Becky's Progress: 22 completed

I've finished five more books...

Choldenko, Gennifer. Al Capone Does My Shirts
Heyer, Georgette. The Grand Sophy*
Heyer, Georgette.The Corinthian.
Pearce, Philippa. Tom's Midnight Garden.
Orczy, Baroness. The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Linda P Review *Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants *Ann Brashares

From Amazon:
They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until the four girls took turns trying them on--four girls, that is, who are close friends, about to be parted for the summer, with very different sizes and builds, not to mention backgrounds and personalities. Yet the pants settle on each girl's hips perfectly, making her look sexy and long-legged and feel confident as a teenager can feel. "These are magical Pants!" they realize, and so they make a pact to share them equally, to mail them back and forth over the summer from wherever they are. Beautiful, distant Lena is going to Greece to be with her grandparents; strong, athletic Bridget is off to soccer camp in Baja, California; hot-tempered Carmen plans to have her divorced father all to herself in South Carolina; and Tibby the rebel will be left at home to slave for minimum wage at Wallman's. Over the summer the Pants come to represent the support of the sisterhood, but they also lead each girl into bruising and ultimately healing confrontations with love and courage, dying and forgiveness. Lena finds her identity in Greece and the courage not to reject love; Bridget gets in over her head with an older camp coach; Carmen finds her father ensconced with a new fiancée and family; and Tibby unwillingly takes on a filmmaking apprentice who is dying of leukemia. Each girl's story is distinct and engrossing, told in a brightly contemporary style. Like the Pants, the reader bounces back and forth among the four unfolding adventures, and the melange is spiced with letters and witty quotes. Ann Brashares has here created four captivating characters and seamlessly interwoven their stories for a young adult novel that is fresh and absorbing. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

I knew I was going to like this book. I'd seen the movie before and love it. I did indeed enjoy the book. I love all the characters and identify with each of them. I love how they are friends and they need each other as much as they need themselves.
Quick read, very funny and charming. Recommended.

A Big One Taken Down

I finally knocked another book off my list: An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor, Bennett Cerf, ed. (1954).

How did a book like this come to be a “gap” in my reading? Two things: first, I’ve read Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor and E.B. and Katharine White’s Subtreasury of American Humor, both of which have turned me on to writers I hadn’t heard of (or simply ignored) before; second, it was among the books my mom took home from her parent’s house after they died, so I thought it might give some insight into my Grandpa (though, in retrospect, it didn’t look well-read). So, when I saw a copy of the book in a used-book store, I picked it up and never read it and finally put it on the “gaps” list to get around to it.

Nearly 700 pages later, I’m not sure it was a worthwhile gap. Maybe if I hadn’t read the other anthologies first, but as it is, Roy Blount’s anthology made me question Cerf’s chapter on “The South” (the book is subdivided first into regions and then into genres) and the Whites’ anthology had already introduced me to the better writers in the collection.

Benchley, Twain, and Perelman are still the cream of the crop for written humor pieces as far as I’m concerned. I love Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is excerpted here (as it was in the Whites’ book). The nicest surprise was an excerpt from Donald Moffat’s A Villa in Brittany (which I’ve already ordered from ABE books), mostly because of the way he translates the French to English. For example, when a car is about to get a ticket:

What is it that it has, Mr. the Agent? She is to me, the carriage.

Still makes me snicker.

And, for good measure, some Benchley:

People lie in bed and send out to the wine-shops for the native drink, which is known as wheero. All that is necessary to do with this drink is to place it in an open saucer on the window sill and inhale deeply from across the room. In about eight seconds the top of the inhaler’s head rises slowly and in a dignified manner until it reaches the ceiling where it floats, bumping gently up and down. The teeth then drop out and arrange themselves on the floor to spell “Portage High School, 1930,” the eyes roll upward and backward, and a strange odor of burning rubber fills the room. This is followed by an unaccountable feeling of intense lassitude.

Progress for July

Well, I didn't read quite as much this month, but I made a little headway on my list:

Fairies in Tradition and Literature Review
Golden Bough Review
If Not, Winter Review
VilletteReview

Then, I finished a few more that are partials - some Shakespeare plays, and the first half of Anne of Green Gables:

Twelfth Night Review
Anne of Green Gables, Avonlea, Island Review
Macbeth Review

It was SO much fun to read Anne of Green Gables again, but the highlight of the month on this list was definitely If Not, Winter, which I highly recommend.

Jennbook's Fill in the Gaps List

Hi, all! Long-time reader, first time poster. :) I'm excited to have finally made the 100-book commitment and join the literary self-education.

My criteria for books which made my List: nothing I've ever read before (natch), consciousness of multiculturalism and gender, fiction only (rule happily broken for My Life in France, and a couple of others), repetition of authors only if I felt strongly about the material about which s/he wrote. My List is below, in alphabetical order. Thanks for the inspiration!


1. Accidental Tourist, The- Anne Tyler
2. Age of Innocence, The - Edith Wharton
3. American Wife- Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Anansi Boys- Neil Gaiman
5. Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy
6. Atonement – Ian McEwan
7. Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The– Junot Diaz
8. Brothers Karamazov, The - Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. Butterfly and the Diving Bell, The- Jean-Dominique Bauby
10. Candide- Voltaire
11. Catch-22- Joseph Heller
12. Cheri & The End of Cheri- Colette
13. Clockwork Orange, A – Anthony Burgess
14. Color Purple, The – Alice Walker
15. Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole (10/10/09)
16. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
17. Daniel Deronda- George Eliot
18. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
19. Dead Souls- Nikolai Gogol
20. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
21. Dombey & Son- Charles Dickens
22. Don Quixote- Miguel de Cervantes
23. East of Eden- John Steinbeck
24. Ender’s Game- Orson Scott Card
25. Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
26. Farewell to Arms, A – Ernest Hemingway
27. Gift, The - Vladimir Nabokov
28. Golden Compass—Philip Pullman
29. Golden Notebook, The – Doris Lessing
30. Grapes of Wrath, The – John Steinbeck
31. Gulliver’s Travels- Jonathan Swift
32. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
33. Hound of the Baskervilles- Arthur Conan Doyle
34. House of Mirth, The- Edith Wharton
35. House of Spirits, The- Isabel Allende
36. House on Mango Street, The - Sandra Cisneros (8/05/09)
37. Human Stain, The- Philip Roth
38. Hunchback of Notre Dame, The – Victor Hugo
39. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
40. I, Robot- Isaac Asimov
41. Iliad, The – Homer
42. Into the Wild- Jon Krakauer
43. Invisible Man, The - H.G. Wells
44. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
45. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell – Susanna Clarke
46. Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
47. Jude the Obscure- Thomas Hardy
48. Kite Runner, The – Khalad Hosseini
49. Lady Chatterley’s Lover- D.H. Lawrence
50. Last King of Scotland, The – Giles Foden
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Like Water for Chocolate- Laura Esquivel
53. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
54. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
55. Member of the Wedding, The- Carson McCullers
56. Moby Dick- Herman Melville
57. Moll Flanders- Daniel Defoe
58. Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
59. My Antonia- Willa Cather
60. My Life in France— Julia Child
61. Namesake, The - Jhumpa Lahiri
62. Odyssey, The- Homer
63. Once and Future King, The – T.H. White
64. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
65. Orlando- Virginia Woolf
66. Paradise- Toni Morrison
67. Passage to India, A - E.M. Forster (9/05/09)
68. Persuasion- Jane Austen
69. Portable Dorothy Parker, The - Dorothy Parker
70. Portrait of a Lady, The – Henry James
71. Possession- A.S. Byatt
72. Reader, The- Bernhard Schlink
73. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
74. Remains of the Day, The – Kazuo Ishiguro
75. Revolutionary Road- Richard Yates
76. Room with a View, A - E.M. Forster
77. Screwtape Letters, The— C.S. Lewis
78. Secret Life of Bees, The – Sue Monk Kidd
79. Shipping News, The- E. Annie Proulx
80. Sister Carrie- Theodore Dreiser
81. Slaughterhouse Five- Kurt Vonnegut
82. Sophie’s Choice- William Styron
83. Sound and the Fury, The – William Faulkner
84. Tender is the Night— F. Scott Fitzgerald
85. Time Machine, The - H.G. Wells
86. Time Traveller’s Wife, The- Audrey Niffenberger
87. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
88. Treasure Island- Robert Louis Stevenson
89. Tristram Shandy- Laurence Sterne
90. Tropic of Cancer- Henry Miller
91. Ulysses- James Joyce
92. Unbearable Lightness of Being, The - Kundera
93. Uncle Tom’s Cabin- Harriet Beecher Stowe
94. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
95. Waiting- Ha Jin
96. Way We Live Now, The- Anthony Trollope
97. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
98. Wonder Boys- Michael Chabon
99. World According to Garp, The – John Irving
100. Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The – Michael Chabon (8/19/09)

Dana, Book Review, *Wonder Boys, *Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys: A Novel by Michael Chabon


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. This wasn't my first foray in the the wonderful world of Michael Chabon, but it was his first adult novel that I have read. I had previously read Summerland which is a fantastic Young Adult fantasy. I'd seen the movie version of Wonder Boys ages ago and loved it, so I was definitely excited to pick up the book. I had high expectations and Chabon exceeded them.

In brief, Wonder Boys is about a college professor, Grady Tripp, who is also a bit of a has been writer. Tripp saw great success with his first couple of novels, hence the professor job, but has been unable to finish his thousand page epic Wonder Boys, due partly to his marijuana addiction, partly to his disastrous marriage and affair, and partly to the fact that he's just trying to cram far too much into this novel. When Grady's neurotic and addict editor rolls into town for the college's LitFest, the pair end up on an epic adventure involving a suicidal student, Tripp's ex-in-laws, a dead dog and a lot of drugs.

While the plot of this novel is hilarious and well crafted, I enjoyed the writing the most. What I wouldn't kill to have Chabon's gift. He is a beautiful writer and each sentence is so melodiously crafted that they are hard to get out of your head. He finds uniques ways of saying things and his comparisons are superb. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone because it's a great book, but I would especially recommend this novel to writers. Seriously, study how this man crafts a sentence, a paragraph, a book. It's beautiful and lyrical. Well worth the read.

View all my reviews >>

Matthew, Progress Report

I've been thoroughly absent lately, what with getting married and all, but I did manage to make some progress on my list:

Finished:
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
Candide by Voltaire

Currently Reading:
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Persian Expedition by Xenophon

I'll add some reviews for the above sometime in the next few days, but for now I'm just going to collapse on the couch for awhile and be really glad my wife and I don't have any more wedding planning and preparation to do.