I mostly read words and sentences... Occasionally a paragraph.
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I mostly read words and sentences... Occasionally a paragraph.
If I recall that's Renne le Chateau?
I've read it three - i think the only book I've ever read three times. The Name of the Rose and Baudolino are also fantastic. As someone who is very into history and culture, his writing fulfills my need for titillation and knowledge at the same time - LOL!
Yep - Name of the Rose i liked but couldn't get on with Baudalino. Yes it was Rennes le Chateau. TI went there once also - just passing through. Had a strange atmosphere.
Eco wrote a factual book about medieval ideas - useful background to The Name of The Rose and has written lots of other great books of essays. Also two wonderful illustrated art books - On Beauty and On Ugliness. Very fitting for this place!
Loved Name of the Rose, but, sorry to admit, I never got all the way through Foucault's Pendulum.
Currently reading Galore by Michael Crummey. It spans three or four generations of Newfoundlanders (known to themselves as livyers). It's got some very strong women characters and is peppered with Newfoundland's own special brand of magical realism. It's a good read. Hope to finish it this weekend.
I am already sad that I have to wait for the last 2 books. If you look at when they were written, it's something like 4-5 years between each edition so far too. I almost got the boxed set when I was like 3/4 done the first book, but I didn't want to wait for it to get here, and walmart had each book for 33% off so I just got them there. I can't wait for season 2 of the show too.
Every day I 'read' the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and BBC News -and check them on a regular basis if I am free during the day -but by 'read' I mean selectively. The advantage of the internet versions is that I don't have to pay for the hard copy of something of which I only have an interest in a half, if that -I don't buy a Sunday paper precisely because I would throw away more than two-thirds of it.
Nostromo is one of the finest novels in English; I used to read it every summer but haven't read it in recent years, but I did go back to Under Western Eyes, one of my favourites; and read The Shadow-Line when a tv series loosely based on it was broadcast earlier this year on the BBC. Currently reading White Mule by William Carlos Williams.
I should put in a good word for the late WG Sebald, who was killed in a road accident a few years ago. He taught translation studies at the Universty of East Anglia, and wrote four novels which deal with the experience of being German in the 20th century -The Emigrants, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. He has a special way of interposing real documents (photos, bills from hotels and cafes) with his narrative, some of which seems to be drawn from his own life (his portrait is on the cover of Austerlitz) so that there are times when its hard to know what is real and what is fiction.
I'm reading a book been out a few years... "The Ethical Slut - A guide to infinite sexual possibilities" By Easton and Liszt... Living an interesting single life, Andy Warhol's quote "Sex is messy..." often rings true. My attempts at grown up conscientious interpersonal life has at times blown up in my face.... ouch, and "messy"! Trying to figure my place, boundaries, transparencies, and being good to those I allow close... while letting them be good to me. Time will tell...
I'd also echo that, and The Name of the Rose was in its own way every bit as brilliant.
I take The Guardian on a daily basis - as an annual subscriber it saves 33% - and The Observer on Sundays. I also subscribe to BBC History Magazine and Acoustic, a UK specialist guitar mag to keep me up to date with new acoustic guitars, amps, accessories etc.
I tend to have several books on the go at any one time. Right now I'm re-reading A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, just for the pleasure of the prose, plus John Keegan's military history of The American Civil War, Hart and Steel's Passchendaele and for fiction, the current Booker winner, The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.
Influential books would include almost anything by Dickens, and for inspiration, always poetry - Burns, Hughes, TS Eliot, Yeats, Hardy, Whitman, Heaney, Larkin - the list goes on for ever. In the factual sphere it would have to be E F Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, published in the 70s and imo pretty much the ur-text for the green and environmentally aware world we now live in.