Harley's comments (member since Apr 18, 2009)

Harley's comments from the Constant Reader group.

I agree 100% with Joyce Carol Oates. Writing changes everything.

Congratulations, Ruth! You deserve the success from all your hard work.

By the time of The Fifth Woman, Wallander is more mature and not as messed up as he was in the first book. He still has problems but he does not make the same mistakes that he makes in Faceless Killers. And I even think the plotting is better in The Fifth Woman.

I find the best way to read a good mystery is listening to it in a car. There is something about being immersed in the world of a book through sound that heightens the tension. I feel like I am right there.

Say, Ruth, I think all poets and wanna-be poets should read the first chapter of the Fifth Woman. Mankell nails the life of an unknown poet. Makes you think twice about writing poetry.

Thanks for the tip on the Mankell book, Gabrielle.

I just finished the Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell on audio CD and loved it. It opens with the murder of a regional poet who has published 9 books of poetry and none have sold more than 300 copies. I am almost finished with the first in the series, Faceless Killers. It is good but not as good as the Fifth Woman.

My favorite mystery writers are Walter Mosley and Sara Paretsky. Sara created a great P.I. female character in V.I. Warshawski who lives and works in Chicago, especially the south side. Mosley created the hard-boiled detective, Easy Rawlins, who lives and works in the Watts neighborhood of LA during the fifties and sixties. Both writers do a great job of creating the characters and the cities. The books are less about the crime and more about the lives of the characters.

My two favorite Ferlinghetti poems are: Underwear and Christ Climbed Down. Here are few lines from Underwear:

"There won't be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense —
strange sedimentary stones and inscrutable cracks!"

I thought the library was wild, too.

Sheila, I also wonder where Chronicles 2 is. Probably still in Dylan's head waiting for time and inspiration. I don't know about you but I was disappointed that he did not touch on the years of his fame. I was also surprised by his anger at being the voice of a generation.

P.S. For anyone who has not listened to the book, Dylan does not read the book.

In case I was not clear, the Chronicles is Dylan's memoir. Unfortunately, I did not have any of his music to listen to while I was listening to the memoir. I wished the publisher would have mixed in some of the songs with the audio reading of the book. It would have been great to hear Dylan talk about a song and then actually hear the song. Maybe some day publishers will create multimedia books.

I just finished listening to Chronicles, Volume 1, by Bob Dylan. I would recommend it for anyone who loves Dylan's music or lived through the 60's. The story is not told in a chronological manner, but worth listening to. The section on making a record was fascinating as a study in creativity. See my review for more.

I read his book, The Dead Lecturer, back in the 60's and appreciated his poems back then. I just picked up the book and thumbed through it after I read this poem. I am not sure that his work has stood the test of time or maybe it is my interests have changed.

Thanks everyone. Last weekend I checked out Chronicles by Bob Dylan and I have been listening to it all week. Unusual in that the story begins when he arrives in New York at the beginning of his career and took him up to the point where he was about to make it big and then jumped 10 years to when his father died and he withdrew from the world to be with his family.

I have listened to abridged books. They work fine with business books because it gives you the basic idea. I would not want abridged with fiction.

I love audio books and audio in general. I first listened to motivational speakers like Zig Ziglar back in the 1980's, then progressed to history, biography and autobiography. I found tapes and CDs work well for business books which I usually find boring and poorly written. I can only listen while driving because I fall asleep if I'm sitting in a chair. I was very hesitant to listen to novels since I love to read them. I have found that mysteries and thrillers are great to listen to while driving. I enter the world the writer creates in a way that I can't do when I am just reading. The audio touches at a deeper emotional level. The one thing I found that I have not been able to listen to while driving is poetry.

I'm glad I found this discussion. I just wish there were more books on CD or available for my Ipod. The one reason listening to non-fiction books works for me is that I have learned to listen to them multiple times. I learn something new each time I listen. I usually don't read a book more than once.

The local art club here in Perrysburg did the same thing last year. We had an exhibit of artists and poets collaborations.

Don't all great literary works depend on the reader? Don't we as readers bring something to the table? Is the burden for what we read and understand solely on the writer?

We as readers bring our experiences, beliefs,expectations and imagination to bear on any literary or artistic work. That is what makes the experience enjoyable.

I think the poet is visiting a empty house that was his grandmother's home and he is remembering what it was like as a child to visit that home. And he is remembering his grandmother through his child's eyes. So there is nostalgia here. For a child, a grandmother could easily be a ghost moving through life. Someone remembered through the fog of years. I can almost smell the pie baking.

My favorite lines are:

the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past

It reminds me growing up on a farm where we had no running water. My how times have changed.

"17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty."

My assumption is that he is referring to the republican/democrat polarization of the political society. (Red vs Blue states) How TV news tends to have people shouting their opinions but not listening to each other.

"It must be that there are only so many faces
in the world, and the longer we live,
the more familiar they become."

Ruth, I loved your poem, Faces. I see a lot of similarity in faces, too. Coming from an artist like yourself, that is profound.

Beautiful poem, especially when I read it aloud. For me sometimes it is less the meaning the listening to the sounds the poem makes as it rolls off my tongue.