Books Read 2008

[brocade_city]

My most emphatic recommendations are emphasized:

1. Middlemarch by George Elliot
2. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
3. Youth by JM Coetzee
4. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
5. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens
8. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky
9. The Story of a Marriage by Andrew

Comments

[hotelstripes]

Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition by Barry R. Burg

! I've wanted to read this, but libraries in my vicinity never have it. What do you think so far?

How'd you like all that McCullers and Darkness Visible? I have an ebook of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter gathering edust.

[brocade_city]

Sodomy... is definitely dense, definitely academic, but also kind of a page turner. I promised to loan it to a friend, but as I am an advocate and practitioner of giving away books, I could send it your way after I loaned it to him.

McCullers, TR Pearson, and a little bit of (come to think of it, unlisted) Twain were part of my attempt to read more southern authors (something that I'm quite bad at doing). The heart... is definitely worth having the e-dust brushed off of it. The others, I admit, I'm a little less excited about.

Darkness Visible is pretty good...it's sort of William Styron attempting to make sense of the fact that he survived a major depressive episode when a lot of other mid 20th-century writers that he admired failed to do so and confronting the stigma surrounded by suicide. The conclusion that he seems to reach "depression is an illness, like pneumonia or the flu, similarly treated by medicines" is one that I don't (wholeheartedly) endorse, but I can see why he reaches it.

[hotelstripes]

I promised to loan it to a friend, but as I am an advocate and practitioner of giving away books, I could send it your way after I loaned it to him.

Aw. I wouldn't turn my nose up if you want to part with it somewhere down the line.

This reminds me - send me your new address! I'll try to put together an interesting mix or something.

[brocade_city]

You're currently behind two people in line for Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.

My current address: 611 A Park Rd NW/Washington, DC 20010

And, I'll go mix-for-mix with you...I actually have a really good idea for a mix (a really good secret idea) that I've been meaning to use for some time.

[hotelstripes]

I emailed my new address - secret mix away!