false 47 265 201 true 5632365 read 3 true 1888800 currently-reading 61 true 1888799 to-read 28 false 3767106 the-f-word 17 false 2224491 audiobook 16 false 2140327 poetry 13 false 2182139 reference-formative 11 false 1889319 womynlovingwomyn 11 false 3621406 thisishowwedoit 6 false 3877471 art 6 false 3767201 class--work- 5 false 3746448 politcs-of-color 4 false 3621365 art-books-not-read-cover-to-cover 3 false 3515930 dint-finish--actually 3 false 2461772 given-world-enough-and-time 2 false 4287258 not-cover-to-cover 2 false 2133842 all-us-kids 2 false 1895215 speculative 1 false 3627040 now---then 1 false 4287282 on-hold 1 false 4287288 active-reference 1 false 4115046 1-buck-at-the-liberry http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/166281-currently-reading-thread-summer-autumn-2009 Jude made a comment in the Audiobooks group:

Have been listening to the Maisie Dobbs mysteries. The reader is excellent- highly charged emotional scenes perfectly executed. These are almost humorless books, so a narrator who can keep us engaged with so many challenged people and let us sit with the earnestness of the heroine and ... well I should put this in another thread but I'm on my first pda & a bit overwhelmed;-) ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/26016189 Jude's review of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
by Ursula K. LeGuin

Yes Abbi - as usual you pick up the deeper nuances where i am just happy to have pierced only the first layer :->!

It does become a much more demanding and useful story if you let it rest as a parable of choices made within the " the limits of our influence."

and all the things you list - yes - and add into that mix what changes about the nature of choice when the chooser has deeper information :->! If I know what i takes to bring a cotton shirt to the rack at Walmart, my decision to buy it is very different from the truly uninformed.

thanks, sweetheart - i wrote this long ago - great to be taken back in with such good thinking. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22647-narrarators-you-don-t-like Jude made a comment in the Audiobooks group:

Ah, Dick Hill:-)! I think if you go to 'self-important' in the dictionary, he is the illustration. One of the readers whose name indicates a pleasure I must forego. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/206950-that-big-fight-dance-party-tc-style Jude made a comment in the Terminalcoffee group:

I can't imagine a better argument than this thread to justify 'a place of their own.' Some days, life in the world of arrogant self-congratulatory dick-swinging calls for an Elsewhere. And sure enough, when a dick got inside he thought it was all about him. Having only one eye is murder on depth perception. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/192843-those-frightful-fairy-tales Jude made a comment in the Folklore & Fairytales group:

Although honestly, I don't really see the landscape of folk tales as populated by white hats and black hats, to me it looks more equivocal than that.

oh! - neither do i - i thought we were talkin bout the hats right now & thought i had identified the females in black ones as a beloved hobby horse of mine. & i was intrigued by the wiki implication that only the FG's (as opposed to dead moms) made it into pop fairy tales, etc... Not meant as refutation or argument - i was just thinking & digging. sorry altogether. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/66275034 Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories (Hardcover) by Elizabeth Strout
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64501455 Origin, A Novel (Kindle Edition) by Diana Abu-Jaber
bookshelves: currently-reading
listening to audiobook. unfamiliar with writer, but so far happy with vocabulary, general sense of foreboding, flat affect of the protagonist & decent emotional atmospherics. girl raised by moneys with heightened sense of smell & i am ready to take her and the writer seriously. markers of abusive potential in old bf, transparent fears & pathologies in foster mom, check. But nothing feels rote & the reader is doing fine. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/64220811 Something Borrowed (Paperback) by Emily Giffin
I am listening - morbidly semi-fascinated - to a truly appropriate subtle-as-a stick-in-your-eye reading of this one on cd. The narrator heightens Darcy's opaque, ignorant self-centeredness to a shrill and nasal pitch, and delivers Rachel as the second-most self aware 30 yr old woman on the planet ( Darcy getting # 1.) Biggest difference between them is that Darcy can get any man she wants and Rachel can read. The inexplicable duration of their "friendship" is a function of neither of them having left the 5th grade girl's room when it comes to human relations.

Utterly unappealing in ANY way, these two cartoon characters go through their predictable and horribly scripted lines, while circling a Ken Doll whose decision to marry the vapid & vicious Darcy takes the whole story to its highest peak of sur-reality.

I've read (listened to, that is) predictable, light weight novels about young women before, and some of them are truly clever with believable characters ( well, as believable as a good romantic comedy), who bring real latent skills to fundamental conflicts involving character and self-respect, grow a bit & get the pretty boy. Harmless. And in both the humor and bemused observations of these heroines I can see the writer's agenda as involving a bit more than churning out a formulaic money maker.

THIS book, tho - indicates the existence of at least one of two really disgusting possibilities - and one incontrovertible pathology:

1) that superficial, unaware, essentially ignorant people write what they know and it sells
or
2) that cynical people write what they think other people think they know and it sells
and
that there is a mass market for stupid stories this badly written about people this vain & clueless is like looking at an xray of a doomed civilization.


]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/63471404 Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (Hardcover) by Matthew B. Crawford
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/62237440 Screening Novel Women: Gender in the British Nineteenth-Century Novel and its Film Adaptations (Hardcover) by Liora Brosh
bookshelves: to-read
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