What are you reading?
Lisa Ongpin Periquet is switching between the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories and Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil’s Legends and Adventures.
Jerome Gomez is reading Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts. This elegant, smart, funny book was first published by Hearst in 1949. Jerome’s copy is a 1977 edition, a gift from his sister when he recently moved into his own place. She found it at the bookay-ukay on Maginhawa Street.
Jerrold Tarog is reading Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks—case studies of people who experience musical seizures, hallucinations, and other epiphanies. He’s planning to reread Culture of Hope by Frederick Turner, his college bible on the definition of art.
Leo Abaya is reading By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art by Hung and Magliaro, and Conversations with Edward Said.
I’m finishing The Lazarus Project, then I’m reading The Engagement, a novel by Georges Simenon that does not feature Inspector Maigret. It was filmed in the 90s as Monsieur Hire.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 6th, 2009 at 00:47
1. Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture
2. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke
3. Elmore Leonard’s Unknown Man #89
4. Julia Alvarez’s In the Name of Salome
July 6th, 2009 at 01:01
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
July 6th, 2009 at 02:35
I’m reading “The Travels of Ibn Battutah” edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Picador), which is about the adventures of a young Moroccan jurist and writer who travels from Morocco to China in the 1300s. His descriptions of of the inhabitants of Makkah, as being so fond of using lots of expensive perfume, made me laugh, as it is still true today.
Also dipping into the Brazilian edition of the memoirs of Che Guevara’s wife Aleida March (“Evocacao” in Portuguese). Since she is such a good Communist she just repeats Marxist mantras, which makes for boring reading. Much more interesting are her family pictures of herself with Che and their children.
July 6th, 2009 at 04:51
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
July 6th, 2009 at 11:20
All The Names by Jose Saramago
On Love by Alain de Botton
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
July 6th, 2009 at 23:38
I’m reading The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud. I’m hating it so far, but that’s part of the fun.
Next up will probably be from a writer who’s right up my alley. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nikolai Gogol, or maybe Don DeLillo.