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Jan. 23rd, 2006 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
momsalive1I am constantly awed by the number and variety of books my f'list reads. In contrast, my recent library history clearly shows I am in a fantasy rut. You inspire me to venture out of it. Recent results are as follows...
These are random pulls off the shelf of titles I sort of remember hearing about. I never remember to bring the list I have going with your recommendations. So far it has taken too much organizational effort to correlate the list with the catalogue I have here on the desktop.
"House of Sand and Fog" (Andre Dubus III)was so heartbreakingly sad I would have put it down except I couldn't. He really nailed the addictive experience. At the moment, I couldn't bear to watch the movie, though I think it got good reviews.
I couldn't get past the first few pages of "City of God" (E.L. Doctorow) - I was confused and not motivated to figure it out. Swirling invocations of cosmology and biology don't sit well with me unless they are very well done. It's too much like grading undergraduate essays to try to tease out what might be a good point. I'm also impatient with snide references to stereotypes about the psychology of scientists, unless I'm the one making them. Or maybe I'm just entirely too defensive.
In complete contrast, I became instantly enmeshed with the narrator of "Enduring Love" (Ian McEwan). He was a theoretical physicist who is now on the outside, writing about science. He is fretting about "how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty". I am 47, and I am fretting along with him.
His wife later observes "...that like a poet, all a theoretical physicist needs besides talent and a good idea is a sheet of paper and a sharp pencil - or a powerful computer. If he wanted, he could go in his study now and 'get back into science.' The department, the professors and the peers and the office he says he needs are irrelevant, but they're his protection against failure, because they will never let him in."
Ouch! I immediately pulled out my pile of unfinished papers and set to work. I made some progress revising a paper sitting on my desk now for a year.
There's a book club at the library I might try out. They are reading "The Ladies of Missalonghi" by Colleen McCullough this month. For some reason I expected to be bored, but I couldn't put it down. Another late night which I must stop - I am screwing up my sleep again and that takes me right down.
On deck: "Murder on the Orient Express"(Agatha Christie),"Rhode Island Blues"(Fay Weldon)and "Good Poems for Hard Times" (edited by Garrison Keillor).
These are random pulls off the shelf of titles I sort of remember hearing about. I never remember to bring the list I have going with your recommendations. So far it has taken too much organizational effort to correlate the list with the catalogue I have here on the desktop.
"House of Sand and Fog" (Andre Dubus III)was so heartbreakingly sad I would have put it down except I couldn't. He really nailed the addictive experience. At the moment, I couldn't bear to watch the movie, though I think it got good reviews.
I couldn't get past the first few pages of "City of God" (E.L. Doctorow) - I was confused and not motivated to figure it out. Swirling invocations of cosmology and biology don't sit well with me unless they are very well done. It's too much like grading undergraduate essays to try to tease out what might be a good point. I'm also impatient with snide references to stereotypes about the psychology of scientists, unless I'm the one making them. Or maybe I'm just entirely too defensive.
In complete contrast, I became instantly enmeshed with the narrator of "Enduring Love" (Ian McEwan). He was a theoretical physicist who is now on the outside, writing about science. He is fretting about "how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty". I am 47, and I am fretting along with him.
His wife later observes "...that like a poet, all a theoretical physicist needs besides talent and a good idea is a sheet of paper and a sharp pencil - or a powerful computer. If he wanted, he could go in his study now and 'get back into science.' The department, the professors and the peers and the office he says he needs are irrelevant, but they're his protection against failure, because they will never let him in."
Ouch! I immediately pulled out my pile of unfinished papers and set to work. I made some progress revising a paper sitting on my desk now for a year.
There's a book club at the library I might try out. They are reading "The Ladies of Missalonghi" by Colleen McCullough this month. For some reason I expected to be bored, but I couldn't put it down. Another late night which I must stop - I am screwing up my sleep again and that takes me right down.
On deck: "Murder on the Orient Express"(Agatha Christie),"Rhode Island Blues"(Fay Weldon)and "Good Poems for Hard Times" (edited by Garrison Keillor).
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Date: 2006-01-23 12:35 pm (UTC)I really really liked "Saturday" Ian McEwan, and if you haven't read "Unless" by Carol Shields you have missed a treat.
I am not starting "A Feast For Crows" until I finish the other 3 books I'm half way through! Viz; Kate Mosse - Laberinth, Agatha Christie - A Three Act Tragedy, and Play of Consciousness - Swami Muktananda. And yes the last one is being read to try and impress someone, I admit it!
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Date: 2006-01-23 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 02:15 am (UTC)