What I'm Reading Right Now

From Zeugma

Contents 1 2008 2 3 2007 4 2006 5 2005 6 2004

2008

• The Dungeon, vol. 2. Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim.
  
• The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins.
  

2007

• The Dungeon, vol. 1. Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim.
  
• The Ruby in Her Navel. Barry Unsworth.
  
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams.
  
• Brave New World. Aldous Huxley.
  
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Philip K. Dick.
  
• The Time Machine. H. G. Wells
• The Invisible Man. H. G. Wells
  
• Visual Literacy. Lynell Burmark. A very basic little book about using visuals in education.
  
• Beyond Bullet Points. Cliff Atkinson. I'd heard a lot about this book, and it does have a very good argument: bulletpoints put people to sleep. That being said, and being said in a mere sentence, there's really not anywhere else to go. But this books takes some 240 pages to get there anyway.
  
• The Other Boleyn Girl. Philippa Gregory. This historical novel, about Mary Boleyn, mistress to Henry VIII before he married her sister Anne, was really pretty fascinating. Gregory seems to do good historical research; there's a nice essay about how she goes about researching her materials in the back of the book.
  
• The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Susanna Clarke. I loved Clarke's full-length novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, about an alternate world of magicians; this one introduces more characters from the same world. Very fun.
  
• Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. I found this author incredibly self-absorbed and pretentious ("Don't do anything to damage my brain!" she shrieks dramatically before asking her shrink for antidepressants). And yet the book, about overcoming hardship and emotionally difficult periods, kept making me think about various issues anyway. There's something here.....I just wish she weren't so annoying in getting at it.
  
• Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi. An amazing autobiographic graphic novel (sounds redundant, doesn't it?) about a young girl growing up in Iran after the fall of the Shah. Really poignant and touching--and I learned a lot I didn't know before.
  
• Gentlemen's Blood. Barbara Holland. A readable history of duels--from sword-fights to pistol fights--and the incredibly misplaced code of honor that led to it all. Mostly this is a series of anecdotes, from the famous Burr-Hamilton duel to the two best friends who got in an argument (to the death) over which steamboat was creeping up the river the fastest. I love her unstated thesis: "What the huh?"
  Males, Nails, Sample Sales. Stephanie Pierson. Kind of silly, but just the ticket if you're looking for summer reading candy. In fact, it's so silly that I'm not even going to provide a link. I picked it up at Anthropologie....'nuff said.
  
• Endangered Pleasures. Barbara Holland. Light-hearted essays about enjoying life. Holland has something of a rant against America's puritanical work ethic....this book will make anyone self-righteously lazy.  
  
• A Contract With God. Will Eisner. A graphic novel about the travails of immigrants to New York in the 1930s.
  
• Moon Over Minneapolis. Fay Weldon. Short stories by one of my favorite contemporary authors. These are all about women making decisions and almost--but never quite!--coming to serious conclusions about life. Rather empowering, really.
  
• The Joy of Drinking. Barbara Holland. A longish essay on the role alcohol has played in society from earliest times. Really quite wonderful. It's a celebration of being human.
  
• Far From the Madding Gerund. Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum. A collection of funny essays on language and linguistics. Loved it.
  
• Y The Last Man. Brian K. Vaughan. All the men on the planet simultaneously implode--except for one. He becomes a fugitive, doggedly trying to return to his beloved girlfriend while all the women left on the planet hunt him down. This is a graphic novel, part of a series.
  
• Almost French. Sarah Turnbull. About the tribulations of an Australian woman who marries a Frenchman and has to adjust to different cultural and social expectations. Kind of whiny.
  
• The Gunslinger. Stephen King. Very male. But different for the Stephen King oevre....and I like the source material, which is Browning's "Childe Roland."If that hadn't been the alleged source material, well, I don't know if I'd as liked it much at all.
  
• 300. Frank Moore. A visually stunning rendition of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans held off an army of thousands before, of course, being mercilessly slaughtered. There's a movie coming out this summer on the subect.
  
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Bill Bryson. Couldn't wait for the paperback: I had to get the hardbound. And it was worth it. I love Bill Bryson: this one is funny as it gets--vintage Bryson.

2006

• Mountains Beyond Mountains. Tracy Kidder. We're considering this one for the Freshman Reading Program. It's about Paul Farmer and his humanitarian work in Haiti. This guy's amazing...but the guilt you feel after reading about what the Haitians have to put up with and what he's willing to sacrifice for them is enormous. An excellent reminder of the kind of inequity that exists in the world.
• S is for Silence. Sue Grafton. Picked this one off my friend's shelf in France and happily skimmed my way through the jeg-lag hours. This one follows a slightly format from Grafton's others: you get historical narrative from the past mixed with investigation from the present. Grafton pretty much had to do it that way, given the thinness of the plot. But it was fun. Wonder if her ingenuity will last until "Z."
  
• Rubyfruit Jungle. Rita Mae Brown. Got a kick out of this one--it's got a feisty and unrepentant heroine--a lesbian--who just does what she wants to do and refuses to ever question herself or get kicked down.
  
• I is for Innocent. Sue Grafton. I used to be hooked on this series, until I got to "H" and never went back. Now I've rediscovered the mindless joy of Grafton. Not great mysteries, perhaps. But a fun page-turner when there's nothing else around.
  
• The Silver Nutmeg. Palmer Brown. The sequel to Beyond the Pawpaw Trees. Not as good as the first, but still wonderful.
  
• To Shield the Queen, Fiona Buckley. A historical mystery about the figures surrounding Elizabeth I and the various machinations for the throne. I thought this was pretty well done, and my standard for historical fiction is pretty high. I'll probably read the others in the series now.
  
• Beyond the Pawpaw Trees. Palmer Brown. I just finished reading this one to my daughter. It's a pity it's out of print, because this was one of my favorites as a child, and I read it over and over again. It's full of delightful twists of reality and lots of thoughtful songs and proverbs. A classic.
  
• The Track of the Cat. Nevada Barr. It took me a while to get into this new mystery series, but I liked it once I did. It's about a female park services ranger solving all the various weird things that take place out in the wilderness. Much of it, apparently, is based on the personal experience of the author.
  
• 84 Charing Cross Road. Helen Hanff. Completely delightful and sweet, and sad.
  
• Conrad's Fate. Diana Wynne Jones. A juvenile-fiction fantasy novel. Not her best.
  
• The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Haven't read this since high school....it really is a great book. I hadn't remembered how great.
  
• A Certain Justice. P. D. James. A Dalgliesh mystery.
  
• My Love Affair With England. Susan Allen Toth. Travels in England.
  
• Mostly Bob. Tom Corwin. Sad and sweet. About a dog.
  
• A Far Cry From Kensington. Muriel Spark. A great book, though it's not really about anything--a mutual dislike that gets a little out of hand. My second-favorite Spark, next to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
  
• The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. Fay Weldon. Absolutely loved this. Am putting it on my best-books ever list. But it's not for everyone (as the back jacket warns).
  
• Aiding and Abetting. Muriel Spark. This was sort-of okay....it's about this wacko faux-psychologist who encounters the man who famously murdered his wife and maid some years back. It's supposed to be funny, but didn't really do too much for me.
  
• An Artist of the Floating World. Kazuo Ishiguro. I like Ishiguro so much I decided to go back to read one of his earlier works. I liked this one especially for its Japanese history and atmosphere, though it's a little slow...and after a while one does start to notice a certain Ishiguro "mode": first-person narrator tells own history, denying his own guilt/complicity in some horrifying aspect of the past. It's here, too, although the ending is softer and therefore a little more surprising than in some of his later works.
  
• Metamorphosis. Franz Kafka. Gregor Samsa has been feeling buggy lately, and one day awakens to discover that he has, indeed, turned into a large bug. I've read this one many times, of course, but read it again for my Literary Study class. And what a great work it is--a parable for modern times.
  
• Ex-Libris. Ross King. A historical mystery involving the collection of lost manuscripts--I thought it would be just my thing. I'm always looking for a new Ian Pears or Umberto Eco (actually, I'd very much appreciate it if Eco would become a new Eco). But this one bogs down heavily toward the middle before kicking into action again at the end. A certain amount of skimming is therefore necessary for the payoff...which turns out, disappointingly, to be all-too-familiar.
  
• Never Let Me Go.Kazuo Ishiguro. My favorite Ishiguro is still Remains of the Day, but I still very much liked this one, even though I knew the "secret" behind the plot--and how stale a plot device it is already-- before I started. But this is poignant nonetheless, and beautifully written. Ishiguro is best at characters coming to know themselves and their own tragic realities.
  
• The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I never got into this book like some have; still, I like some of the allegorical commentary on the types of people out there and how to approach what the author calls "the heart." I guess I'll spend some time ruminating on this to see if it gets me anywhere
  
• Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen. I assigned this one for class and remembered, once again, why I think Jane Austen is one of the top three writers in the English language (after Shakespeare and Chaucer, of course). Her insight into people and their motivations is just so sharp. This is a book to be savored slowly, so you can enjoy the wit...but alas, my class doesn't seem to be yet convinced.
  
• Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog John Grogan. I really liked this one--I like stories about dogs anyway; go figure. Anyway, this one has some hilarious moments, and it's a sweet story about the powerful relationship between people and dogs.
  
• Loop Group. Larry McMurtry. About the lives and relationships of a couple of older women. Supposed to be funny, but mainly just sad and painful as far as I was concerned. And I hate these attempts to get inside women's minds--McMurtry's grasp on the feminine psyche is about as far off from reality as you can get. I skimmed through to the end--neither the plot nor the characters got any better. Mostly just worse. Yuck.
  
• The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde. I taught this one in my Literary Study class, and have read it before, of course. But I was struck again upon rereading by what an amazing writer Wilde is. This is up there among my favorites of all time.
  
• Why I'm Still Married. Propp and Trounstine. A collection of essays by well-known women authors on love and monogamy, a topic that had come up in class. I found it a nice, affirmation-like, Valentine's-sort of book, until I got to the last essay on open marriage and threw the whole thing in the trash. Yick. This thing left such a bad taste in my mouth.
  
• The Lost Continent Bill Bryson. I poo-pooed this book about a year ago, but I take it back. After you get past the Southern states the monologue becomes witty, vintage Bryson I adore.
  
• The Lighthouse. P.D. James. Critics are lauding this mystery as one of her best in years; I'd have to agree. I love the island atmosphere...reminds me of Skull Beneath the Skin, which I always thought was her best work. I'll never like Dalgliesh as much as Cordelia, but this book at least comes close.
  
• Ptolemy's Gate. Jonathan Stroud. Fantastic conclusion to the Bartimaeus Trilogy.

2005

• BEST BOOK I'VE READ ALL YEAR: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Followed, at a distant second, by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
  
• Barrel Fever. David Sedaris. One of Sedaris's earliest books (maybe the very earliest?)...and it really shows. These stories are harsher and have less sympathetic characters than Sedaris's later books. Still, there are some funny moments.
  
• A Year of Wonders. Geraldine Brooks. I knew this would be a weep-fest when I picked it up: it's loosely based on the historical town of Eyam, which was struck by the plague in the 16th century. Only a handful of people survived (and this, incidentally, has become interesting to virologists of late because the descendents of the few survivors apparently have left an interesting genetic legacy for scientists to explore....but this is of course beside the point). Anyway, this story is told from the point of view of one of the survivors, a woman who buries her husband and all her children in the course of a single year.
  
• Mere Christianity. C. S. Lewis. A pretty startling book, actually. The first half is an explanation of how Lewis turned from aetheism to Christianity; the second half is a justification of contemporary Christian practice. I found the first half very thought-provoking; Lewis raises a lot of issues I guess I'd either taken for granted or just never questioned very much. The second half? Eh.....take or leave it.
  
• The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. John Steinbeck. Such a wonderful book. I read this years ago in high school; now it's been reissued, with Steinbeck's letters about the writing of the book at the end. He writes these stories as "parables" for modern humanity...and like many of Steinbeck's later works, this one is funny and wise and sad, all at the same time.
  
• Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary is so hateful....as a portrait in reality, I'd have to feel some sympathy for this woman who is so much more creative and bright than her repressive society will ever appreciate. But the way Flaubert paints her, these very characteristics are despicable. Shame on him.
  
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain. Haven't read this in years...and I must confess, I don't usually include works I've read for courses on this list...unless--go figure--they seem somehow more novelesque than the works I normally read? Anyway, this one is such a classic, using all the absurdities of the sixth century as metaphors for 19th century society.
  
• Candide. Voltaire. What a horrifying work! I've read bits and pieces of it in the past as good examples of parody, but when you put it all together--ye gads. What a dismal look at the 19th century.
  
• Comma Sense. Richard Lederer and John Shore. I admit this one is for a course...but it's awfully fun, and a good review even for people who think they've got their grammar down pat. I read it straight through, almost like a novel.
  
• Blink. Malcolm Gladwell. An interesting account of why our snap judgments work--or why they fail. And--most useful of all--a promise that practicing the interpretation of "micro" facial expressions can help us become better at these kinds of intuitive judgments.
  
• Curriculum as Conversation. Arthur N. Applebee. I expected much from this book with its theme of valuing "knowledge-in-action" over the memorization of traditions. But as usual, there's a lot of talk here at not much sense of how to really change the classroom curriculum, except through the now-standard cliches of "collaborative learning," "portfolios," and other catch-all terms that have bandied about for the last twenty years.
  
• The Princess and the Goblin.[%28Empty%20Reference%21%29 ]George MacDonald. A children's classic I read years and years ago. The images are just as powerful and magical now as they were then.
  
• A Year in the Merde Stephen Clarke. Ouch! But very funny, in a most unpolitically correct kind of way. It's about a young Englishman who takes a year-long stint in France as a kind of advertising-promotions kind of guy. But really he's just there for the women.
  
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Susannah Clarke. Again....and it really is that good. I love, love, love this book....it's a "me" kind of book. Can't promise that those who aren't me will like it as much....
  
• Magical Thinking Augusten Burroughs. Less narratival than Burroughs' other books, but still, some hysterical essays in here. I like the one about the manipulative maid the best.
  
• Running With Scissors. Augusten Burroughs. The horrifying and yet still strangely funny first book in Burroughs' memoirs, about his life with the completely dysfunctional family of a psychologist who adopts him. Doesn't make you trust psychologists much!
  
• A Wild Sheep Chase. Haruki Murakami. What a wretched book--pretentious, condescending, even poorly written. The best I can say about it is that it is nice to see that great writers don't necessarily always start that way. Practice helps.
  
• Dry. Augusten Burroughs. This book was recommended to me as "like David Sedaris, but crueler." It's definitely about a harsher, darker world--the world of a serious alcoholic who can't even fathom the extent of his own problems. I loved this book, though--ultimately it's about really screwing up and then managing to get on with life again.
  
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Haruki Murakami. A completely inexplicable book, with so many questions left unanswered at the end, and yet I loved it anyway. I can't explain it. I don't think this one is for everyone. Read the Amazon readers' reviews....they'll give you a better sense of it.
  
• More Than You Know. Beth Gutcheon. A creepy ghost story about a young girl who unravels the truth behind a hundred-year-old ax murder--but also very literary. Dark and suspenseful--I stayed up half the night reading it through to the end, and then couldn't sleep afterward.
  
• Lost in a Good Book. Jasper Fforde. I'd heard quite a lot about this detective series that takes place in literary fiction: i.e. bringing
• Rebecca's deWinter to justice for the murder of his wife and the like. Fun, but really whacky.
  
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. J. K. Rowling. A little predictable, and not as good as the others....but the final volume promises to be quite different. I can't wait.
  
• Will in the World (Stephen Greenblatt) and The Age of Shakespeare (Frank Kermode). I read these side by side, comparing their very different conclusions about Shakespeare's alleged Catholicism, the circumstances that so severely reduced his prosperous father, and the like. I think Greenblatt's careful analysis of the hostile religious environment of the time was much more persuasive than Kermode's dismissive wave of the hand regarding Catholicism....Kermode likes to stick to facts, and there are certainly very few of those at hand. But Greenblatt does so much more with what he has.
  
• Gullible's Travels. Cash Peters. Funny stories about a radio reporter whose job it is to seek out trashy museums and tours.
  
• Mona Lisa Overdrive. William Gibson. A little thick in plot, and lots of unanswered questions at the end, but that's not what Gibson's known for: its his ability to create atmosphere and a character or two you really like and trust. That's the way I felt about Angie Mitchell, the girl with the biochip in her brain.
  
• What the Dogs Have Taught Me. Merril Markoe. Kind of like a smart Bridget Jones with dogs. Hilarious.
  
• Brewer's Rogues, Villains, and Eccentrics. William Donaldson. A compendium of little histories about some of Britain's more colorful figures. And who knew there were so many women out there doing great things disguised as men? No one knew they were really female until they died.
  
• Mortal Love. Elizabeth Hand. All the best books I've read in recent years have been Common Reader recommendations--this is another one. It's about a muse and the obsessive effect she has on a generation of artists and writers.
  
• Hold the Enlightenment. Tim Cahill. I've read all the Bryson out there, but Cahill may be the next best thing
  
• Stitch N' Bitch. Debbie Stoller. A Yale Ph.D. offers the recapturing of the domestic arts as the next wave of feminism. And she tries to teach you to knit, too--with more than a bit of attitude--but so far I haven't absorbed much of that part.
  
• A Walk in the Woods. Bill Bryon. Again. Because it was so good the first time.
  
• Pattern Recognition William Gibson. Really good, with lots of nice postmodern commentary. Made me think.
  
• Portnoy's Complaint. Philip Roth. Hmm. A rather scary book about a misogynist, self-loathiing young man I hope I never meet the likes of. Still, kind of interesting.
  
• The Bad Beginning. Lemony Snicket. A quick read and pretty funny, in a diabolical, subversive, take-pleasure-in-the-pain-of-others sort of way.
  
• Living Buddha, Living Christ. Thich Nhat Hanh. A reflective set of essays that reinterpret conventional Christianity. This was loaned to me after the death of my grandmother...I read it straight through, then bought myself a copy.
  
• Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office. Lois P. Frankel. The title says it all: it's about the things men do that get them ahead, that women have been taught to be too polite to do themselves.
  
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Susannah Clarke. I loved this book. A Dickens-like story about 19th century England, except there are magicians in it. Fun and wonderfully satisfying.

2004

• Shadow of the Wind. Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I absolutely loved this book all the way until the disappointingly trite ending, which you can see coming pretty much from page 7. My advice is to stop reading at p. 359 and just assume you already know the end anyway. That way you'll enjoy it. It's about a boy whose father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he discovers the eponymous Shadow of the Wind, written by an author has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As the boy becomes more fascinated with the author's life and disappearance he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying his books. The boy may have the last surviving copy, and--of course!--someone wants it. Very forceful and beautifully written--all the way, as I said, until the last hundred pages or so.
• The Songs of the Kings. Barry Unsworth. A retelling of the beginning moments of the Iliad, with lots of attention paid to the personalities who manipulate events for their own agendas. Here Odysseus is the cynical plotter who edges the Greeks into launching their war against the Trojans by sacrificing the king's own daughter. Excellent just as a page-turner, but also for understanding the central characters of the Homeric epics on a much deeper level.
• Lady Oracle. Margaret Atwood. An extraordinarily unorganized woman screws up her life enough that she has to fake a suicide to get out of her problems. By the end of the book this woman was really irritating me.
• Chimera. John Barth. Three ancient myths retold to underscore a postmodernish theme about the entertwined seductions of reading and sex.
• The Golem's Eye. Jonathan Stroud. The second book in the Bartimaeus series. I may like these as much as the Harry Potter books. Is that possible? These characters are so much darker and more cynical--and so much funnier, in a way. The HP books are humorous, too, but in the details; these books have less whimsical descriptions, but much nastier and funnier characters.
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. David Sedaris. Another excellent volume from one of my favorite writers. More poignant than his others, and a little less raucously funny, but still wonderful.
• The Amulet of SamarkandJonathan Stroud. I picked this one up as a filler-in for the next Harry Potter. But it turned out to be an excellent read. It's about a child-magician with a vendetta for a much more experienced colleague.
• The Alienist.Caleb Carr. A murder mystery set in turn-of-the-century New York, with lots of atmosphere. Pretty darned good, if a trifle in need of editing.
• The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down.Anne Fadiman. About the tragic illness of a young Hmong girl and the conflict between her parents and their cultural beliefs and U.S. medical practice. Heartbreaking.
• Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a PsychoanalystJeffrey Masson. An account of the author's training in psychoanalysis and his subsequent disillusionment with the field. A very revealing glimpse into the mechanisms of self-preservation in any organized institution.
• Dogs Never Lie About Love. Jeffrey Masson. A fun book about dogs and their loyalty, with lots of anecdotes.
• Against Therapy. Jeffrey Masson. A real eye-opener. Some of the descriptions of abuse in the name of therapy were so horrifying I could hardly bear to read them. By the time I got to the end of the book, I couldn't help agreeing with Masson that the good therapists must be rare indeed, because any system designed to profit from the misery of others will have self-corruption built within it.
• The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Alexander McCall Smith. A sweet but wise story about a woman in Botswana who solves mysteries for her neighbors. The style is a lot like Achebe's Things Fall Apart--simple and direct, with lots of cultural atmosphere.
• San Diego Specters. John J. Lamb. I confess--I love ghost stories. And these are all local ones! A fun, quick read--and a good way to find out about San Diego history.
• Days Like Today. Rachel Ingalls. I was thrilled to find a new Rachel Ingalls book--though this one is only available in the UK (what's up with that?). This is a collection of stories that allegedly deals with the psychology embodied by the great Greek myths of Cupid and Psyche, Oedipus, Odysseus, and Icarus--but the magical realism of some of her earlier works isn't there at all. Cleanly written and very readable, but the themes and connections to the myths are difficult to grasp.
• Catch 22. Joseph Heller. My father's been prodding me for years to read this absurdist antiwar classic. I love Yossarian's dead-pan logic and his fearless twisting of the rules--like when he convinces his entire camp that Bologna has already been taken by the Allies so that he and his squadron don't have to fly out there on a suicidal mission to bomb it. And some parts are laugh-out-loud: take the doctor who describes the clueless young couple who ask him why they aren't having any children, only to have it revealed that the wife is still a virgin. Great stuff.
• Grettir's Saga. One of the few sagas to engage the supernatural. The antihero is the outlaw Grettir, who battles ghosts, bog-men, and worse in an endless metaphoric struggle against the rules of society. For a heartless outlaw, Grettir manages to inspire a huge amount of sympathy by the end.
• Hrafnkel's Saga. A thirteenth-century Icelandic saga about honor and dishonor and the consequences of dealing with bullies. (It doesn't always come out fair in the end.) Includes the most realistic depictions of medieval rural life and the medieval way of thinking that I've come across outside of Chaucer.
• Five Quarters of the Orange. Joanne Harris. An amazing book--about a French woman's reminiscence on her childhood during the Occupation and the dark secret that affects all of her adult choices. Full of earthy images (and food!); sinister and troubling, but ultimately so not what you expect.
• Travels With Charley. John Steinbeck. A wonderful book, slow and meandering, about travel, America, and the companionship of dogs. Best of all are Steinbeck's incredible insights into the human condition. Not all of it is uplifting--parts are even horrifying--but every bit of it is worth reading. I may add this to my "best books ever" list.
• A Mind to Murder. P.D. James. I think I've read almost all of her books. This is an early one, less psychological than some of her more recent works and closer to the genre of straight "detective fiction." It takes place in a psychiatric clinic, where someone is rooting through the more embarrassing client records for the purpose of blackmail...
• Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends. Marie Heaney. A beautifully retold collection of strange Celtic tales from a 12th c. manuscript that date from much earlier, dealing with such folk heroes as Cuchulainn, Bran, and my favorite, Finn. Many take place in the area surrounding Newgrange, a large Celtic center north of Dublin; others are part of the Ulster Cycle and are centered in northeastern Ireland. Among these is "Bricriu's Feast," considered one of the analogues to Gawain and the Green Knight because of its folkloric beheading sequence.
• In a Sunburned Country. Bill Bryson. I think I may be running out of Bryson books after this. What will I do?!! This is one of my favorite Bryson books yet--full of interesting stories about Australia and its people. Did you know that one of Australia's prime ministers took a dip in the ocean one day not so long ago, and disappeared forever? Can you imagine that happening to a president in the US? I've never had any particular desire to visit Australia, but Bryson may be changing my mind.
• The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown. What a disappointment. The first few chapters were promisingly gripping. But then the conspiracy stuff itself turned out to be so...well, so late eighties. What's all the fuss about? This stuff has been said so many times it's no longer interesting. And I'd guess any historical research Brown did came from watching A & E.
• Made in America. Bill Bryson. Okay, Bryson's redeemed himself with this one. This book is great--the kind of book I wish I could write. Lots of information on US history and anecdotes about some American heroes. I had no idea until Bryson came along that Ben Franklin was such a lascivious old coot. And, of course, it's funny...
• How to Speak Dog. Stanley Coren. A friend sent me this one to celebrate the arrival of our new [../Documents/My%20Files/Web/corgi.html puppy]. I had to laugh at the idea of a psychologist who specializes in dogs, but this book is really insightful. Plus it's got lots of information on animal communication patterns, the history of the relationship between humans and pets, and the like, all presented in a very readable, turn-the-page format.
• The Lost Continent. Bill Bryson. This is the first Bryson book I've been disappointed in. The first two chapters, on his father, are marvelous, but after that things just get boring. Perhaps it's the subject: life in small-town America. Bryson makes all these towns look tediously alike.
• Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi. Easily the best and most touching book I've read on the impact of great literature on everyday life--especially life in which reading literature can be considered a treasonous offense.
• Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Dave Hickey. This one came highly recommended; it's about the value of art, lit, and Las Vegas. I found it readable but not quite as inspiring as the one above.
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Thomas C. Foster. I'm ordering this one for my next Intro to Lit course. The chatty tone gets a little annoying after a while, but there are still lots of great pointers in here for beginning students, like "every trip is a quest," "if she comes up again, it's baptism," and "irony trumps everything."
• Think Like a Shrink. Emmanuel Rosen. Some insights, I guess, but nothing that hadn't occurred to me already. Kind of trite, come to think of it, and more than a little self-congratulatory.
• House on Mango Street. Sandra Cisneros. See "overrated."
• The Alchemist. Paulo Coelho. Thought I'd read the book everyone's making such a fuss about. It's sort of an okay allegory about life as a journey. A little too Jonathan-Livingston-Seagullish for my tastes.
• Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis. Ellis is such a beautiful writer. These are quiet pieces, but poignant.
• Bill Bryson: A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island; I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Neither Here Nor There. Can you tell I'm on a Bryson kick? Who else would remark that you can tell the nationality of people by what kind of food they eat: "The Germans had plates piled high with meat and potatoes, the Danes had Carlsbergs and cream cakes, the Swedes one piece of crispbread with a little dead fish on it"? I just can't stop reading these--I haven't laughed so hard in ages.
• [../Documents/My%20Files/Web/Cold%20Comfort%20Farm Cold Comfort Farm]. Stella Gibbons. Hilarious and sweet. But you have to read Jane Austen first.
• Does She Or Doesn't She. Alisa Kwitney. An inauspicious beginning to my year's readings. Started out funny in an absurd sort of way, but got ludicrously over-the-top at the end.