*** What are you reading? OCTOBER 2011

Starting a day early. My daughter's birthday party tomorrow will keep me away.

I finished History: A Novel by Elsa Morante - a book that really strikes when you set it down and start thinking about it.

I'm switching between four books right now.
1. Woman of Rome, a biography of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck.
2. Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters by JoAnn Deak, with Teresa Barker
3. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. This will be a le Salon Group read starting October 20. There has been a huge amount of anticipation about the read. I've started it now just to get going and get a sense of it, but I won't focus on it until closer to Oct 20.
4. The Winter 2010-2011 issue of The Iowa Review, which I'm finishing up, I think. I started it in May.

In Patagonia has been lying around neglected. No explanation for that, I just haven't been focusing on it.

ETA 'm (after "I")

I am switching between four books at the moment:

Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes
The reign of Chivalry by Richard barber
Vanity Fair W M Thackeray
The cinnamon Peeler Michael Ondaatje

O yes, Vanity Fair. I read that years ago, when I lived in Barcelona. I have nothing but the best and most pleasant memories reading that racy (and huge) novel, while it is connected with many other happy moments in my life.

I have had a very slow reading year this year. I am currently about half-way through Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, which I have been reading sporadically for the last month and a half. It was around that time that I gave up on War and Peace despite being about 2/3 of the way through the book. My main reason for giving up on it was that I was reading it on a cheap ereader, and it hurt my eyes to read it for long periods of time. This caused problems because I knew that I would never get a book of that length finished unless I could spend long periods of time reading it. I may pick it back up before the year is over.

fuzzy_patters...I intended to read Shadow Country this year. I read the first 70 pages twice, and got distracted twice...I'll try again sometime.

I'm reading The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai, which consists of three novellas set in modern India, along with Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas and When I Was a Poet by David Meltzer.

Reading Dan Simmons the terror, a fictionalized account of sir John franklin's doomed arctic expedition to find the northwest passage. Also looking for a new non-fiction book to start since I just finished George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, which was slow-going at first but picked up the closer the book got to the actual war. Has anyone read Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition? I'm thinking it might be fun to watch the upcoming Ken burns documentary and read this book, as it's a subject I know virtually nothing about.

I have just finished Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita, an interesting although not always convincing extended argument about the ways in which our view of the world is shaped (and distorted?) by the media we use to represent it.

Other books finished recently include Unless by Carol Shields, which I enjoyed although various people have told me her other work, which I have not read, is better; and a very fine first poetry collection, Guarding the Flame by an Irish poet now resident in New Zealand, Majella Cullinane.

Next up for me are The Coldest Place On Earth - a book about one of the lesser-known journeys of Antarctic exploration, from the coast to Russia's Vostok station - and bilingual (English/Chinese) poetry collection Delicate Access by Madeleine Marie Slavick.

>1 dchaikin:, dchaikin: I enjoyed In Patagonia very much when I read it.

On my reading shelf for October (some in progress, others yet to be started):

Raise the Red Lantern by Su Tong
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Politics by Aristotle
I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni (re-read)
Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker
Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Perez Galdos
Collected Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy
Nadja by Andre Breton
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

baswood, Vanity Fair and de Troyes's Arthurian Romances are on my to-read list. Will be interested in hearing your thoughts on both.

I have set aside all of my other reading projects (of which there are many) for school assignments, which include The Mill on the Floss and Ulysses. Pretty heavy going this semester!

At the moment I am reading:

Fiction:
American Rust by Philipp Meyer

Non-Fiction:
The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, edited by Claude Rawson
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature by M.H. Abrams

Poetry:
Book 3 of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

I've just finished and reviewed What It Is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes, who wrote the novel Matterhorn, about the Vietnam war, that I liked so much earlier this year. It covers a lot of the same territory in nonfictional form, bringing in personal, historical, psychological, spiritual, and mythological perspectives.

I'm nearing the end of Bellefleur - just as well as lately it's been affecting my dreams. Somehow, considering the book, I am not surprised. And like the younger generation of Bellefleurs, I might need have to escape the family legacy...

I have started reading Being Dead by Jim Crace, and am already half way through. Its gruesomeness is somehow addictive, like a horror movie.

I've finished and reviewed the autobiographical novel I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures between Dakar, Paris, and Milan by Pap Khouma, the story of the difficult life of a Senegalese man who immigrates to Italy and becomes a vendor of statues, jewelry, and other goods.

I got a copy of a book I suspect many of the Club Read habitues would really like: Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw, who did a blog interview over here that I found enlightening.

Here is a quote from the interview on a topic I myownself really wanted to know about:
SB: What was the impetus for you to re-imagine your experiences from this challenging time by using miniatures and toy cameras?

JS: I think I needed to process the Katrina experience on my own terms. I had done some documentation of the disaster’s physical aftermath, but didn’t quite feel that I owned that work – if that makes any sense – or that it was saying anything that hadn’t already been said. I knew that I had complete ownership of my own story and there were elements so surreal they were dying to be told.

Exactly how the idea to recreate the saga in miniature was sparked is hard for me to pinpoint. Perhaps looking at the king cake babies on our spice rack and going “hmmm… baby?” Recently I came across a photograph taken during the evacuation, in September of 2005. My friends’ children had put tiny rescue vehicles into a glass vase with water. At the time it struck me as an apt metaphor for what was happening in New Orleans – enough to both remark on it and photograph it - and I wonder if that wasn’t the initial seed that opened my subconscious mind to the possibility of using stand-ins to describe the events.

Shaw is an interesting and articulate advocate for her work.

I have just finished two very different non-fiction books, The Coldest Place On Earth (Antarctic exploration) and The Day The Raids Came (police "anti-terror" raids in New Zealand), both reviewed on my thread, and I seem to be on a non-fiction jag at the moment, because my upcoming reading includes books about New Zealand's climate change policy, and Poet In New York by Lorca.

Fiction on the horizon includes The Telling by Ursula Le Guin, and The Secret River by Kate Grenville, and there's a collection of poetry I've been wanting to get around to reading for a while, delicate access by Madeleine Mary Slavick.

But reading is having to be fitted into odd corners, because the book tour for my new book starts in less than a fortnight, and there is lots of preparation to do. So ... I should get on with it!

Just realized I hadn't posted on this thread at all this month. But I've just finished Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was charming and funny.

Next up is The Course of Irish History by T.W. Moody. Because, while buying books on Hawaiian history in Hawaii last month, I forced myself to face up to the fact that every time I go somewhere interesting on vacation I pick up a history of that place, and then never seem to get around to reading any of them. Well, no more! It's time to finally tackle that history of Ireland I bought when I was there! In 1999. Sigh.

So far this month I finally finished The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco, but I still have it handy because I like it so much. I have also read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt and This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics by Sean Hall. I'm just about to finish Imaginary Portraits by Walter Pater. I am reading this because I read Marius the Epicurean by him and in his correspondence he compared them and so I'm still trying to figure out the subtleties of Marius. I've had Aegypt by John Crowley on my Kindle for several months and just started reading it this week. Too soon to have formed much of an impression of it yet. I am anticipating the Magic Mountain group read in Le Salon later this month and keep promising myself I'll read more fiction. But I have this stack of incredibly interesting nonfiction books that keeps getting in the way! Also this month has been terribly busy workwise and the work is interfering with my enjoyment of reading!

I continue to flit from book to book: dithering with another Swedish mystery (not really grabbing me), read about a third of a book Dukedom is reviewing for Belletrista, read the introduction to Margaret Atwood's latest book about her life with SF, read the story on Steve Jobs in the New Yorker (and Nicolson Baker's piece on Apple), wandered through a new Pie cookbook (I don't just look at the pictures, you know), read a couple of stories from Kevin Brockmeier's recent collection while sitting in a waiting room...

Finished Japan: Its History and Culture by W. Scott Morton, which is brief cultural and social history of Japan from its earliest prehistory to the modern day. I think it was an excellent way for me to dive into the complexity that is Japan, and will hopefully prove to be insightful resource while I read more of Japanese fiction. While this book cleared up much of my ignorance I still have so much to learn.

I read Summer Resort by Esther Kinsky. Interesting...

I am reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann as part of the group read over at the salon

Apart from that I am also reading:
Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 by Michael Bennett
In the Heart of the Sea: The tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick This is the true story of the whaling expedition that inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The Magic Mountain continues.

I finished several books:
1. The Winter 2010-2011 issue of The Iowa Review, which I started it in May.
2. Woman of Rome : A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck
3. In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin, which I started in August
4. A Short History of Wisconsin by Erika Janik, which I stared in July
5. Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters by Joann Deak & Teresa Barker
6. RE:AL : The Journal of Liberal Arts, Volume 30.1 Spring/summer 2005 by Stephen F. Austin State University -- the first "book" here that I actually started this month
7. The Red, Candle-lit Darkness by Larry D. Thomas, a new, 12-poem, handmade volume with woodcuts
8. The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger, read aloud with my daughter. This is wonderfully done.

Beside TMM, I'm also reading:
- Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion by Dale McGowan (editor)
- A Sea in Flames : The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina -- the fifth book I've looked into on this, excellent so far
- The People Look Like Flowers at Last : New Poems by Charles Bukowski

I'm finding myself unable to put The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins down.

I have recently finished and reviewed the entertaining anthology Slightly Peculiar Love Stories - and I'm currently enjoying Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964, a fascinating history about an era of popular music that is too easily forgotten; The Secret River by Kate Grenville; and Tongues Of Ash, the debut poetry collection by my fellow book-tour poet Keith Westwater.

I have just finished reading M.H. Abrams's erudite and stimulating examination of Romantic literature, Natural Supernaturalism.

In fiction, I am reading John Crowley's Little, Big, which is wonderful stuff. I am also reading The Collected Poems of Emily Bronte, and her biography (A Life of Emily Bronte) by Edward Chitham.

Finishing up Prehistoric Cookery today, and also reading Hoe schrijg je een familiegeschiedenis (How to write a family history) by Marijke Hilhorst and Hoe schrijf ik een biografie (How to write a biography by Dik van der Meulen and Monica Soeting.

I've finished and reviewed Yalta: The Price of Peace by S. M. Plokhy, a readable, informative, and thought-provoking history and analysis of the conference that helped shape the second half of the 20th century.

I've just finished The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, the winner of this year's Orange Prize.

The November (it's November now in some places) thread is here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/125982