books, books, books

alexv · Post by **alexv** » Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:25 pm

Otis, "meme" is Richard Dawkins' coinage. He's an evolutionary biologist who wrote a best-selling book a few years ago called "The Selfish Gene". He uses the term "meme" to mean an idea that replicates, as genes do, but does so outside the body, propagating itself through human communication. Just like genes live to replicate, so do "memes". Not sure if I buy it, but part of his rationale, or so he says, for being so stridently, and publicly, anti-religion is to see how far the anti-religion "meme" can go.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:01 pm

I see. Very familiar with Dawkins and his beliefs, but hadn't heard the term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

StrictTime · Post by **StrictTime** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 3:41 pm

Picked up A Primer of Freudian Psychology, The Trial, and Breakfast of Champions from the school library in anticipation of Thanksgiving break. Finally, more Vonnegut, and of course, Kafka, who is probably my current favourite writer. And I did look for Raymond Carver, but they didn't have it.

miss buenos aires · Post by **miss buenos aires** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 7:04 am

The joys of buying local: for my mother's birthday, I ordered her a copy of Brother, I'm Dying (about Haiti) from her local bookstore. I asked the guy to not let her buy it (she's his biggest customer). When my dad tried to buy a copy for his sister, the owner was like, "Why are you buying this? Is this for your wife?" Ha! Amazon won't do that.

Post by **BlueChair** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 8:43 am

martinfoyle · Post by **martinfoyle** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 9:57 am

Just finished Sid Griffins excellent book on the Basement Tapes, Million Dollar Bash. While some find the writing style a bit sloppy, which it is, I love Sids enthusiasm for the subject and makes it me want to get some of these recordings asap and listen to them again.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Fri Nov 23, 2007 2:40 pm

StrictTime wrote:Kafka, who is probably my current favourite writer.

I gave his spirit your regards in Prague this week. I had a guidebook that had notes on Kafka's Prague. He always lived fairly centrally. If I had had time, I would have sought out the various places he lived, but I didn't (work). Didn't read about where he's buried, but I assume it's there. I walked up to the castle and thought of The Castle. It's hard to imagine how his Prague was then. It's 10 years since I last went, and it's become very developed as a tourist venue since then. Beautiful day and night, really one of Europe's finest places.

StrictTime · Post by **StrictTime** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 11:34 pm

Misfortune, birthday present. Well, rather, my little brother gave me his leftover Barnes and Noble gift card from Christmas and that's what I got with it. Wesley Stace, although probably much better known as John Wesley Harding.

Musicophilia, a present from my uncle. Seems quite interesting. By Oliver Sacks. He looks sort of like George Carlin.

Tim(e) · Post by **Tim(e)** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 6:19 am

StrictTime wrote: Musicophilia, a present from my uncle. Seems quite interesting. By Oliver Sacks. He looks sort of like George Carlin.

If you like that, let me recommend "Uncle Tungsten" also by Oliver Sacks. And as I mentioned earlier in this thread, hunt down some Haruki Murakami books. "Underground", his account of the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway is an absolutely amazing read.

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 1:04 pm

Bill Bryson's Made In America.

And it's overdue, but I think I can pay in canned goods if I get it back by Saturday.

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 2:18 pm

Just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I found much more compelling than the only other one of his I'd read before (All The Pretty Horses). I think you could call it what would happen if Hemingway wrote The Stand. Anyway, I had no idea he had Knoxville connections until I read it in yesterday's paper. James Agee and Cormac McCarthy. We is literate, y'all!

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/dec/1 ... 216cormac/

StrictTime · Post by **StrictTime** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 3:18 pm

mood swung wrote:I think you could call it what would happen if Hemingway wrote The Stand.

The sounds extremely interesting. (No sarcasm at all, truly)

And still Musicophilia. It's a slow go but very interesting. I'm so busy with other things I don't have the time to read as much as I might like, but the section on amusia was fascinating. In school, we're reading A Doll's House by Ibsen. Not bad, but sort of dull.

Post by **BlueChair** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 4:32 pm

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 7:38 pm

Astonished to find, after Seeing Alexv's FARTY contribution, that he wasn't one of the people adding to this thread today and putting us all to shame. In a near Alexv run, albeit one that goes back a few months, I've read a trio of Ian MacEwan:

Saturday - a bit ridiculous in places, but generally very impressive and engrossing. A book in a day with lots of kind of stream of consciousness (kind of cos it's so polished and self-conscious).

Enduring Love - finally got round to it. I really enjoyed it. The title is a clever pun.

Amsterdam - I also bought this years ago and never read it, partly as a protest against the fact that his obviously weightier titles never won the Booker prize and this did. Actually, it's really rather fab. Brief, yes, but pleasingly nasty and very witty with it. Bit like Iris Murdoch, but for our times.

The boy can write, he really can. He frequently reminds me of Philip Roth in being able to nail the exact thing with the precise words. Sentences that you want to savour and go back to. Less experimental and daring than Amis, but matching him for verbal dexterity.

And now for the big one:

I got it a year ago when it was first out, but I'm such a slow reader (as well as a slow learner, boom boom) that I've been terrified. I could sit and enjoy every last word of Gravity's Rainbow as a student, but where is the time for this now? Over 1,000 pages of relatively small text (will I need even stronger reading glasses afterwards?), and heavy enough in hardback to give me RSI. A few pages in and already I'm in love with it. Mason & Dixon was a fabulous romp, and this looks like being even more outlandish, as well as historically invigorating. Pynchon-doubters hated it, Pynchon-lovers adored it. Michael Chabon (another writer I'm dying to read and haven't yet) voted it the best thing he'd read all year in the Guardian's recent piece on this theme, his only complaint being it wasn't long enough.

Best writer since Dickens for names. We start off on the airship Inconvenience with the 5-man crew known as The Chums of Chance led by Randolph St Cosmo, aided by Lindsay Noseworth. On board is a Henry James reading dog, currently enjoying The Princess Casamassima. They are flying to Chicago for the 1893 World Fair. By the end of the novel the First World War will have happened and we will have travelled through numerous lands and cities, as well as states of reality, absurdity and fantasy.

It's the tone I love. The wit behind every sentence. The love for his characters and their absurd predicaments. The endless profusion of learning and verbal excess. I hope he features on your curriculum, Strict Time. He did on mine as part of my Modern American Lit option. We only read the relatively slight but funny Crying of Lot 49, but of course I also read every last word of V and his masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. For me without question one of America's finest writers ever and my favorite living novelist.

I love to read in bed, when awake enough, but this will present a hell of a challenge. Here's hoping I can find the daytime during my two-week Christmas break. See you back on this thread in 12 months.

Now everybody...

alexv · Post by **alexv** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:58 am

Due Considerations--John Updike. Updike's fiction, with a few exceptions, has never really connected with me. Only the Rabbit books and Couples, one of my favorite post-war American novels, have fully registered.

But his criticism and essays are another thing altogether. He and Gore Vidal are to my mind the two grand old men of American letters, with writing styles that are unmatched. Updike is traditional, encyclopedic and gentle; Vidal is the sarcastic gadfly.

Updike writes book reviews, essays and asides on every topic under the sun. And it's all addictively readable.

You can pick up Due Considerations, open it to any page and find yourself in the company of a slightly old fashioned, spectacularly observant and endlessly curious intelligence that teases out subtle, nuanced and sensitive ideas out of practically every aspect of life. And the writing style makes your heart melt.

High lit; pop lit; foreign authors; american authors; cartooning; baseball; museum architecture; art; sex; religion; 9/11 (uniquely observed); travel. You name it, he writes about it in the most beautiful prose of any American writer.

There are drawbacks: he's by nature an "explainer'", so that every reference is accompanied by detailed, footnote-like, text, which can, after a while, become a little too much. And his sensitivity to everything the world has to offer is such that it can overwhelm. It's hard to imagine anyone capable of being moved to rhapsodic heights as often, and by so many varied things.

But in a way, these weaknesses are part of his charm. He is irreplaceable.

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 1:43 pm

The FARTYs don't have a book category. !!!

Get to editing, people.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 6:44 pm

I was gonna comment, but then I so rarely read books in the year they're published that it was gonna be a bit of a random category.

The Updike sounds good. Would like to check that out.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 8:10 pm

David Peace's The Damned Utd was my favorite book of the year. Came out last year in the UK, but I didn't get around to reading it until this year.

Not a big field of candidates, much to my shame.

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 8:15 pm

was gonna comment, but then I so rarely read books in the year they're published that it was gonna be a bit of a random category.

Nothing wrong with randomness. Nothing at all.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:08 am

You should know. I was looking at The Damned Utd and it looks very original in style. Are they making a film of it?

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 8:27 am

Oh, eat a booger, Westinghouse.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 8:52 am

Otis Westinghouse wrote:I was looking at The Damned Utd and it looks very original in style. Are they making a film of it?

I don't know - would make a good picture if they could get the football parts right. Can't think of who I would cast as Clough.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 11:30 am

Steve Coogan.

Moody: see you under the mistletoe.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 11:32 am

Otis Westinghouse wrote:Moody: see you under the mistletoe.

Not after you've eaten a booger!

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 3:48 pm

That's what he gets for being such a slave to the literal.