Daily joy

Are there any creatures on this earth that have a better life than these dogs? Every day at Daily Oliver.

8:38:45 AM      trackback [] 

Some good reads

I’ve been looking for a good book to get into, as opposed to the deluge of newspapers, weekly New Yorker’s and of course lots of online reading I wade through every day. The last book that I tried to read and got partway into before giving up was Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. I admired the writing but it was incredibly dense and peculiar and hard work to get through.

Yesterday I picked up The Secret Life of Bees and read the first 50 pages last night. I’m really enjoying it. I’ll try to write my impressions when I’m done. I also picked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, written from the perspective of an autistic boy. I read bits of it in the bookstore and the writing is delightful. Looking forward to it. Also on my list to read is Middlesex, which has gotten great reviews; it’s now out in paperback. And I’m waiting for The Lovely Bones to come out in paperback. Guess I’ll be spending a lot of time with my nose in a book.

My housemate has been going through my bookshelves and reading some of my old favorites. Right now she’s reading The Sixteen Pleasures, set in Florence in the late 1960’s. It’s been many years since I read it, but I can vividly recall scenes – the intricacies of book restoration and art restoration, cafés in Florence, and those pages of priceless medieval smut bound into an old prayer book. She also read my copy of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, another great one for learning things – the different kinds of snow, the cultural conflicts between Greenlanders and Danes in Denmark – while getting propelled along in a thriller. And she read the very unusual The Giant’s House, by Elizabeth McCracken – good story.

One other book I’ve been looking for is my copy of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. I must have lent it out to someone. That book has some of the loveliest understated writing I’ve ever read. I’ll have to try to track it down.

7:17:43 AM      trackback []