Author Topic: Book Thread  (Read 41576 times)

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Carnal Knowledge
« Reply #20 on: May 02, 2006, 06:24:01 pm »
I'm reading a great article in The New Yorker by Bill Buford. It's called "Carnal Knowledge" about his purchase of a pig for butchering in Tuscany. He is a chef, in case you're confused.
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Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #21 on: July 18, 2006, 06:24:28 pm »
The latest book I am reading is "Augusta Locke" by William Heywood Henderson about a woman who grows up in the Rocky Mountains and lives as a man in Wyoming, owning a cattle ranch. It's a great read, and has a recommendation from Annie Proulx on the jacket.
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Offline Andrew

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #22 on: July 18, 2006, 08:19:14 pm »
One of my favorite Victorian novels is Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters.  Not many people had even heard of this before the excellent Masterpiece Theatre version a few years ago.  Some people who don't care for Dickens or Thackeray imagine they don't like the Victorians, but Gaskell is worlds away from them in this work, a little more in the late Austen tradition.  Certainly there is Austenian genius in how characters like Mrs Gibson reveal their moral qualities unwittingly in their speech - it's really rare in novels to have dialog which places the characters so perfectly.  It's also like Austen in having an extremely sympathetic main character set in the midst of a very mixed, difficult family situation, as in Pride and Prejudice.  And the family is surrounded by an immense, varied, beautifully painted rural community.  The action never lags, working itself out in unpredictable ways.  I'm really working myself up to a rereading!

Offline henrypie

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #23 on: July 19, 2006, 09:22:50 am »
Thanks, Frontie, for reviving the thread!

I am now reading The March by E.L. Doctorow.  It's his most recent, I believe.  (His Ragtime goes on the all-time-favorite pile.  Holy crap, that's a fine little book.)  Anyway The March is speeding by, gripping and beautiful.  (It's set in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina in the midst of Sherman's March to the Sea.)

Offline Andrew

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #24 on: August 06, 2006, 02:20:06 pm »
Something just made me remember the much-loved story "A White Heron" by the 19th century Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett.  This has so many beautiful things to say about growing up... being true to what you have always been even as you become someone new...

Stories are a nice alternative for people who think they have no time to read. 

If anyone else knows and likes this story I would be glad to hear of it.

Offline Andrew

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #25 on: August 06, 2006, 02:48:50 pm »
Well, that happens in "A White Heron".  Because it's set in Jewett's native Maine I took it along a few years ago when we visited Acadia National Park, staying in a cottage overlooking Southwest Harbor.  I read it aloud one evening to my partner and the friend who came with us.  And had great difficulty controlling my voice as I read the last paragraph.

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #26 on: August 06, 2006, 03:01:48 pm »
This is on the Internet! at
http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/awh/awh-cont.htm
along with a lot of her other things.
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Offline Andrew

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #27 on: August 06, 2006, 03:09:21 pm »
Did you have a chance to read it, Front-Ranger?  Did you like it...even a little bit?  I read it in high school when it was in the anthology for our English class.  And something made me remember it and want to seek it out years later, though I was too young to know what I thought about it or about much of anything the first time around.

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #28 on: August 06, 2006, 03:32:14 pm »
Yes, I just finished reading it and liked it very much. I can't wait to read more of her work! Have to explore the whole site. As for you, Andrew, I might have to start calling U Thoreau. I have several Rokcy Mountain wildflower pics to post on your Nature Journal
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Offline Andrew

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Re: Book Thread
« Reply #29 on: August 06, 2006, 03:39:39 pm »
I'll look forward to the wildflowers.  Unfortunately I don't think any of Jewett's other stories are at all like A White Heron, she put everything she had to say about nature in that one story.  But I know there are other stories about small town life and I want to read them.