Book recommendations, please

[Penelope]

I loved War and Peace, I think you'll enjoy it.

I recently read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would; it's a ripping yarn, and the paradoxical treatment of anti-semitism (while still being somewhat anti-semitic) was certainly interesting. Just as interesting is the fact that the title character barely registers in the book, while the villain Brian de Bois-Guilbert is far more prevalent and fascinating; the same is true of Rebecca of York, the Jewess, who has depth that nominal heroine Rowena lacks. Look forward to seeing the various film versions.

Am now reading Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, which I've already seen several film versions of, and am surprised at how basic the book is--there's not really much subtext here--though perhaps it's a poor translation.

[Franz Ferdinand]

Seeing as how this thread has been inactive since September, I thought I'd revive it with a mention for some of the best books I read in the last year. The Man Booker Prize was a write-off and I spent the early part of the year reading some previous winners:
- Barry Unsworth, "Sacred Hunger" (1992 co-winner)
- Penelope Lively, "Moon Tiger" (1987 winner)
Some other fiction books that stood out were Ravi Hage's "De Niro's Game"; Junot Diaz's Pulitzer-winning "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; Javier Cercas' "The Speed of Light"; John Berger's "From A to X"; David Park's "The Truth Commissioner"; Damon Galgut's "The Impostor"; Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" (which I enjoyed far more than I anticipated); and Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning "The White Tiger"

The best non-fiction book for me was Ron Rosenbaum's "The Shakespeare Wars", where Rosenbaum (as particularly well-read and intelligent but not scholarly Shakespeare fan) dissects textual scholars, stage interpretations and "Shakespeare the Writer" - it was not a literary biography, but it was a fantastic and entertaining read. Second was Samantha Power's "A Problem From Hell", a deeply researched and passionate treatise on American's failure to prevent 20th Century genocides the world over. Finally, any Murakami is better than no Murakami, and while some did not particularly care for his new non-fiction book on running, I found it lucid and fascinating.

For this year I have set myself a lofty reading list, primarily to clear out some space on my bookshelf and get around to reading books that have been there for years unread.
January: "Don Quixote" and "The Brothers Karamazov" (both of which I've been half done for a year now)
February: Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
March: Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables"
April: Dante, "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" (the Hollander translations)
May: David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
June: James Joyce, "Ulysses"
July-Aug: Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"
Sep-Dec: Marcel Proust, "In Search of Lost Time" (the six-volume Modern Library edition)

[Franz Ferdinand]

I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore, my first Murakami. What a phenomenal novel, and a fantastic world that he has created. Steppenwolf is adapting it for their first show this season, and I can't wait to see what they do with it. I also can't wait to read more of his work. I know he has some huge fans here, any suggestions?

I started Blindness last night. It is already fascinating, but I can see where the film could falter.

The first one I read was "South of the Border, West of the Sun" which was a short and accessible love story, unbelievably nostalgic and bittersweet, a wonderful intro to Murakami. My favorite novel is probably "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", though you MUST read his short stories. "The Elephant Vanishes" and "Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow" are both full of amazing little vignettes of his genius.

Blindness the novel seems thoroughly unadaptable to me, though I can definitely see how they could make it work. Not looking forward to the movie at all, despite Meirelles.

[flipp525]

I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore, my first Murakami. What a phenomenal novel, and a fantastic world that he has created. Steppenwolf is adapting it for their first show this season, and I can't wait to see what they do with it. I also can't wait to read more of his work. I know he has some huge fans here, any suggestions?

The most accessible Murakami is probably Norweigen Wood, his most well-known work. It's good and nostalgiac and highly memorable. I love Sputnik Sweetheart and Dance, Dance, Dance as well for entirely different reasons. But, his best novel, in my opinion in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- a hugely ambitious, densely plotted masterpiece with characters you'll never forget. It's just brilliant.

[Penelope]

For the Francophiles on the board, I highly recommend Graham Robb's The Discovery of France; a biographer of Hugo and Rimbaud, as well as the author of Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Robb explores how rural France, the hidden valleys, mountains and passes--and the people, their languages and cultures--were discovered, explored, consumed and repressed from before the Revolution up to the present day. It's marvelously written, and filled with fascinating details, and makes me wish I could spend months exploring the country.

[FilmFan720]

I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore, my first Murakami. What a phenomenal novel, and a fantastic world that he has created. Steppenwolf is adapting it for their first show this season, and I can't wait to see what they do with it. I also can't wait to read more of his work. I know he has some huge fans here, any suggestions?

I started Blindness last night. It is already fascinating, but I can see where the film could falter.

[Franz Ferdinand]

I've been reading "A Fraction of the Whole" by Steve Toltz recently, which was just today announced as one of the six books shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. As a frequenter of Booker developments, this year's shortlist is weak, mainly because the long list was also weak to begin with. A lot of great books this year were overlooked for uninspired choices, and frankly, there could be a Shadow Booker set up with completely different - and much better - choices.

The Toltz novel is hilarious though, something any fan of cynical comedy would adore.

[Franz Ferdinand]

Since I didn't even realize the Booker committee announced their shortlist for the Best of the Booker prize over a month ago, I've been trying to catch up with the nominees. I just finished Nadine Gordimer's "The Conservationist" which won in 1974. It is a slender yet dense work about South Africa, a white man who runs a "leisure farm" there but realizes that the land and people won't exactly side with him. The point of view and perspective change often, and too often left me going back to figure out exactly who "he" is that was the current subject. I tend to read fairly fast (hence my long list of books finished), and I frequently find some books are meant to be read slower - say, novels from Nobel laureates like Gordimer.

This also gives me an excuse to re-read "Midnight's Children" for the first time in five years, and I find that, even with the ludicrous hype and accolades it has amassed over the years, it is still a delightful and exciting read. It would be a shame for it to win THREE different Booker prizes, but damned if doesn't deserve to.

[Penelope]

In the past month, I've read Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Red and the Black by Stendhal; posted comments on my blog.

[cam]

I have been reading Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, which is rich in musical discussions and repression of musicians during the Stalinist Era. If you have read about the MCarthy years in the US, this will turn your hair white.

[flipp525]

Revolutionary Road (1961), Richard Yates' searing novel of post-war 1950's surburban life, is at once a un-idealized portrait as it is an indictment of middle class existence. What makes this effort different from contemporary versions of the same story, is that Yates penned his novel with little to no hindsight of his own time period. His sharp, incisive observations, therefore, feel more immediate, organic and compelling.

Frank and April Wheeler are living (what might look like from the outside) the American Dream: 2.5 children, a beautiful house in the Connecticut suburbs, good health, good looks, late 20's, the whole world is seemingly at their feet. Yet, they are unhappy -- with each other, the state of their lives and everyone and everything around them. Both are complex people who don't seem to fit the mold of the life they're living. And both feel uncomfortable in the traditional roles to which they've been reluctantly assigned. Their own self-realization of this rigidity makes their respective stasis all the more depressing. Yates creates a detailed world where men have affairs with their secretaries during lunch as a matter of course and catch the train in time for dinner with their nuclear family while housewives, left alone with their own thoughts, use domesticity to combat the impending depression their lives have engendered. Tackling such subjects as abortion, mental illness, suicide, infidelity and ex-pats, Yates lends an unflinching voice to the myriad problems of a cookie-cutter, white-washed suburban existence.

And Yates doesn't reserve the meaty characterization for his main duo. The writing for his secondary characters is also incredibly rich and complex. Shep Campbell, a friend of the Wheelers as well as a secret admirer of April's, has a diverse backstory that rises to the forefront, etching in scenes where before he might've only appeared peripherally to the reader. Mrs. Helen Givings, the Wheelers realtor and the town's resident busybody, is given a depth of humanity by the narrator that leaves the reader embarrassed for perhaps judging her too harshly in the beginning of the novel. One of the hardest things to come away from this book is whether or not we're supposed to view all the characters as symbolic/representative or anomolies of their time. Is the writing wistfully ironic or disarmingly realistic? There are passages where you could support both points of view which makes the reading of the novel much more interesting, but troubling. The use of the play "The Petrified Forest" within the novel is interesting in light of what happens in the last chapter to April.

Understandably, the film version will be promoted as the reunion of Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio who play yet another tragic duo (with Kathy Bates as the ubiquitous Mrs. Givings). However, this story is powerful enough in its own right to draw critical praise and a massive audience. I'm curious as to how Sam Mendes will treat the subject matter and material. After all, this most certainly isn't "American Beauty: The Beginning".



Edited By flipp525 on 1208980116

[Franz Ferdinand]

Since the Booker committee will be creating a Best of the Booker shortlist/competition in the summer and fall, I have been trying to struggle through the remaining winners, and am thus in the middle of Barry Unsworth's 1992 winner "Sacred Hunger". Thus far it is quite addictive, for such a long book I have read a good half of it in a very short time. It is almost Dickensian in its layering of characters and subplots, but it hasn't yet lost the main plot of slave trading in the eighteenth century. It is a rich and satisfying book, though I still have much to get through:

1969: P.H. Newby's "Something to Answer For"
1971: V.S. Naipaul's "In a Free State"
1972: John Berger's "G"
1973: J.G. Farrell's "The Siege of Krishnapur"
1974: Nadine Gordimer's "The Conservationist"
1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's "Heat and Dust"
1976: David Storey's "Saville"
1977: Paul Scott's "Staying On"
1978: Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea"
1980: William Golding's "Rites of Passage"
1982: Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's Ark"
1991: Ben Okri's "The Famished Road"
1997: Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"
2000: Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
2003: DBC Pierre's "Vernon God Little"

[kaytodd]

Enjoyed Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End. It is set in a Chicago advertising agency experiencing serious financial problems and downsizing in the years at the end of the financial boon of the 1990's. But anyone who has ever worked in an large office with cubicles will recognize themselves and a lot of their co-workers.

A lot of U.S. companies have made increasing demands on their employees in recent decades, requiring fewer employees to do the same amount and quality of work when the company had far more personnel. Payroll and benefits make employees almost always the largest expense a business has. People, especially in the U.S., are spending much more time at work than in previous generations. We often spend as much or sometimes more time interacting with our co-workers than our families. Ferris' book is about such a group of co-workers, who have the added tension of layoffs hanging over them.

This book covers a few years in this office. These employees had triumphs and tragedies in their home lives and these events affected their work lives and their co-workers. There are the usual conflicts, romances and breakups. These characters are multi-dimensional and their stories are moving and well written. I recommend this book.

[Franz Ferdinand]

I've been reading Ron Rosenbaum's "The Shakespeare Wars" lately and I find it a blast, a smart and stimulating look at Shakespearean scholarship and the battles it induces through disagreements about seemingly slight differences in Shakespeare's work. Should there be a pause after every line in a soliloquoy? What were Hamlet's and Lear's REAL final words? As someone who has studied Shakespeare in the past, I find this book a great pleasure to read.

[flipp525]

In The Folding Star (1994), Alan Hollinghurst takes the story of a gay male teacher's somewhat inappropriate obsession with his student and infuses it with such a beautiful sense of intense longing and desire that the entire novel is elevated from the simple arena of "gay fiction", to a rich and absorbing novel with almost universal implications. Sometimes described as the gay man's version of Nabokov's Lolita, Hollinghurst interweaves the narrative of Edward Manners' secret desire for Luc, a high-school student exactly half his age, with the life of a relatively obscure 1890's Flemish Symbolist painter named Edgard Orst whose lifetime artistic output contained hundreds of images of the same woman. Manners even works in a museum devoted to Orst's life's work run by the father of another one of his students.

Disaffected from society, promiscuous and peripatetic, the paunchy thirty-three year old Manners feeds his obsession with erotic dalliances in the woods with strangers, cruising the men of Belgium with the eyes of a hapless devotee. One of his paramours even runs a makeshift pornography business from his flat, supplying lusting older men with the used jock straps and soiled undergarments absconded from the local public pool gym lockers. Everything Manners does leads him closer and closer to Luc, until the explosive and haunting finale. Like The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst's deft prose treats an erotic encounter and a detailed description of a painting with the same level of precision, respecting language as an equal opportunity means of expression able to convey and contain the multitude of experience. This book is for anyone who's ever experienced unrequited love on either side of the coin.



Edited By flipp525 on 1208905657