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| From: | edunkel  | 6/27/2007 2:04 pm |
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(1 of 6) | | | | 36.1 | |
| What are you planning to read this summer? |
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Messages 2 through 3 of 6 were Deleted
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| | | | | 36.4 in reply to 36.3 | |
| the parallel between the end of the Pax Romana and the impending stoppage of a potential Pax Americana is very interesting. I'm sure there are many similarities between the two from leadership to the properties of each society to macropolitical conditions. This summer I'm reading Issacson's Einstein biography which I'm almost done with. It reads more like a science textbook than a tale of the man himself. Maybe that says a lot about the man. I'm also reading a book called Three Cups of Tea. It's the account of a man who voyaged to the northern, most remote reaches of Pakistan to book schools for the children of that area. Truly, truly inspiring |
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| From: | kheller | 7/19/2007 10:41 am |
| To: | ALL |
(5 of 6) | | | | 36.5 in reply to 36.1 | |
When we started this summer reading discussion, the idea was to recommend books or authors. While we realize it's difficult to get published and reviewed, it would be nice if posters could refrain from simply promoting their own work or posting recommendations that read like amazon.com blurbs. This summer, I've read Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, which was recommended on an NPR block. This short British novel is terrific, funny and insightful, and it's nice to discover an often overlooked author. Are their authors in this vein that you might recommend? |
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| | | | | 36.6 in reply to 36.5 | |
If you were a local author who cannot get reviewed after five (soon to be six) bestselling novels available on Amazon, you would be frustated too! I love Somerset Maugham. I have read everything the man ever wrote .Maugham, as John Le Carre and Raymond Chandler correctly said, invented the modern spy thriller with his ASHENDEN series. Other great storytellers? Balzac, Faulkner at his best, the great Russians from Gogol tro Isaac Babel. Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert's protege, was not only a superb short story writer but a fine writer of short novels. America's most underrated novelist is John O'Hara, not only our best short story writer (even better than Cheever andf Hemingway and Fitzgerald) but the author of APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA, perhaps the best first novel ever written by an American, and the result of Dorothy Parker's persistent encouragement. Among current authors, I would say that in the WWII generation Mailer and Vidal are both superb storytellers with wildly different gifts. Some people find Roth and Updike compelling; I find that they both peaked in 1969 and have been repeating their obsessions ever since. Among even younger novelists, John Irving still provides value for the price of a paperback. I would also commend Robert Stone as perhaps America's finest current novelist. It is typical of the literary world that DeLillo, whom I admired when his early boks were out of print and i discovered them in a used bookstore on the Upper West Side, is pittted against Roth as "our greatest novelist" whenn Robert Stone is really our masterpiece writer. |
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