Cathy's comments (member since Feb 04, 2008)

Cathy's comments from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die group.

Cold Comfort Farm is absolutely hilarious.

I lost 70 books when they changed the list! My will to survive has been crushed.

Cold Comfort Farm, in spite of the title, is both happy and hilarious. Also, Thank You Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse -- all the Jeeves books are frothy and delightful.

Possession ends up being very positive. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is light -- so is Invisible Cities. Flaubert's Parrot is a fun book (I wish The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters was on the list, because I think it's even better, but it's not so oh well).

And finally, going back a ways, Don Quixote is a blast! Not exactly one of those books you can zip through, but it's really very funny.

I agree that The Breast is an utter waste of time. Also the Kathy Acker selections, A Prayer of Owen Meany (I HATE THAT BOOK!) and there are at least four too many Don Delillos.

OTOH, I absolutely love The Blind Assassin and Edna O'Brien.

I think it was the summer when I was 12 that I DEVOURED the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. They're tremendous fun -- if you want to branch out from contemporary YA, check them out!

Wow -- now I feel really annoyed that I wasted one of those slots on "Clan of the Cave Bear"!

Atonement absolutely blew me away -- I haven't enjoyed any of the others I've read as much. I'll have to check out Amsterdam.

The early ones are really dark, twisted, and disturbing, and I have no desire to read more of them than I already have. No Enduring Love for me, please!

I just finished Fingersmith. What a corking good read! If you like rollicking Victorian pastiche, pick this one up.

I might have enjoyed Tipping the Velvet just a smidge more (maybe just because I read it first), but I thought Fingersmith was tons better than Affinity.

No, I know other people who've been bored by it! I feel like it's one of those books you have to relax and immerse yourself in the atmosphere and the lushness of the prose, because it's not like the plot is going to clip right along. I've always wanted to read it in a hammock, with an umbrella drink and orchids and things like that around. ;-)

I read two Ackers when I was in my early 20s and didn't know any better. I thought they were both just awful. Yeah, OK, it's experimental and she's trying to do all this metatextual hoo-ha -- but that doesn't help the reading experience.

I think I was stupid enough to read both HER "Story of the Eye" AND Bataille's "Story of the Eye." Ugh, yech, ptooie.

Now Love in the Time of Cholera, on the other hand, is one of my favorites and I'd love to discuss.

I read it years ago -- I don't remember everything about it vividly, but I do know that I really liked it. It was so lush and sensual, and gave you more to hang on to than some of Winterston's more experimental books.

I think the narrator is intentionally ambiguous, and that part of the point of the book is that that ambiguity is almost intolerable for the reader because we're so hardwired to think in terms of gender. Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness does the same kind of thing -- she imagines this intelligent, sophisticated alien race who essentially have no gender until their breeding season, and then individuals may become one of ... three genders, I think? And they differ from season to season as to which gender they become. It's shockingly hard to visualize the characters as not being male or female -- at least it was for me.

Smarti, I have the same problem with Austen (except Emma, which I love because it's so funny). I think for me, the stumbling block is that she never describes anything in as much detail as I would like -- I don't know what anyone looks like except in very general terms, that they're pretty or of a certain age or what have you. She doesn't describe mannerisms or clothing or food in any great detail. When you combine that with how circumspect most of the characters are, it's hard for me to get engaged with what's happening; it all seems very abstract.

I think that's why I often enjoy movies based on her books much more than the books themselves.

I'm in Glendale, so right in the neighborhood.

You're making me want to pick up Saramago.

Thanks to being sick in bed, I just devoured two list books back to back. The Lonely Girl (it's on the list under its alternate title, The Girl with Green Eyes) is the second in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy, and it's so good, maybe even better than the first. Two Irish girls leave the countryside to try their luck in big, bad Dublin, and the narrator falls in with an older man. She's very passive and awkward, and apparently her brash, bossy friend narrates the third book -- I can't wait to see how that goes.

Then I moved on to The Siege of Krishnapur, which I'd never even heard of before the list. What a fantastic book! It's kind of a familiar scenario -- a bunch of frivolous British Victorians end up holed up for months during the Sepoy mutiny and you see what becomes of them under duress -- but the characters are terrific and it's so vividly written. For a book with so much bloodshed and cholera and horror, it is also often very funny. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

So, there you go -- two excellent books I would probably never have read without the List.

>I currently have 67 books from the list sitting on my bookcase unread!

Hey, at least you won't run out of stuff to read any time soon. ;-)

I'm trembling on the cusp of 30%, at 29.97%. I need to pick up something short to bump me over, because I think the next couple of books I have at home are Ivanhoe and Fingersmith, and either of those is going to take a while.

I suspect I'm way older than most of you, plus I was an English major in college so that gave me an early boost.

I've just starting Eva Trout, by Elizabeth Bowen. So far, it's compelling, but all the characters communicate in a very oblique way. It's extremely ENGLISH.

I'd never read Bowen before and she writes beautifully. there's a short passage describing what one character, who married a fruit farmer (who has now failed horribly at that career), imagined life in the orchards would be like, and it's just so swoony and gorgeous.

I'm still reading the March selection, so I think I'll never catch up for April. Although all the discussion of steaminess is making it sound more appealing than I thought it would be. ;-)

Midnight's Children is my absolute favorite Rushdie.

I'm STILL reading Ground Beneath! I'm really enjoying it, but this novel is quite a timesuck.

I'm finding the narrator to be quite the ambiguous figure ... what did people make of him?

Logan, I did like Maximum City, although parts were so grim that it was difficult to read. I loved how much detail he went into about the workings of the city, although he relies a lot on these first-person relationships he formed with whores, murderers, and filmmakers, so it's more of a snapshot of a small group of individuals than it is a comprehensive portrait of Bombay.

I bought Shantaram a few months ago, and your endorsement is making me think I should bump it up in my "to read" queue.

I started The Ground Beneath Her Feet yesterday. I found Moor's Last Sigh and Satanic Verses unfinishable, but I'm really enjoying this so far! I finished Maximum City, a nonfiction account of modern Bombay, the same day, so I'm really enjoying all the Bombay stuff in Ground Beneath Her Feet. Wordplay, mythology, and rock and roll -- what's not to like?