I'm halfway through the movie End of the Tour and despite not being the biggest DFW fan, I'm enjoying it. I don't see what BEE's problem was with it, so far.

End of the Tour isn't something I'd usually watch, but I was on a plane so gave it a go, and absolutely loved it. It got me into reading a lot more of DFW's stuff.

Just picked up Consider the Lobster (a collection of DFW nonfiction) from the library.

I mostly loved 'End of Tour'. My only issue is I think Jessie eisenberg or however u spell it ****ing sucks & tilts the hell out of me.

I made the mistake of reading Lipsky's "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" the day before watching End of the Tour. 80-90% of the movie's dialogue is straight from the book (they are basically transcripts, of course).

Finally finished The Sunne in Splendour

As many others here have posted it is a pretty amazing book. Highly recommend.
Has anybody else other books by Penman?

I listened to the first Harry Potter book read by Stephen Fry.

What a delightful book. That's the best word to describe it, I think. Reminds me of reading Roald Dahl as a kid. Even the bullying and violence is somehow cute and inoffensive. Very British: dry humour, great names, the entire world seems constructed out of rounded edges.

Of course there are problems and "wait, what?" moments. Some spots are overly explained. Stephen Fry reading Hermione is a bit awkward. Overall, though, it's quite fun and easy to zone in and out of on my walk to work.

4/5*

Finished Light Years by James Salter. For style and substance, it is simply magisterial. My apartment is so crammed with books now that I try to keep whatever I am reading nice and clean so I may resell it at my bookstore or leave it in a little free library, but after about page 25 of Light Years I could not restrain myself from pulling out a pen and marking every other paragraph. I look forward to reading it again and again.

Afterwards, I read The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Nicely paced, completely forgettable.

If you haven't already seen it, you will probably enjoy this New Yorker profile of Salter: http://http://www.newyorker.com/maga.../the-last-book. Though it was published on the occasion of his last novel, it focuses on Light Years—suggesting that it is best novel. The part about how deeply he wounded the couple on whom he based the novel is striking, and made me think Salter is one cold SOB.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Pretty long and gets tiresome in parts. Namely the old people on the cruise interacting with other Euro old people. In the end, I enjoyed it. I could relate to a lot of the family interactions and stuff going on in the siblings' lives. Very much a family novel. I was warned going in that it's a book about a mother trying to get her grown up children home for Christmas. That's exactly the central plot.

Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Crazy story. I've read only Slaughterhouse Five before and forgot how nut bar science fictiony he can be. Very enjoyable and a quick read. Involves Aliens, Mars, religion, the Stock Market and rich people. A pretty profound study of the meaning of life and our belief in fate and why things happen. I'll definitely be reading more from him.

Currently about half way through Underworld by Don DeLillo. It keeps jumping back in time and through different peoples lives. All slightly related and linked by a common object. I'm worried that by the end I won't get the overall theme/message and will have read 800+ pages of random stories that I'm unable to make the big leap to see the genius of.

Looking back on this series, the first book is easily the worst and least engaging. Second is better, but the third onward are great. One thing that bugged me about the first book that I didn't notice nearly as much in later books is Zelazny's prose. He doesn't build paragraphs. At times, it's like he's just feeding you sentence after sentence. Like, a whole scene will happen in one sentence and then we're off to another scene in the next. This aspect gets much better in books 2-5, but it is something Zelazny tends to do in any case. The story also veers away from our world and Corwin's stupid amnesia and so forth into the fantasy realm where we become acquainted with his strange family. I'm not saying to keep reading if you can't stand it, but it does get a good bit better. Besides, the books are so short, it's almost like you might as well get through at least the second book -- especially if you've already got it in hand.

And two more I finished:

Sometimes I'll pick up a book that I have zero acquaintance with just so I can learn something new. So I got Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, which goes through the history of autism -- its frequent misdiagnoses, some of the weird treatments people have tried, its unknown causes, etc. I definitely learned a lot from the book, but it seems to focus on historical success stories rather than everyday autism. Still a pretty good book.

Have Space Suit -- Will Travel by Robert Heinlein. I didn't expect a YA story going in, but that's what I got, and it turns out it's very good. Heinlein is campier and softer with his scifi than he usually is, and it makes for an enjoyable story. Wish I would've read this when I was 13.

This is exactly why I was quitting. To be precise the paragraph that went "I had no army and that sucked, so I walked into shadow and found 250k soldiers. That was good because they were a good army. Then we invaded."

So if that stops sometime soon I guess I'll continue on. I powered through Gardens of the Moon might as well get through this too. Thanks for the info.

Rereading Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, a wonderful meditation on Hollywood screwball comedies and their connection to Shakespearean Romance.

Haven't read The Overcoat, but it's part of a major plot point in a book I just started, The Namesake. Interpreter of Maladies is probably my favorite short story collection ever, so I'm really looking forward to this.

Salter is one of my favorites (of which there are very few). The knock on him was that the was a stylist and suffered from frigidity. He attempted to refute that with his final novel, All That Is. If you haven't read it you should give it a try. It's much more subtle and nuanced. I recently had a discussion with a UNLV creative writing professor regarding how successful Salter was in addressing his critics. She thought he was very successful with All That Is. I didn't think his deficiencies were so great to start with.

Regardless, Light Years is a genuine and sincere depiction all the contemporary problems of upper-middle-class white America. Salter was able to do that without resorting to the irony and satire that devalues so many considers of the same group.

I first learned to write descriptive prose from deconstructing the whole first chapter and the beginning of the second of A Sport and a Pastime. Having lived in Paris at about the same time, I can testify that Salter nails the train departure from Paris like nothing else I've ever seen (though Michele Butor, who Salter had read, came close, very close in Second Thoughts).

I'll have something to say on Ian Toll's Six Frigates soon...BUT No...Greene's The Quiet American is not forgettable. Not for me in the near forty years since I read it. An extremely important book. I picked it up some years after my initial reading of Dog Soldiers and immediately from the first pages realized that Robert Stone could never had written his great book without Quiet American. As one who participated in America's reckless and horrifying adventure in SE Asia I could only wonder at our feckless politicians who put us there when Greene's book was there for all to read. Salter is a fine stylist and writer but few who pick up a pen can get to The Heart of the Matter like Greene.

really enjoying How Soccer Explains the World by one of those Foer bros

I like how each chapter is a different topic

so far:

1. Red Star Belgrade and Yugoslavian collapse
2. Celtic - Rangers
3. Jewish identity in European soccer (and a bit about Ferencvaros at the end)

I blazed through Never Let Me Go the last couple days -- I just couldn't put it down. It's one of those books that people get annoyed after asking what it's about: "Oh, I can't really say anything without spoiling it. But you need to read it!" I won't be bucking this trend, other than to say that it's a masterfully paced mystery. The tone reminds me of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The only knock against the book is that the prose is nothing special. Ishiguro's writing is functional and avoids getting in its own way, which is saying more than most books, at least, but there isn't anything beautiful or particularly memorable in the writing itself. With that said, I'm left thinking about the world he's created, how various events relate, and how brilliantly he handled the slow reveal days later.

4.5/5

I also read it recently and really enjoyed it. The Buried Giant deals with some similar themes and is also very good, might want to check it out.

The Overcoat is almost universally praised. Dostoevsky credited it with being a seminal piece of Russian literature. Nabokov thought Gogol was at his best when he became a little unhinged, a little irrational. You can see that happen in The Overcoat and in several other short stories and it's at that point that Gogol's short stories have their greatest connection with humanity and human frailty. It's like Gogol is able to connect his pen directly with his emotions bypassing the rational part of his brain that wants to make the action make sense and comply with social norms. Those moments have the sense of genuineness about them that every writer strives to capture.

Haha, yeah, I remember that one. There are quite a few of them in that first book. Zelazny's not a great scene builder by any means, but I think his editor took him aside after this book, shook him vigorously a couple times, and told him to flesh those things out a little.

It's not even so much the fact that he's glossing over the building-an-army part, or the my-brother-doesn't-like-me part that bugs me, it's more how he words it. It's pretty amateurish -- like he wasn't even trying. I'm not going to say he corrects it completely as the series progresses, but it does go from terrible in book one to tolerable by book three.

I've read maybe 200 books over the past two years. I think Never Let Me Go might be my favorite. Great write-up. It's one of those books that you don't even want to tell people what it's about because that would spoil the fun. Also in my top ten in that time frame would be Remains of the Day, which is a completely different kind of story (thematically, if not stylistically) but equally well-put-together. Ishiguro is truly a master at disseminating information.

Sounds great, going to add Gogol to my to-read list.

Yup, love it.



You might like Tibor Fischer's Under The Frog: it's fiction but it's very good and it's roughly basketball and Hungarian collapse.

I found the Overcoat by Gogol on Amazon and it's 26 pages. How can I resist?

Get the collection instead. They're all great!