Ebook seems to be my Luddite red line. I just prefer my stack of murdered trees. I’m headed back to Trumpland soon. I’ll try again. Camus and Steinbeck are high on my to get list.
I am happily plodding through East of Eden. It’s just so good. My wife calls it gossip when I catch her up on what Kate the whore has been up to-- ha!
This is supposed to be the best book ever according to lots of people. I want to read but held back by story line and length.
With ereader I always have unlimited options at fingertip so just go with mood at moment for current and next read.
It’s not meant for one sitting, I’m finding. I read a bit and then turn it over in mhead for days-- then start in again.
I mean, Adam’s brother HAS to come back now, right? After what Kate the whore said? good god man, I have to go and find out. lol
Lol
The World of Suzie Wong
Guy and prostitute go through ups and downs 
of falling in love in Hong Kong.
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
I’ve had Infinite Jest on my to read list forever but kept holding off, daunted by its 2,000 page length, half which are footnotes (some of which go on for multiple pages). Now it’s firmly scratched off the list unless you really put forward a good case to convince me otherwise. This guy badly needed an editor - quite a few of these stories read more like half-baked ideas for a story than actual stories, and even the better stories drag on, repetitively conveying story elements that could easily be condensed into a quarter of the length with no great loss. The fictional interviews with the disturbing men, which take up 1/4 to 1/3 of the collection, are the highlights. And while Wallace’s direct, unfiltered transmissions from the Id can be bracing in small doses, there’s no way I could ever take 2,000 pages of this style. The characters are too self-absorbed to an absurd extreme in their first-world problems for me to care (this is a general problem for most contemporary American literature, though), and while Wallace’s too-clever-by-half, overeducated, breaking the 4th wall style is amusing at first, it wears thin reeeeal fast. I can see how he appealed to a certain subset of overeducated, on the spectrum, white males with woman problems (a demographic I myself am in) that he seems to speak unnervingly directly for…so, yeah I get his cult status, and why that geeky subset so badly overrate him.
Has anybody read Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver?
Unobtainium at my local library (all copies loaned out and on reserve when returned).
Kingsolver is a Kentucky progressive, strike one (an often irrational, feral lot; see for example Ashley Judd). The novel won a Pulitzer, strike two. It’s unobtainium, 1-2. Reviewers say things like “21st century Huck Finn,” 2-2.
Can anybody send this to a full count?
Yeah, I got there a few years ago.
Get it together. The literary equivalent of a banana taped to a wall.
Buy it ya cheapo!
I did have my students in literature class read his narrative essay “shipping out: on the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise”
Looks good but 560 pages takes some commitment for me lately.
We’ll Prescribe You A Cat
by
Syou Ishida
4/5
Damn if this book didn’t make me think how almost any story could be improved by just adding a cat.
Just bought this recently in Kyoto.
So apparently horny fairy books are popular with women. Fairy smut.
There is an overwhelming amount of recommendations on these type of books when searching for book recommendations.
"What’s so addictive about these books? Why do you see people dragging around novels the size of carry-on luggage to read in cafes and on the train?
There are the essential ingredients of course: fairies, swords, magical palaces and rose gardens. But the real answer is: explicit sex scenes."
So like sexual stimulation without baggage.
Fairy smut had a different meaning back in the day. 
Any Taiwanese publications that do a good year-end list for local books?
So I’ve just finished East of Eden. Wow. What a marvelous book.
I want to weigh it against 100 Years of Solitude but I’m afraid something would be lost in the translation.
I may buy Steinbecks entire collection!
No idea. 
