(no subject)

[threeplusfire]

I'm on book #53 for the year. This ravenous consumption of novels reminds me of being ten, twelve years old. When I knew I had to read everything because I would never have enough time for all the live I ought to live, that my body was a betrayal, that there were so many things I didn't know.

If you've read anything really good recently, I'd love to know. I like good novels and niche histories and biographies.

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

I've been distracted this winter and so doing a lot of comfort re-reading/not very challenging stuff (along with You Can't Go Home Again, which is so utterly awful I can't tear my eyes away from it) but some recent good ones:

FICTION

Continent, Jim Crace
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori
Portraits of a Marriage, Sándor Márai (trans. George Szirtes)
Miss X, Or the Wolf Woman, Christine Crow
Swimming Home, Deborah Levy
Red Shift, Alan Garner
Heatwave and Crazy Birds, Gabriela Avigur-Rotem (trans. Dalya Bilu)
Unity, Michael Arditti
Angel, Elizabeth Taylor
Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones
Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun: Four New Plays, Rebecca Ann Rugg & Harvey Young (eds.)
Grief Lessons: Four Plays, Euripides (trans. Anne Carson)
War Music, Christopher Logue
My Last Movie Star, Martha Sherrill

NONFICTION

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso (trans. Tim Parks)
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, Alex Ross
The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures, Alan Garner
The Agony and the Eggplant: Daniel Pinkwater's Heroic Struggles in the Name of YA Literature, Walter Hogan
Ganz Normal Anders: Gay Voices From East Germany, Jürgen Lemke & John Borneman (eds.) (trans. John Borneman)**

**NOTE: This was published in 1991 and even though some of the interviewees are clearly trans/gender-variant the actual treatment of trans issues is clumsy to nonexistent, but still a groundbreaking sociohistorical study of its kind and worth reading.

Anyway, suggestions!

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much!! A lot of my reading this year hasn't been terribly challenging - see the entire Penman collection really. But sometimes I want something immersed in a different environment.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

If you're open to children's fiction, I loved E.C. Spykman's Terrible, Horrible Edie so much that I tracked down the other three (sadly still very out of print) books in the series. (THE is the third of four books, but can be read on its own without any context needed.) The author loathed the pervasive sexism of her childhood culture and it shows in her portrayal of the family dynamics, particularly between the two proto-feminist sisters and their eldest, openly misogynistic brother.

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

Fell deeply in love with "Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka.

Couldn't finish "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell.

Re-read and re-shivered through "Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood.

Working through "The Blind Assassin" by Atwood as well.

Also reading "Non-violent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg and it is blowing my mind. Nonviolently, somehow.

[splix.livejournal.com]

I've been reading a mixture of trash and literature. Some fiction recs:

Goodbye to Berlin, Down there on a Visit, Prater Violet - Isherwood
Dark Angel - Karleen Koen
The Power and the Glory - Greene
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
The Bell Jar - Plath
The Young Sherlock Holmes novels by oh god Andrew something. I can't remember his last name.
The Vesuvius Club, Black Butterfly, and The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss

I haven't read a lot of nonfiction but I really loved The Beautiful Fall, parallelling Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Can't remember the author, sorry.

[in-thy-bounty.livejournal.com]

How I wish I could keep up with you! This year I have still not finished a single book, though I have started 7 or 8. Once it becomes light in the evenings after returning home I can start disappearing into the forest with books.