last weekend we drove up to the mountains to a little village/settlement called wandiligong. it’s a four hour drive, so i normally read until my stomach and head hurt. i took this along and finished it on the way home. amazing. i don’t know why i previously avoided mccarthy, but i’ve never counted him amongst ‘southern gothic’ writers like faulkner and o’connor and welty and mccullers. i sure think differently now. i don’t know a word of spanish but it didn’t matter, i pretended like these adolescent californian boys (old enough to be my grandparents now) pretended they knew what the hell they were doing in mexico, with guns and wild horses and scars across their faces.
what are you reading?
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I am reading Everything is Illuminated by JS Foer. It’s making me feel very much.
My friend Stacey and I write a blog where we usually end up talking about books.. booktalk is the greatest.
i read everything is illuminated last year. it’s wonderful, hey?
i prefer extremely loud & incredibly close – it made me rethink what writing can do on a page. however, there’s something in the understated nature of everything is illuminated that i also really liked.
i’m according to garp by john irving. what a book. amazink. but i am worried about how long it is. i’m halfway through and so much has happened. hmm.
i just finished reading the boy in the moon by ian brown – a nonfiction telling of a man’s battle to connect to and help his severely mentally disabled son. categorised under memoir/health which is absurd, but it’s an incredible read.
michael chabon’s ‘manhood for amateurs’ and every essay seems to illustrate some aspect of how parents always betray their children .. always, without fail .. interspersed with ‘collins : italian verbs’ and being fascinated by the fact that some common italian verbs that are irregular in the ordinary present tense also have irregular present subjunctives (fascinating, ne pas?) .. and relentlessly editing my own massive, but ultimately unpublishable book, ‘pure grist’ (it was called ‘wall and piece’, but banksy stole that title) .. being a collection of photographs of gallery art and street art (if’n yer interested, you can have the only copy i ever intend to make) ..
regards
I saw the movie According to Garp really late one night on tv and wondered what the hell it was. I liked the story though, it was quite compelling but devastating
I fully intend to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as soon as I can find it in a secondhand bookstore.. cause that’s all my meagre budget allows for..
i think ‘according to garp’ is one of those books that’s always been in the periphery of my mind, and one day i start to read it and berate myself for not doing so earlier. so, i should.
Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. The descriptions are amazing, and every sentence serves to better describe the pseudo-fantasy (‘new weird’, I think they call it) world he’s created. Great stuff so far.
‘shantaram’ – gregory david roberts. amazing.
and recently, ‘the call of the wild’ – jack london. i swallowed it in a very short space of time, and then berated myself for not dragging it out over several days. i was also gifted a copy of ‘picnic at hanging rock’ from millie when she was over here in january, which i am ashamed to say i have never read. but i intend to take it to devon and read it sitting in the sunshine on the lawn, in a pretty dress with a cool glass of something delicious next to me, pretending to be you.