Summer Reading List
Well, I don't really have one, but these are the books that I've managed to read thus far. It helps that I had a conference as I was able to knock out three books whilst there:
1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides This book about a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl but lived as a male adult won the pulitzer in 2003. It's quite a lengthy novel and one that begins with the narrator's grandparents in post world war I Asia Minor and their journey to prohibition era Detroit, through race riots in the 1960s and to present day Berlin. I read it as part of my monthly book discussion group.
2. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway -- This is another book discussion group selection. It's the novel that made the running of the bulls in Pamplona famous. This is a typical Hemingway book: short, choppy sentences, man's existential conflict with nature/animal, and flat, static female characters.
3. The Silent Angel by Heinrich Boll -- This was an unpublished novel by the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature author. It is quite an interesting book about a German soldier who somehow escapes execution for desertion and flees home to the ruined city of Cologne(although it is never mentioned by name). Highly recommended.
4. Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country by Andy Bellin -- A journalist and avid poker player gives a very honest account on the nation's obsession with gambling.
This is a book which is difficult to describe. Within it there are tips, "war stories" about particular poker games, interviews with professional poker players and several down and out stories about some of the pathetic gamblers and low-lifes
who play the new national pastime.
1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides This book about a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl but lived as a male adult won the pulitzer in 2003. It's quite a lengthy novel and one that begins with the narrator's grandparents in post world war I Asia Minor and their journey to prohibition era Detroit, through race riots in the 1960s and to present day Berlin. I read it as part of my monthly book discussion group.
2. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway -- This is another book discussion group selection. It's the novel that made the running of the bulls in Pamplona famous. This is a typical Hemingway book: short, choppy sentences, man's existential conflict with nature/animal, and flat, static female characters.
3. The Silent Angel by Heinrich Boll -- This was an unpublished novel by the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature author. It is quite an interesting book about a German soldier who somehow escapes execution for desertion and flees home to the ruined city of Cologne(although it is never mentioned by name). Highly recommended.
4. Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country by Andy Bellin -- A journalist and avid poker player gives a very honest account on the nation's obsession with gambling.
This is a book which is difficult to describe. Within it there are tips, "war stories" about particular poker games, interviews with professional poker players and several down and out stories about some of the pathetic gamblers and low-lifes
who play the new national pastime.
posted by torporindy at 6/17/2005
2 Comments:
Sun Also Rises is the only Hemingway work I've ever made it through without getting really bored and/or annoyed and/or rooting for people to die so the book would end.
Tried to read Moveable Feast for Banned Book Month and failed miserably.
Lemming, a friend once remarked on Hemingway's Old Man and the sea--"it confirmed what I always suspected of fishing--it is boring".
I've never been a Hemingway fan. I do enjoy Camus who writes with a similar choppy style.
Hi Chased.
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