the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (in which I learn that Chile has elected its first woman president. Kent told me this some time ago and I remember thinking, Oh? I ought to find out more about that.)
Spontaneous Combustion, a thinly fictionalized autobiographical novel by David B. Feinberg (the incidents in at least the first third recapitulate incidents in Feinberg's first novel, Eighty-Sixed)
924 Gilman, edited by Brian Edge (a sort of oral history of Berkeley's famed collectively run punk rock club; the book's repetitive and rarely exposes a prose style but I'm enjoying it)
In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel by Truman Capote (I've been meaning to read this forever and it's a little premature to say I'm reading it since so far I've only read the first sentence about five times; while it was lying on the couch Kent took it up and got to the fourth page)
Parthenon West Review, issue 3, a poetry magazine out of San Francisco
Swann's Way, the endless novel (with endless sentences) by Marcel Proust
The Work of a Common Woman, poems by Judy Grahn (Grahn agreed to read as part of the Poetry & Pizza series this fall -- yay!)
Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Funny in Farsi: a memoir of growing up Iranian in America, by Firoozeh Dumas (the "Berkeley Reads" book this year; I tried to read along with the community book the first year they announced one but stalled out on Ellison's Invisible Man midway through the first chapter)
Snow Crash, a virtual reality novel by Neal Stephenson (as with In Cold Blood it is premature to say I'm reading this, really, but Stephenson keeps getting the hype and, um, I see by looking at page 211 that there's a librarian in it)
Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two, edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (if this had been a 430 page anthology I would have finished it already)
Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, edited by Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner (I've read two of the stories; maybe now that I'm between New Yorkers I will read a third)
The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath (I read the bio Bitter Fame but I find I keep pulling Plath biographies down from the bookstore shelf and flipping through them for fresh anecdotes; "It took three days driving north to find a cloud / The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accomodate.")
For those of you not up to looking, the books that have hung on since last pile are: Plath's Collected, Snapshots, Parthenon West, 924 Gilman, Poems for the Millennium, Long Walk to Freedom, and Swann's Way.
Other books have fallen into and out of the pile in the meantime but I'm not going to go tote those up.
1 comment:
Read Funny in Farsi a couple of years ago. Some of it was pretty funny.
Read Snow Crash many years ago. I remember really enjoying it even though I didn't quite grok some of the esoteric stuff at the end. Ever so often I think of reading it again to see if it would make more sense to me now. I've read everything Stephenson has written up to Cryptonomicon (including stuff he wrote under a pseudonym) but Cryptonomicon has been my road block. A novel about the code makers/breakers in WWII just doesn't sound tasty enough for me to start chewing that thick book. If the book were shorter looking I'd have probably eaten it already. Silly.
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