What did you read in May?

[Kafka's Crow]

Sorry I am three days late with my monthly reading thread but things happened last month, terrible things. I was a bit hesitant and still am. Well, I failed to complete yet another English novel! And Wuthering Heights, of all the books! You can hang me but I can't go beyond the half way mark! What a torture. I did manage to read:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nicholas Nasim Taleb: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/0141034599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212500962&sr=8-1

The Daughter of the Commandant and The Queen of Hearts by Alexander Pushkin:
http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/book/369
http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/book/76

Boris Pasternak Fifty Poems (Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater)
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140168957129&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.ebay.co.uk%3A80%2F%3Ffsop%3 D32%26satitle%3D140168957129%26fvi%3D1

Not a very fruitful month but by the middle of April I had finished the first three (including the big Taleb book) till Bronte bogged me down. It has thrown me off course. I have started re-reading Lolita.

What did other the bookworms read in April?

[Pecksie]

Oh Crow oh Crow oh Crow! Do give Wuthering Heights another try! You'll be glad you did.

Anything by Pushkin is a treat. I read Eugene Onegin a couple of months ago and adored it.

I'm currently reading forty years' collected poetry of Brendan Kennelly, and a book of Indian short stories by Lavanya Sankaran which so far I'm finding rather annoyingly shallow and smug. Which has lately been a recurring problem with many of the young authors I read. Something's rotten in Bangalore...

[Kafka's Crow]

Oh Crow oh Crow oh Crow! Do give Wuthering Heights another try! You'll be glad you did.

Anything by Pushkin is a treat. I read Eugene Onegin a couple of months ago and adored it.

I'm currently reading forty years' collected poetry of Brendan Kennelly, and a book of Indian short stories by Lavanya Sankaran which so far I'm finding rather annoyingly shallow and smug. Which has lately been a recurring problem with many of the young authors I read. Something's rotten in Bangalore...

... then heaven will direct it! I don't know, I might go back to the Heights. We'll see. At the moment this is how it stands:

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i72/Raz1/lolitablurb005.jpg

That's how far I managed to read and then stopped, scrawled all the 'profanities' on it and haven't been back yet. I must go back to it. I think I am seeing what differentiates the English novel from, say, French or specially Russian novel. I must go back and I think this will resolve my long-standing dilemma. It is the narrative voice. I am irritated by the narrative voice here.

As far as I am aware, the best collection of Indian short-stories is edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vintage-Book-Indian-Writing-1947-97/dp/0099731010/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212507936&sr=8-7

And this large collection by Alok Bhalla titled Stories about the Partition of India in three volumes is also great (though quite rare):

http://www.indiaclub.com/shop/SearchResults.asp?ProdStock=93

I am out of touch with the current Indian writing, once started a postgraduate studentship in postcolonial literature and dropped out. Never looked back ever since.

I did order your recommended Selected Writings of Jules Supervielle:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811203891
but Amazon will deliver it later as it is currently out of stock. It is on order for me and I will get it shortly, hopefully.

[thelastmelon]

Is this supposed to be a thread for the reading in May? Since April was over a month ago. :rolleyes:

[Niamh]

It is may reading. Kafka, do you want me to change the title?

Didnt get a chance to read much last month.
Continued with That they may face the rising sun by MaGaharn
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
And a Manuscript.
Very disapointing. :(

[Dark Muse]

Currently still working on School reading, but almost done

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

A Passage to Inida, E.M. Forster

and By Stephen Crane:

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

The Monster

Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

The Blue Hotel

[slobone]

Let's see if I can remember... May, huh? Only counting books I actually finished?

Mystery Mile, Margery Allingham
What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, Agatha Christie
The Anchor Bible commentary on the book of Mark, vol. 1
The Age of Innocence

[thelastmelon]

During May I managed to read:

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Daughter of Fortune - Isabel Allende
The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
He Would Not Kill Patience - John Dickson Carr
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

[slobone]

He Would Not Kill Patience - John Dickson Carr


Hmm, that's one of the few of his I haven't read. Is it one of the later ones? Any good?

[Kafka's Crow]

It is may reading. Kafka, do you want me to change the title?

Didnt get a chance to read much last month.
Continued with That they may face the rising sun by MaGaharn
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
And a Manuscript.
Very disapointing. :(


Please do change the title. I am very absent-minded these days. We are experiencing an extremely wet summer in the good Old Blighty and it has made me very depressed. Thanks for pointing it out Niamh, please do change the title if you can.

Cheers!

[Dark Muse]

Oops, I did not even notice it should be May and not April......LOL

[EricP]

Last month I read the following books:
"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The Human Stain" by Philip Roth
"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
"The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi

[Niamh]

Please do change the title. I am very absent-minded these days. We are experiencing an extremely wet summer in the good Old Blighty and it has made me very depressed. Thanks for pointing it out Niamh, please do change the title if you can.

Cheers!

I've changed the title. I hope you dont mind me changing it to "What did you read in May!" I thought it was more in keeping with your last two for March and April.:)

[johann cruyff]

I didn't read much in May,just one relatively unknown novel by Ivo Andrić and Machiavelli's The Prince. I should have more time on my hands soon though,and then I plan on returning to my usual reading form.

[Kafka's Crow]

I've changed the title. I hope you dont mind me changing it to "What did you read in May!" I thought it was more in keeping with your last two for March and April.:)

Excellent and very thoughtful! This year is zooming by. Didn't we have Christmas only recently?

Thanks Niamh!

[Erichtho]

And Wuthering Heights, of all the books! You can hang me but I can't go beyond the half way mark! What a torture.

I also read this book in May. I needed around three weeks to slog through it, and I can tell you it didn't get better in the second half. It was truly awful... what a disappointment. :(

[Niamh]

I still have the page marked where i closed Wuthering Heights and never picked it back up again eight years ago. I was about half way too. Ugg! :sick:

[_Shannon_]

I read The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Papillon by Henri Charriere, and The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene and about 2/3 of Love In the Time of Cholera.

And Kafka's Cow- having re-read Wuthering Heights- last year, perhaps?-- don't sweat not finishing it's really not all that good. I read it originally in my teens--and really, really loved it--but reading again after all of the books I've read now- and not so wide-eyed about literature, in general...When I re-read Heights --I really found the construction lacking, and the language overly emotional and imprecise. I was surprised-because I was thinking that I would just love, love it--and really did not.

[Kafka's Crow]

Oh Crow oh Crow oh Crow! Do give Wuthering Heights another try! You'll be glad you did.


It shall be done! Just picked up the ereader, erased all the things I had written on that page and resumed from the half-way mark onwards. Catherine and Heathcliff are re-united and it is becoming very emotional now! I WILL finish this book. Will withhold my judgment till the end.

[slobone]

I got through the second half of WH by drawing up a genealogical chart so I could keep the characters straight. Then I named hamsters after them...

[Kafka's Crow]

I got through the second half of WH by drawing up a genealogical chart so I could keep the characters straight. Then I named hamsters after them...

That's funny. So you had all these little hamsters running around and you trying to figure out which one is which! Wasn't the book enough to confuse you? It can numb your brain at times.

[Hank Stamper]

Last month I read -
A Brief History of Time
Gulliver's Travels
Of Mice & Men
We
Boy (had a weird urge to read this again after seeing a newspaper clipping of Roald Dahl's old writing shed)
The Aspern Papers

[thelastmelon]

He Would Not Kill Patience - John Dickson Carr


Hmm, that's one of the few of his I haven't read. Is it one of the later ones? Any good?

He Wouldn't Kill Patience was published under the name of Carter Dickson in 1944. It's a locked room mystery, and very interesting. I loved it, and so does my dad who recommended it to me. It's worth reading. I'm going to read The Crooked Hinge by him as well sometime soon. :)

[Kafka's Crow]

I only finished a single novel last month...but that novel was The Wings of the Dove, so I wouldn't say it wasn't productive. What a beast that book is!
*crawls back to the relative safety of 'middle' James*

Oh, and I reread his novella The Beast in the Jungle as well. An old favorite.

I admire your patience :D

[slobone]

I only finished a single novel last month...but that novel was The Wings of the Dove, so I wouldn't say it wasn't productive. What a beast that book is!
*crawls back to the relative safety of 'middle' James*

Oh, and I reread his novella The Beast in the Jungle as well. An old favorite.
Late James ain't easy. The Ambassadors took me three tries. Wings of the Dove I got through in one, then went back and read it again after seeing the movie (which is dreadful BTW). Golden Bowl I haven't gotten to yet, but it's coming up soon.

Even his short stories get a little weird in his later phase. Lots of supernatural stuff, and semi-autobiographical musings on the writer's life. No sex, though.

[Kafka's Crow]

Merci, monsieur. :D

De rien!

Did you read anything interesting as well? I mean some literary criticism. Weren't you working on Paradis Lost (or was it Dori?)

[slobone]

Even his short stories get a little weird in his later phase. Lots of supernatural stuff, and semi-autobiographical musings on the writer's life. No sex, though.


It's there - you just have to look for it. :D It's definitely in Wings anyway. .

My post was a little garbled. I meant that when James wrote autobiographically, he didn't include anything about his own sex life (though people claim to have found encoded versions of it here and there.)

And the sex in the novels is kept firmly offstage. When Kate tells Densher she'll come to his room if he does her a favor, James assumed we'd all know exactly what that meant. No need to dramatize it, as they did so trashily in the movie.

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Densher moves from a well-known tourist hotel in Venice to an obscure pensione , presumably for the express purpose of enabling Kate to visit him without running into anybody she knows. In The Ambassadors James also seems to know all about how to handle an illicit affair discreetly. I can't help wondering if any of that knowledge came from personal experience. Maybe that's where the encoding comes in...

[Mark F.]

Ham On Rye, Bukowski
Dreams From Bunker Hill, John Fante
Franny and Zooey, J D Salinger
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee
The Grave of the Fireflies and other stories by Nosaka
Letter to Father, Kafka

[Dori]

Hmm . . .

I didn't read much in May, just a few short stories and maybe a short play to prepare for my English final.

It's now June and I find myself picking up The Idiot by Dostoevsky for the third time (the previous two times being failed attempts).

[Scheherazade]

I've changed the title. I hope you dont mind me changing it to "What did you read in May!" I thought it was more in keeping with your last two for March and April.:)


Excellent and very thoughtful! This year is zooming by. Didn't we have Christmas only recently?

Thanks Niamh!Would you mind if I edited the title again to replace the "!" with a "?"?

It is bugging me terribly! :blush:

[PabloQ]

The Octopus and McTeague by Frank Norris

[Niamh]

Would you mind if I edited the title again to replace the "!" with a "?"?

It is bugging me terribly! :blush:

Okay. :(

[cipherdecoy]

Light In August by Faulkner, and I'm still reading it. Thanks to examinations and whatnot.

[Kafka's Crow]

Hmm . . .

I didn't read much in May, just a few short stories and maybe a short play to prepare for my English final.

It's now June and I find myself picking up The Idiot by Dostoevsky for the third time (the previous two times being failed attempts).

Now you have picked a 'real' book, stick with it. My teacher rated The Idiot above, even, The Brothers Karamazov. I never agreed with him still Dostoevsky is one writer who never wrote anything which could be classified below superlatively good. If I could, I'd read only Beckett, Joyce, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

[Hank Stamper]

Ham On Rye, Bukowski
Dreams From Bunker Hill, John Fante

nice choices :D

did you enjoy them? Ham on Rye is one of Bukowski's best I think.

[Tiny Dancer]

I read

Pride and Prejudice (for at least the 10th time)
Emma - Jane Austen
Woman in White - Wilkie Collins.. well i atleast read half of this but i just got bored.
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Claudius the God - Robert Graves
Prisoner of Azkiban (typical, i know) - J K Rowling

[Orpheus]

In May I read:

Pictors Metamorphosis and other Fairy Tales - Hermann Hesse
Beneath the Wheel - Hermann Hesse
The Story of B - Daniel Quinn
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Houseni
Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world - Jack Weatherford
The Invisible Mman - H.G. Wells
The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain
The Prophet - Khalil Gibran

[Ethan Roy]

I didn't get a chance to read too much, exam prep and all, but here's what I got:

1984
Lord of the Flies
Treasure Island
A Midsummer Night's Dream

[Mark F.]

nice choices :D

did you enjoy them? Ham on Rye is one of Bukowski's best I think.

Ham On Rye is my favorite Bukowski novel so far, I've read all the others except for Hollywood. The novel really helps you understand more about the Chinanski character than all the others. And his prose is as good as ever.

[Sloan]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll