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  <name><![CDATA[Chuck Lowry]]></name>
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    <about><![CDATA[A cranky old man, something of a nut on grammar, punctuation and spelling, classical education but an appreciation of the moderns, including (besides the authors whose works are mentioned above) Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy.  The conundrum for those of us who have spent a lifetime reading is to decide whether to return to those books that over the years have given so much pleasure and profit and food for thought (I have been, for example, reading The Aeneid for forty years, since I was a senior in high school), or move on to patch some of the gaping holes (Tolstoy, Austen, Steinbeck, a million others) that make our pretentions to literacy and erudition laughable.  ]]></about>
    <age>60</age>
    <gender>male</gender>
    <location>Brooklyn, NY</location>
    <website><![CDATA[]]></website>
    <joined>05/2007</joined>
    <last_active>10/2009</last_active>
    <interests><![CDATA[Don't know much about history, don't know much biology...]]></interests>
    <favorite_books><![CDATA[The Moviegoer, Love in the Time of Cholera, Brideshead Revisited, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, South of the Border West of the Sun, Jude the Obscure, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy]]></favorite_books>
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    <action_text><![CDATA[new comment from Chuck]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16343230</link>
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    <updated_at>Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:07:27 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[I hope Samantha remembers who first told her to read Love in the Time of Cholera--what a great novel.  Fifty-three years of unrequited love is enough even for the Irish!]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="comment">
    <action_text><![CDATA[new comment from Chuck]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3642971</link>
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    <updated_at>Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:05:52 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[Hey, Bridget, how are you?  That is exactly the edition of THIALH that I have and read.  **** is about right.  I liked it about that much, but I liked The Ballad of the Sad Cafe even better.  Still, I thought that the racial element in Hunter was very poignant, if somewhat idealized.  I understand that Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers did not like each other at all.  Oh well. ]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="review">
    <action_text><![CDATA[gave 4 stars to: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142080.Collected_Poems_1909_1962">Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Centenary Edition)</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18540.T_S_Eliot">T.S. Eliot</a>]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5470779</link>
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  <id type="integer">91609</id>
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    <updated_at>Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:21:29 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[Poetry is funny stuff.  Either you &quot;get&quot; it or you don't.  And there are as many different kinds of poetry as there are of prose, and what differs in style and form can convey a simlar message, and vice versa.<br/><br/>T. S. Eliot has some lovely pieces that can be read on their own, wit...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5470779">more...</a>]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="comment">
    <action_text><![CDATA[new comment from Chuck]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/12402474</link>
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    <updated_at>Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:46:39 -0800</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[Augustine a realist?  Surely the last honor he would claim--or want to claim--for himself.  Interestingly enough, the original Latin title of the treatise is De Civitate Dei.  The word civitas has a lot of resonance in Latin that the word city does not have in English.  It is almost exclusively a word with political connotations.  For example, it is linguistically closely related to civis, citizen.  This is opposed to the Latin word urbs (cf. urban), which denominates a city in its cultural rather than political aspect.  [My poor wife--she gets this stuff all the time.  I can scarcely imagine how much she must hate me.]<br/><br/>Funny how we associate certain books with certain places and experiences.  I remember sitting in the café at Blackwell's, in Oxford, drinking bad coffee and eating lovely miniature mince pies as I read De Civitate Dei.  Not a bad life, though not the one that developed for me.]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="comment">
    <action_text><![CDATA[new comment from Chuck]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3642667</link>
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  <id type="integer">91609</id>
  <name>Chuck Lowry</name>
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    <updated_at>Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:18:18 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[Among the things that Bridget will be too young to know is that in the early seventies, after I escaped from high school, many schools replaced Catcher in the Rye with A Separate Peace.  For several years, Catcher in the Rye had been used in cities as the high school junior's or senior's introduction to contemporary literature.  At some point after I got out of high school (1967, how much longer could I live?), it was thought that Catcher in the Rye was too quirky or edgy for high school students and was replaced by the more mainstream A Separate Peace.  It may have been the first appearance of what became the rampaging academic disease of political correctness.  I loved Catcher in the Rye so much--I still reread it every few years--that to this day I have refused to read A Separate Peace.]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="comment">
    <action_text><![CDATA[new comment from Chuck]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3643026</link>
    <image_url>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172888618s/228560.jpg</image_url>
    <actor>
  <id type="integer">91609</id>
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    <updated_at>Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:11:48 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[I read this years ago and liked it well enough, though I was somewhat put off by the switching back and forth between Europe and Brooklyn, between the grim horror and the somewhat madcap eroticism.  Then I read Confessions of Nat Turner, which I thought was wonderful.  Most recently, though, I read Darkness Visible, Styron's non-fiction account of his severe depression which almost led to suicide in the late eighties.  If you want to know the difference between a bad day and the unrelieved horror of deep depression, this short (84 pages) account will set you straight.]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="review">
    <action_text><![CDATA[gave 2 stars to: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17803.After_Dark">After Dark (Hardcover)</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3354.Haruki_Murakami">Haruki Murakami</a>]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2794109</link>
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    <updated_at>Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:50:48 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[This book really disappointed me.  I am a great fan of Murakami.  I think that South of the Border, West of the Sun may be (along with Oracle Night, by Paul Auster) the page-for-page most intense novel I have ever read, and I love many of the stories, especially in After the Quake.  I therefore coul...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2794109">more...</a>]]></body>
        
    
  </update>  
      <update type="review">
    <action_text><![CDATA[gave 5 stars to: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9712.Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera">Love in the Time of Cholera (Paperback)</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13450.Gabriel_Garc_a_M_rquez">Gabriel García Márquez</a>]]></action_text>
    <link>http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2793959</link>
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    <actor>
  <id type="integer">91609</id>
  <name>Chuck Lowry</name>
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    <updated_at>Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:35:09 -0700</updated_at>
        
      
          <body><![CDATA[Fifty-three years of unrequited love is a lot even for a pessimistic Irishman like myself.  It is a marvelous accomplishment to show how we deal with love, fidelity, disappointment, the effect that affairs of the heart have on daily life and vice versa.  There is a lot of humanity in this novel, and...<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2793959">more...</a>]]></body>
        
    
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