Moving, books
Sep. 12th, 2009 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwVermont showed us a delightful face for the first week of our arrival, treating us to warm breezy days with clear skies, cool but not cold nights, and plenty of sunlight on beaches and the lake. We had friends in from out of town, relatives who helped us move, and got to eat tasty food. September is a season of markets, fairs, and street festivals as best as I can tell, and our favorite musician of all time (Richard Thompson) will be playing Burlington in just three weeks or so.
Books-wise, I'm still in a phase of re-reading comforting and /or familiar things or types-of-things. I brought home the first volume of Roger Zelazny's collected short stories (yay!), tore through a re-read of some more Georgette Heyer (A Lady of Quality, I think).
Then I surprised myself a bit and picked up a book by Muriel Spark. It had no book jacket and sat flat and black on the "staff recommends" table. The title was "Loitering with Intent" which was too good a title to pass by. So far I love it. It reminded me that I do read literary fiction. (I'm always announcing, in just the pompous tone used by readers of literary fiction reviewed in the New Yorker, that I "only read genre", but it isn't actually true.)
So I thought about it and here are some literary fiction authors I've read and valued, since I'm always claiming to read only f/sf, horror, mystery, romance, etc.
Doris Lessing - the Golden Notebook and Love, Again both blew my mind. Her other work has been consistently intriguing to me.
Jeanette Winterson - I read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and a few others.
Margaret Atwood - I really liked the Edible Woman, appreciated the Handmaid's Tale though I really don't enjoy stories set after the disaster, and liked the Robber Bride quite a lot. I think I've read others but those three I remember clearly.
Richard Meltzer - The Night (Alone) - I'm not sure if this qualifies as lit fic as it's more experimental. I loved it to pieces and then foolishly gave it away.
Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers is one of my favorite books ever.
Richard Brautigan - I've read maybe four or five of his novels, a bunch of poetry. My favorite is Sombrero Fallout.
Stefan Heym - The King David Report was the book that propelled me into my adolescent bible reading phase. I really enjoyed it, and then I quite enjoyed reading all the related books in the Old Testament.
does it count if it's for school? My junior year of high school we read Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and I loved it. I think of it as being like a detective noir novel since he falls through the underbelly of his own constructed world. And though I can't stand Of Mice and Men, I loved Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath unreasoningly - not for the Joads so much as for all the other bits.
Books-wise, I'm still in a phase of re-reading comforting and /or familiar things or types-of-things. I brought home the first volume of Roger Zelazny's collected short stories (yay!), tore through a re-read of some more Georgette Heyer (A Lady of Quality, I think).
Then I surprised myself a bit and picked up a book by Muriel Spark. It had no book jacket and sat flat and black on the "staff recommends" table. The title was "Loitering with Intent" which was too good a title to pass by. So far I love it. It reminded me that I do read literary fiction. (I'm always announcing, in just the pompous tone used by readers of literary fiction reviewed in the New Yorker, that I "only read genre", but it isn't actually true.)
So I thought about it and here are some literary fiction authors I've read and valued, since I'm always claiming to read only f/sf, horror, mystery, romance, etc.
Doris Lessing - the Golden Notebook and Love, Again both blew my mind. Her other work has been consistently intriguing to me.
Jeanette Winterson - I read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and a few others.
Margaret Atwood - I really liked the Edible Woman, appreciated the Handmaid's Tale though I really don't enjoy stories set after the disaster, and liked the Robber Bride quite a lot. I think I've read others but those three I remember clearly.
Richard Meltzer - The Night (Alone) - I'm not sure if this qualifies as lit fic as it's more experimental. I loved it to pieces and then foolishly gave it away.
Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers is one of my favorite books ever.
Richard Brautigan - I've read maybe four or five of his novels, a bunch of poetry. My favorite is Sombrero Fallout.
Stefan Heym - The King David Report was the book that propelled me into my adolescent bible reading phase. I really enjoyed it, and then I quite enjoyed reading all the related books in the Old Testament.
does it count if it's for school? My junior year of high school we read Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and I loved it. I think of it as being like a detective noir novel since he falls through the underbelly of his own constructed world. And though I can't stand Of Mice and Men, I loved Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath unreasoningly - not for the Joads so much as for all the other bits.
