book 3 Jhumpa Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies

bad girls in the updike way. noreast tenure among the squabs. marriage bound girls boredy bored

she should talk the dot head more. The Treatment of Bibi Haldar. The Real Durwan

Some light quarantine reading from James Thurber these past couple weeks: Thurber on Crime (1991), posthumous collection of humor and cartoons and even some surprisingly good reportage, all crime-related. The Thurber Carnival (1945), anthology of more or less his best-known work; if you're going to read just one Thurber book, this is the one. Thurber’s Dogs (1955), doggy stuff, the best ones appearing in the previous book, the rest only mildly amusing.

The Cremator (1967) by Ladislav Fuks. Creepy psychological horror novel set in Prague on the eve of the Holocaust. Not bad.

The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth. Really good alternative history novel, taking off from the premise of Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh defeating FDR in 1940, which transforms America into a fascist state. Just watched the first episode of David Simon’s six-part miniseries based on the book, and it was good as well.

book 4 Joyce Carol Oates Dear Husband

possibly the worst story teller ever. gothified updike. bad boys as femsplained by miz potato head

The three saddest words in the English language, according to Gore Vidal: Joyce Carol Oates.

book 5 O Henry Gift Of The Magi and others

hobos in jungles and safecrackers with a chance

its got some bounce anyway, no sad sack melodram

the bad guys are strivers not sneaks



[

but also its old time radio its narrators runnin the show

its boy golly gee aint babe a stroke

guys with ties and suits workin with words in the white guy world

mad men circa 1928

]

Finding it quite enjoyable

Great single topic book.

Six weeks since the last post? Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away? (it's a quote from Aliens, so don't have a cow.)

Emma (1815) Jane Austen - Have you ever sworn that you would read X before you die...a kind of book bucket list? I had such a list. Tolstoy, Cervantes, Proust, Dostoyevsky, that kind of stuff. Most of it I had gotten through years ago but Jane Austen was still a big fat 0. Dover Publications (a great company) had a sale late last year on paperbacks so I bought a copy of Emma, generally considered her best novel. The Covid shutdown seemed like the perfect time to finally tackle an author almost universally lauded as one of the finest female novelists of all time.

What a waste. Don't misunderstand me. The writing is par excellence but I have read textbooks on chemistry which were also very well written. You don't read a 300+ page novel just to be wowed by writing skill. A novel has to have a compelling story line and be entertaining, does it not? Emma falls short on both accounts spectacularly. It was boring and predictable. Worse, it was pointless, other than being a great window into what English bourgeois life must have been like in the early 1800s, the so-called country house period. Other than the history lesson, it's many hours of my life I'll never get back.

If you have a book bucket list, good for you. If Emma is on it, think again.

Posted by crazystengel on 4/6/2020 2:51:00 PM (view original):
The three saddest words in the English language, according to Gore Vidal: Joyce Carol Oates.

Due respect to Gore Vidal, but Joyce Carol Oates is one of the best writers on boxing I have ever read. Yes, boxing. Look it up.

The MVP Machine. Data to build a better ballplayer. Thanx Statcast. Driveline origins and the anti-baseball Trevor Bauer. 12-year old Club is just the beginning, and everyone's gaining on you.

Posted by usf_bulls on 6/9/2020 5:52:00 PM (view original):
Six weeks since the last post? Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away? (it's a quote from Aliens, so don't have a cow.)

Emma (1815) Jane Austen - Have you ever sworn that you would read X before you die...a kind of book bucket list? I had such a list. Tolstoy, Cervantes, Proust, Dostoyevsky, that kind of stuff. Most of it I had gotten through years ago but Jane Austen was still a big fat 0. Dover Publications (a great company) had a sale late last year on paperbacks so I bought a copy of Emma, generally considered her best novel. The Covid shutdown seemed like the perfect time to finally tackle an author almost universally lauded as one of the finest female novelists of all time.

What a waste. Don't misunderstand me. The writing is par excellence but I have read textbooks on chemistry which were also very well written. You don't read a 300+ page novel just to be wowed by writing skill. A novel has to have a compelling story line and be entertaining, does it not? Emma falls short on both accounts spectacularly. It was boring and predictable. Worse, it was pointless, other than being a great window into what English bourgeois life must have been like in the early 1800s, the so-called country house period. Other than the history lesson, it's many hours of my life I'll never get back.

If you have a book bucket list, good for you. If Emma is on it, think again.

I don't think I have read Emma. Sense and Sensibility is very, very good and was hard to put down. Certainly the world she describes - the world of the women of aristocratic families in late 18th and early 19th century England, in families that have fallen on hard times - is a world very far from most of our experiences, but she is able to engage us in that world to a remarkable degree, and make us care about the lives, aspirations, disappointments, sorrows, and triumphs of these women from, compared to the rest of the population privileged and wealthy families, and I write that as an avowed socialist with roots in the labor movement.

Will take a look at Emma to see if I have the same impression. Every great hitter has a slump or an off-year. Maybe Emma was hers.

I think the best two novels ever are Moby Dick and Anna Karenina. I WANT to love War and Peace, took a course on Russian Novels in college and could not finish it, picked it up again some years later and couldn't finish it, and tried reading it two years ago, and for the third time got maybe halfway through and put it down. Does Napoleon win in the end?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34jQKSP2EMI

Later Sam finds out there is a movie version, after reading the whole thing to impress Diane.

Great episode, italyprof! I love Coach's line: "Forget it, Sam. Nobody can read four ounces a day."

I agree Anna Karenina is the superior novel, but I liked War and Peace too, and it helped me to appreciate the Russian film adaption from the late 1960s, one of the best movies I've ever seen, certainly the best "epic."

I have yet to read Moby Dick. Or any Jane Austen.

Recent books read:

The Image and Other Stories (1985) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Later period Singer, 22 stories, about half good, half only so-so. Not his best.

Act of Passion (1946) by Georges Simenon. Well-written, but the crazy passion of the narrator (first person, a rarity for the author) was a bit ludicrous at times. Nice appreciative introduction by Roger Ebert.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or The Murder at Road Hill House (2008) by Kate Summerscale. Very good “creative non-fiction” account of an 1860 English murder, full of fascinating historical detail, and a surprising “what became of them?” coda that traces the protagonists’ later years.

Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker (2010) by St. Clair McKelway. New Yorker reportage from the 1930s to ‘60s, most of it dealing with crime and rascality in a humorous way, a lot of it excellent.

I just finished Ballpark by Paul Goldberger (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41552080-ballpark) which was fantastic. He looks at the history of ballparks and their architecture, and how they fit into their city's surroundings.

Now I'm slogging my way through The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50231529-the-iowa-baseball-confederacy) by WP Kinsella (the guy who wrote Shoeless Joe, that became the movie Field of Dreams, a book I did like). The Confederacy book has just been OK so far.