The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Book Thread
Front-Ranger:
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.
Front-Ranger:
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.
Andrew:
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!
henrypie:
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.)
Andrew:
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.
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