Terence's comments
(member since Jul 23, 2008)
Terence's comments from the The Next Best Book Club group.
(showing 1-11 of 11)
The office won this month's sales competition so we got a gift certificate (huzzah, huzzah, huzzah):
Nonfiction:
How Women Got Their Curves
China's Cosmopolitan Empire
The Languages of China
Aurelian and the Third Century
Diocletian and the Roman Recovery
Lost in the Sacred
Fiction:
Run Man Run, Chester Himes
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
The Red Tree, Caitlin Kiernan
The Marquise of O, Heinrich von Kleist
Fantasia, Assia Djebar
Transition, Iain Banks
All the Windracked Stars, Elizabeth Bear
Hah! Pikers, slackers, gold-bricking layabouts :-)
I live with 9 cats (deep breath - Cassie, Emma, Calvin, Meggie, Malcolm, Irene, Oberon, Puck, Miss Gray), all of whom I've rescued in various ways from the awful streets of LA.
I used to work with a foster-pet organization but it got too depressing.
Man, I love GoodReads!
Thanks for the site info, JG
Now I can only read English with any ease but back in the day (way back in the day), during my graduate student days, I claimed a fair knowledge of German, French & Italian but I never had the time to read any fiction in those languages except for the last - on a Christmas vacation in Italy, I picked up a anthology of H.P. Lovecraft's stories.
I'd love to learn Russian since I don't know whether my adoration of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky is because of their translators or because of them :-)
With the cost of books, my preferred source of reading materials has been the library for a while now. I'm fortunate to live in the LA area - I've got cards for 5 library systems and I can usually find all but the most obscure or newest books (though, I may have to use interlibrary loan to get them).
I'm also fortunate to have a fairly decent (but small) used-book store within walking distance. Otherwise, it's a drive upwards of 40 miles to find any other good one.
For older stuff whose copyrights have run out, I've also discovered The Internet Archive and The Gutenberg Project. Among other works, I've downloaded for free H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come and several works by James Branch Cabell.
1. Nina from Truly Madly Deeply
2. Sonora Webster from Wild Hearts Cant Be Broken
3. Amelie from Amelie
4. Rose from Titanic
5. Joker from The Dark Knight
6. Napoleon Dynamite from Napoleon Dynamite
7. Captain Jack Sparrow
8. Oddball from Kelly's Heroes
filets
I don't remember where or exactly when I learned to read but what I DO remember is my 2nd grade teacher (so I was about 7) telling me that the book I was reading was too difficult for me (as I recall, it was one of those horse books like Black Beauty).
Fortunately, I decided to ignore her advice and (so far) haven't regretted it.
She also tried to stop me from practicing my cursive writing skills because we hadn't started that yet.
Egads! How did I survive to 3rd grade?
Right now I'm in the middle of "Imperial Capitals of China" by Arthur Cotterell. An interesting enough read, as these things go, but the copy editor in me has been appalled by the egregious textual errors -- "bareness" for "barrenness," "dairy" for "diary," and it goes on and on.
Fictionwise, I'm in the midst of the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan's "Say You're One of Them," a collection of short stories about children surviving some truly harrowing experiences. The first story is about a 12-year-old prostitute and her family, and the second one (which I'm still reading) is about 2 children being "fattened" for eventual sale into slavery.
The physical conditions these characters find themselves in are gruesome but there's a certain elan about the children that saves the reader from utter despair.
Sera, I sympathize with the desire to know the backstory but I don't think that would have served McCarthy in writing the novel. It doesn't matter. The focus, and rightly so, is entirely on the father and his son and their trek. What makes the novel so wrenching is that the reader doesn't even know if there's a point to it all -- Is the wasteland worldwide? Is anyone growing food? Can anyone?
Regarding good guys vs. bad guys: This is another point, I think McCarthy was making. In such a world, does morality matter? I think he would say "yes"; otherwise, why not join one of the cannibal bands roaming the countryside?
