I also read this recently and enjoyed it. I think it may well be his best work - I liked In A Sunburned Country, thought I'm a Stranger Here Myself was meh and considered his African Diary largely a waste of time.

Today's random selection is David Shalleck's Mediterranean Summer: A Season on France's Cote d'Azur and Italy's Costa Bella. Since I've already read the collected works of Peter Mayle, I have to broaden my horizons...

I read a lot. Thank goodness for the interlibrary loan system!

Heheh, that reminds me of a great article once I read called "The Dog is Us." It was about how so many of this gal's friends gave up smoking dope as they got older. It said that when you're young and first start smoking dope, you see things in a new light. You see how artificial and absurd and phony everything is, and that makes everything funny. You see how high a stake people have in nonsense and how scared and uptight we are about having everything just exactly our way. You see how contrived, constrained, arbitrary and therefore basically funny so many of those preconceptions, ideas and ways of behaving we valued so highly and unquestioningly are, and even the dog just walking into the room is funny. The whole room can sit around sharing a laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the dog. Then we grow older, and start making choices of our own that we may not like that much and that can last a lifetime, make moral compromises that at least some part of us knows aren't all that great, and lock ourselves into lifestyles that may not really suit us, and into ever-tighter habits and routines that we cling to as if we had a great stake in them despite their absurdity, as if they were saving us from drowning.

And then we realize that the dog is us ... AND IT'S NOT FUNNY. And that's when nobody smokes dope anymore.

This is a autobiography by Pam Des Barres, who was a groupie in the 60's-70's and made infamous in the song "We're an American Band" ("..these fine ladies, they had a plan, they were out to meet the boys in the band") by Grand Funk RR. It isn't as titillating as I'd hoped but still a good read.

I'm reading "Don't Try This at Home" by Dave Navarro and Neil Strauss. It covers a year in the life of Dave Navarro (guitarist extraordinaire in Jane's Addiction), a year he is shooting coke and heroin almost non-stop. It's a sad and wild story, and he bags Carmen Electra at the end of the book FTW!

I just picked up IV by Klosterman. So far I've only read a couple of essays, but I'm not that impressed. It just seems like he's trying to hard to find meaning in issues/events that are meaningless. I'll finish it though.

I finished Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley a couple days ago and I loved it. Really witty and well-written.

Reading Nine Stories by Salinger right now and it's wonderful.

Also Koontz's Forever Odd (out of sequence). I'm finding it meh...good but not great.

I am not very well read at all. I am lazy and tend towards short stories- Hawthorne being my favorite. Steinbeck's The Winter Of Our Discontent was the last novel I read and thoroughly enjoyed.

Nothing wrong with short stories. They're sometimes great and often at least as good as an author's longer works. Since most novelists start out on short stories, they're also a great introduction to a writer at a digestible pace, and give you a sense of where he's come from and where he's going. Reading through a lot of the short stories an author wrote before he was ready to write novels can give me a sense of being privy to the story of his developing skill and imagination. I think that's by far the best introduction to a novelist.

If nothing else, it lets you know whether you're likely to want to put in the energy to read his novels, or maybe even two or three of them in case the first one or two are iffy or outright duds.

i read that one, and a couple others about cheating in poker. This one was probably the best one, although they have all seemed alittle unbelievable, this one espically, but its short and i read it in like a day and ahalf.

i just finished no country for old men, it was meh to me. I read the road also and didnt like it, but people spoke so highly about no country on 2+2 so i got it.

right now im reading motherless brooklyn, and the crying of lot 49, but i cant seem which one i want to commit to andfinish first.

Vintage books have just brought out a "Vintage Twins" promotion here, where you can buy various double packs of books that supposedly complement each other. I've just bought The Brothers Grimm complete fairytales, which came with Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber".

I don't think I've ever read any of the Grimm stories before, so I'm looking forward to starting a batch of them sometime tonight. I'd never even heard of the Carter book, but from the cover it seems she's revised a bunch of fairy tales and looks like it's going to be a pretty fun read too.

Fairy tales are fantastic, have fun. If anyone today could write anywhere near well enough to have it carried down as oral tradition for hundreds of years, the world would beat a path to his door.

Just finished reading To Air is Human: One Man's Quest to Become the World's Greatest Air Guitarist. It was a very funny book and I recommend it for anyone looking for something fun and not too serious.

Angela Carter is fantastic.

I'm reading these books at the moment:

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Ironweed by William Kennedy
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

I was just given I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak. I will be reading this shortly after Catcher in the Rye I think. Has anyone read this or heard good/bad things about it?

Have you read William Kennedy before? I really love his book "Roscoe". I also enjoyed "Flaming Corsage" a lot. I liked Roscoe more because the theme was more interesting to me, but "Flaming Corsage" was narrated in a style I liked a lot.

whoa....deja vu....didn't you ask me this already a little while ago??