Bond...James Bond wrote:Don't try to organize something...perhaps this should just be a list of what we're reading or whatever. Trying to give grown people reading assignments isn't going to work.
by the way: I'm very slow reading lately...have school work to keep up with and 30 hours of work to deal with....so I'm only reading about 50 pages a day or so.
This might work better at least at the beginning. Then if two or more were reading the same thing something specific to that could split off?
I've never been part of a book club because...well its what I do for a living in large part so my reading practice is not like most peoples. I read extremely fast. I'm always reading 1) things for class that I'm teaching, 2) things that relate to writing projects, 3) incidental night reading that is a far from the other things as possible for sheer relief. This also includes a vast amount of re-reading things I like and new, just published stuff.
Recently I fiinished the Philip Pullman trilogy
His Dark Materials. I've been meaning to read it for about 8 years now, but the idiotical backlash against the film of The Golden Compass got me motivated. I liked it ENORMOUSLY. I never read fantasy/sci fi so it was a real eye opener. The relgious themes were very interesting. I've since read an incidental short story/possible chapter of forthcoming novel? thing called
Lyra's Oxford and a short book on the science alluded to in the trilogy and a concordium of the triliogy's references to hisotry, religion, philosophy etc. The latter was not that great. I'd like to read what looks like a heeeelarious fundamentalist book that warns parents against
His Dark Materials (
The Pied Piper of Atheism) but I won't buy it--I need to get it from a library.
I also read the Junot Diaz book of short stories,
Drown this weekend (I'd read a handful in the New Yorker when they were published) with an eye to possibly using some in my current Intro to Lit course. I also re-read Sinclair Lewis's
Babbit this weekend just because. I've also been reading a great deal of Sherman Alexie.
I'm finishing a huge ass bio of William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) because it touches on things relevant to my book project. Funny charity should mention the monument at the Little Big Horn in her asinine drivel on the MMM---like everything else she's completely incorrect about it, but I thought better of getting off topic with a discussion even though I'd been reading about that very thing.
Not pertinent to anything pressing is my dallying through
In Sacred Lonliness. I don't know if I'll finish it, I think I've gotten what I "need" from it. It's very depressing and while that never usually puts me off things, boy, this is a very very sad book. I did glean some useful items for my own work, though, so maybe I'll go back to it.
That's whats on my mind at the moment. I actually was toying with the idea of opening a Celestial or Off Topic thread on
His Dark Materials. I can't recommend it highly enough. It moved me emotionally as well as engaging me intellectually. It made me cry at least five times and it made me think of "god" in very different ways than I have before. Also it made me remember good things in Milton (hard to beleive) and why I need to get a lot of Blake lines tattooed on my body (argh!! I still haven;t gotten my manuscript tattoo!!! How do I forget this? Have I mentioned the author Shelley Jackson yet here? And how I'm part of the living manuscript of one of her stories????)
Ok...make of this what you will. I'm typing while eating dinner and drinking a nice dry white wine....also its raining.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."