was well-stocked with food for a change, so I didn't go outside today except to go out with the dogs. Hope all is well with everyone here. Happy reading, etc.

Hi Becky!
You sure had a great month of reading in January!

So glad your weather was not damaging.
We've had lots and lots of snow - light and fluffy.
It's a winter wonderland and still snowing. I do so love it. :)

Yes, a very good month. Mine only had one Five star and way too many 3 1/2's -- esp means I'm not choosing well or challenging myself, or a little of both.

I'm doing this 24 hour read so I can't linger. I'm a much slower reader than I realized.... or else I can't add, or a little of both.

We had around 9 inches, not 20, but the wind was ferocious for part of the day so I'm glad the kids were home not on buses. We might get another five or so inches tonight, but hey, it's snow not ice.

Glad you kept your power!

Yay, Becky! Cheers for coming through with power and warmth!! Thank you for posting on my thread. I do think we must have remarkably similar educational backgrounds! I love your teaching yourself to read with crayons. I wish I had been that smart. I don't remember feelings about my first grade classmates and their reading one way or the other, but they all still twit me about the teacher's saying, apparently more than once, "Why can't you read with expression like Peggy Ann?" I have no recollection of that either. What I do remember is lying to my mother when she asked, "Have you done your reading homework?" I knew I could read "Dick and Jane" with no prep, and she wouldn't let me read my own stuff until I had done the required work, so I daily perjured myself and told her yes.
ETA: the cardinals are lovely!

What a great photo of the cardinals!

I hope you are warm, safe and dry.

Thanks for visiting, Linda and everyone. Claudia, I'm so glad the snow you're getting is the beautiful kind. I tried Lucy's tip and used fireplace ashes on the steps to my wooden deck--worked like a charm for my dogs (humans, too), but beautiful--not. Ha. Lucy, I'm so impressed with the readathon. I'm sure my eyeballs would be falling out after such a day of reading. And Peggy-- so I daily perjured myself and told her yes--snort!

#5: I read the Mitford book several years ago, Becky. I hope you like it!

Yes, I'm starting to think about the "fewer but better". The problem I find myself dealing with is that books appear superficially intriguing, and then end up disappointing me. Do I discard them? That removes the possibility that they'll improve and end up being ones I really enjoy -- which has certainly happened. And then there are the books that I think of as brain candy -- amusing and entertaining, but not really not that memorable. But I also like being diverted! I wouldn't want an endless diet of granola and other ultra-healthy foods, with nary a chance of a chocolate-dipped strawberry, after all! (any more than I'd want a chocolate-based diet...)

Have you read the Debo Devonshire/Patrick Leigh Fermor correspondence, by any chance? I nabbed that last year and enjoyed it, though admit I did so mostly because of Fermor. Wish he'd finish volume 3 of his 1930s peregrinations.

Have you read the Debo Devonshire/Patrick Leigh Fermor correspondence

No, I haven't, but I took a look and this is a book I need to find. Love the title, In Tearing Haste. I see it's by the same woman who edited the Mitford letters, and she seems to have done a good job of it. Thanks for the tip! Yes, Fermor is amazing.

Are these darned touchstones working yet? In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor ed by Charlotte Mosley. Ach, no, touchstones not working.

I first learned about Fermor about.... 3, 4? years ago reading a long article about him in the NYer -- he was in his 90's and still going strong then..... living in Crete or somewhere in Greece, I think, still able to make hearts throb too. An incredible piece on his wartime exploits (which were amazing!), he has amazing instincts. I read the first walking book and found myself so sad about everything that was lost in the war, the people, the vilages, the beauty that I haven't been able to pick up the second one and I have to admit that I didn't realize that the 3rd one was never finished.... I think I've looked for it once or twice and been frustrated and puzzled!

I'm tempted too by those letters! Onto the wishlist they go!

I'm going to cram in as many books as I can before my time is up! As long as I'm enjoying a stupid book, no problem - reading a stupid book I'm not enjoying well.... We have a rule around here which is don't eat any dessert or sweet unless you love it! EG if you take a few bites and don't think "MMMMMmmmm." That's my definition of an empty calorie!

>14 sibylline:. One of my goals this year is not to be so reluctant to abandon a book I'm not enjoying. I'm reading one right now at night and asking myself--Why am I continuing to read this thing? It's just interesting enough that I want to find out how he's going to wrap things up. But wow, otherwise it's pretty much a stinker. I'll have more to say about it later, but the issue remains, how/when do you know when to abandon a book? Some people use the 50-page rule, but that rarely works for me. Usually I get three-quarters through a dumb book before I'll say, Yeah, it's dumb, why continue? Then I hate myself for having read so far, so nine times out of ten I'll just go ahead and finish the thing. Bleh. I have, however, started to use, more and more often, the "Life Is Too Short" rule, and increasingly that is working for me. I imagine the older I get, the better that rule will apply.

If it is a book you own, why not have a dedicated spot where you put those books you feel ambivalent about..... put in a bookmark, a note, and see if you ever come back. Sometimes I have a feeling that it is truly me, not the book. I started The Education of Henry Adams at least three or four times -- I had a shelf like that in Philadelphia and when we moved I went through it, EHA is one of the only survivors of that purge and I couldn't even tell you what the others were.... no regrets.

If only I could take your lessons to heart! I do abandon books with bookmark inside and a firm admonition to self that I will get back to them. I already own more than I can read if I do nothing but read for the rest of my natural life, and more come in all the time. This year and last, I've been reading more weighty stuff, so I begin to doubt my ability to get to even 75. This is not a problem for Becky, Lucy, or Suzanne, but it weighs on poor Peggy, who also has a Scottish distaste for waste - and nothing is more wasted than an unread book!

I can't find my Howart's Sorting Hat bookmark. I'm hoping I left it in a book at the bottom of a pile somewhere and that someone else didn't hit the jackpot at the FOL book sale!

>18 mamzel:. I just read you post and thought, "Huh?" But OK, I get it. The whole HP phenomenon sort of passed me by. I know, culturally deprived or something.

7 & 12: I had no four or five star books in January, but console myself that the 3 stars are at least enjoyable. I'm a voracious reader, and often at night I need some escapist reading.

I do have some "meat" I'm still moving through slowly. And I'm happy to say the first two I finished in February were 4 stars on my list, but I haven't got comments posted yet.

Hello! I've been lurking on your thread. I really enjoyed reading your comments on your first thread about the Mary McCarthy bio. I first read McCarthy's The Group in my early 20's and reread it in my 30's and again a couple of years ago. Each time I identified with a different character and found new things to appreciate about McCarthy's writing. I also read her book A Charmed Life and absolutely HATED it. I found it strange that I loved one of her books soooo much and despised the other. I'll need to look for the bio and read it.

I'm also a Mitford fan, so I'll be interested to see how you like The Sisters. The Pursuit of Love and Love In a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford are on my all-time fave books list. They were a certainly a fascinating family. Have you read The Bolter?

Chiming in on the discussion of abandoning books--I don't have any hard and fast rules myself about when to stop reading, BUT I can usually tell whether I'm just not "feeling" a book at that moment in time and I may want to return to it later or whether I'm just in a little dry spot and need to keep reading through it OR whether I just plain don't like a book and will let it go unfinished. When I was younger, I felt compelled to finish NO MATTER WHAT. Now, I feel "too many books, too little time" so I easily abandon!

Sandy K

Hi Sandy. Thanks for stopping by! It looks as though we have some reading interests in common. You're not alone in your assessment of McCarthy's A Charmed Life. She's such a fascinating character. I didn't like her, but I was very interested in her story.

I'm reading the book by Gay Talese about The New York Times, and this morning I came across a quotation in his book that I find simply fascinating. I'm old enough to remember JFK first-hand. He really was a very charming guy, and the history books remind us of that daily. But in Talese's book, published in 1966, I found this quotation from an editorial by James Reston of the The Times, written just a week before Kennedy's death:

There is a vague feeling of doubt and disappointment in the country about Kennedy's first term. . . . He has touched the intellect of the country but not the heart. He has informed but not inspired the nation. He is undoubtedly the most popular political figure of the day, but he has been lucky in his competition. . . . It is not a general reaction, but there is clearly a feeling in the country, often expressed by middle-aged women, that the Kennedys are setting standards that are too fancy, too fast, and as one woman said in Philadelphia, 'too European.' . . . Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt have there been so many men's-club stories in circulation against 'that man in the White House.' . . . {It} is a far cry from the atmosphere he promised when he ran for the Presidency in 1960.

That's a fascinating quote, Becky, and the timing is really interesting. I remember hearing that Jackie Kennedy had a big part in creating the legend of Camelot about the Kennedy presidency after his death. I guess I was 9 when he died so my main memory is watching the funeral on TV. I've pretty much always assumed everyone loved him.

Ah, Camelot -- it's all branding!

I'm reading a book I'm not in love with now (Swiss Watching by Diccon Bewes), but since it's a NetGalley, I don't want to jeopardize my chances of getting more, so I'll finish and dash off a quick comment. I've got shelves full of partly-finished books, and have just gone through stashes of books in my bedroom, winnowing out a bunch that since I've never managed to get into them in the last decade, this is unlikely to happen in the next decade. They will go onto paperback swap v. soon.

I don't think I could apply a 50 page rule. There have been plenty of books I would have missed out on that way... True, some are captivating me by page 50 (including some that will later disappoint), but 50 pages feels so arbitrary...

It's all branding--politics, that is.

Anywho, I've decided that I haven't been fair to the novel I'm reading, Finn by Jon Clinch. This is absolutely not a casual read, not one you can pick up and put down like you would some sort of supermarket "entertainment" read. The time shifts in it are sophisticated and tricky. You have to pay attention to what Clinch is doing, or it's easy lose track of important connections. However, that said, this book, because of its complexity, is also immensely satisifying. I'm at the exact half-way mark, and I think it's time to push on and finish the book.

I like what has been pointed out by one scholar at the Twain forum, R. Kent Rasmussen, about Clinch's book, that the book provides stimulating speculations on questions about Pap's backstory:

How did Pap Finn get to be the monster that he is?

What feelings does he have toward Huck?

Who was Huck's mother and what kind of a relationship did Pap have with her?

What kinds of relationships did Pap have with his own father and mother?

So I'm going to give it a good hour or two and who knows--maybe I'll just push on to the end. It's Friday afternoon, I've worked hard all week, and this seems like a good way to spend a little down time. Happy Friday, everyone.

I just read where Jon Clinch said that one of his inspirations for this book was the character of Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner's Absalom, Absolom!. Seriously, if you have read Finn and you enjoyed the complexities of that book, then you really should give Faulkner's book a try--but be ready to read with a pencil and paper in hand for taking notes to help you keep things straight. Really, if you're looking for a work of fiction that will stretch you as a reader, give that one a try.

No review, just some reactions to the book.

This morning I finished Finn the novel by Jon Clinch. I won't say it was based on Huckleberry Finn because that wouldn't be accurate. To say it's a "prequel" wouldn't be quite right either. It's more of an interpretation or spinoff. Maybe there's a more exact term, but I don't know what it is.

In reading some of the comments and reviews of this book, I get the idea that some readers believe that it was Twain's intent to make his character, Huckleberry Finn, a mulatto boy. This idea comes from one of those recent scholarly takes on Twain's book that is someone's (Shelley Fisher Fishkin's) thesis which resulted in selling a book and furthering her academic career--the book, Was Huck Black?. It's Fisher Fishkin's argument that the character of Huck Finn has an African American voice and was modeled on an actual African American child known to Twain. Fine, that's her opinion and she's entitled to it. I've thumbed through and read parts of her book, and I don't agree with her thesis. Then Clinch has taken FF's thesis one step farther in his own novel and made his Huck a mulatto child. Again, that's fine, this is a novel and Clinch can do in his novel whatever he wants. But I think it's unfortunate that some readers confuse what Clinch did in his novel, what Fisher Fishkin wrote in her book, and the character created by Twain. Let's be clear: Twain's Huckleberry wasn't black.

Having said that, don't misunderstand, I liked what Clinch did for the backstory of Huckleberry Finn. I found the story very convincing, and the details helped to explain and round out the character of Pap Finn. I just think it's a shame that readers are confusing Clinch's book with Twain's.

I also enjoyed the family that Clinch created for Pap Finn--his father, the Judge, his mother, and his sycophantic brother Will. It was also entertaining to view the Widow Douglas, who appears in Twain's book, through Clinch's eyes.

For me this book was a solid 5-star read. I only had one problem with it, and that was the dialogue, which normally would be enough to knock the book from 5 to 4 stars. However, everything else about this book was so superior, even the bad dialogue couldn't take away from my enjoyment of the book.

In the back of my paperback edition, I found a Q&A with the author in which he discusses his dialogue. The question was, "Why didn't you use dialect in Finn? My answer to that question would be twofold: One, Twain's dialect in his book was pure genius, and any attempt on Clinch's part to duplicate Twain's dialect could only fail; and two, I don't think today's readers would tolerate or accept that level of dialect. Clinch's answer to the questions was that he was going for a "Homeric quality of repeated, formulaic expressing"; also, he says this: "By stripping the speech of characters like Finn and Bliss down to its barest essence, I was able to create a contrast between narrative and dialogue that conveys the impression of dialect without giving in to specifics."

Well, if only he had given the spare, stripped down speech only to Finn or Bliss, then what he was doing might have been quite powerful. However, Clinch has all of his characters, at one time or another, speaking in this "stripped down" way, and I found the contrast between the dialogue and narrative to be jarring and intrusive.

But that said, the book is a triumph, one that I wouldn't mind starting over again and reading straight through immediately, something I've never done and would generally never think to do. However, instead I'm going to reread Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, since this is a book mentioned by Clinch as one of his influences, particularly the character of Thomas Sutpen who looms in the background of Faulkner's book, much in the way that Judge Finn is the powerful, motivating character behind the scenes in Clinch's book.

Ed. in an attempt to fix the touchstone for Clinch's book which I wasn't able to do so I deleted the touchstone.

Beautiful work Becky -- since I haven't read Finn, I can't say more, but I'm hooked, that's for sure!

Wow, Becky! You really dive deep when you read a book. I admire your analytical skill and insight. I'm hoping someday I will have read enough to start doing this type of thing myself... but I fear my memory skills won't hold out.

I would consider this a great review - for what is a re-view but looking back and giving your understanding of - and reactions to - the book? I could get the summary of a book from many sources - but what I'm interested in would be people's reactions. Like yours! Thanks. :)

Thanks, Sib and Claudia, and my DH would probably thank you as well, since it was his income (and extreme patience) that allowed me to go to school for this stuff. He didn't once ask me, "What are you going to do with your English degrees?" even though he is not a man who "gets" fiction of any kind--I think the last novel he read was in high school, Gone With the Wind, which he read in one night, or so he says. Heh. He gave me the space and time to do do this, and because of that we are materially much poorer than we could have been and I am personally much richer. He's a good man.

I forgot to add why I read this book, although I may just be repeating things I said earlier. I learned of this book on LT (where else--ha!) sometime last year and had it in my TBR pile. Since I just finished a re-read of Huckleberry Finn, I decided, what better time to read Finn. I think it added to the enjoyment of the book to have had Twain's book recently in mind.

Another reason I read Clinch's book was because I'm trying to boost the level of contemporary fiction I read so that at least "sometimes" I'm reading something in new fiction beyond "entertainment" level.

Becky, I have a husband who went through the same kind of thing with me... when both my kids were in college... I declared I was going too! There were 3 of us in college and since I quit work to do this... our income was cut almost in half.

Ron was *very* patient and never asked "What on earth are you going to do with a degree in psychology/philosophy?" Like your DH, he gave me all the time, space and support I needed. It was one of the best times of my life. So, there are TWO good men on this planet! ;-)

{{Big grin}}

Becky, I loved your comments on Finn and about your husband.

I bought a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last month after reading your comments on that book. I hope to get to it soon and then I think I'll try Finn afterwards.

ETA: You should consider teaching online literature classes.

Kudos from me too, Becky! Finn moves up on my must-have, must-read list.

Hmm, I have not ever read Huckleberry Finn, though I have it, picked up at some point as a book I ought to have. Maybe it's high time.

De-lurking to say I've really enjoyed the discussion on your threads, especially around Huck Finn and related book. My real life book group read Huckleberry Finn last year, but I missed out on that read though I got myself a copy. This has reminded me to get back to it soon.

Thanks for visiting, everyone. Last night I started a Swedish mystery/thriller, Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell. I like the blurb on the front of the book, "Sweden's greatest living mystery writer." That's because Sweden's real "greatest" mystery writer unfortunately died, Steig Larsson. I'm not very far into this one, but it's clear that Mankell isn't Larsson; however, I didn't expect him to be--and this is the first in the series--so we'll see where it goes.

I'm struck more by Mankell's book that I was in Larsson's writing: Sweden is not the U.S.A. Already we've had a couple of snarky mentions of America--that the crime scene was bloody "like an American movie" and a reference to "American gas-guzzlers." Well, Mankell, try driving across Kansas or Texas or Nevada sometime in one of your Swedish wind-up-toy cars. Just sayin'. Also, the premise of the book is that the old people out on the isolated farms are being terrorized by a murderer. The old man next door to the old people who are murdered goes back to his house and picks up a crowbar. In the U.S., an old farmer would go back to the farmhouse and pick up his shotgun. It's just something I noticed.

As for my other books, I'm still working on The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese, his 1967 history of The New York Times. I also started a book by Dinesh D'Souza, Life After Death: The Evidence. And then my new AmLit book, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is still sitting unopened on my desk. That's pretty much it, but it all ought to keep me busy enough.

P.S. For those who think we should be more like Sweden in our driving habits: Sweden is slightly larger than California. It's a matter of scale.

P.P.S. I drove a Volvo for 20 years. Heh. My "gas-guzzling American car." Before that it was a VW.

Ed. to ad the P.S. and the P.P.S.

#37 Becky, I enjoyed your reactions to the "snarky" American comments in the Mankell book. (It's one that's been on my list for a while, but I haven't read him yet.) I enjoy learning what others think of us - we Americans being the self-centered creatures that we are! But you make an interesting point. Sweden is the size of California. The USA is the size of Europe. It only makes sense, then, when we have a bigger influence than another single country. The entire European continent has only twice the population of our single nation. As far as driving habits go, do you know how other people cross the wide open spaces in their countries? I know that the Canadians drive the same kinds of cars that we do, but what about in other parts of the world? And you're right, the old American farmer would be grabbing his shotgun, not a crowbar. That's probably because we're too barbaric to have banned gun ownership yet. So, do Swedes use crowbars for hunting game, too? :-) (Apologies to any Swedes, no offense intended.)

Hope you have a great week!

>38 sjmccreary:. Hi Sandy,

Well, I wasn't being critical of "old American farmers." I think in the situation that the Swedish farmer found himself, we wouldn't call it "barbarism" if he were to protect himself with the crowbar. So surely it's not barbaric to protect oneself with a shotgun?

So, do Swedes use crowbars for hunting game, too? :-)

I got a laugh from that one.

I finished The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese, the history of The New York Times, up to about the mid-Sixties. The book was originally published in 1967.

I enjoyed this book a lot, although I thought Talese's writing became rather formulaic as I worked my way through the book, which is why I gave it only 3.5 stars. Journalism and The Times have traveled a long, strange road since the Sixties. I can only wonder what some of those editors back in the Thirties and Forties would have to say about The Times in particular and journalism in general today.

Why I read the book. This is part of the reading I'm doing for a writing project. The reading is focused on Manhattan in the 1920s through 1940s.

While this one is fresh in my mind, I'm going to read another book that's been on my shelf for awhile, The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times, by Richard F. Shepard, published in 1996. Shepard worked at The Times for almost 50 years. He says this is a book "that tries to explain how The Times came to be what it is."

30- My husband seems a lot like yours, Becky. And Claudia. He's not a reader but he supports me without grumbling, since he knows it makes me happy.

#39 I didn't mean to imply that I really think it's barbaric to own or (properly) use guns. My comment was tongue in cheek. On the contrary, I am a strong proponent of the right of private citizens to own guns. My dad taught me gun safety when I was a little girl and took me target shooting as soon as I was big enough to handle the heavy weapons. I haven't shot anyone yet!

Becky

Hello to you. As usual, you are reading some great books.

Hi Linda! Sandy--I gotcha! I didn't think you were implying that, but it occurred to me that someone else might think I was being critical of an "old American farmer" with his shotgun. I expressed myself poorly. I'm right there with you about the right to own guns. I found Stieg Larsson's books a little odd about that topic, which probably got my antennas up about Sweden and guns in the first place, so when the character in the Mankell book picked up a crowbar instead of his shotgun, I noticed it. I might not have if I hadn't read Larsson's books.

People I know have been on at me to read Mankell for years, possibly decades -- long before Stieg Larsson appeared. My closest Swedish friend (we've known each other more than 30 years) says both do a good job of dealing with the seamy underside of the apparently perfect squeaky clean world of Sweden.

I remember when I moved back to Canada after living first in England and then in Belgium how struck I was with the size of the cars compared to the little whizzy things seen on the streets in Europe. Of course, there the simplest way to get from point A to point B is often the train -- or the plane. Cars are more likely to be used only if you live in a more remote area, or aren't near a commuter railroad, or for family vacations, IMO. I certainly know plenty of people there who are car-less or even driver's license-less; here the latter is unheard of and the former is still rare. I'll have to google some data on car ownership.

The thing that I keep trying to explain to non-Americans is why more of us don't have passports. To them it seems irrational. I point out that we can drive for three days or more in any direction and never leave the country. Whereas to fly somewhere for a two week holiday en famille would cost the average family a month or two's salary, more or less. In contrast, you don't go very far in Europe without having to show a passport or national identity document because you're crossing a border or even leaving the Schengen zone. It's something they take so for granted that it's normal; thus the idea that we don't have passports is seen as a rejection of the outer world. In fact, it's nothing more than a reflection of the fact that we can go from Florida and the beaches, to the mountains in Colorado, or the big cities, or sailing in the Pacific -- all in the same country.

I have many cousins of the second-cousin variety who live in the Netherlands. They simply cannot comprehend the breadth of this country--there's no explaining it to them. You can practically drive for three days just in Texas--ha.

Apropos to pretty much nothing. One of the longest nights of my life was spent driving across Nevada in a bad rainstorm. There is simply nothing there. (Sorry Nevadans--I know, the desert is beautiful, but not to drive through at night in the rain.)

#46: You can practically drive for three days just in Texas

Boy, isn't that the truth? I have driven straight across Texas without stopping and that is a l-o-n-g trip!

Hey, Becky! *waves* Even if I do not post a lot here, I am always lurking.

Hi Stasha. DH & I lived in Burkeburnett, TX when he was in the Air Force. Then we were stationed in Fort Worth for two years. His uncle lived in Houston, so we would drive there once in awhile. This was back in 1974 when we had our VW bug. No air conditioning, of course. Oh my, no one can comprehend the distances of that state until they've driven through it.

Good grief, how about if I spell your name right, Stasia? {blush}

I hope you have a good night at work.

#48: Not working tonight, thank goodness. I have to do meal plans and grocery lists before heading to the store in the AM. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to pull myself away from LT :)

No worries about the name spelling. Believe me, I have seen it spelled a variety of ways!

>45 Chatterbox:: Excellent points, Suz. I've had difficulty explaining the passport thing myself. And then there's the dismal state of public transport in most parts of the US. And gasoline is much more expensive in many parts of Europe than it is here. So Europeans see US driving through that lens as excessive, "gas guzzling."

Re cars in Britain -- I read a piece about how difficult it is to pass the test AND that it costs around $600 (maybe more, I'm trying not to exaggerrate) just to GET the license and then cars and insurance and gas are all hellishly expensive compared to the US. That would slow me down.

I think one thing the Mankell books tackle well is the influx of non-Swedish people and how that is changing the culture. I think he is careful not to take sides, he wants to examine what is happening, not make judgements about it. It's harder for us to imagine the effect of so much change so fast in what was such a highly heterogeneous society for millenia.

>51 sibylline:. Excellent points, Sib. I'm struck by Mankell's use of the word "foreigner" in his book, how unlikely it would be for an American writer to use that word and yet how appropriate it is for a writer to use to describe Swedish immigrants. After all, it's a place where someone could still be described as "not looking Swedish." The same thing is happening all over Europe. Even in the Netherlands, the most tolerant place on the planet, people are having second thoughts about what unlimited immigration is doing to fundamentally change their country.

I'm enjoying the Mankell book quite a bit. It's the first in a series, so I'm imagining that he's going to be developing the Wallander character as he goes along.

And all I can say about the Euros attitude about the U.S. as gas guzzlers is that they can't possibly understand, there is simply no comparison to be made, even if you compare the land mass of Europe with the land mass of the U.S., since the population densities are so entirely different. They don't get it. So I guess what they think about me driving my car doesn't matter very much.

The DH is a passionate Wallender fan. The BBC series is excellent but very brutal.

Sib, I'm pretty sure you're the one who recommended this series to me, by way of your DH.

>51 sibylline:: Re cars in Britain -- I read a piece about how difficult it is to pass the test AND that it costs around $600 (maybe more, I'm trying not to exaggerrate) just to GET the license and then cars and insurance and gas are all hellishly expensive compared to the US. That would slow me down.

I've done it and it is much more rigorous. I don't recall the cost but the figure you gave could be close if you include the cost of driver education which is more intensive than we do in the US. But I'm a better driver because of it! :)

>52 labwriter:: And all I can say about the Euros attitude about the U.S. as gas guzzlers is that they can't possibly understand, there is simply no comparison to be made . This statement could apply on many topics, in both directions. It may be difficult to understand, but I think it's very important to have the dialogue, and attempt to understand. The differences aren't good or bad, they are just different.

>55 lauralkeet:. 'Way too serious for me for a Tuesday.

I'm reading The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times, by Richard Shepard. This is a great book. I love snooping through archives, and it's clear that Shepard does too. He's using internal memos and personal papers to create snapshots of what THE PAPER OF RECORD has been like--and why--through the decades. It's a very engaging read.

I hope someone is working on this same kind of thing for The New Yorker since they opened up their archives at the NYPL. I would give anything for about a week of free time in New York to sit at that library and read through those papers. I'd start with the working papers of the long-time fiction editor, Katharine Sergeant Angell White.

Enough of the newspapers for today, since I'm making good progress on my newest effort.

My next AmLit reread is Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. I pretty much never make notes in my books, but I see in the copy that's on my shelf that I made lots of notes in this one, and I have to say that I'm glad I did. I wish I could remember which professor I read this book with. My notebooks are somewhere in the basement, but it's too cold to go down there (it's 12 degrees here this morning which is unusually cold for us), so I will do without.

If anyone is thinking of reading this book, I recommend the Vintage International edition, which is the corrected text.

To say that Faulkner jumps around with the narrator in this thing is an understatement. One of the challenges of reading this book is to figure out "who is talking" at any particular moment. Another is to understand what the heck is happening in the story. One strategy I remember using when we studied this book in class was to create a timeline for each chapter. This edition has a genealogy of the characters in the back of the book--who the character is, when they were born, who they were married to, when they died, etc. This is a necessary and useful list, and a chronology would also be very helpful. Without these even an attentive reader will probably give up in frustration and defeat.

So I'm making my way through Chapt. 1, reminding myself of who is who. Wow. Faulkner makes the reader work hard, but ultimately it's a satisfying read--or at least that's what I remember. We'll see.

That kind of geneology is helpful with another of Faulkner's books, Go Down, Moses, which was stitched together out of short works concerning the same family over several generations. And in some of the stories, he makes you work to realize who is speaking here too. But it's a very worthwhile effort.

Becky, I wasn't sure if you had seen the link to this article posted elsewhere on LT. It's about an addendum to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 for those over 50:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropp...

Hi Pat. No, I haven't seen that article. That's great, thank you so much. There's a lot to what she has to say, since, as she points out, the pile of books ain't getting any smaller. Ha.

>58 ffortsa:. I don't believe I've ever read Faulkner's Go Down Moses. I'll check it out. Thanks.

That's funny, Pat. I don't quite do it, but it's funny, and I'm getting a bit better.
Becky, I guess that I haven't read even half of Faulkner, but somehow I feel as though I've read a lot! I ought to go check my list. Anyway, no *Absalom* and no *Moses* for sure - and no plans to get to either anytime soon.

#52 -- Yes the whole concept of "foreigner" is something different altogether in Europe. Here, it's just someone who detectably wasn't born in the country. There are some regions where it can mean something more (eg Yankee in the South) but it doesn't come with the same level of uncertainty about how to view someone for the most part. I find it intriguing to see European nations juggling with the same issue that has been a part of N. America since nearly day 1, even if we haven't always been great about full acceptance (eg quotas, no dogs or Irishmen in park, no Catholics need apply, etc.)

Not sure I'll be ready for more Faulkner until next year. But that's OK, as I've got plenty else to be getting on with!

Pat

Thanks for that very interesting link!

I finished the police procedural I was reading, Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, who is Swedish. Bleak, methodical, reserved-- words that come to mind while reading this book, words which seem to also describe the Scandinavian mindset. The main character, Kurt Wallander, is pretty much a universal detective type--in mid-to-late career, his family life a mess because of his job, he drinks too much, eats bad food, and is completely absorbed by his work.

The plot was good enough to keep me reading. The setting was rather thin, and there was really only the main character who was fleshed out enough to be interesting. The men he works with, with the exception of the one that Mankell seems to be killing off with disease, are all pretty interchangeable. Wallander can't carry this series by himself, so I would be looking for an interesting character to show up soon. There didn't seem to be much potential for that in this first book.

I found Mankell's social commentary to be at least as interesting as the crime. This was first published in Sweden in 1991 when Sweden was beginning to wake up to the idea that they had a problem with their liberal immigration laws. I can only wonder what's happened with that issue over the past 20 years.

I'm giving it 3-stars, with reservations; the book wasn't compelling enough to make me immediately run out and get the next in the series, although probably I will read more of Mankell. The second in the series: The Dogs of Riga, originally published in 1992.

The Pearl article is charming -- and sensible, taken with a grain of salt. It only works with novels, of course, not non-fiction. Great conclusion!

#44 And now I've got you! We're saying the same thing, aren't we? I understand what you mean by Larsson getting your "antennas up" about gun ownership. I don't remember where I first began to notice the same thing. In Larsson, surely, but I think also in British TV maybe. Maybe other places, too.

Loved the Pearl article and can't wait until I have permission to judge a book by its cover!

Last night I started reading The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell. What an engaging read! I couldn't put it down.

#67: I really enjoyed that one when I read it a couple of years ago, Becky. I hope you continue to like it.

Those Mitfords really were unbelievably entertaining!

Oh yes, entertaining.

Debo wouldn’t have been a marchioness had it not been for a Kennedy family tragedy. JFK’s sister Kathleen married Billy Hartington, Andrew’s (who married Debo) older brother. (Rose disowned her for that.) Billy was killed by a sniper in WWII, making Andrew the heir. (Then, of course, Kathleen was killed in a plane crash later. V v sad.)

Not quoting from the biog, to be sure. I have a feeling one could go on and on like this about these women. Ah, Unity. Debo was mild compared to her.

One of the vignettes that is pinned in my mind is a description of their father's adoption of 'cocktail' hour -- he managed somehow to turn what was supposed to be a relaxing hour before dinner of pleasant slightly inebriated chit-chat into a total nightmare for his guests. Mostly, as I remember it, because he loathed the whole notion, but felt he had to 'keep up'. I seem to remember he would stand at the fireplace glaring at everyone with his bourbon or scotch or whatever in hand until the dinner gong rang.

Yes, he apparently hated everyone who wasn't "family" although he apparently could be quite humorous.

Decca's take on her father David's definition (and hatred) of outsiders: Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners, but also other people's children, and almost all young men--in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth's surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbors to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.

He especially hated daughter Nancy's Twenties Oxford Arties types who would come to the house smelling of violet hair creme. He threw one out of the house for having a comb in his breast pocket ("a man carrying a comb!")

The biog is hugely entertaining, so far.

Becky, I almost bought The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family yesterday but decided to wait. There were several books on the Mitfords and I wasn't sure which was the best one. I have a feeling I'll be buying it soon considering how much you're liking it.

Do you know anything about the new Mitford biography that's out Wait for Me! Memoirs by Deborah Mitford the Duchess of Devonshire? I saw it favorably reviewed on LT the other day.

>73 phebj:. No, I don't. This is my first exposure to the Mitfords. The first book I bought was The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, and I decided that I would get more out of it if I knew something about the family. I'm just pretty much blown away (both good and bad) by all of them. This biography of them is a good read, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe it isn't just a little bit "sanitized." That's just a feeling I have, based on nothing much. The sisters are interesting enough and the writing good enough that I could easily sit and read the book all day. If I could.

Becky, you are such a serpent in the garden. My copy of the correspondence is here, and I'm waiting for *The Sisters* and House of Mitford (by a nephew) to appear. I'll start whichever of them shows up first. Can't wait!

Ha ha! The Mitfords are a bottomless pit of fascination, not unlike the Bloomies. Yep that was a kind of gargled metaphor but I like it.

I think for years I've been reading biogs that refer in some way to one of the sisters or another, and I've always just blanked it out in my reading as (a name I don't know). I have no idea why up to now I've had no curiosity about these people. I've been shaking my head over them all day.

What an astonishing mixture they were! I feel like I've been tripping over them for years, between the Nancy Mitford historical bios (which I read long before the novels), Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death and Unity's rather inappropriate fixation on one Herr Hitler. Debo seems to be the least eccentric of the lot!

(Loved the phrase "gargled metaphor as much as the gargled metaphor itself.)

May have to hunt down that bio... Sigh...

The only other family that is equally fascinating are the Durrells -- imagine having Gerald and Lawrence under one roof!!!! It boggles the mind!

Diana Mitford was simply outrageous (well, except for Pam and Debbo, they all were). Two points of contact for her that I find fascinating. 1) When she was married to Bryan Guinness, they lived next to Lytton Strachey. Diana was the one who gave Carrington the shotgun she used to kill herself after Lytton died. Of course Diana had no idea about Carrington's plan. And 2) The biographer points out that Diana was probably the only person, or at least one of the very few, who knew both Hitler and Churchill well on a personal level.

I've put most of my other books aside so that I can read this biog, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family. This is a solid 5-star read, both for the absorbing subject and the good writing. I'm really enjoying it; I'm up to about 1935 now, things aren't going well with these sisters, and there's a sense that they're going to get a whole lot worse. I feel for their parents. The father said in about 1936, ""I'm normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other. What do you say about my daughters? Isn't it very sad?" I think it is sad. They were hugely talented and privileged women, and so far there's precious little reason they have to show for using up so much oxygen.

>78 Chatterbox:. Just curious, based on the conversation about memoirs on your thread: would you read the memoirs written by the Mitford sisters? I have one by Jesssica (Decca) Mitford: Daughters and Rebels that I'm looking forward to reading.

I loved Hons and Rebels. (I think that is the title....) I'm not sure it's in my library here either, so I am glad you brought it up. I think that is where I read my description of cocktail hour in fact. Nancy definitely earned her oxygen, both her novels and biographies are excellent.

Well, I have no doubt that Nancy did, Sib, but she hasn't yet in 1936. Oh jeeze, I'm supposed to making dinner. Yikes. Ha ha, off I go.

I suppose one could argue that they overreacted to the world in which they found themselves -- that strange era in between the two world wars.

And yes, I'd definitely read anything by either Jessica or Nancy.

Thank goodness for the Wiki page, or I would never find my thread.

I'm still reading Dinesh D'Souza's book, Life After Death: The Evidence. It's quite a compelling read.

What does the atheist know that the religious believer doesn't? Nothing. For the atheist, no less than for the believer, it is entirely a matter of faith.

Hi Becky!
Love the quote re atheist above. How true!
And... I have been resisting The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family but how can I ignore a "solid 5-star read" ?
Into the whirlpool of desire!
Need a nice looooong, quiet reading vacation! ;-)
Have a nice day!

A little FB thing that's making the rounds. I had no problem reading this. I'm not sure if that's good or bad--ha. So much for editing.

AOCDRNDICG TO RSCHEEARCH AT CMABRIGDE UINERVTISY, IT DSENO'T MTAETR WAHT OERDR THE LTTERES IN A WROD ARE, THE OLNY IPROAMTNT TIHNG IS TAHT THE FRSIT AND LSAT LTTEER BE IN THE RGHIT PCLAE. TIHS IS BCUSEAE THE HUAMN MNID DEOS NOT RAED ERVEY LTETER BY ISTLEF, BUT THE WROD AS A WLOHE. IF YOU CAN RAED TIHS, PSOT IT TO YUOR WLAL. OLNY 55% OF PLEPOE CAN..

I used to practice reading upside-down and backwards when I worked at a newspaper that had the old linotype machines..... but yah, I could read this no problem. It's interesting that 45% can't. That seems like a heck of a lot!!! I am guessing LTers would have an unusually high percentage rate?

Reading upside-down and backwards, surely a good skill to have--ha. Especially when someone is sitting across the desk from their boss.

No problem with #86 ... agree with you, Lucy. LTers should have no problem with all the reading they do. It just comes naturally. ;-)

No problem at all reading that - unfortunately, I sometimes type like that too!

Labwriter, you should always be able to find your own thread by looking in the 'started by you' category. If not for that, I'd never find my thread, either.

>90 ffortsa:. "started by you"--Thanks! That a real help. I've never used that table before. I guess I don't go to the home page very often. Good to know.

#86: I did not have any problem reading it either. I do not think anyone on LT would.

I heard about this book from my son last night when we were discussing the new movie of the same name by the Coen brothers. It's a 1968 novel that was apparently overlooked by the general public in favor of the John Wayne version of the movie. I had no idea there was a novel and probably wouldn't have read it if my son hadn't recommended it. I downloaded it to my Kindle and was up until 2:00 a.m. reading the thing. I would have read it straight through, but I couldn't stay awake. {The re-publication of the book was evidently #1 on The NYT Bestseller List on 30 Jan 2011. Who knew? Heh.}

Charles Portis writes the story in the first person from the point of view of Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl, although she's actually telling the story as an old woman in 1928. Portis is hilarious in this thing, although Mattie's telling of the story is deadpan serious.

Once I'm finished with True Grit, I plan to find his novel Norwood, which is set in the 1950s.

#93: Mark recommended that one recently. I will have to get to it one of these days.

I don't think you'll be sorry, Stasia.

I must be getting soft, or something. I just gave another 5-star rating to a biography, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family. That's the second 5-stars for a biography this year.

I came to this book with almost no knowledge of these famous and infamous Mitford sisters. What an amazing group! They were from an English upper-class family and it seems that all were hugely talented, although like most women from their class at that time they didn't attend the university. Much of the issues they had as young women, for those who did have "issues" which was most of them, seemed to stem from boredom as much as anything. To be clear, they were bored, but those of us reading about them certainly are anything but.

I gave the biography 5 stars based largely on the material from the Thirties and Forties, which makes up the bulk of the book. The biographer, Mary S. Lovell, brings the 1960s through the present to a pretty crashing end. The last fourth or so of the book seems rushed, although I don't really fault Lovell for that. The last years of their lives were productive for some of them, but of course they all faced the illnesses of aging that we will all face eventually if we live that long. It was a very engaging read, and it will set me up well for reading their correspondence, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, ed. by Charlotte Mosley, Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law.

#95: I knew little of the Mitfords when I read Lovell's biography of them too, Becky. I found them fascinating. I am glad you enjoyed the book.

Hmmm. I'd never heard of these women before. This one needs to go on the TBR.

I've found that joining LT's US Presidents Challenge, where we're reading a presidential bio every month, has made me really appreciate a good biography. They weren't something I read much of, but now I'm finding I appreciate them more and more.

I could read 86 too and laughed about Lucy reading upside down and backwards. I've been very nearsighted since I was 8. Mama had a book, Sight Without Glasses that recommended reading upside down as a cure! So I read any number of Nancy Drews upside down.... Maybe I'd be blind if I hadn't?

>98 LizzieD:. Peggy, I went to the link and the image for the book cover is just slightly out of focus--haha.

>97 drneutron:. Jim, I've been aware of the US Presidents Challenge and been hugely impressed by it--it's quite a commitment.

The six Mitford sisters were both talented and outrageous. Nancy Mitford wrote novels and biographies, although I've never read anything by her. Diana Mitford was the "most hated woman" in Britain during WWII and spent the war in Holloway Prison for her fascist activities and relationship with Hitler. Unity Mitford was rumored to have had a love affair with Hitler; that she was in love with him wasn't disputed. She shot herself when England declared war on Germany. Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death, became an American citizen, and was a committed Communist. There have been so many books by and about the family that it's referred to as the "Mitford industry." What I found really fascinating was the lead-up to WWII and the differing points of view and why people gravitated to one side or another.

Becky, I saw the movie True Grit recently and it was interesting to see the book cover because they copied that dress almost exactly for the character of Mattie Ross.

You're really enticing me with all this talk of the Mitfords and your 5 star rating for The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family. I think I'm starting to hit the wall with wanting to read too many books at the same time!

>86 labwriter: re the order of letters - I worked in an office where the boss would proofread a letter by reading it backwards. I find that really works!

That's a tried and true copy-edit technique -- it separates each sentence, so you don't get caught up in the flow and miss errors.

Becky, this is almost completely your fault. I'm reading (and loving) Love in a Cold Climate, and since The House of Mitford was the first of the biographies to arrive, I've started it too. I'm not going to finish another book in February - well, maybe *Love/Climate* and it's your fault...... And thank you!

Hi Peggy. I'll be really interested to hear what you have to say about The House of Mitford--and Nancy Mitford's book as well. Honestly, I now understand why those who read about these people are almost a cult. Ha.

"How well do you know your Western literature?"

I just found a quiz at the LA Times, the premise of which is that Charles Portis and his 1968 novel, True Grit, and Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, were influenced by the writing of Jack London. I haven't read the McCarthy novel, but I would throw in another writer whose cadence and tone is similar to that of True Grit, and that's Annie Proulx's. As I've been reading Portis's novel the past couple of days, I've been hearing echoes of another writer, but I couldn't remember who. Today it finally came to me: Annie Proulx. I'm going to have to moodle this around some. I definitely want to read McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, the movie version of which was of course also produced by the Coen brothers (2007). I saw the movie the other night, and while it's very violent, I was hugely entertained by it. Predictably, my son also loved it, and DH didn't like it. DH is a "straight narrative" sort of guy. He can only take so much of the Coen brothers. I also loved their 1996 movie, Fargo which DH was just so-so about.

OK, to sum up: I need to finish True Grit. I need to read No Country for Old Men. I need to pull some of my Annie Proulx off the shelf and re-read some of that. And I need to read something of Jack London besides Call of the Wild, although it wouldn't hurt to re-read that one as well.

Oh, yes, the quiz is here if you're interested. My score: 62%. Oh well, thus the re-reads. Heh.

Oh yes, and I happily notice that this fits in well with my "read more American classic fiction" goal for 2011.

Ed. to fix the html.

I got 56% on the quiz. Much higher than I expected since I have not read a single one of those books.

Stasia--{grin} Well, I hope you'll put True Grit in your black hole. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross is a wonderful character. Why this book wasn't taken up by the feminists in academia in the Seventies is a mystery to me--maybe because the author was male, which if true right there proves the short-sightedness of the feminists' scheme. This is the sort of book that should be taught in high school English classes, rather than some of the classic lit that's forced on students at too early an age. Oh well. If anyone in the novel has "true grit," it would be Mattie. I finished it last night, and I'm having trouble deciding between 4 and 5 stars. I think it's a 4, but it's not far off from a 5.

Why I read this book It was recommended to me by my son. Also, I found some of what has been written about the book recently to be intriguing, in light of the Coen brothers remake of the movie of the same name. I'm looking forward to seeing their movie.

I started Jar City last night, the police procedural set in Iceland. So far it's a bit odd, not an unusual response, I suppose, when you jump into a culture that is completely unfamiliar. I kept comparing it to the Swedish mystery/thrillers I've read recently, and all I can say at this point is that, well, Iceland sure isn't Sweden.

#107: I already have it in the BlackHole, Becky, thanks to Mark's recent review of it.

I will be interested in seeing what you think of Jar City when you are done with it. I read it not too long ago.

>108 alcottacre:. Oh, that's good. I just read Mark's review and was interested to find that he gave the book 4.5 stars. My reaction was the same, although my rating scheme doesn't call for "4.5"--maybe it should.

#109: My rating scheme has 'quarter' stars too - so I may rate a book at 3.75 or 4.25. I find LT's ratings too limited.

I had set aside all the various books I was reading in order to read the Mitford Sisters biog. Now that I'm finished with that, I've gone back to some of those other books, namely Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. This is a re-read for me, and as I mentioned before, uncharacteristically for one of my books, this one is filled with notes and thank goodness for that. This one will make you work, but it's worth it. In fact, it may make your brain hurt. My strategy for reading it this time is to make a timeline of what's happening in each chapter. Then eventually I'll conflate all of the timelines. For someone who might ask, "Why would anyone do that?" I would answer that I find it relaxing, the same way some people find crossword puzzles relaxing. I also think a timeline will help me figure out this book.

Hi Becky, I admit I'm the someone asking "Why would anyone do that?". So thank you for answering that question. Now I understand a little better. And you have given me some insight into why I have trouble with Faulkner. I don't want to work at it or make my brain hurt. (I also don't like crossword puzzles... except for the pleasure of filling in blank spaces.) So, I don't find any of that "relaxing" .

I appreciate beautifully written literature, humor, unexpected twists, exploring the whole range of human emotions and learning about people and events that have shaped history and various cultures. There surely must be great value in Faulkner's writing... but I don't want to work that hard for fiction.

Anyway - I can accept your explanation of why you pursue this challenge. I never looked at it that way. Thanks for letting me into your world a little bit. If any brain is up to the task... I would say yours certainly is! Have fun! :)

Absalom, Absalom!--here's one of the challenges of this book for me. This is something that Faulkner said about the book:

Although none of the narrators got the facts right, since "no one individual can look at truth," there is a truth and the reader can ultimately know it.

Not every reader is concerned with the truth or "the facts" of the story, and certainly there are other ways of reading this book besides reconstructing a chronological narrative. However, one of the questions I have about this book is, How did Faulkner write this thing? It seems to me that he must have had a straight narrative design of the story in his mind, and then he wrote from that, taking the narrative apart in strange and extreme ways, throwing in different narrators, some of them extremely unreliable, although the reader may be slow to realize that fact and may never completely get it if he/she isn't paying attention. I don't think this is a book that can be "gotten" on first reading, although someone might dispute that.

Faulkner uses the Compson family, many of whom appear in this book, in another book that is also multiple points of view: The Sound and the Fury. I read that in high school, but haven't read it since. Why the book would be assigned in a high school class--well, someone would have to explain that one to me. I need to read it again. I still have the original copy I read in about 1969, with notes that I made, trying to understand the thing. I guess I should be happy the teacher didn't try to make us read Absalom, Absalom!.

#107: I'm guessing True Grit was reissued last year because of the Cohen brothers movie. My library system owns 2 copies of the 1968 publication and 5 copies of last year's reissue - and there are a total of of 86 people on the wait list for it! So it will be a bit before I read it, alas.

#113: Your Falkner discussion is fascinating. I've never read any of his work, but I've already got some brain exercises on my plate and don't want to add any more right now.

The Reivers is very readable as is Sartoris -- both good places to start the Faulkner adventure..... hmmm...... but have I put these books in my library? Have to run and see!

Good stuff here!

I've had no internet (or TV) access for two days due to an error by our provider. They turned it off in error and now can't seem to get it turned back on--or at least they don't seem to be in any hurry to do so. I'm incensed with this company, but I finally decided that it did no good to stomp around the house nursing my hatred for them, so I'm here at our town library. This place is so depressing. The library is using some kind of nasty old building--splotchy cement floors, exposed ceilings, terrible flouriscent lighting, and some sort of clanging fan that evidently keeps the noxious fumes in this building from making everyone pass out. It's going to be this way for two years while they renovate the town library. Ugh.

Ardene, I'm sorry to hear about the wait at your library for True Grit, but I think it's worth the wait. Also, it's not a long book to read, so maybe the wait will be shorter than the numbers would indicate.

Lucy, I've never read either Faulkner title that you mention. I've read As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and AA.

Anywho, I spent part of the day reading my Icelandic police procedural, Jar City. I'm about halfway through, and I'm finding it very good reading. The crime and investigation is interesting, even though the direction of the investigation is a bit far-fetched--although not to the point that it strains credulity. It's interesting to note that people in Iceland go by their first names, so this author would be known as "Arnuldur." You know it's a small country when everyone can go by their first name--haha. There's not too much in this one in the way of "typical Icelandic" information. I don't know much more about their culture or country than before I started the book. Everyone seems to live in a small flat, there's lots of smoking, and maybe a little less caffeine than in Sweden. No USA bashing, which is nice. The weather seems to be incredibly obnoxious--lots of pouring rain, plus the days are very short, so you get the sense that everything happens in the rain, in the dark.

I've also gotten quite a bit reading done in Absalom, Absalom!. I was reading in one of the William Faulkner biogs this morning about what was going on with Faulkner when he was writing this thing, etc. Good grief. Evidently writing was for him a refuge. He certainly wasn't sitting around waiting for a "good day" to happen so that he could write. He was essentially bankrupt, his much-loved brother died in a plane crash, his marriage was, as usual, falling apart, and he seems to have been pretty much drunk a good part of the day. Yet he wrote this incredible book. He also had to go to Hollywood and work at screenwriting so that he could pay his bills. He hated everything about Hollywood, but he couldn't turn down the $1,000 a week they were willing to pay for the drivel they asked him to write.

The biographer (this one is Stephen B. Oates, whom I don't have much use for, but that's for another day) suggests that one of the themes of the book is the "profound and distrubing truth" that people can never fully know their past. As someone whose favorite hobby is genealogy, I've been moodling that one around all day. With that, I will sign off. Oh, I wanted to add something, a quotation from one of the characters in Absalom: This comes from Quentin's father: "We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames."

Who knows if or when we will get our internet turned back on, but I'll return tomorrow to the library (oh, that fan noise is so pleasant) or I hope I'll be here sooner if a miracle occurs.

Ed to add the Faulkner quotation.

Good luck with your cable woes. I am not sorry to leave all that behind even if I can't watch the weather channel or download big things onto the computer at home. Most of the time, that hardly matters.

I loved both of those Faulkners.

Egads. Hope things get straightened out soon.

Becky, I hope your internet problem is fixed quickly. I must say that the library sounds dreadful.

Hooray. Internet Fixed. I'm ridiculously happy about something that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Being without the internet reminds me of the days when I was a kid when the paper boy would fail to throw a paper at our house. It was a colossal headache if my mother didn't have her morning paper to read with her coffee. My dad would make the call to the newspaper boy, and usually "Bobby" would remember where he'd thrown it--"Mr. Roorda, I think it might have gone close to that big sticker bush out front," and, sure enough, my dad would find it in the middle of that big sticker bush. But if he could get it out, he wouldn't call Bobby back again and make him bring out a new paper, because my dad was a paperboy himself when he was a kid, and I think he understood.

Welcome back, Becky! I'm still waiting for my Lovell bio, but you might want to look at House of Mitford. He spends the first 200 or so pages on the girls' grandfathers, fascinating men in their own right.

Glad you are back up and running again, Becky!

>120 labwriter:: I can relate to your mother's distress about her morning paper. Apparently, paper delivery was seen as "optional" during our recent round of snow and cold temperatures. Luckily, the computer goes as well with my morning coffee as does the increasingly shrinking daily paper!

Becky, have you seen the "under new management" (our own laytonwoman3rd) Faulkner thread here? It will be interesting to see if it catches on. I'm excited about it because I find Faulkner difficult to read on my own. I don't think I'm as patient a reader as you are.

Thanks, everyone. Lizzie, in the introduction to the volume of letters that was edited by Charlotte Mosley, she makes the point you're making about the grandfathers, that they were fascinating men, intelligent, and accomplished men; then she also says something like, talent often skips a generation. I'm going to have to find that biog.

Donna, thanks for the tip about the Faulkner group. I'll be checking it out. Thanks!

Hi There Becky

I'm sneaking in an early message to wish you a very Happy Birthday on Monday!

Then I'll sneak in an early "Thank you," dear heart, for your lovely bd message. My hope/plan is for a quiet weekend and dinner with my guys.

So glad for you that you are up and running again!

I found a funny review of Absalom, Absalom! here at LT from a guy named "Banoo," 20 Jul 2008. I want to post part of it here to keep track of it and to share. One way of talking about Faulkner's writing in this book is to say that it's recursive, that he's created a novel of voices that speak in monologues and soliloquies from different perspectives, with a circular plot that builds suspense, gradually revealing to the reader what's going on.

Another way to talk about his writing is like this, from Banoo:

Faulkner’s language is similar to the way my grandmother used to tell. It might start like this... "... your mother won’t let you go to that party because, well, I remember when she was just a little girl and your Uncle Bob had just shot the leg off of Mana’s cat thinking it was a fox; CT never got over that and said that if Mana would just let him sleep inside on his own bed and not on the porch things like that would never happen but it wasn’t Mana that made him sleep out there but her strong will, CT’s daughter, you know, Rosie always said that her Aunt Mana may be small in stature but her will was like one of those carved faces on... what are those rocks called, Mount Rushmore, but that was my sister, bow-legged though she was she stood tall and firm when it came to the way things should be run around the house; which is why your mother..."

It seemed my Grandmama could tell a story that encompassed not only the entire family but several generations of that family because it was all related to the actual story she was trying to tell. Maybe that’s what Faulkner was eluding to when he said there was no past. The past is just a part of the present.

I think that's just hilarious, and it's spot-on.

I want to say a word about the Icelandic police procedural/mystery that I'm reading at night, Jar City, the first in a series with a character who goes by the name of Erlendur. In one of my recent posts about this book, I said that the direction of the investigation seemed a bit far-fetched. Well, I guess I'm not the only one thinking that. Arnuldur, which is what I'm calling this author since I can't type his last name and he says that Icelanders go by their first names anyway, has Erlendur's fellow detective on the case say this to him about halfway through the book: "I don't feel as if we're looking for Holberg's murderer. It's as if we're looking for something completely different and I'm unclear what it is."

Whew, that makes me feel better, since now I know that Arnaldur is aware that his readers just might be thinking this, and maybe we're not just being led down the garden path. I wonder if detectives don't often feel this way in the middle of an investigation--that they've gone off down some rat hole, following a lead that, when they follow it back, they begin to think that they've been following their own distorted judgment of the case.

Anywho, I'm enjoying this book quite a bit. His daughter is still a sad case though, and I wish she could pull herself together.

Becky -- priceless - thanks for posting that review. Glad you are liking Jar City I am intending to buy that for the DH for his boiday.....

#128: It is spot on, isn't it? Thanks, Becky.

Have a great weekend and a wonderful birthday!

Thanks very much, Stasia. I hope you have a great weekend as well. I know you work weekends--do you work every weekend, or does your schedule vary? Anyway, all the best. It means a lot to see your name on all these threads here in Group 75.

I spent several hours yesterday and several today reading Chapter 4, about 35 pages, of Absalom, Absalom!. Whew, this is the most convoluted, dense chapter yet, from an unreliable narrator, no less. Sentence after sentence constructed of 500 or more words. William Faulkner, you make me tired. I'm one-third of the way through the book. Chapter 5 looks promising--a new narrator, thank the reading gods.

I'm still reading my newspaper histories, particularly The Papers Papers A Reporter's Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times by Richard F. Shepard. The book was published in 1996 and is a fascinating look at 50 years or so of The NYTs, the years that Shepard spent working at the paper. If I ever finish this book (it's slow going not because it's not interesting, but because I set it aside to read the Mitford Sisters biog) then I will read The Paper The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, by Richard Kluger. The Herald Tribune has an interesting history in that it was the paper to go to if you were a woman in the 1930s and you wanted to work on a newspaper. The New York Times--forget it. You could be a telephone operator or maybe a secretary.

Passing through, I'm not around much today because I'm doing a readathon.....

>130 sibylline:, 134. I'm guessing your DH would like the Iceland series by Arnulder, if he likes the Swedish series by Mankell. The second one is called Silence of the Grave. Definitely not your "cozy mystery"--heh. Enjoy your readathon.

#132: Yes, I work every weekend, Thursday night-Sunday night, 10pm to 8am. Helps explain my wonky waking hours, doesn't it?

Hope it's a great day, Becky!

ETA: Oh shoot! Well, I'm a day early. Thought it was today. This should teach me to check my facts before I get all excited... but it won't. Still wishing you a fun birthday! :}

>136 alcottacre:. I do so understand, Sashia--my own history of working twenty years of nights in the hospital. It was a tough shift in some ways, but in others it suited me well because I didn't have to mess with the hoo-haw that went on during the day shift.

>137 -Cee-:. Thanks so much, Claudia. My family has made this sort of a "birthday weekend," which has been very sweet.

#138: I didn't have to mess with the hoo-haw that went on during the day shift.

Exactly!

I'm still reading Life After Death The Evidence by Dinesh D'Souza. Last weekend I posted about this book on another thread, one where the invited subject was "Religion." I was quite unsettled to find that the mere mention of this book brought a firestorm down on my head, out of the blue, from a person who admittedly had read nothing of D'Souza's work beyond a few out-of-context quotations she found on Wikipedia--quotations that pertained, not to the book I was reading, but to one of his other books published in 1996.

I've waited a week to say anything about that here on my thread because I was quite worked up about the whole issue. Now a week later I'm considerably calmer, and I'd like to share some thoughts I've had about how I'm going to let this experience guide the way I use this Library Thing site.

I'm a social and political conservative, and I've never done anything here to conceal that point of view, although I try not to be provocative and "in your face" about it, either. What I'm not, however, is an ideologue. I like to read and be exposed to ideas that I don't necessarily agree with. I'm not looking to live in an echo chamber of ideas that will simply parrot back to me a narrow point of view. Having said that, I plan to continue to post about the books that interest me. I've heard other people on this site say they don't post books that they think might be "controversial." That's not me, and I'm going to continue to post about any book that strikes my fancy, for whatever reason.

Having said that, I have decided to change my ways about posting, in general, on this site. At least for the forseeable future, I've decided I'm going to stick to posting on my own thread here at the 75 group. I'm no longer going to get into any back-and-forth discussions on other people's threads. My thread is my thread, and I can post on it what I want to, within the bounds of civility, of course. If others want to read my thread and post here, I'd love to hear what they have to say. It should be obvious I enjoy conversations about books and about what other people are reading. What I don't plan to do here at LT is have discussions about politics. I have other forums where I do that, including my own political blog, and within that context I have great discussions with well-informed people who are on all sides of the political spectrum. I'm not looking to do that here.

So, if you don't see me making many substantive posts on other threads at Group 75 for awhile, don't be surprised and don't take it personally. This is just my way, for now, of protecting myself from some of the nonsense.

Last night I finished Jar City by Arnaldur Indriadason. This was an entertaining, albeit "dark," police procedural/mystery that I thought was above average in the genre, particularly for a "first" in a series. What I found somewhat disappointing was that I didn't come away with much of a feel for the Icelandic culture or people or even geography. Pretty much the only thing that made this an "Iceland" book were the names; otherwise, the setting could have been a lot of places. But, that's really more of a quibble than a serious criticism. It's a dark book, and from what I can tell the second one in the series is even more so. However, I found myself quite entertained by the story and the main chararacter of the book. Next up in the series: Silence of the Grave.

I gave the book 3.5 stars.

The book to read to get deep into the Icelandic soul is Haldor Laxness Independent People. If you're curious now, having read this. I read some other novel not too long ago, by a woman, hmm, maybe I can find it in my own booklist, if I was smart and put "fiction Icelandic" on my tag.

I'm glad you're still here!

>142 sibylline:. Great, I'll have a look at the Laxness book. I also found one written by an American living in Iceland: The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland by Bill Holm.

I know what you mean, I don't use tags like I should either.

#140 Hi, Becky. Sorry to hear of your unpleasant experience. I only learned of the religious books thread earlier today, so I had not witnessed your exchange until now. I thought Jim's comments were very diplomatic - and reasonable. I don't blame you for retreating to the relative safety of your own thread and am actually pleased that you are doing so, since now I won't miss any more of your insightful and thought-provoking comments. I don't always agree with you, but I do always appreciate your opinions. I think most people here are perfectly capable of remaining civil when faced with an opposing position and are able to respond without resorting to taunts that sound remarkably like the childish "oh yeah? well, take that!" exchanges of grade school.

I do have to say, though, that I agree that it seems like we conservatives are vastly outnumbered here. I don't know whether our numbers are truly so small, or whether we are just more likely to keep quiet about those opinions. For myself, I think that I generally do not speak of my political leanings because, in most exchanges, it simply isn't relevant. Even when it might be relevant, I usually choose to keep my opinions to myself. I don't even answer political polls when they are being conducted for my favored candidates - I tell the pollsters that it is no one's business how I plan to vote.

#141 Glad you enjoyed Jar City. This has been one of my favorite series since I discovered it a couple of years ago. This book was my introduction to Scandinavian fiction.

I'm sorry that you had an bad experience, Becky. I hate for that to happen. Never mind. You are valued here.
And ---- (This is right, isn't it?) ------

I like to read and be exposed to ideas that I don't necessarily agree with. I'm not looking to live in an echo chamber of ideas that will simply parrot back to me a narrow point of view. Having said that, I plan to continue to post about the books that interest me. I've heard other people on this site say they don't post books that they think might be "controversial." That's not me, and I'm going to continue to post about any book that strikes my fancy, for whatever reason.

Becky, this is exactly what I like about LT--being exposed to books and points of view that I might not come across on my own. I've read many books that I've loved in the last year that I first heard about from you and value your thread for that reason.

I have no issue with controversial subjects as long as people are respectful about expressing their opinions. I feel lucky to have found the 75ers as my first group on LT because when I occassionally click on hot topics I'm often disappointed to see "discussions" about topics, primarily religion, that end up being some version of "you're stupid because you don't agree with me."

Although I suspect we have very different opinions on politics and religion, I've always found your comments on these subjects as well as others to be well-considered and considerate and hope you feel comfortable continuing to express yourself when you want to.

I'll be back tomorrow to wish you a Happy Birthday but I'm glad you've already started celebrating!

As one of the social and political conservative members of the group, Becky, I understand a bit about where you are coming from. I am sorry that you had such a bad experience especially here in this group.

Well, thank you Sandy and Peggy and Pat and Sashia for your comments as well as the BD wishes. I agree that conservatives are outnumbered on LT, and I have a hard time understanding why, but I guess it's probably just time to move on.

I was reading in Absalom, Absalom! last night, and was so happy to have finished Chapt. 4, since it's one of the densest, most convoluted chapters of the book. Well, it turns out Chapt. 5 isn't much better; the narrator for this one seems to be Miss Rosa, or is it Quentin remembering what Miss Rosa told him? Again, like in Chapt. 4, the sentences go on and on, sometimes for a page or more, and here and there Faulkner sticks in a plot point, so if you sort of nod off and you're not paying attention, you can miss what's going on. The narration is full of constructs like, "I do not even know of my own knowledge," "they cannot have told you this either," "so I have heard," "they will have told you doubtless already." Someone at the Faulkner thread told us that "there really is no difficult Faulkner." We were encouraged to "slow down, don't rush" and then we would have no trouble understanding the words. True, no trouble with the literal words on the page, but if someone is reading Faulkner literally, then they don't have a prayer when they run up against Faulkner's unreliable narrators. Anyway, it's fun, but I'll be glad to get to the last 1/3 of the book.

First of all, before I forget, Happy Birthday! Hope you get to do what you want to all day long!

Second -- I find with books like Absalom, with dense prose that is itself a metaphor or manifestation of how difficult it is to communicate or whatever..... the residue of it, once you are done, is almost the most interesting part of the experience..... you'll hear echoes in it when someone starts telling you a long convoluted story or even, your own voice in your head....

The other less exalted by-product is that, for awhile, everything else you read is so blissfully easy!

Good Morning, Becky, and Happy Birthday! I hope your day in Webster Groves is brighter than it is here. We just barely got our walk in before it started raining.

A note about conservatives. I'm part of your crowd but I find it tends to be a quiet group. Maybe the fact that we are 'right' and we know it makes it easier to let the liberals have their say. Personally, I don't feel that I have to justify my opinion here on LT or anywhere else for that matter. I'm sorry you had a poor experience here. Sometimes people don't think before they hit that 'submit' button!

I'm lovin' your Faulkner comments. I'm still in the baby stages of Faulkner 101 so I won't be reading Absalom Absalom anytime soon. My strategy is to read through The Portable Faulkner to get small doses of his writing while building up a sense of the Y--- community he writes about.

Happy birthday, Becky! Glad to hear that your family spread the celebration out for the entire weekend.

Well, Happy Real Birthday!

Sorry to hear of your bad experience.
Hate when that happens. It just feels bad. :(
Takes a while to get over, too.

I don't think I am liberal or conservative. Probably a mix??? Whatever.
I'm for what makes good sense and what feels like the right thing to do.
All subjective, I guess.
But you can say express your opinions here and I will be happy to read them. As always. IMO, you add great value to our group.
Whether we agree or not is not the important issue. That we are respectful, open-minded and tolerant is key.

Faulkner: All the things you are suffering through are why I just cannot read this guy. I just don't get it. I must be missing some brain cells.

Hi Becky--Happy Birthday! Hope you have a great time celebrating.

Is there an easy Faulkner? I've never read anything of his but Absalom, Absalom sounds daunting, to say the least.

I think 'As I Lay Dying' is a fairly easy read, even though it too is written from different points of view. There's an audio of it that is very clear and easy to listen to, as well, and I found listening to it clarified my reading.

Thanks all for your kind BD wishes--Sandy, Claudia, Pat, Donna, Lucy. It's a gray rainy day here, so (oh darn) I guess I'll have to stay in and read--haha.

>149 sibylline:. Hi Sib. Yes, I absolutely agree, and I love Faulkner for reading out loud. I keep picturing him sitting at his desk writing this stuff, wondering what was in his head that made him write this way.

>152 -Cee-:. Claudia, I don't think it's "missing brain cells" not to enjoy Faulkner. Plenty of people wonder what all the shouting is about. I read in one of his biographies (and I assume it's true) that the year he died NONE of his books were still in print.

>153 phebj:. Pat, if I'd never read anything by him before and wanted to try something, I would read some of his short stories, particularly "A Rose for Emily." There's a collection of them that I particularly like: Collected Stories William Faulkner, a collection published by Vintage Books. Some of his short stuff was hack work, written purely for money to be published in places like The Saturday Evening Post. But I like a lot of his short stories, just the same.

A question which has nothing to do with books or reading:



Why is it that every little girl these days seems to be dressed in "extreme pink"? Don't get me wrong, I think this little girl is darling. But every single girl's snowsuit I see is gag-me pink, accessorized with pink gloves, and a pink scarf (although maybe with touches of brown, green, and blue), and pink hats, and. . . well, you get the idea. (Or even worse, paired with purple.) Honestly, I can't stand the color and have never worn it; I especially can't stand it when it's overdone on someone my age. But even for little girls, doesn't its use today seem just a tad bit--well, excessive? And the pink gods forbid that any little girl would actually wear her big brother's hand-me-down snowsuit, since it's not--PINK! That's my curmudgeonly rant for the day.

Ed. for speling.

Ooooo I like the idea of a Rant of the Day.......

Anyhow. Pink. Well. It is sort of like the Barbie weirdness. Every year it seems the Barbie thing moves back so that even younger girls have to have a Barbie. My daughter was completely finished with Barbie by the time she was say, 6, maybe a little earlier. I played with Barbie when I was 11...... I don't know at all what this means, I almost feel that it's a good thing, that the Barbie and Pink phase is short but quick -- our Barbies got some, uh, Barbaric treatment as well -- I mean they weren't ever taken very seriously, the career stuff or the clothes or anything. My daughter and her friends seem to enjoy putting them in predicaments..... no weddings with Ken or fashion shows.... So back to Pink. For about two years pink was the IT color: kindergarten and first and then 2nd grade hit and BOOM. OVER. We had to get rid of everything pink, she couldn't stand the sight of it. All but one or two girls had that reaction. Pink was SO OVER. What is interesting too is that she was in a combined 1-2nd grade, so that the 2nd grade girls seemed to be defining themselves as 'different' from the 'younger' girls, in part, by wearing pants and not wearing pink.

This is a ramble rather than a rant.....

#156: ArggHhhh! And if you want to buy something cute for a girl baby to wear, there is nothing but pink! Or things in colors I like with footballs or trucks or other stereotypical boy toys that Mom or Dad or both won't appreciate on their bundle of joy.

Happy belated birthday Becky.

Happy belated birthday!

My niece (age 8) would dress in that bright pink combined with purple every day if she could! In her case, it's definitely a choice, and she has gravitated to those colors all her life. I've always preferred a mix of blues and greens, and still do, to this day!

You've inspired me to bump up Jar City on my list. I read a non-Erlendur book of his, Operation Napoleon, that I found downright bad, so I never started reading the series. Hopefully that will prove to be an early aberration...

Re the political discussions -- the only kinds of people of any political stripe that I can't be dealing with are those who are so convinced they are right that they can't listen to/hear/understand/think about arguments or points of view that may conflict with preconceived ideas. And in my experience, this type of personality pops up all across the spectrum -- he/she/it is by no means confined to the loony left or the rabid right. Those are the people I can't and won't engage with, because there is no communication possible. Also, I always want to understand how someone has reached an opinion or conviction of any kind -- what was the process? If someone says "I just think this", well, I don't get it. There are certainly people on LT whose views/convictions I don't share. I think for the most part this corner of LT is one where people are more tactful about how they express themselves, and more prone to just walk away rather than try to bite their interlocutor's head off (rhetorically speaking, of course...) That said, I suspect I'd react badly to anyone suggesting that I was stupid, irrational, unable to think clearly or reason, ill-informed, etc. and that explained my view on a particular issue. In other words, someone who opts to ignore the basic rules of civility on the boards should be prepared to take it as well as dish it out. That said, hopefully very few will see this kind of forum as good place to pick a fight. Heavens, they can just turn on the television set for that...

I'd probably define myself as a classic liberal, and one of the things that IS capable of driving me a bit crazy is the way that the word "liberal" has been co-opted and applied to ideas/behaviors, etc. that actually aren't liberal. Ditto "feminist". Somehow, a feminist is someone who believes that we should all use men's washrooms and undergo abortions so that we know what it's like to control our own bodies. I'm quite happy to describe myself as a feminist because all that the word means to me is that no one has a right to tell me what I can/cannot or should/should not do simply because of my gender. Ironically, a classic liberal (eg John Stuart Mill) focuses on individual rights vs societal rights. What violence we do to language sometimes...

OK, am off to read a mindless book to cool off my brain. Glad your internet is back...

157 (labwriter): My niece at age 8 was all pink and purple and glitter. Now at age 10, she's all green and brown. There is hope.

My ramble didn't really answer why.... so I'll attempt it.... at least what I suspect might be happening..... a sort of speeded up 'trousseau complex' -- in other words -- a working out of some aspect of female identity that signifies a separation from boys, boy interests, etc. Some girls actually like pink and stick with it, but remarkably few. And I didn't see the rejection of pink sometime during second grade as a peer decision although that may have been a factor. I really think it is developmental, where, in our culture, some differentiation process is happening and manifesting in one of the 'available' ways. Curiously, it was in 3rd grade that my daughter returned to being part of a boy-girl friend group, the pink phase also went with a girls-only phase. (Up to mid kindergarten she had always had as many friends who were boys as girls, and in 3rd she returned to that.) Just one of my cockamamie theories. I have lots of them!

I was lucky that my daughter outgrew the pink stage relatively early. She is now 8, and is quite content with any color.....as long as it is topped with sequins, glitter, and jewels (the more the merrier). She's quite outgoing with her outfits, but manages to put herself together fairly well with little to no help from mom. I only have to ask her to go change once or twice a month.

>161 sibylline:. "speeded up trousseau complex"--oh Heaven help! Well, all of this is very interesting. I'm standing on the sidelines here, as I have no girls of my own. The closest is my 16-month-old niece who lives in Denver, so I don't see her much except for pictures. She wears a pink and silver crown, not one but three tutus--pink, purple, and bright pink--a pink snowsuit, pink PJ's, pink and white tennis shoes, pink-striped t-shirts. At this age, it isn't the child choosing this wardrobe, it's the mother. What is in her mind? Was she frightened by pink elephants when she was pregnant? I understand that it may be hard to find baby and toddler clothes that aren't pink (as Ardene points out in #158), but that begs the question--Why?

Anyway, it's just something that I thought about when I opened up facebook today and saw this child.

>159 Chatterbox:. Thanks for your considered words re: politics and LT.

Someone was arguing with me that there are "more conservatives than you think" on LT, and I thought to myself, No, I don't think so." I was trying to figure out how I came to the conclusion that there are more lefties than righties on this website, when I was putting some books into my library today, and I realized that that's where I got the idea of the lopsided numbers. You take a new popular "righty" book and you find, "4 members" have added this book in their libraries; same deal with a "lefty" book and you find "7,387 members" have added this book to their libraries. Yes, I'm exaggerating to make a point, but I've seen this over and over again. It's sorta like the color pink--I don't get it.

>157 sibylline:. Oh, and I had to come back to say that I fell off my chair laughing at the "Barbie weirdness."

My daughter and her friends seem to enjoy putting them in predicaments.....

That is so hilarious. I think I had one of the very few brunette Barbies when I was about seven--yep, the Internet says that this one came out in 1959. Now I ask you, does she look even one bit friendly? She looks devious. She looks creepy. She looks like she would sell you out in a heartbeat. I did not like this doll.



In general, I didn't like playing with dolls--I simply didn't get it (gee, is there a theme here?). Anyway, there came a point in my life when I knew that if I wanted to play with any of my neighbor friends, I had to "play Barbies." Let's just say that my play was standard and uninspired. I would have loved the "predicaments" play theme.

I was never into playing Barbies, I confess. But my niece is utterly in love with her American Girl doll and its assorted (and surreally expensive) accoutrements.

I'm not sure I'd judge the collective political bias of a group of people by their libraries. I can't imagine Stasia, for instance, popping the new Glenn Beck into her library. Also, I'm wary of categorizing some books. True, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington kinda categorize themselves, but there are plenty of left-leaning folks who would slam George Soros as an evil demented capitalist denizen of the right, and those on the right would tend to look at his political views and say because he is an avowed Democrat and critic of unrestrained free enterprise (and who would know better than a hedge fund manager what that means?!) he must be a socialist. (I was actually interviewed by a radio show once about philanthropy, and informed by the host that Soros was a socialist. I had to burst out laughing; couldn't restrain myself.) Some of us probably are political liberals and social conservatives; or political conservatives and social liberals -- so even if we read political books, they might send misleading messages. Or we don't read books that we might be expected to read. For instance, Chris Hedges, whose first book I thought was absolutely wonderful -- War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is currently driving me nuts with his sloppy thinking.

But then, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter much to me whether the other LTers vote Libertarian or Green Party. As long as none of them try to tell me what I should think. (Oh, how I HATE that word -- "should". Deeply evil.)

>166 Chatterbox:. It wasn't so much, in the case I've described here, of someone telling me what I "should" think; instead, she was telling everyone what all conservatives "do" think. And with that, she flipped me right into crazy.

Hmmm if the mom is choosing the wardrobe then....... delayed trousseau complex? What will be interesting is what happens when your niece wants to pick her own clothes.

So I'm reading this Icelandic novel, a police procedural/mystery called Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indriadason. Since the setting and information about Iceland and its culture has been somewhat thin, I decided to get a book about Iceland, since the little that Indriadason has had to say makes me want to know more. Lucy recommended a book to me, but I had already bought this one. Too bad--I should have taken Lucy's recommendation, and I probably still will.

I read the first chapter in this book last night, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland, by Bill Holm. He's an American who lives part of the year in Iceland--the summer months, by the way. I'm a little bit confused who he thinks his audience is for this book. Throughout the first chapter, his self-congratulatory America-bashing is just plain tedious. I'm of two minds: 1) Maybe he's gotten it out of his system and he'll go on to write about Iceland; or 2) Maybe I don't care and I will abandon the book. Well, it's a small book. I guess I'll at least read into Chapt. 2 and see if he's over his hate-America-first thing.

P.S. Lucy's recommendation: Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

I should probably report in on my progress re: Absalom, Absalom!. I'm almost halfway, 150 pages, and when I checked my notes to see how long I've been reading this thing, I found that I started it on Feb. 8 with plans to read a chapter a day--haha. I should have known better, since there are only 9 chapters. At the present time, I'm well into Chapt. 6. We've flipped narrators again, and we're now into Quentin Compson's head, c.1909, the same Quentin Compson who appears in The Sound and the Fury. This book isn't in any sense a continuation of TSATF; it simply uses some of the same characters.

I love what Faulkner does in this chapter. We find Quentin in school at Harvard with a Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon. Quentin's conversation with Shreve gives Faulkner the chance to "explain" the South to someone who knows nothing about it. So in this chapter we read about the events that we've heard of in previous chapters, only this time the information is from the point of view of Shreve--what he understood about what Quentin told him. And of course Quentin himself has only heard about any of this second- and third-hand. So what is truth, who owns it, who knows it?--which is a big theme of this book.

Oh, and P.S. My newest project is going to be cutting into my reading time until it's finished--a major reorg of my books. My son has finally taken his "stuff" that was stored in his old room (he was in the Army for five years and then somewhat at loose ends after that); so now I have a whole new room and I can finally reorganize my books. Which, I guess some here will agree with me, is both a blessing and a curse. Our town library is having a book drive, and I'm determined this time (heh) to get some of these books out the door.

I have 2 daughters. I dressed the first one in pink as a baby so everyone would know she was a girl - very traditional. But when daughter #2 came along, I inserted other colors into her wardrobe. I was getting sick of pink.
I do like pink - but enough is enough. Daughter #2 looked better in blue anyway.
I used to sew their clothes, so they would get whatever color I could find cheap (including recycled men's shirts).
Why pink or blue? I think traditionally and even now, it signifies the sex of the child which is hard to tell when they are babies. After that? Just society's interpretation of what is feminine/masculine. :P Can't seem to shake the stereotypes.

Hi Claudia. I wonder if it also isn't marketing: push the cute pink snowsuits and no one will think of using big brother's tan suit as a hand-me-down on little Susie. The excess makes me just a little bit ill. I mean, look at that little girl in the picture. Everything is new, everything matches; she's dressed to play outside, for heaven's sake, yet the way she's dressed you would think she was going for a fashion shoot at Vale. Sigh.

Well, I have seen some boy's clothes handed down to girls - but you willl NEVER see a boy in a pink snowsuit!!!!! Or pink anything else for that matter. Yeah... the little girl in the picture is cute... but the pink needs more relief!

I should warn you -- the Laxness is on a par with The Sound and the Fury. Laxness is a Nobel prize winner (1948ish) -- more or less for this book. It wasn't even properly translated into English until the late 80's or 90's so no one even read it. It took me a couple of years, off and on, to read IP, partly because the style took some getting used to, because the WORLD that was Iceland is/was a TOUGH place around 1900 when the book starts (carefully, because it was WWI that transformed a culture that had not changed at all since....... the settling of Iceland was accomplished) - and because I reread huge passages when I finally 'got' it, usually in a state of awe. Previous to IP I had only read Njaal's Saga -- one of the great Icelandic epics, all full of great acts of fantastic bravery and heroism and derring do. IP is one of the most blunt and brutal portrayals of exploitation of the many by the few, but the focus in on the Icelandic character and how it is formed by the landscape and conditions.

Remember how in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the old folks lie in bed together all day to keep warm? Well, that is what elderly Icelanders and the littler children did, huddle in bed more or less in permanent darkness, drinking vast quantities of coffee, either bitching and moaning or reciting these huge sagas, teaching them to their children, entertaining themselves, wiling away the winter. They heated their houses partly by living in the room over the sheep. So, yeah, as we say around here, smelllehhh. I'm making it sound cosy -- it wasn't. Plenty of these folks, if they could scrape up passage, left for Amerikky, and just about anything they encountered there was better than home.

Keep us posted on your book reorganizing, Becky. I need to do that myself but I've been waiting to feel motivated to do it. I thought my library sale would do it but, alas, it was last Saturday and I think I only managed to donate five or six books. Lucy mentioned somewhere else a new book about proscratination, maybe I can postpone the book reorganizing further while I track down that book. :)

Thanks for all the info about Iceland, Lucy. I loved that image of the old and young huddling together all day bitching and moaning and telling the sagas!

The book is called The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination Chrisoula Andreou is one of the editors. It is hideously expensive, put out by the Oxford U. Press. Doesn't appear to be out yet in paperback..... so it's going to have to wait awhile......

Wow, lots to catch up on in this thread--starting with the gorgeous picture in post #1!

Anyway, just a comment about Barbies--when I was a little girl, my best friend I used to "play Barbies" all the time, but I don't remember lots of role-play type activities. We mainly fought over who had the best ones, as I recall (and played with the Barbie hot tub because you could put water in it and make it bubble). For us I think it turned out to be more debate practice than anything.

>175 phebj:, 176. Yeah, I guess this is used as a textbook, so the price is ridiculously high. The lowest I saw for a used copy was $45. Amazon has it new for $52. Beyond that, I didn't look too hard.

Well, the book reorganizing is going slowly, but I am making progress. I also seem to have given myself a pretty good case of conjunctivitis from the dust or something. Every once in awhile it pays to dust off those shelves! Fortunately, by coincidence, I have an eye dr. appt. tomorrow.

DH gets so freaked out whenever I start moving books around--not that I really blame him. If he had a comparable collection of "something" I probably wouldn't be all that thrilled. When we were first married, he made me my first bookcase--little did he know, haha! He's a patient man.

P.S. This is the first time in a long, long time I've been able to put all of my fiction in one place, and I'm finding that the number of duplicates is somewhat embarrassing. Some of that is because I needed to buy a particular edition of a book for school. Some is because my son read the book in high school and didn't ask me if I had a copy. Just the duplicates alone will make an impressive box of books going out the door. My strategy is always to make sure that DH sees me taking said boxes to whomever is collecting used books. It makes him feel better when he sees a few books going out the door for a change instead of in. Heh.

I'm finally caught up on your thread Becky! The discussions here are always interesting and I enjoy them very much.

I've GOT to learn about the Mitfords. I know nothing about them but from what I can tell I will love them...I have a Mitford book on my shelves to read - forget the title but it isn't the one you just read. I put yours on my wishlist for later.

As far as Barbies go...I loved Barbies as a young girl. Most of the little girls I know now don't like Barbies. All they want is Bratz dolls instead. Personally, I'd take a Barbie over a Bratz doll anyday, haha...

I had to Google "Bratz" to see what those were. Well, I guess every generation needs to have their own thing. Suzanne mentioned Madame Alexander dolls. Oh my, these are not your mother's Madame Alexander! I might have to get a "Fancy Nancy" for my niece when she's a little older--she dresses just like this, including crown, sunglasses, and tutu. Ha! I might also need a part-time job just to afford them. Yikes.

>166 Chatterbox:. Oh, my mistake. Her reference was to American Girl dolls. Also highly unaffordable!



I can't believe I started a conversation about dolls on my thread. My thread? I was such a tomboy.

181- Actually that one doesn't look so bad. I wouldn't mind giving a girl one of those. Although they do get expensive.

Most of the ones I've seen have too much makeup and too few clothes on them to be the best role model for young girls. I will search for a link to the type of Bratz dolls I mean...

Okay, here's a quick link...you have to scroll down to the dolls below the "My Little Pony" section.

http://kidcrave.com/toys/kids-toys-that-inspired-cartoons/

They also made cartoons out of the Bratz craze. The cartoon characters are more provocative than the dolls, in my opinion.

I went to the Madame Alexander website, and even this crabby old curmudgeon has to admit that these dolls are darling. The last doll my mother ever bought me was a Madame Alexander "bride" doll. I so hated it, even she gave trying to get me to like dolls.

I was a girly-girl and always wanted an American Girl doll. Never got one because they were so expensive. I had plenty of other dolls, though, so no big loss. :)

I went over to check out the Madame Alexander dolls which looked pretty good and then checked out Angela's link and ended up spending time looking at all the Steiff stuffed animals. I used to love getting those as a child. The Snoopy and Woodstock made me think of you, Becky (and it's only $310!).

My daughter did go through an American Girl doll phase -- my mother and her other grandma gave her Felicity (the original one -- from Williamsburg) and amazingly, she was motivated to earn the money to buy another one -- gosh -- from around 1910, I forget now, Sophie or something. She loved the books and I think we read all the stories about all of the girls. But they were a howling success in that she actually did learn an amazing amount of stuff, wanted me to have a 'real' tea party and show her how to do it properly, made us take her to Williamsburg -- all in all -- I have nothing but good to say. The only slightly ghastly experience was having to go to the AG store in New York -- we went up for the day with other friends who indulge their daughter awfully, and they insisted on that being part of the agenda. Just for an hour, but bleh! The store was full of those skinny intense moms who have to have THE thing, and naturally it was around xmas time..... my daughter got a little weirded out, which was fine with me, so we got out of there pretty fast.

edited to fix speling as Becky likes to say!

So what did I do last night? I bought my niece a doll. Haha. My mother will have a stroke over that one. ("She bought her what???) She's 16 months old and this doll is advertised as "My First Babydoll" or something. It's designed to go into the water, and since evidently she almost lives in water, I think that might be something she would enjoy. I despaired of finding anything for her, since the pictures her mother takes of her playing at home show her surrounded with enough toys to fill a 50-child daycare center. But that's something my mother-in-law used to do with my son (her only grandchild): she would say to me, well, your son has everything, so I just didn't know what to send him. I think she said that every single birthday and Christmas. So I decided not to fall into that trap, but instead to try to find something that she might enjoy. I think this doll might be a hit. Or not, but at least I tried.

That's the last mention of "doll" on this thread for awhile.

{{rolls eyes}} Well, I'm sort of plodding along with my Icelandic police procedural/mystery, Silence of the Grave. My Kindle informs me that I'm 80% through this thing. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this isn't the best one of the series, although since it's only the second one I've read--who knows? One of the problems I'm having with it is the way he goes back and forth in time in the story. It's not so much that the transitions are abrupt; it's more that Arnuldur does this in odd places in the story, so much so that it actually makes me stop reading and say, "What the heck--why now?" The one thing a writer doesn't want to do is do something to break into the reader's "dream" of the story. Maybe one reason this seems particularly bad in this book is because of the way the book is presented on the Kindle. I'm wondering if the actual book might give better cues to this movement in time on the page? Who knows. This is one of the problems I have with e-readers--that they don't represent the words on the "page" the way the writer meant for them to appear. Another problem might be that this is a whacko translation. Maybe this book "reads better" in Icelandic.

This isn't a bad book--I would still give it at least 3 stars (unless the ending drops off badly). One thing, though, if I'm going to plow through a book that's been translated into English and tolerate all kinds of place names and personal names that I stumble over and can't pronounce in my head, then there needs to be a reason--like I'm enjoying the book from the point of view of another culture. This series, so far, doesn't have enough "Iceland" in it for me to care to continue chewing through these names. There are enough good police procedurals out there that are good reads where I don't have to do that. I'm not completely sure I'm going to continue with book #3, which is Voices. It gets good citizen reviews on Amazon, so I might get it, although I'm not going to read three of these in a row.

P.S. Our very own Richard of the 75 has written a great review of Voices, as only he can. OK, Richard, you convinced me, I'll read the thing, probably. If anyone is thinking of reading this series, read Richard's review of this one first, because he really nails it re: how I feel about the first two books as well. Recommended, sort of.

You done good, Becky, the effort to think of what she would love best is what counts. My daughter might qualify as a kid who had 'everything'- although we tried hard to be moderate being a long-awaited, treasured only that was a difficult task -- and it always fascinated me how amazingly random her choice of the IT toy was and how much, when you did succeed, that toy really mattered -- she was, of course, akin to a cat and something the toy equivalent of a bottle-cap would be the IT toy for years.......

I am reading your comments on the Iceland procedurals with great interest..... the hubster likes this genre a lot and I am so-so about them, so it really helps.

I had my eye exam today:

E F N G R N E

I told my doctor that it all reminded me of Icelandic names. To my surprise, she said her partner's grandparents were from Iceland and she's traveled there--and that she's told her the same thing! Ha. So I'm not so far off.

That's pretty funny!

It does! It does! Aren't you glad you said something! I love that kind of thing.

I'm back with an Absalom, Absalom! update. Anyone picking up this book to give it a quick read, don't be led astray by the book's apparent small size. My copy is "only" 300 pages--of tiny solid type, not a paragraph break in sight, sometimes not for pages and pages. I honestly thought I could read a chapter a day and knock this thing out in about a week and a half. Haha. Then my goal was adjusted to "before the end of February." Haha.

That being said, I love this book. And isn't that the way it goes, with some of the things you love the most: it's a love/hate thing.

Anyway, I'm on Chapt. 7 (out of 9, and I'm just past the half-way mark). We're being treated again to Shreve the Canadian's bemused, mocking view of the South:

"Jesus, the South is fine, isn't it. It's better than the theatre, isn't it. It's better than Ben Hur, isn't it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn't it." Quentin did not answer.

P.S. Chapt. 7 has 58 pages. 58 pages?! I think I've been averaging about 10 pages a day for the last week or so. I need to speed up a little bit on this thing, because I'd rather not still be reading it this summer.

I have got to read this book.

I'm loving your Faulkner quotes and posts, B.

Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indriadson.



{rolling my eyes} I read this book on my Kindle at night before I go to sleep. Kindle says I've been 90%+ finished with this thing for about four days. I can't stay awake long enough to finish the book. That's my review.

I'm now at 97% and, to be honest, I could stop reading right now. I don't think there are any surprises. I've pretty much guessed who is buried in the grave on the hill for about 100 pages. At this point I don't even care anymore.

OK, so I'm making this sound like a lousy book. It's not. I just can't seem to get it finished, and being so close to finished for several days is driving me batty. I want to move on. I want to actually get some reading done. I probably do 30% of my reading at night, but I have to be able to stay awake to do that. Good grief, what with my book reorg plan cutting into my daytime reading time and then this book putting me to sleep at night, I haven't finished a book in what seems like weeks.

I know exactly what book I'm going to read next. I'm dying to get to it. So I'm going to sit here and finish this Icelandic thing right now--and then it's done. I don't think it's quite as bad as 2.5 stars, so I'm giving it 3 stars, with reservations; I think the problem is I've just become fairly crabby about this book.

OK--done. Like I said, it's not a bad book. It dragged in places and could have been tightened up. Also, the way he went from present time in the story to the past and back again was inartfully done. He ought to read some John Marquand--like The Late George Apley--Marquand was a master of the flashback, "the perfectly structured and sweepingly cinematic movements backward in time that carried readers deep into the past of the Marquand characters." I'm not asking that this writer be a "master" of the technique; however, if he's going to use it and make it an integral part of the book, then he ought not to be such a hack about it.

Another Marquand fan, Oh I love his writing so much! He should be in my underappreciated list, in fact, that is where I'm headed, then back to the 'thon.

I've flipped into a completely new place and frame of mind with Faulkner's book, Absalom, Absalom! in Chapt. 7. After giving us this character, Thomas Sutpen, a man without a single redeeming characteristic, now suddenly we are hearing of Sutpen's life when he was a 14-year-old boy--and while it doesn't "change" everything for me about the man Sutpen, it puts who he became into a different perspective. Sutpen is only a young boy, his mother is dead, his father is a brute and a drunk, and the boy is trying to figure out a very difficult problem: "if there were only someone else, some older and smarter person to ask." The boy had no one, and it makes me see this character quite differently.

Also, as I was reading, I realized that in describing this young boy, born in 1804 and living in the Virginia Tidewater area, that Faulkner was describing my own third great-grandfather, Jeremiah Campbell, born just seven years before Sutpen. I've done a lot of research on this Campbell family, but there are large gaps still, partly because I need to go to Virginia and look in the old records (the records I've seen are of his family in northeastern Tennessee). As I was reading this passage, I imagined that Thomas Sutpen's experience as a young boy could very well have been Jeremiah's as well:

he not only probably bigger than the teacher (the kind of teacher that would be teaching a one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations) but a good deal more of a man, who probably brought into the school with him along with his sober watchful mountain reserve a good deal of latent insubordination that he would not be aware of any more than he would be aware at first that the teacher was afraid of him. It would not be intractability and maybe you couldn't call it pride either, but maybe just the self-reliance of mountains and solitude, since some of his blood at least (his mother was a mountain woman, a Scottish woman who, so he told Grandfather, never did quite learn to speak English) had been bred in the mountains, but which, whatever it was, was that which forbade him to condescend to memorize dry sums and such but which did permit him to listen when the teacher read aloud.

It's this sort of recognition in fiction that can absolutely knock your socks off.

DH and I just went dragging around to four different stores (two of them hardware stores), looking for bookcases. I wanted the put-them-together-yourself kind that I found 5 or so years ago at the hardware store, but no soap. Came home empty handed. Got on Amazon.buyanything.com, spent 2.5 minutes total time, looking and buying, and came up with exactly what I was looking for--no tax, no extra shipping because of Amazon Prime. I'm not trying to sell anything here; I'm just sayin'--more and more I find that I'm doing my shopping for just about everything on the internet.

I'm giving the Icelandic culture book, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland, by Bill Holm, a pass. Chapter 1 was filled with America bashing, but I thought maybe he would get it out of his system. In Chapt. 2 he says he's going to use Iceland to give him "perspective from which to consider what has come of America"--"too big, too noisy, too populated, too frenzied--probably too brainlessly religious, media crazed, shopaholic, and warlike for me to see anything but a vast cloud of human white noise."

This book is not for me. I'll put it in the box of books going to the library book sale.

That sounds like an absurd book, the US is far too complicated to be compared to a country like Iceland!

I am finding the same thing with the I-net.....

Loving the comments here, as always. I have thoroughly enjoyed the Erlendur series, but I have to agree about Silence of the Grave. Probably my least favorite to date. Voices, otoh, is one of my favorites. Give him one more try.

Oh, thanks, Sandy, I was hoping someone might weigh in on Voices. Thank you. I'll try him again.

I did a big, big push yesterday on Absalom, Absalom! and managed to finish Chapt. 7. Two more chapters to go; I'm finally 'way past the half-way mark, so I'm feeling good.

I started a strange book last night but didn't get very far in it: I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. This is the same guy who wrote Godel, Escher, and Bach, first published in 1980, winning the Pulitzer Prize. I don't pretend to understand what he was saying in that book very well, although I was helped along quite a bit by my very brilliant DH whose favorite thing is "math" or something. Hofstadter has described that book as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll". Really--ouch!

I believe this new book, published in 2007, is more accessible to the general reader. He writes in the preface that his audience is "a general educated public," although I'm pretty sure that was also the audience for GEB. Very generally, "Loop" is a discussion of the concept of "I"--"What do we mean when we say "I"? This is an older writer's book, he says, more reflective and personal than GEB (that book was written when he was only 27 years old).

For whatever reason, "Loop" gets some very hostile reviews at LT. One would think that anyone who hated the book as much as some of these people appear to have hated it would simply leave it alone. Whatever. I'm looking forward to at least giving it a shot.

As I usually try to do on Sundays, I'm reading a book that comes from my religious/spirituality stack. That book has been for several weeks and continues to be Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D'Souza. When I was last reading D'Souza last week, I was into Chapt. 6 where he discusses consciousness and the mind and evolution. I made a note of a quotation from Michael Shermer found in Why Darwin Matters: "Evolution is not a theory about the origin of life but only 'of how kinds can become other kinds.'"

Anyway, on to Chapt. 7, "The Spiritual Brain: Finding the Soul within the Body." Have a good Sunday everyone.

Happy Sunday to you also, B, I'm enjoying my last little bit of quiet. I struggled through most of GEB what seems like a million years ago...... I'll be interested to see what you think of the new one.

Becky, I am enjoying your comments on Absalom, Absalom! very much. I probably won't be reading it anytime soon, but I am 'favoriting' some of your posts to reread when I do get to the book. I did the same with Huckleberry Finn, which I am loving btw.

I like your Spiritual Sunday idea. We go to early church, then come home and dive back into the secular world. I'd like to keep the Jesus vibe going a little longer than that. ;-) I pulled out Bishop Spong's A New Christianity for A New World. Now there is something I won't get in a Methodist sermon!

Hi Lucy & Donna.

>205 sibylline:. It would be interesting to see how I would respond to GEB now compared to the first time. I hope I would understand it better, but who knows?

>206 Donna828:. I've read a couple of things by Spong: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and Liberating the Gospels. I'm also an Episocpalian, as he is (or was, I haven't kept track of what he's up to these days), but I've been more or less pushed out of the church by the preponderance of liberal voices that have taken the church down what I think is a very strange path. Well, "pushed out" sounds too passive. I walked out--that's more accurate.

That being said, although I don't agree with a lot of what Spong writes, I do enjoy reading him. I think he's intelligent and thoughtful and in the books I've read he presents his case very well. I'll be interested to see what you think of the book.

Congrats on finding the right bookshelves for you. I just recently had that experience myself. I bought mine in store, but I noticed that amazon sells them, so I posted a review.

You're right. The internet has completely changed the way we shop for things. And in many ways I think it's changed for the better. When I bought my last car, used, I did research online and was better prepared, and knew more about the car than the salesman did. I believe I embarrassed him a little. And I got my car for the price I thought it was worth, too!

Angela

How right you are! The internet has revolutionized the way in which we shop. I collect dolls. Doll stores are limited, not only in number but in selection. With the internet, and ebay, I can find what I need and wait until the price is what I can afford.

Becky, my tbr pile now contains Life After Death: The Evidence. It sounds like a fascinating book.

Hi Linda & Angela. Linda, what kinds of dolls do you collect? I collect fabric for quilts--mostly 1930s through 1950s. I made quilts for 20 years and then when I started writing I decided it was either the writing or the quilts--I couldn't do both. Now all of my quilting stuff is packed away, but I still like to collect fabric now and then.

We had another whacko storm last night in St. Louis. I took my dogs outside at about 11:00 and it was eerily still. If you've ever been in tornado weather, you know what I mean. The tornado sirens started while I was outside, and I decided we all needed to be in the basement, pronto. DH was upstairs asleep, but I yelled at him anyway to come downstairs. Tornado weather is spooky at night because you can't see the sky like you can during the day. We were down there for about half an hour, and again, like a few weeks ago, I think we really dodged a bullet. This has been one strange winter!

Reading Chapt. 8 this morning of Absalom, Absalom!. Like Chapt. 7 was, this one is over 50 pages long, full of convoluted imaginings of what Shreve the Canadian thought might have happened in Quentin's family two generations before.

Hi Becky! Interesting topics here - and so varied!
As I read your comments on Absalom, Absalom I shudder inside and my mind keeps saying "Exactly! And THAT'S why I never want to read Faulkner again!"
Just can't tolerate his style - if there is one. You are very strong and brave.
I'll just never get it! Ah, well.

Have a good one! :)

Never say never, Claudia -- we might toughen you up yet!

Wow -- tornado sirens. See, to me, that is as alien as succotash!

That's a good one, Sib. {grin}

I just finished a book that I've been reading since the second week of February, although it seems longer: The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey through the Archives of The New York Times, by Richard F. Shepard. I really enjoyed this book. The history of The New York Times is the history of journalism. As Shepard says, this book is only one slice of that history. He started at the paper as a copyboy in 1946 and worked there for almost 50 years. The years from about the 1940s to the 1960s are the best represented here, although he goes back into the early years of Adolph Ochs and continues to the beginnings of the tenure of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

I would give the book a solid 4-star rating for being informative and very readable.

Next up in this category is Richard Kluger's The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. This book is a heavy monster, almost 800 pages long. If I can finish it sometime in March, I guess I'll have to be happy with that.

Here's my new March thread.