My teacher says I'm breaking books at an eighth grade level: book thread

[ellaguru]

I haven't read her book yet, but this is what my yoga teacher does when she's not teaching me yoga.

[fishjim]

Has anyone read the new 33 1/3 by Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music? Lethem is hot and cold for me, and if he's cold on this topic, I'd rather not jump in the pool.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

i think lethem's fiction is boring as hell. never read his crit, but i know people who rep for it

[nonotyet]

Early 20th century breast implant materials:
paraffin wax
glass balls
ivory
woodchips
peanut oil
honey
goats' milk
ox cartilage

Q: Do you want to know what happened when the wax in the breast implants melted?
A: No you fucking don't. 

[mountmccabe]

Has anyone read the new 33 1/3 by Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music? Lethem is hot and cold for me, and if he's cold on this topic, I'd rather not jump in the pool.

I just started this; I will plan to post comments when I am done!

[elpollodiablo]

If you've read Lethem's fiction you've pretty much read his criticism too.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

well then yaaaaawwwwwwnnnn forever

[fishjim]

well then yaaaaawwwwwwnnnn forever

basically my feeling too, though i remember liking Gun, With Occasional Music - but that just may be because it was his first book and he was a local and i was in college. not sure if i care enough to re-read and see if it's really any better than the rest of the endleth Lethem.

[elpollodiablo]

I don't mind Lethem so much when he's not writing about pop music. That's just not very often.

[fishjim]

Yeah, and let's count our blessings: he's got all the potential to be a Jonathan Franzen, and he isn't.

WELL DONE LETHEM

[Greg Nog]

Oh, I got a Nook!  I really like it, somewhat unexpectedly.

So I just read Redshirts, the new book by John Scalzi, and thought it was mildly bad.  Now I'm reading Home, the new one by Toni Morrison, and I'm liking it pretty well so far.

[cold before sunrise]

these three hipsterish types staying in the same guesthouse as us take turns reciting passages from shantaram in the evening. what a book.

[monkeypants]

I just finished Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things.  I picked it up recently at a library sale, pretty much at random.  Never heard of the book or the author, but the title stood out and the description/blurbs on the back cover made me think it was worth a couple bucks.  Turns out I totally dug it.  An engaging story and just beautifully written.  Highly recommended.  Happy accidents are nice.

[Greg Nog]

Now I'm reading Home, the new one by Toni Morrison, and I'm liking it pretty well so far.

Enhh.... finished it, and less enthused than I was.  There's a meta-thing where a character speaks to the third-person narrator that I think is actually kinda bad, and a Twist that I think actually detracts from the rest of the themes.  Not a bad book, exactly, but I'd be more inclined to just reread A Mercy (which didn't seem to get much praise compared to most of Morrison's stuff, but which I really really loved).

[mixed cats]

I can't stop cramming Poirot books into my eyes.

[Anne the Man]

Finished Sex at Dawn, which I've been reading on and off for a few months. It's good, though has problematic gender stereotyping at times and AWFUL typos which I think I raged about earlier (forageing? wageing? Was this written by highly intelligent FIVE-year olds?!), but I learnt a lot of interesting things. Corn flakes and graham crackers were invented with the intention to stop masturbation, who knew! Anyway, it's helped me with material for my own book, so swag.

[YojimboMonkey]

Oh hey I read that, or started to anyway, all bonobo polyamory and shit

[elpollodiablo]

This week I finished The Condition of Postmodernism by David Harvey, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and I should be done with J.R. soon. The Gaddis is a lot of fun, but I don't know that it measures up all that well with some of the works to which it's often compared. I'd take a Gravity's Rainbow or a Catch-22, instead.

[monkeypants]

Tom McCarthy - Remainder.

Odd little book, but I liked it.  Has anyone read his other two novels  - C and Men In Space?  The library has the former.  I'm keen to check it out.

[RavingLunatic]

This week I finished The Condition of Postmodernism by David Harvey, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Connecticut Yankee is one of my Twain favorites. So many great quotes on injustice and hypocrisy and "those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship." I love the bit on the French Revolution in that book; it's one of those great Twain quotes that I thought worth memorizing.

Why, it was like reading about France and the French before the ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood; one, a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of shame and wrong and misery, the like of which is not to be mated but in hell. There were two reigns of terror, if we would but remember it and consider it. One lasted mere months, the other a thousand years. One inflicted death upon some ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions. Yet all are shudders are reserved for the "horrors" of that minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak. Whereas what is swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is death by lightning compared to death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over. But all of France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful terror, which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

And is that David Harvey the same one who wrote the companion to Marx's Capital? I own that one and read it I think about a year ago, when I was re-reading Marx's tome. Good book. I've thought about reading his interpretation of the worldwide economic crisis, which I think came out a couple years ago.

[RavingLunatic]

Pollo, if I remember correctly, you're a fan of Moby Dick. I read it for the first time this past December and loved it. I loved it even more after reading a couple books of essays on it. One of them was Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Moby Dick, and I felt like it just opened up my eyes to so many things I missed when reading it. I plan on re-reading it sometime with these perspectives in mind.

Anyways, I was wondering if you or anyone else had read much of Melville's other work. I recently read Typee, Omoo, and am about two-thirds of the way through Mardi. (I guess I'm going in chronological order.) The last especially is the sort of book that you just wish you could have somebody to discuss it with or at least be able to read some literary analysis of. You don't happen to know any good books about Melville's early work do you? I know it's a long shot, but I don't really know where to go for info on this stuff.

[davy]

Redburn might actually be my favorite Melville book. It's pretty straight-up seafaring adventure-type stuff but I have a weakness. Bartleby the Scrivener is also fantastic, obviously.

I didn't like Pierre: or The Ambiguities so much.

[auto-da-fey]

You don't happen to know any good books about Melville's early work do you? I know it's a long shot, but I don't really know where to go for info on this stuff.

I'm not an expert on Melville by any means, but I really like David Reynolds' Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. It links Melville--esp. the early work IIRC, though it's been about a decade--to the working-class dime-novel pulp "sensation" fiction of authors like George Thompson and George Lippard (who are both pretty amazing). Possibly not quite exactly what you're asking for, but highly recommended.

[hannah]

I love Melville. I’ve read (in order of preference) Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, White Jacket, and Typee. Omoo and Mardi and Israel Potter and Redburn are on my summer reading list, as I might devote a small section of my dissertation to Melville (specifically to Jay Leyda’s Melville Log and Walker Cowen’s Melville's Marginalia). Anyhow, I am coming at Melville slightly backward, so I cannot really offer much help—I just wanted to prove my Melville cred, really, cuz that is just the way I am. Anyway, one idea: the Northwestern University Press editions I have of Mardi and Israel Potter have useful bibliographies, which is probably a good place to start.

[davy]

I'm tellin' you guys: Redburn is the real deal.