What are you currently reading?

[Gold Knight]

Franz Kafka--The Trial

[Ten thumbs]

Covering an issue that remains topical today:

Maria Edgeworth: Patronage

[Geo Dude]

I've just finished Bill C. Malone's Country Music, USA and started on Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Patoski.

[Bogey]

Some of his paintings are coming to Denver in the fall.

[Jake]

[asin]0822347946[/asin] [asin]069105052X[/asin]

Preparing for my move this summer.

[Karl Henning]

Alan will wonder just what's taken me so long (the book has been on my shelf for some months now), but at last I have cracked open Her Fearful Symmetry.  I am entirely in its grip, now.

[Elgarian]

Alan will wonder just what's taken me so long (the book has been on my shelf for some months now), but at last I have cracked open Her Fearful Symmetry.  I am entirely in its grip, now.

No, I don't wonder. I know what it's like. A book just sits and sits and suddenly the time is right.

I firmly predict that you will respond to it in one of the following ways:

1. Best novel I've read for years.
2. Worst novel I've read for years.
3. Somewhere in between 1 and 2.
4. It's profound.
5. It's silly.
6. Somewhere between 4 and 5.
7. I'd really like to see the movie.
8. Oh  thank goodness there's no movie of it that I ought to see.
9. Somewhere between 7 and 8.

[DavidW]

Now that I've moved I plan on checking out the novel myself soon.

[Karl Henning]

I sem to recall, Alan, that you made a similarly firm prediction regarding The Spirit of England, and by gum, if ye wasn't right!

Good to see you've moved into the Shed, Davey.  (You've always lived here, of course.)

[Karl Henning]

He belonged to one on-line forum that existed to allow various scholars worldwide to debate the merits of various texts and to amuse each other by ridiculing the work of translators who didn't belong to the forum.

So true to life!

[Elgarian]

I sem to recall, Alan, that you made a similarly firm prediction regarding The Spirit of England, and by gum, if ye wasn't right!

Actually, I've had a massive spate of novel-reading during recent months (I found, years ago, that my strike rate for novels was so poor - I had to read a lot of them to find one that seemed to reward the effort - that I pretty much switched off.) Some quick comments:

Top of the tree
Audrey Niffenegger: Her Fearful Symmetry. Most profoundly affecting novel I've read in the last ten years, in so many ways and through so many layers. Maybe ever.

Highly memorable
Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus
Eowen Ivey: The Snow Child

Good, well-written, but probably forgettable
Sadie Jones: The Outcast, Small Wars, The Uninvited Guests. She has a 'thing' about looking beneath the veneer of respectable living, and exposing the worms that lurk there.
M L Stedman: The Light Between Oceans. A real page-turner, very moving (about a lighthouse-keeper and his wife who find an abandoned baby in a boat, and keep it) but I find I'm disappointingly unchanged by the experience of reading it.
Wendy Jones: The Thoughts & Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals. Very nicely done, and a happy ending! Hoorah!
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveller's Wife. Famous, beautifully written in an easy style, like all her stuff, but doesn't have the depth of HFS.
Dana Spiota: Stone Arabia. Fascinating idea, about a failed rock musician who spends his life constructing a fantasised archive about what would have happened if he'd succeeded. Fine until the ending, which is incomprehensible, and which makes me want to throw the damn book out of the window.

[Karl Henning]

Almost done with Part I of HFS. Digging it! I hesitate to speak in detail, lest I spill spoilers.

If I were not on my way to the museum, I'd ring you, dude. Another time!

[Elgarian]

Almost done with Part I of HFS. Digging it! I hesitate to speak in detail, lest I spill spoilers.

If I were not on my way to the museum, I'd ring you, dude. Another time!

That's good news all round. It's the later half of the book that some people complain about, but provided one keeps in mind the central theme - that our tendency to cling to things that we should be letting go is not a good idea - everything (in hindsight) turns out to have an interlocked inevitability about it.

I promise not to move more than 2 metres from the phone in the meantime. (A promise surprisingly easy to keep - I fell off my bike today and landed on my backside; so am having a bit of difficulty moving anywhere!)

[DavidW]

I've checked it out of the library and will start it as soon as I finish Unsinkable.

[asin]B001GIPSDY[/asin]

Unsinkable is very informative and mostly free of the bias of other accounts of the sinking of the Titanic.

[Bogey]

I've checked it out of the library and will start it as soon as I finish Unsinkable.

[asin]B001GIPSDY[/asin]

Unsinkable is very informative and mostly free of the bias of other accounts of the sinking of the Titanic.

Cool David.  Did not know that you enjoyed reading about the Titanic.  Did you see the traveling exhibit?

http://www.rmstitanic.net/exhibitions.html

I am not sure that they are all the same, but the one that came to Denver a few years back was incredible....is the TX one in range?

[DavidW]

The Houston one isn't but the SC one will be once I move.

It will be worth the drive to see White Star Line china!  Thanks for the headsup Bill.

[Opus106]

Unsinkable is very informative and mostly free of the bias of other accounts of the sinking of the Titanic.

What is the kind of bias you refer to?

[DavidW]

What is the kind of bias you refer to?

Egalitarianism... many make the story out to be about class warfare, which it is not.  Nobody was willfully trying to ensure that the 3rd class passengers did not make it to the lifeboats.  It amounts to libel since most of the passengers and nearly all of the crew acted heroically during the sinking of the ship.  So many of the crew deliberately gave their lives to fulfill their duty.

[Opus106]

Egalitarianism... many make the story out to be about class warfare, which it is not.  Nobody was willfully trying to ensure that the 3rd class passengers did not make it to the lifeboats.  It amounts to libel since most of the passengers and nearly all of the crew acted heroically during the sinking of the ship.  So many of the crew deliberately gave their lives to fulfill their duty.

Thanks.

[Karl Henning]

That's good news all round. It's the later half of the book that some people complain about, but provided one keeps in mind the central theme - that our tendency to cling to things that we should be letting go is not a good idea - everything (in hindsight) turns out to have an interlocked inevitability about it.

I promise not to move more than 2 metres from the phone in the meantime. (A promise surprisingly easy to keep - I fell off my bike today and landed on my backside; so am having a bit of difficulty moving anywhere!)

Hope you're mending quickly!

Very much enjoying the book, though my progress is slower (quite some napping yesterday) than I anticipated.  It is not normally the sort of book I read, but I find it so well written, that detail of normality doesn't much seem to matter.