filed in Daily Life
What are you Reading?
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. And you?
Photo by Jonathan Whitfill
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40 comments for “What are you Reading?”
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oh, looks like an interesting book! will recommend it to my book group. I’m reading “the Circle” by Dave Eggers (for the book group) and “They Killed Our pResident” by Jesse Ventura.
I’ll let you know about Pynchon’s new book. One of the members of our book group has already been complaining about it.
I am working my way through a stack of old New Yorkers ….and listening to two audiobooks while I knit (I knit a LOT), alternating between Bleak House and Moby Dick.
Also awaiting a book about my musical idol that I just ordered, Glenn Gould: Music and Mind–really looking forward to reading that one.
My New Yorker stack is getting very high. I finally dug into one over the weekend. It’s always such a pleasure to read.
Half way through East of Eden. Ugh. So horrifying! Haven’t we enough in real life? I knit, too. And have never read Moby Dick, but listen to podcasters talk about knitting while I am knitting. The SO says it’s like listening to paint dry! Isn’t he a funny one? I don’t thnk a copy of the New Yorker has been seen in East Wenatchee for several decades.
I LOVED East of Eden.
Old New Yorkers and just getting into The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt but may switch to The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, one of my favorite authors.
really want to read The Goldfinch! it’s been so controversial (considered ‘high-lit’ by some and ‘kids-lit’ by others)……want to read it to see what I think!
I really liked Donna Tartt’s book The Little Friend (her first one, The Secret History, not so much) and so am interested in The Goldfinch too. So much to read, so little time!
I like big, fat books. I get to spend a long time with them. I highly recommend it.
I love big books too – some of my favorite reading memories are of Middlemarch and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.
Another (fairly) big book I just adore is Jamesland by Michelle Huneven. It is a novel set in LA; Wendy, maybe you know it already. I find myself actually craving it from time to time and have probably read it 5 times at least.
I’ve read Middlemarch a few times, it’s so good, and really enjoyed American Pastoral, which was one of my favorite Roth books. Don’t know about Jamesland. Thanks for the alert.
I had some issues with the book, but ended up in utter appreciation of the scope and audacity.
If you can, hang in there with The Goldfinch. I think it’s worth it.
I am devouring Peter Matthieson’s epic masterpiece SHADOW COUNTRY. Cannot put it down. The characters, even the most despicable, come alive in his brilliant use of individual points of view. A very compelling read.
I just googled it. Looks amazing.
I love New Yorker too and always keep at least one or two issues buried in my purse for commuting times.
My favorite time with The New Yorker is on planes.
I finished Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” about a month ago and felt like I needed a cigarette and a bourbon. I don’t do many big books (defined as any book over 500+ pages) but that one was both excellent and … in need of some editing. I’m still exhausted from it so I’ve got on deck something light, “The Provence Cure For the Brokenhearted.” I chose it because the cover was pretty. 🙂
One of the people in our book group recently had twins, so we’ve been reading short stories. A very nice break in between big books. Our group also read the novella, Speedboat by Renata Adler. Even though it’s only 170 pages, I could barely get through it.
“The Faraway Nearby” by Rebecca Solnit. Ahhhmazing!
I just read the first few pages on Amazon. The writing is exquisite.
I’m in the middle of a biography of Colin Powell.
That’s an interesting choice. Are you enjoying it, Stacey?
Yes, I am, but I find myself looking up stuff quite a lot (military acronyms and Federal bureaucracies and stuff like that). I rarely read fiction, so it’s actually pretty much in line with the stuff I normally read. It’s astounding to me how removed he saw himself from the Civil Rights movement, in spite of the fact that it was in his face all the time.
Stacey, Colin Powell probably thought that way because he’s originally from Jamaica and the Civil Rights Movement was an American issue. As a black woman, I’ve participated in more than my share of conversations with non-African Americans and how they think all those problems don’t affect them. I knew a fair-skinned Jamaican woman who was flat-out say “hey, I’m not black, I’m Jamaican so (insert issue affecting black women) has nothing to do with me.” Um, ok.
Now Condolezza Rice is an interesting woman in that she wasn’t really touched by the Civil Rights Movement (she says) even though she grew up in Birmingham during that time period.
Latarsha, why wasn’t Rice touched by the Civil Rights movement?
True, his Jamaican heritage did put some distance between him and the struggles of African Americans, but his wife was from Birmingham, AL, and the hotel where they stayed on their wedding night was one of the first places in the city that was bombed when the violence started. She was expecting their first child as the city was convulsing in riots.
Also, his Army career took him to several military bases in the Jim Crow south, and finding an affordable home in which to live was difficult when they couldn’t get on-base military housing. He also had issues finding churches, watering holes, and stores that he could patronize while stationed in the south. As a Jamaican-American from New York City, where he didn’t experience these problems, this must have been a huge shock to his system.
On top of all of that, as a young black military officer in the 1960’s, he was getting promoted swiftly up the chain of command at a time when black officers were few and far between. Some of the decisions to promote him had the potential to be seen as a result of affirmative action (and he did everything he could to make sure that no one believed that the color of his skin was a factor). In one passage, a discussion among senior officers is described which resulted in his being chosen to attend the National War College in DC, and one of the officers who was pulling for him to be chosen to go was threatening to play the race card to make sure he got his way. That was in the early 1970’s.
Colin Powell has a very complicated history, including his legacy of the Iraq war.
I mostly read fiction, so I’m fascinated by those who gravitate towards biographies.
I find myself becoming very critical of the writing when I’m reading fiction. I tend to focus on writing style, character motivation and suspension of disbelief, to the point where I kind of block myself from enjoying it. The last fictional book I read was “The Da Vinci Code”, something like 10 years ago. Someone had recommended it to me because of the subject matter. I’ll admit, the subject was intriguing, but in the end, I hated it because of the pacing and what I thought of as un-natural-sounding dialogue, lol.
Have you ever tried short stories? Recently, my book group has been reading them and it’s been very enjoyable. And not that much of a time commitment.
Stacey, the book sounds interesting. I’ll add it to my Goodreads queue. My “to read” list just crossed the 200 mark!
Wendy, Condoleezza Rice’s family were of the middle class and had some status in Birmingham even during its segregated time. She has said before about 10 years ago or more, that her family believed the Jim Crow laws were too much to bear for everybody and eventually the system would have fallen apart on its own because it was no longer sustainable so the CRM really wasn’t needed. I categorically don’t believe that. Her family was also quite educated so some say that they thought they were too good to be marching in the streets, participating in demonstrations, and so forth. I find it an oddly curious position to take considering she was a child during the church bombing and was probably around the same age of the girls that died.
With Colin Powell, his American experience is as an immigrant living in a northern state that while bigoted in its own way, did not have any of the legally-sanctioned bigotry that the south had so for him to see how other people were living was indeed an eye-opener. Condoleezza knew perfectly well what whites only and colored only meant and she and her family seemed to be ok with that.
The other side of that is my father grew up in a very small town in Tennessee and when I would ask him about the civil rights movement, discrimination and everything, he says his town was “too small and too poor to hate anybody.” For him, all the marching and protesting was stuff happening in some distant land; his speck of a town was just that far removed from all that.
Thanks for the analysis. It’s very interesting.
Wendy – I sometimes read short stories back when I was in my early 20’s, but they just didn’t do it for me. Colin Powell’s involvement with the Bush administration during the early days of the Iraq War is the main reason why I’m reading this book.
Latarsha – The title of the book is “Soldier”, by Karen DeYoung. There is a fleeting reference to Condoleeza Rice’s childhood, and her father’s position in the community, and even mentions, that she actually heard the church bombing from her pew at another church not far away.
I agree with you in that the Civil Rights Movement needed to take place; I even think that we might need some form of another one, unfortunately, given some of the things that are still happening today. I recently got into an argument with an acquaintance of mine who lives in Louisiana over the Duck Dynasty thing several months ago. While I disagree with the stuff that guy said about gay people, I can see where he might have gotten those views through his religious beliefs. I was more offended when he stated in that article that black people were happy living under Jim Crow – there’s nothing in the Christian faith that justifies that. My acquaintance said that he was probably right about it though, because her (white) parents told her the same thing about the Jim Crow era. Not long after that, I got into another argument with someone over the Cliven Bundy thing and his remarks about black people. It’s absolutely appalling to me that there are still people – some of whom haven’t even hit the age of 50 yet – who believe stuff like that.
My mom grew up in North Carolina, not very far from where Woolworth sit-ins happened in Greensboro. She had already gotten married to a Navy man and moved to California by then, but my grandfather made sure she was aware of it during their bi-weekly phone calls. She told me that, as a child, she didn’t have any real awareness of segregation or Jim Crow, because, without realizing it, she rarely, if ever, left the “white” part of town. She did realize much later what had been going on and how wrong it was, but that took a lot of years.
Willful ignorance is a terrible thing. But we also can’t sit on the sidelines, and expect someone else to make the world a better place. It’s up to all of us.
Stacey, I continue to find it amazing that two people can live in the same place at the same time and have two completely different experiences and impressions of life.
Last year I went to a lecture by Isabel Wilkerson who wrote the fantastic book “The Warmth of Other Suns” all about the black migration from the south to three regions of the US — NYC, Chicago and LA — during the 20s, 30s and 40. I was sitting in the audience before the lecture started and several rows back I could hear one white woman tell her friend about the author, the premise of the book and so on. The woman is trying to explain sharecropping to her friend and her friend has a loud voice and she keeps asking one question cringe-inducing question after another — “WHAT’S SHARECROPPING?” “WHY DIDN’T THE PEOPLE JUST BUY THE LAND OUTRIGHT?” “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE LAND OWNER DIDN’T ALWAYS PAY THEM? DID THE BLACKS TELL THE OWNER THEY WEREN’T BEING PAID?” “IF THEY WEREN’T BEING TREATED RIGHT, WHY DIDN’T THEY JUST LEAVE?” “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY COULDN’T JUST LEAVE? THERE WERE TRAINS AND STUFF, RIGHT?”
I was dying laughing and I could tell the first woman was mortified to have to explain to her loud-ass friend in a room full of educated blacks and whites on a university campus no less, what sharecropping is and why people weren’t able to just leave Jim Crow south. She kept saying in a hushed voice “It wasn’t as easy at that! People couldn’t just leave!”
Latarsha, that would be so funny if it still wasn’t so true…
Not to get all political or anything, but it bugs me to pieces when certain people say of the homeless, “well, they should just get a job”. Or they say of low-paid employees, “well, they should just get a better job”, or “they should get an education so they can get a better job”. We really like to think that we’re the land of the free, but we really aren’t as free as we like to think we are. So many people have lost the capacity of empathy and compassion, and are oh-so-quick to judge others without getting to know them or their circumstances – they think it’s ever-so-easy to just trade in a hard life for a less-hard life. (Can you tell I live in an area that’s been overtaken by the Tea Party? lol…)
I’ll have to look for Wilkerson’s book on my next trip to my local library – I love social history! 🙂
Ditto, Stacey. Income inequality is a real thing.
Stacey – The Isabel Wilkerson book really is incredible. There’s so much history in it but it’s a legitimately good read too. I was so glad that I got to hear her speak. She said she deliberately didn’t go into separate bathrooms/schools/water fountains/etc. in the book because that’s stuff we already know. What most people don’t know is the depth of so many laws over minute interactions separating blacks and whites. Like she told us about one town that had it as a law that blacks and whites couldn’t play checkers together. Seriously. In another southern town she told us how there was a black Bible and a white Bible for swearing people in at the courthouse and some person’s trial was delayed in getting started because the court reporter couldn’t find the “black” Bible. It’s the same Bible mind you. No difference in text or publisher. But one was for blacks and another for whites. Oh, and even thought Atlanta was the first southern city to allow blacks to be police officers, it was actually against the law for blacks to arrest whites.
The one that really got me was there was a law that prevented a black person from passing a white person in their car on the highway. So if I were behind you and you were driving slow, it was against the law for me to pass you. I would have to wait until you exited the highway to pass you. Isabel said Jim Crow was bad for blacks obviously but bad for whites too. As she put it “If I’m in a ditch, you have to get in the ditch too to make certain I stay there.”
I hear you on the frustration of the “just get a job” community. For every hustler earnestly working to game the system, there are dozens of people desperately trying to raise themselves and their families into a better station in life. The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth has really done a number on people in so many soul-crushing ways. It doesn’t take into consideration at all the many ways the system is rigged against people and how much a variable chance and circumstance really are. Also, it’s always the ones with significant personal and relationship advantages trying to sell you on how hard they worked to get where they are.