What are you reading? - Page 176

Ciardi's translation of the Divine Comedy. It will probably be my secondary reading.

Paul Bowles's autobiography, Without Stopping.

I'm in Wolfe phase.

I completed reading Blood Meridian this evening. I struggled to feel compassion for any of the characters, but once I made it past needing that, I found the judge a fascinating character. Both books have very simple plots. A direction. A handful of characters. McCarthy relies on violence in both to make a story, but more so in BM. I don't care one way or another about the amount of violence. The writing style here is more dense than in The Road. That's how I became less enchanted. I found myself longing for the later work, its simplicity not only in style but also the relationship between father and son and the constant impending threat to their frailty and the setting and the color palette and the doom, all working together. I miss that meditation on finality. All of us felt cabin fever yesterday. I took my 7-year-old son out for a walk in our neighborhood late in the afternoon and felt the cold and the dark on us and wondered how I would take care of him if it were like that all the time from thereon. Cold, dark, no food, other people were a threat. We came upon a yard lighted with Christmas lights and floodlights and a family making snowmen in the front yard. A few steps away was their lit up front door, and past the door their warm house. For a moment I hesitated to go any further.

Welcome to Mccarthy.

The Painted Word is really funny at times and the small illustrations are great. I haven't read this since undergrad days ~1o yrs, but I think it still holds up.

BTW - Nice Richter avatar.

Continuing my quest to read all of Hemingways books.

I have always few books ongoing at the same time. I just started HOTEL HEAVEN: CONFESSIONS OF A LUXURY HOTEL ADDICT by Matthew Brace. Others are Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray, Naomi Klein No Logo and Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Gillian Tett's "Fool's Gold": It's an extremely interesting read, providing an explanation of how CDOs came to be and the people, models and events that led to the Great Panic, focusing on credit derivatives. While the particulars of the financial products might confuse some readers, I think she did a fantastic job with this book. In Fed We Trust is also a must-read for those who wanting to more about the origins of the financial crisis.

Made to Stick. Most useful book I've read in a long time.

Flying through Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection of short stories and getting stuck in Ildikó von Kürthy's Blaue Wunder.

I'm probably not going to read this right away since I plan on tackling one of R. Caro's LBJ books first, but I just bought it and am excited. Only cost me $5 thanks to a Borders gift card I found in a drawer.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Right before that was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. After wasting years of my life on video games, I'm just now finally reaching the point in my book-reading career/lifething where I'm absolutely enchanted by dead Russian authors. Oh motherland!

I started 'John Barleycorn' by Jack London and had to stop after only 30 p.s; not only do I dislike the authors style very much (too primitive and outright boring) but also the way he presents his allegedly autobiographical tale of confession of his drinking career (namely in the most embarrassing and ennervating sense) : he basically thinks of his potential readers as idiots who don't see through his insincere and hypocritical-moralistic exculpations...this alone would even have been o.k. if done funnily or wittily but instead he chooses to put his (fake, IMO) blame for his equally faked 'alcoholism' on everything and everyone but himself, seriously and humorlessly. Don't read that author- he's a bore and a provincial show-off (a Hemmingway de poche)...and worst of all: he can't write (no wonder that he made large sums of money with it when still alive since the taste of the day, of the plebs, is more often than not ephemeral and revealing of bad quality- see also Dickens and Harry Potter (?), I believe).

Well, on to fairer shores, I say!