I assume you meant Confederacy of Dunces, but am not sure.

Finished Rabbit, Run and can't decide how I feel about the drowning. I can't decide whether the scene is filled with extremely deep insights about the effect of the mother and all the confusion completely debilitating Janice, whether the death is some sort of subliminally driven infanticide or whether the author completely misses the mark in that there's almost no level of impairment great enough to cause a loving parent to drown an infant in the circumstances described.

I can see a forgetful distracted mother leaving the child for what she sees as a brief moment and then coming back to a drowned child, but having the child drown while in the presence of the mother seems to mar the believability.

I've liked other Updike works, but haven't made up my mind in terms of finishing the Rabbit series.

Why didn't anyone like Glamorama? And by anyone, I mean, most people think it's not very good compared to is others. It was the last book of his I read and I thought it was just wild and crazy. I really liked Victor and how he dealt with these absurd situations. I can't believe what happened in the middle of the book. It was a complete surprise. I thought it was quite interesting.

He's just a whiny bitch. I hate Holden. I hated that book. However, I particularly enjoyed Franny and Zoe by J.D. Salinger.

I think he's meant to surprise you with his observations and the intensity of his feelings, but not all of his observations are kind. He's clearly a kid, not someone whose personality is somehow perfectly formed making perfectly balanced observations and decisions.

If we expect him to be perfect or hold it against him, that he is not entirely adult, we are probably poor readers and kidding ourselves about not just him, but ourselves as well.

The Feast of the Goat- a fiction on the tail end of General Trujillo's murderous reign in the Dominican Republic. Mario Vargas Llosa creates a frighteningly crazy character in Trujillo, a rock hard dictator who rules with an iron fist. The story follows the overthrowing of the government (and the assassination attempt of Trujillo) and moves at a very fast pace. I liked it alot...I felt like I really got into the mind and thought process of Trujillo and the other characters. Recommended.

Finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I found the book interesting and entertaining, especially the pithy philosophical references and musings presented as interstices. This novel is, on the whole, an excellent work, though I can see that it may bite some people the wrong way. There is more to appreciate if you have some philosophical readings under your belt but it is not a perquisite to enjoying this very well written novel. I recommend it. Curmudgeons and misanthropes will probably enjoy this novel more than others.

This same author also wrote Gourmet Rhapsody, which I have not read but may check out at some future date.

-Zeno

started bukowski's ''post office'' this afternoon and am nearly finished. it's a quick and easy read, but not nearly as enjoyable as ''ham on rye''.

also started everything is illuminated and think it's hysterical. it seems to be living up to all of its praise. can anyone suggest reading any of foer's other work?

hope to be apart of this discussion more regularly-- maybe it will motivate me to read a bit more.

Same here, just started it last night. It's good so far, I'm just wondering what in the hell would possess their country to start a contest like the Long Walk. I'm sure you find out eventually, possibly from that Slebbins character (the one that told the story about the end of one of the other Long Walks.)

Survivor was cancelled.

I spent some time in vegas. I stopped reading. I finished the magicians. I happen to very much like the third part of the book. It is kind of like porn for dungeons and dragons nerds in the same way that Ann coulter/Moore are porn for republican/democrats. I found it to be an enjoyable somewhat light read.

It' Bread and Circuses. Keep the population amused or distracted and you control them.

I liked Ham on Rye a lot. Bukowski can be pretty damn funny. There used to be a great documentary about him available on the Netflix Watch Instantly.

I couldn't get into Foer's Everything is Illuminated, but I'll probably try it again soon.

finished everything is illuminated and now on to extremely loud & incredibly close. loved everything is illuminated-- while some passages felt a bit slow, the writing is so wonderful, that i couldn't put it down. hoping i have a similar experience with foer's next novel. what next? i need some suggestions that are equally postmodern/funny/sad/fantastic/etc....

I had to share this most unexpected find: a Raymond Carver story with a happy ending!

Fever
by Raymond Carver

Carver's stories speak to the inescapable rut of reality. Most of us never even realize we're digging our own grave one sad decision at a time. By the time some of us realize what's happened, we're too deep to have much hope of climbing out. Carver's endings are made even more unnerving by his tendency to end when his characters arrive at an epiphany that, however profound, mostly serves to remind them how dour their existence is. And they rarely resolve anything. At best, the character's are more aware of their problems. But usually the epiphanies are so vague that they raise more questions than they answer. I have learned to appreciate the art of Carver's writing and just accept that his stories aren't about hope. I started reading one of his short stories, Fever, with the same expectation. Boy, was I wrong. At the end of this story I felt a kind of joy about life that I had not realized I was missing.

The story centers on Carlyle, a father of two small children whose wife recently left him to become a kind of hippie with another man. Carlyle spends each day in a fever, the past like a disease that's threatening to kill him. Carver's titles play into the points of his story from the outset, so I went into Fever thinking the point was obvious: which one is going to break first, Carlyle or the fever?

Carlyle won't let go of his wife. Though they have both taken new lovers, he still hasn't given up hope that one day she'll come back. But when he speaks to her on the phone he can tell that the woman he longs for is gone. He hates himself for still loving her, for still wanting her. And there is the problem of how to take care of his little children while he teaches during the day. The best it seems he can hope for is a fat teenage girl that invites her boyfriends over so they can smoke dope and listen to loud records instead of taking care of his kids. One time Carlyle comes home early and finds his children dirty and sobbing, the fat girl in the living room with her shirt open. He fires her and continues looking for someone more appropriate to watch his kids.

If this was a typical Carver story, that would be the end. We would have the question, who is going to break first, and that would be enough. But he hires an old woman that we can tell is a different kind of person. She's smart. She's kind. She knows what to do. She immediately puts Carlyle and his children at ease. Carlyle is surprised to suddenly feel a spring in his step that he never thought he would get back. He finds he can think of his wife without that familiar longing, and the heat of his anger seems to be cooling. A pivotal moment occurs during his art class. In a kind of shock that he's able to say this sort of thing, he tells his students that the secret to painting is to master making your mistakes seem intentional.

Then comes the bad news. You might think you're in for the typical Carver ending when the old maid tells Carlyle that she has to quit, but Carver surprises us again with a note of hope.

This old couple is getting on in their years and unable to resist accepting a position with a relative that will allow them to do more than get by. They'll have a chance to thrive in the autumn of their years. They leave Carlyle with the same hope for his own future. Instead of worrying that with this woman's disappearance Carlyle's life will again collapse, we're left with the impression that he's been delivered an epiphany on how to escape the past: simply let go.

Quite a few moments throughout the story made me smile. I won't go on describing them since I think most of the fun of Carver is in his execution. If you gave up on Carver before you read Fever, go back and read this one.

Just wanted to say I drop in here from time to time to see what you guys are reading for recommendations.

Just got Brave New World and it's very good.

Keep it up guys.

Great review, Busto. You definitely made me want to take a crack at that story.

You know more than I do how unexpected the tone of this story was, especially the ending. I had to check the cover and make sure I was still reading the same book. I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone.

He was trying for a lot more of that in his late career. A lot of people find downbeat stories very hard to take regardless of how good or even great they are. Or even see anything that isn't upbeat as downbeat.

Just finished The Harvard Psychedelic Club which is essentially a biography of Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Andrew Weil.

The main point of discussion is the psilocybin and LSD experiments that Alpert and Leary were running on grad students and others at Harvard in the early '60's. The studies were of immense interest to these academics both from a psychological point of view and as a mechanism to better understand and mimic certain religious experiences.

All the usual cast of '60's characters make their way through the book and the author takes the readers from the East Coast academic beginnings of the psychedelic drug movement into what developed in San Francisco and Berkeley, to the ashrams in India. You get your Nixons, Reagans and G. Gordon Liddys on one side of the equation and your Owlsey Stanleys, Jerry Garcias and Carlos Castenedas on the other. The book is filled with sympathetic, wealthy socialites who quietly support Leary and Alpert during their various run-ins with authority (like getting a ten year sentence for having two roaches in the car).

The book paints a very sympathetic picture of Leary and Alpert and their efforts are put in the same light. Smith is beatified on the pages. For those not familiar with Huston smith, he was born into a family of Methodist ministers who then became an authority on comparative religion. He dabbled in LSD (which was legal at the time) under the tutelage of Alpert and Leary as a method to understand mystical traditions and Eastern religions.

Weil is portrayed as an opportunistic snitch who is mistrusted from his initial meetings with the Harvard professors and takes his revenge by becoming a principal antagonist in getting the two professors driven out of Harvard. I didn't really know much about Weil other than knowing he was the bearded guy who PBS trots out during pledge drives. He becomes the dirty commercial underbelly of what the author loosely describes as the counterculture as driven by guys like Leary and Alpert, though he is generously labeled "the Healer" by the author.

The book is a very fast read and is stuffed with stories that readers of a certain age and range of experiences will be quite familiar, but the author ties things together nicely to come up with a very engaging narrative describing what it was like to be one of the leading personalities present at the creation when the match was lit on the '60's.

Picked up Nicholson Baker's The Fermata this weekend, since a couple people told me it was a sublime modern classic. Really good book and definitely one of my favorites already: it's about a man who can stop time and uses it to undress women, but it's written in a fantastically surreal fashion and is basically just furiously conscious writing by an author who was at the top of his game. It's pretty explicit/disturbing at times though, so you have been warned.

Can anyone recommend a book where a huge life change takes place and the character changes drastically?

From film I can think of the examples Office Space and Wanted. I just love reading about stiffs/pushovers becoming men and not caring about anything.

A Separate Peace

Currently I'm reading a fun book called Cheers! An Intemperate History of Beer in Canada by Nicholas Pashley. I highly recommend for Canadians, non-Canadians may enjoy it anyway because it covers non-Canadian stuff but it will probably mean more to Canadians.

I read Baker's The Anthologist a few months ago and thought the world of it. I've read almost all of his books except The Fermata. The idea seems a little seamy for my taste, but I'm weird about things like that. I did read Vox, also pretty seamy, his book about phone sex.

Where did you find this story/book?

It is in at least two of his short story collections, Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From.