Recently finished books?

[kpjayan]

Christophe Isherwood - Mr.Norris Changes Trains : One of the famous Berlin stories of Isherwood. Written and published in 1935, during the rise of Hitler. Good book, but "A Singleman" is better.

[Hamlet]

- as background reading to the 16/17th century I guess:-

"Reprobates: The Rise and Fall of the Cavaliers before, during and after The English Civil War" by John Stubbs, the lives of certain characters and poets who came out of the circle located around Ben Jonson, a nonfiction account of England's path towards Civil War, Cavaliers and roundheads and religious attitudes of the time.

Stubbs appears to be an author on the up, his "John Donne The Reformed Soul" looks interesting.

"The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy, made quite a splash apparently in the 90s when first released, England's Catholic past, reappraised.

[Hamlet]

oh, and 20 pages off the end of DON QUIXOTE, hopefully that counts as being as good as across the line, but a "reading" judge on these matters might disagree.

[Worldeater]

Antonio Tabucchi-Pereira maintains
Witold Gombrowicz-Diary

[pesahson]

Antonio Tabucchi-Pereira maintains
Witold Gombrowicz-Diary

Gombrowicz's Diary has been on my bookshelf for years now. I don't know whether I'll ever get around to reading it. I'm glad you liked it. The opening words are memorable. "Monday. Me. Tuesday. Me. Wednesday. Me. Thursday. Me"

The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us Ch.F. Chabris and D. Simons.

Noting groundbreaking but I enjoyed it and learned a lot. It covers the following subjects: illusion of attention, illusion of memory, illusion of confidence, illusion of knowledge, illusion of cause, illusion of potential.

N'espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres (This is Not the End of the Book) Jean-Claude Carriere, Umberto Eco and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac.

My first book entirely read in French. The only reason I got it was for a learning experience, but surprisingly, I understood 90% without much effort.
This book is like following a conversation between well-read and passionate people. Both Eco and Carriere are book collectors and it was a great pleasure to read/hear them talk about what they love.

[Eric]

There's a lot of good stuff in Gombrowicz' diaries, Pesahson. The main merit of the books is that he gives honest opinions about everyone, usually scathing ones. One of the butts of his attacks is the exile Polish community, with which you would have thought he would sympathise. But he finds many such people nostalgic and stuck in an old-fashioned world that perhaps never really existed in the first place. He doesn't mince words and has opinions on many things, not least on literature. Though there is certainly an element of narcissism in the diaries.

For those of you that read Spanish, there are interesting glimpses into his life in Argentina at:

http://www.literatura.org/wg/wgea.htm

I think that at least the first two volumes of Gombrowicz' diaries are available in English. I've only got the first one, which only covers the years 1953-1956, but even in that you get a good idea of his diary style.

I've not got him as my avatar for nothing (although I don't look a bit like him).

[sirena]

The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
The Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope

[Colonel Green]

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Not quite what I was expecting, in many ways. Given Dostoyevsky's reputation, the last thing I imagined was a redemptive ending. Anyway, this is one of those novels where you can immediately see why it became a classic. It also, interestingly, deconstructs Nietzche decades before he even started publishing his theories. The plot is becomes a little Dickens-style contrived in places, but that's the 19th century novel for you.

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The third of Singer's novels that I've read, and perhaps The Slave (the first) set a particularly high bar, but neither of the next two really measured up to that or to the short story collection that I've read by him. This isn't a bad story by any means, and has some very tense scenes, but I've seen this listed as one of his best works, and I don't think I'd quite put it up there.

New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) by Czeslaw Milosz

I've been picking my way through this over the last month or so; there's only so much of one man's poetry that you can read at a time, and this thing is 750 pages. Huge poetry collections like this are a bit hard to rate; there's a lot of five-star material here, and long sections of poems (and some prose; there's a great piece on the death of Christopher Robin Milne) that didn't especially interest me. I thought the best work were from the first two post-World War II collections (the scraps of material from the 1930s are pretty unremarkable) and toward the end, where he becomes especially fixated on his own mortality (and rivers). I'd previously read his non-fiction The Captive Mind.

[Bubba]

Ladro contro assassino (Thief versus murderer), a slim crime novel by the interesting Ukraine-born Italian writer Giorgio Scerbanenco, who died the year of my birth but whose books are still being read and reprinted and even, I think, translated into English. He's an odd one, and to my mind his books are far better than those of that sentimental French lefty--his name escapes me just now--whose Marseille-based crime novels were inexplicably popular ten years or so ago. Scerbanenco's political sympathies are harder to pin down; in Ladro contro assassino he makes fun of Italian hippies, but they also turn out to be positive characters. In a lot of his work, his extraordinary sympathy for his women characters is also evident--though they often have bad things happen to him (not always are they passive victims). That he made a living as a writer for women's magazines may account in part for this show of sympathy, but it also strikes one as genuine, a fairly rare quality in a lot of Mediterranean (French and Italian, that is) noir, which, when it comes to women, often veers wildly between the opposing poles of mawkishness and machismo, if not downright misogyny.

[Daniel del Real]

Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Not quite what I was expecting, in many ways. Given Dostoyevsky's reputation, the last thing I imagined was a redemptive ending. Anyway, this is one of those novels where you can immediately see why it became a classic. It also, interestingly, deconstructs Nietzche decades before he even started publishing his theories. The plot is becomes a little Dickens-style contrived in places, but that's the 19th century novel for you.

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The third of Singer's novels that I've read, and perhaps The Slave (the first) set a particularly high bar, but neither of the next two really measured up to that or to the short story collection that I've read by him. This isn't a bad story by any means, and has some very tense scenes, but I've seen this listed as one of his best works, and I don't think I'd quite put it up there.

New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) by Czeslaw Milosz

I've been picking my way through this over the last month or so; there's only so much of one man's poetry that you can read at a time, and this thing is 750 pages. Huge poetry collections like this are a bit hard to rate; there's a lot of five-star material here, and long sections of poems (and some prose; there's a great piece on the death of Christopher Robin Milne) that didn't especially interest me. I thought the best work were from the first two post-World War II collections (the scraps of material from the 1930s are pretty unremarkable) and toward the end, where he becomes especially fixated on his own mortality (and rivers). I'd previously read his non-fiction The Captive Mind.

Very interesting triad of books Colonel. Haven't read Crime & Punishment but this is something I want to remedy in the next months. On the other hand I've been looking to read Singer, specially the Slave, for months now; right now, reading Job by Joseph Roth is encouraging me more to do so with all the description of Polish and Ukrainian Jews and how a language denied and banned for so many centuries like the Yiddish played a very important cultural and life role fir them.

[Daniel del Real]

Juan Goytisolo, Coto Vedado (memoir)

It is truly impressive the mastery of Spanish language this man posses. He takes total control and domain of a language that at the beginning was strange to him and later became the way of his expression, sometimes to denounce and condemn the injustice he has witnessed all his life of his own country towards minorities. This is the first part of his memoirs, comprehending from the origins of his family from both sides, to the year 1956. He would continue this task in a second volume named En Los Reinos de Taifa, a book I need to get after being surprised with this terrific way of viewing life only Goytisolo has.

[Liam]

Haven't read Crime & Punishment

Oh gawd. OK, I won't say anything, .

[kpjayan]

Gil Courtemanche - A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali : AIDS, sex, violence, in the expected lines. Cruel, gruesome account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Most of the characters and places are real and their 'real names' are used, claims the writer. It begin reassuring to the readers that "This Novel is a Novel'. Graphic description of violence and rape, off-putting at times.

Immediately after reading the book I watched the 'Hotel Rwanda' again last night. Incidently both claims to be based on real characters. Events in both, the book and the movie are happening at Hotel des Mille - Collins. Both happening at the same time and through two different perspective. While the movie, restricts its focus on the 1994 genocide ( a week to 10 days probably), the book has larger canvas, including the AIDS epidemic and the initial build up of the violence. Movie appealed in the visual sense, but the book seems to have been much more deep into the conflict, through the personal experience.

[pesahson]

+++ Dan Ariely Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

[Daniel del Real]

Gil Courtemanche - A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali : AIDS, sex, violence, in the expected lines. Cruel, gruesome account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Most of the characters and places are real and their 'real names' are used, claims the writer. It begin reassuring to the readers that "This Novel is a Novel'. Graphic description of violence and rape, off-putting at times.

Immediately after reading the book I watched the 'Hotel Rwanda' again last night. Incidently both claims to be based on real characters. Events in both, the book and the movie are happening at Hotel des Mille - Collins. Both happening at the same time and through two different perspective. While the movie, restricts its focus on the 1994 genocide ( a week to 10 days probably), the book has larger canvas, including the AIDS epidemic and the initial build up of the violence. Movie appealed in the visual sense, but the book seems to have been much more deep into the conflict, through the personal experience.

Rwanda's genocide is a very interesting and terribly bleak historical passage. I also was very impressed when I watched the movie Hotel Rwanda and tried to get more information about the causes of all this tragedy. Found a illustrative novel, Murambi, The Book of Bones by Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop. Read it three years ago and it helped providing a historical context of the Tutsis and the Hulus and how it came to the point where all this horrible situation got unchained back in 1994. We have a thread about it here at the forum.

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...light=boubacar

Hadn't heard about the novel you read before, but I'll look for it as this is a theme that frightens and interests me at the same time, due to the connection to human evilness and what unleashes it to its final and most devastating consequences.

[Daniel del Real]

Joseph Roth, Job

One of the best prosists out there, no doubt about it.

[Worldeater]

Great one but my favorite by Roth is Hotel Savoy.

[Stiffelio]

Great one but my favorite by Roth is Hotel Savoy.

Mine is The Radetzky March.

[Daniel del Real]

I've read Hotel Savoy and it's also incredible, very close to Job, can't tell which one is better. I also loved Tarabas. Will be reading Radetzky March later this month. It is highly praised as his master work so probably I'll be finding my Roth's favorite as well

[Colonel Green]

Close Quarters by Sir William Golding
Fire Down Below by Sir William Golding

I read the first book in the "Sea Trilogy" about a month ago, and had to wait a while for the two sequels to come out. I doubt Golding intended this to be a trilogy initially; the first one won the Booker and set him up for the Nobel, and there was a seven-year gap between Rites of Passage and Close Quarters (Fire Down Below came out two years after). Moreover, Rites told what was basically a complete story, and the two sequels use a different narrative style. While the first book was a sort of comedy of manners turned surprise morality play, the second and third books are a more straightforward sea story (Golding shows off a lot with regard to his knowledge of Nelsonian sailing ships, sort of like if Tom Clancy was writing about the period); the second is okay, the third much better. They're also markedly more optimistic than a lot of Golding's other work.