Books: And What Are You Reading?

[lizkat]

I'm reading the lovely The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles. It jumps between the Paris of 1939, where a newly-minted French librarian, Odile Soucher, begins working at the American Library in Paris, and Montana in 1983, where we again meet an older Odile..... The 1939 segments are particularly interesting, of course, as the author draws us into the growing conflict in Europe and the rise of the Nazis...... The descriptions of how the beautiful city of Paris was altered by fear and worry as residents and tourists alike began to leave or bravely stayed in attempts to try and protect precious homes, loved ones, cherished items.....including -- yes, books, are especially powerful. For librarians, booklovers and historians alike, this is a novel not to be missed.

So I went to put a hold on an ebook version at my library and there's a wait list they estimate at 20 WEEKS.

Heh. Might have to spring for a paperback version instead and pass it along to kin later.

 

[Member 216]

I am almost finished Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Bought it soon after release but never got around to reading it due to numerous relocations. Quite an interesting read. For those who have not read it, give it a go. Good background on how key products and services came to fruition. One bizarre takeaway: Steve seemed to cry a lot. at least in the early Apple years.

 

[Ulenspiegel]

Ken Follett Century Trilogy.

 

[Clix Pix]

So I went to put a hold on an ebook version at my library and there's a wait list they estimate at 20 WEEKS.

Heh. Might have to spring for a paperback version instead and pass it along to kin later.

Go ahead and spring for the paperback, Liz! It will be worth it...... I loved the book and it is just delightful.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Ken Follett Century Trilogy.

I've read it - and, while interesting - it is nowhere nearly as good as The Pillars Of The Earth, which I think excellent.

I'm reading the lovely The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles. It jumps between the Paris of 1939, where a newly-minted French librarian, Odile Soucher, begins working at the American Library in Paris, and Montana in 1983, where we again meet an older Odile..... The 1939 segments are particularly interesting, of course, as the author draws us into the growing conflict in Europe and the rise of the Nazis...... The descriptions of how the beautiful city of Paris was altered by fear and worry as residents and tourists alike began to leave or bravely stayed in attempts to try and protect precious homes, loved ones, cherished items.....including -- yes, books, are especially powerful. For librarians, booklovers and historians alike, this is a novel not to be missed.

Received word that this has arrived; shall pay the library a visit over the coming days to collect it.

 

[Deleted member 215]

Two books featured in The New York Review of Books (which I just subscribed to a few months ago):

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper

and

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

I enjoyed Menand's The Metaphysical Club, so I think I will like this one too.

 

[lizkat]

Just now I'm taking another break from my "deep dive" into history of some Central American countries (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador), and reading a very wonderful piece from the fall 1994 issue of Paris Review.

(I'm enjoying the deep dive project but have to switch it up with other material because the history of those three countries is not light reading by any means. To understand completely where the term "banana republic" has actually come from is to weep.)​

The Paris Review piece was the first in their series on the art of editing.

The Art of Editing No. 1

COURTESY OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX Robert Gottlieb is a man of eclectic tastes, and it is difficult to make generalizations about the authors he has worked with or the hundreds of books he has edited. In his years at Simon & Schuster, where he became editor in chief, and as publisher...

www.theparisreview.org

The article was made possible by Larissa MacFarquhar, who conducted interviews with Robert Gottlieb and with people he suggested to her for this project, mostly writers whose works he had edited. Gottlieb has edited a raft of well known writers at both Simon & Schuster and at Knopf, and is also a past editor of The New Yorker. The piece opens with a profile of Gottlieb and then moves on to the interview excerpts, presented as takes from Gottlieb about his interactions on editing in general and sometimes with respect to a particular writer, interspersed with those writers' takes on their experience in having been edited by Gottlieb. There was no direct conversation between the writers and Gottlieb for this piece.

It's great fun to read. Here's a bit from Michael Crichton's recollection of what it was like to have Gottlieb edit his book The Andromeda Strain:

When I sent Bob a draft of The Andromeda Strain --the first book I did for him-- in 1968 he said he would publish it if I would agree to completely rewrite it. I gulped and said OK. He gave me his feelings about what had to happen on the phone, in about twenty minutes. He was very quick. Anyway, I rewrote it completely. He called me up and said, Well, this is good, now you only have to rewrite half of it...

And I loved this offering from Toni Morrison:

I think we erroneously give pride of place to the act of writing rather than the act of reading. People think you just read because you can understand the language, but a certain kind of reading is a very high-level intellectual process. I have such reverence for that kind of sensitive reading—it is not just absorbing things and identifying what’s wrong but a much deeper thing that I can see would be perfectly satisfying. Anyway, this separation is fairly recent: not long ago the great readers were the great writers, the great critics were the great novelists, the great poets were the great translators. People didn’t make these big distinctions about which one was more thrilling than the other.

Writing for me is just a very sustained process of reading. The only difference is that writing a book might take three or four years, and I'm doing it. I never wrote a line until after I became an editor, and only then because I wanted to read something that I couldn’t find. That was the first book I wrote.

Gottlieb on the differences in editing for a magazine vs for a book publisher:

In book publishing, the editor and the author have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be and to sell as many copies as possible. In a magazine, it’s a different matter. Of course a magazine editor wants the writing to be as good as possible, but he wants it to be as good as possible for the magazine, while the writer wants to preserve his piece’s integrity. At a magazine, the writer can always withdraw his piece, but basically the editor is in charge. In book publishing, editors are the servants of the writers, and if we don’t serve writers well, they leave us.

 

[Deleted member 215]

I picked up this for free outside the public library last week:

Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell

A biography of Virginia Woolf written by her nephew.

 

[lizkat]

I picked up this for free outside the public library last week:

Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell

A biography of Virginia Woolf written by her nephew.

Not gonna be an easy read, that one.

 

[Clix Pix]

I've read it - and, while interesting - it is nowhere nearly as good as The Pillars Of The Earth, which I think excellent.


Received word that this [The Paris Library] has arrived; shall pay the library a visit over the coming days to collect it.

So, SS, did you enjoy The Paris Library? Or maybe you haven't had a chance to read it yet?

 

[Scepticalscribe]

So, SS, did you enjoy The Paris Library? Or maybe you haven't had a chance to read it yet?

I've yet to pick it up from the library, and have already carefully put several library books - I spent a few days last week reading books - into my briefcase for return to the library, tomorrow or the next day.

@JamesMike requested my thoughts on The Autumn of The Ace (the concluding volume of the latest trilogy by Louis de Bernieres).

It is the concluding volume of a trilogy (the story of which - over all three books - spans a number of characters and their families over the course of much of the twentieth century), and, as such, perhaps, strikes a sort of (unintentional) elegiac note, a note already strongly alluded to, in the title (The Autumn Of The Ace).

Really, it is a book about farewells, goodbyes, death, dying and making peace with the inevitability of one's own mortality. In fact, I suspect that de Bernieres is not simply saying farewell to the characters in the trilogy, but to characters across his entire oeuvre, for The Autumn Of The Ace slyly references some of his other works, as characters from these books make fleeting (or not so fleeting) cameos, or brief flying visits, where their stories intersect with the stories of the characters in The Autumn Of The Ace.

(For those who have read de Bernieres extensively - and I have - you will recognise characters from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Partisan's Daughter, the War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, and Notwithstanding, as they make their entrances, or make themselves known, fleetingly or otherwise).

Actually, increasingly, I am coming to the conclusion that Louis de Bernieres is one of those authors who has written one exceptional book (Captain Corelli's Mandolin) and nothing else he has written before or since comes close to that masterpiece, where everything came together, and the story, setting and characters all worked perfectly.

The strengths of this book lie in the pleasure of recognising the cross references to his other works, and a genuinely powerful and superb passage where the protagonist (the Ace of the title, he was a hero from the First World War as well as the Second World War) travels to what had become Pakistan after (near the Afghan border) a few years after Indian Independence to bury his brother who had served in the old Frontier Scouts of the Indian Army (of British Imperial India, the Raj), and who had always loved the North West Frontier.

Another strength is the lovely relationship, but far too little space is devoted to it - it is rare enough to see middle aged enduring affection and love depicted anywhere, whereas young love is never short of stories - depicted between a clergyman (also a decorated war hero from the First World War) and his wife, the sister-in-law of the protagonist, who had married the clergyman towards the end of the First World War.

And he depicts male relationships - friendships, relationships, comrades, familes - very well, and is endlessly understanding of - and exceptionally sympathetic to - male short-comings almost irrespective of what they do.

As for short-comings: The entire book is a farewell, whereas most of the characters don't actually die until the story is well underway.

And there is the inescapable fact that ever since de Bernieres went through an acrimonious marriage or relationship breakdown, well over a decade ago, he has struggled with female characters; these days, although he tries hard, he finds it a challenge to write with insight, or empathy, or sympathy, or, at times, even liking, for female characters, whereas he is instinctively sympathetic to his male characters.

Much of the time, he doesn't "get" women, and it becomes clear that he doesn't really actually like them all that much, even when the male characters treat them poorly and with contempt.

So, I'll still read de Bernieres, but I suspect that his best work may be behind him.

 

[Clix Pix]

Huh, that's interesting about not picking up the copy on hold for you yet......my library system sends out the notice that a book is being held for me and I have only a certain time frame within which to pick it up -- I think one week. If I don't get it within that period, then the book is returned to the owning library and/or put on hold for the next interested reader, if there is one, and that person is notified.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

I have been reading "Blood and Oil - Mohammed Bin Salman's Quest For Global Power" by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck which is exceedingly good, exceptionally well-researched and both deeply unsettling and extremely thought-provoking.

 

[Deleted member 215]

Just picked up:

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Bellow's final novel. A fictionalized account of his friendship with Straussian professor and philosopher Allan Bloom.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Just picked up:

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Bellow's final novel. A fictionalized account of his friendship with Straussian professor and philosopher Allan Bloom.

While I cannot claim to have read exhaustively of the works of Saul Bellow,, (and I haven't read Ravelstein), I have read several of his books, and - to my mind - Herzog is his best book by far.

 

[lizkat]

August beach-read times are just about running out the clock now, so I'm starting to gather up additions to an already long list of "what's next?" --although I'm extending my 2021 summer's "deep dive" into Central American history and literature into the autumn. Even paring down that idea to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador wouldn't let me fit that project into a single season, although I did knew that back in the spring. Also, as far as the history goes, it's not light reading, to say the least. So there will be tendrils from that project heading into the future, same as with some of my other summer focus projects, e.g. Caribbean fiction, South Asian fiction etc. With the latter I ended up "in" Sri Lanka for the season and the rest of that map's literature still awaits attention.

Anyway the American Book Awards for 2021 have just been announced, so I will be looking over reviews of those pretty soon. Sometimes books I end up adding to my own sprawling reading lists are not the subject of a particular book review but rather the references to other books and writers recalled by the reviewer. That's why I usually start with reviews and not the books themselves when an awarding organization announces its long lists, short lists or winners.

Anyway just now aside from both beach reads and the Central American explorations, I've spent weeks on and off reading Chang-Rae Lee's My Year Abroad, which densely layered tome I found jaw-dropping, obsessive, fascinating, loathsome, delicious, hilarious, appalling...

​

Kept putting it down and picking it up again, despite occasionally thinking I only admired it because I couldn't stay aware of its mechanics at all, it just drew me in, even if I hated assorted themes or scenarios. Who'd have thought such a long book could be such a page turner. It really is long though and I did stay aware of that. A few times I laughed to remember a remark by one of my brothers when I was reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: "You must be one of the few people actually gonna make it to the end of that thing." Lee's book is not that long, but it did have its uphill moments for me.

Back to my beach reads. This next batch self-destructs off my iPad in 4 to 11 days... a few South Florida Carl Hiaasen novels and a couple other things I picked without much investigation from my library's list of "available now" selections...

 

[Scepticalscribe]

"Scoff - A History of Food and Class in Britain" - by Pen Vogler.

Interesting, informative, witty, and full of fascinating, intriguing, and sometimes unexpected insights.

 

[lizkat]

Still wrapping up my beach reads but put them on pause long enough to fish out from my ebook archives a couple books by Steve Coll about the USA and its involvement in the wars(s) in Afghanistan.

The earlier of the two books is Ghost Wars, about the so many covert international players in Afghanistan during the then Soviet Union's eventually disastrous adventures there. The later one carries the title Directorate S, which is an agency of Pakistan's intelligence services, and which has engaged for years with the Taliban to its own domestic benefit, but knew it risked getting burned by the experience. Now of course Pakistan has sorta won the doorprize, which is a house afire...

Both books were pretty good reads, and I want to read them again now with some hindsight applied...

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Visited the library today, returned some books, and collected a few that had been held for me.

These included The Paris Library, by Janet Skeslien Charles, as recommended on these threads by @Clix Pix, and The Fall of Carthage, by Adrian Goldsworthy, as recommended by @yaxomoxay.

 

[Clix Pix]

Enjoy!!! I'll be interested in hearing what you think of The Paris Library.....