ahhh--nice to be back....

[likethebeer]

It's disconcerting when this goes down. I get a feeling as if I'm in outer space, have just been ejected from the space craft, my communications device isn't working, and neither is anyone else's. Poor brad.

I am making a list for the moment of the books that I've read since the 2nd week of November (it's not really a big leap to guess why I've been reading tons of fiction since then). These are someone grouped in the same order that I read them, although they get sort of jumbled up in my head from late November-early December.

1. Baudolino - Umberto Eco. Not a terribly bad effort on Eco's part. I think you have to be a certain kind of fan of his writing. He does concentrate in part on the idea of the use of language creating reality, and that happens very often in this book. The beginning of the 13th century, a man named Baudolino, who becomes friends and is taken in by the Holy Roman Emperor, and eventually travels through a wild and woolly land looking for the legendary John the Prester, with his companions and what is definitely not the Holy Grail.
   
   
2. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. I enjoyed this book, in part because the world that Golden writes about is so vividly described. Nitta Sayuri is a famous former geisha who tells the story of how she was sold into a geisha house, how she goes from the lowest of the lows to the highest high in terms of geisha-hood. All the while she's in love with a man who barely knows she exists.
   
   
3. The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl. Made me want to read the Divine Comedy (have I? noooo. It still sits by my bed, as it has for the last, um, 2 years). The author took a real club from the 18th century and wove a fiction around it. Five men: Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, their publisher, and George Washington Greene, get together every week to go over Longfellow's work on the translation of the Divine Comedy (starting with Inferno). This will become the first English translation in America. The translation is against the desires of the powerful at Harvard (who own the publishing house and employ Holmes & Lowell). They see Dante unworthy of consideration, b/c Italian is a violent, low language used by dirty immigrants. Into this, Pearl weaves a series of murders that the Dante Club members slowly realize are based on punishments in the Inferno. So, the characters praise Dante, talk about him and the meaning of some of his imagery; they're also older men who stumble into a murder mystery. So, it's literary and intriguing, but also has an Agatha Christie-like quality to it, with these old men stumbling around after a murderer.
   
   
4. Angels and Demons - Dan Brown. The same character as the one in The DaVinci Code. The plot is even more absurd, although somewhat the same. This book was written before the DaVinci Code, so it is as if Dan Brown was trying out the idea first in Angels & Demons. Still, I read the whole damned thing in one 24-hour period. "Symbologist" (idiot-eeze for an iconologist) Robert Langdon is called early one morning w/news about the gruesome murder of some famous guy by a secret organization that is no longer supposed to exist. Running around Rome w/a hot chickie ensues.
   
   
5. Perfect Circle - Sean Stewart. The only book that I've read of this group that's taking place in modern day. Will Kennedy "sees dead people." He's a former punk who can't hold down a job, is still in love with his ex-wife, and has a 12 year old daughter. A relative calls him up 1 night to see about taking care of the guy's girl ghost in the garage for $1,000. Will has just gotten fired from the pet store he works at, so he takes his relative up on it, reluctantly. Things spiral from there. I like the character of Will. His experiences in seeing ghosts and ghost "roads" are interesting. They're a part of his life; not nightmarish, just there, walking across his path all the time. I wanted to hit him at points though for being really dumb and self-destructive. But I think that's in part the point of the book. It's about a man struggling to grow up.
   
   
6. FLLW (Penguin Lives series) - Ada Huxtable. I've already talked about it in enough places.
   
   
7. Pompeii & Archangel - Robert Harris. Pompeii's the more recent, and more famous one. It's about an "aquarius" (someone who's job it is to look after an aquaduct) in a city near Pompeii. Something has gone wrong w/the water on the aquaduct, and he's got to figure out why. Plus, his predecessor has disappeared. All of this starts 2 days before Mt. Vesuvius blows. In fact, the impending eruption is causing all of the problems on the aquaduct. Others have said it about this book - it makes you care about aquaducts. Archangel is about a secret left by Stalin that the main character tries to figure out. Given my history, I had to read it. It's pretty good up until near the end when the secret is "revealed".
   
   
8. Outlander - Diana Gabaldon. I thought this was going to be a time travel story. Instead, I got, more or less, a bodice-ripper. This chick goes back in time through a mini-stonehenge to the mid-1700s in Scotland. Eventually, hot sex w/a Scottish guy ensues (even though this woman is married back in the 20th century and could go back there is she really really wanted to). The Scottish guy is portrayed pretty well, but what made me realize that this was a bodice ripper wasn't so much the sex, but the fact that the main character really never talked about the bodily, earthy concerns of going back to the 18th century. She never seemed to have a problem getting food, clothing, hot water.... And I was really curious in the beginning b/c I was wondering (sorry guys), how this woman was going to keep her secret about being a 20th century woman when she got her period. There was a whole set of things that a woman would have to do before Stay-free and Tampax. Yeah, the lead character's from 1945, but still. She'd have to ask someone something and that would just give it away. But, nope. Never came up. Still, like Angels & Demons, I still read the damned thing. I'm not going to read the sequals. There are 5 sequels, apparently, and they're all about 800 pages.
   

And currently I'm reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susannah Clarke. That's a glorious book taht I want to write about later. I have to get ready to go into Madison.

Comments

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

You are a reading fool! I need to go on a reading kick soon, as my hands are too sore to knit.

[likethebeer.livejournal.com]

I figured I had a lot to live up with, what w/you & djymm.

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know. You and djymm read real books. I read the Beany Malone series of books for nice young Catholic girls. It's all small r reading here, really.