What are you reading?

[gainesvillegreen]

The Lost City of Z
by David Grann

I've heard good things. What's the verdict thus far?

[rowjimmy]

I've barely cracked it but I'm intrigued...
I'll report back.

[Mr Minor]

I've barely cracked it but I'm intrigued...
I'll report back.

Non-fiction or realistic fiction?

Don't know anything about it.

[rowjimmy]

I've barely cracked it but I'm intrigued...
I'll report back.

Non-fiction or realistic fiction?

Don't know anything about it.

Non Fiction.
From Publisher's Weekly (via Amazon)

In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale.

There's also a review written by John Grisham (yeah, THAT John Grisham) on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Obsession-Vintage-Departures/dp/1400078458

[Mr Minor]

Intrigued.  Putting that on the list...

[gainesvillegreen]

It has gotten excellent reviews both in the paper and blog presses. I have always enjoyed travel literature or travel writing - V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, others I am forgetting. Bill Bryson.

I have a MY-NUTE break from school the next few days, so I am halfway through the latest Roberto Bolano:

Bolaño's brief, wonderfully eccentric novel moves around two themes he developed at length in The Savage Detectives—poets and conspiracies. In 1938 Paris, semirecluse Pierre Pain, the 48-year-old mesmerist narrator, is in love with young widow Marcelle Reynaud, who calls him to request his service in treating a friend's husband. Eager to impress, Pain agrees to treat the man, Oscar Vallejo, a Peruvian poet, who is hiccupping himself to death. Pain's re-entry into normal life soon goes awry: two thuggish Spaniards bribe him to withdraw from the case, Pain experiences auditory hallucinations, Madame Reynaud disappears, and Pain runs into a fellow mesmerist, Plomeur-Boudou, working as a torturer for Franco, who tells Pain an obscure tale about the purported assassination of Pierre Curie. Is all this simply a bizarre swirl of coincidences befalling a lonely and slightly mad bachelor, or are these events links in a chain of murders? One of Bolaño's first novels, this already displays his brilliant, alchemical gift for transmuting the dead-ends of life into sinister mysteries.

Interesting if you have read his other novels, but not required or a good place to start. What is interesting, although the above description does mention poets, is that this is the least involved novel, that I've read, regarding writers, poets, or the writing process. So from that standpoint it is refreshing. This is an early work (other than short stories, what else of his is there to publish?), so leeway must be given.

Also, for any and all who have read his short story collection, Last Evenings on Earth, the beginning story in that collection, "Sensini", relates (a fictional) Bolano's forays into entering provincial literary contests to earn food to live. In Monsieur Pain, he writes a brief introducation talking about that story and the book in question in that short story is Monsieur Pain. So that is pretty neat-o.

[justjezmund]

:crazy: finally got these today(this one and the next in the series)  im not even through the first chapter yet mostly from laughing so much.

[birdman]

My 12 y.o. daughter has been raving about a series of books for awhile so I finally read through the first two books. Outstanding reads. I was blown away by how violent this "young adult" story was. Kind of a cross between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and King's "The Running Man".


Cant wait for the final book in the series.
Stephen King wrote a great review:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20223443,00.html
Brief synopsis:As negative Utopias go, Suzanne Collins has created a dilly. The United States is gone. North America has become Panem, a TV-dominated dictatorship run from a city called the Capitol. The rest of Panem is divided into 12 Districts (the former 13th had the bad judgment to revolt and no longer exists). The yearly highlight in this nightmare world is the Hunger Games, a bloodthirsty reality TV show in which 24 teenagers chosen by lottery — two from each District — fight each other in a desolate environment called the ''arena.'' The winner gets a life of ease; the losers get death. The only ''unspoken rule'' is that you can't eat the dead contestants. Let's see the makers of the movie version try to get a PG-13 on this baby.

[rowjimmy]

The Lost City of Z
by David Grann

I've heard good things. What's the verdict thus far?

Halfway through...
Totally digging it.

[gainesvillegreen]

^Nice. Will have to put it onto the to be read list this summer. What caught my eye in the reviews was his weaving together of the historical journey and his current travels. I want to see how he does that.

I don't expect it to, but, if it tanks in the last half, please do let me know. So many books, so little time   :wink:

[cactusfan]

The Lost City of Z
by David Grann

I've heard good things. What's the verdict thus far?

Halfway through...
Totally digging it.

my dad just gave this to me for my birthday. i hope it stays good!

[Declan]

Barbrah Ehrenreich -- Dancing in the Streets
Ehrenreich -- Nickled and Dimed
John Storey -- Inventing Popular Culture
Michel Foucault -- Discipline and Punishment

[Mr Minor]

My 12 y.o. daughter has been raving about a series of books for awhile so I finally read through the first two books. Outstanding reads. I was blown away by how violent this "young adult" story was. Kind of a cross between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and King's "The Running Man".

I have a lot of students reading those and they can't say enough about them.  Great comparison to those two other adult short stories, as that is exactly what I thought of when I heard about and read the first one.

For me:

Armageddon in Retrospect


Awesome.  I really enjoyed the short stories, except for one near the end which was just too predictable.  Other than that I was really impressed and happy with it.  Short stories are such an art, sometimes unappreciated, but I totally think they are more difficult to write than a novel as you need to do so much in so little space.
Fans of Vonnegut or not, I would recommend reading it.

[gainesvillegreen]

Time hasn't been as much of an issue this week as I thought, so I've cracked open a couple of books out of South Africa.

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
Author: Nadine Gordimer

Review from PW:

Thirteen stories from South African Nobel Prize–winner Gordimer offer a staccato demonstration of how people's origins, inheritances and histories—and the loss of them—are inescapable. The title story centers on the white, twice-divorced academic descendant of a London diamond prospector who visits his forebear's mine in Kimberly, South Africa, and wonders about who in the township, black and white, he may be related to. The narrator of Dreaming of the Dead is haunted by famous former companions (the late intellectuals Edward Said and Susan Sontag), while the grieving widow of Allesverloren (or All Is Lost) seeks out her husband's former lover to unearth a message from him. The daughter of A Beneficiary, meanwhile, finds an unsettling letter among the effects of her late mother, an actress. Cultural inheritance shadows the marriage of a Hungarian couple that emigrates to South Africa in Alternate Endings: Second Sense, and also the son of A Frivolous Woman, who resents his flamboyant German-Jewish émigré mother's easy adaptability. Again and again, Gordimer puts big, sweeping disasters (the Holocaust, apartheid) in the pasts of flawed, ill-equipped characters and shows how their choices have been little more than wing beats against history. The results are terrifying, sometimes acidly funny and often beautiful.

I have two stories left here, and although not the best work of hers I've read (July's People, Burger's Daughter, The Pickup), she has such a unique voice, unique structure to her sentences.  It was remarked above about short-stories being difficult to write, but this is one writer who excels at both novel writing and short-story writing. Which is very rare. There are stories in here about a white academic attempting to find a 'native' (this being South Africa) composition to his family tree, what it is to be a tape worm, and one about a woman who seeks the gay lover of her dead husband. Stories are set in South Africa, Germany, southern France, London, and a GI tract.

Secondly, there is this allegory:
Blood Kin

A spare political fable assesses the contaminating nature of power in both public and private lives.A small cast of nameless characters interacts intricately in Dovey's poised debut, set in an unnamed country in the grip of political turmoil. Three men initially share the narration - a portraitist, a chef and a barber - all of whom have worked for the President and are now swept up in regime change when the Commander launches a coup. Imprisoned in the head of state's Summer Residence, the President is beaten and forced to confront the violence he inflicted on his opponents, while the three captured workers take up their old roles, now in the service of the new leader. The portraitist's wife, eight months pregnant, has also been taken prisoner. The barber recognizes the Commander's wife: Previously she was the fiancee of his brother, who was one of the President's victims. The book is divided into three parts, and in part two the women speak - the chef's daughter and the wives - revealing their pasts and their mixed feelings toward their relations. Simultaneously sensuous and claustrophobic, the novel charts deception, estrangement and the recognition of power's inevitably corrupting tendency. The brief but intense story concludes in a violent cycle of death, birth and grim continuity. A dense, dark, impressively controlled first work. Not for optimists.

I'm at the midway point where the voices flip. Those that likes Bolano's The Skating Rink will like the structure and lay or feel of this novel. Decent debut so far. Claustrophobic is a good word. And not all the time logical in the idea after idea aspect of writing.

[gainesvillegreen]

Also, not that it really makes any difference to the written word on the page, Ceridwen Dovey looks like this. In case you see her out and about or something. You'll recognize her.