What books are you reading right now?

I mentioned this in the bargain hunting thread, and it's worth repeating here.

A couple of Salvation Army stores in San Antonio that I visited had a book sale. You could fill a standard plastic bag, like the kind you get at the grocery store, with as many books that would fit and pay $1.99. I don't know if this sale is still going on and/or was done at other Salvation Army stores.

 

I'm seriously enjoying The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. There are a few parts that seem too contrived, but that can be said of many fiction writers since fiction is contrived. Overall it's a great story and is very well written.

I also enjoyed The Great Santini, even though several times Conroy presented some intrigueing situations, but then completely skipped providing the resolutions. The main one that sticks in my mind is: What happened when the kids were released from jail? It almost seems as though Conroy wasn't sure what to write, so he didn't. Boo, hiss!

Unfortunately, a couple of Conroy's subsequent novels are basically a rewrite of TPOT.

 

I decided to read The Exorcist, for fun. I've seen the movie, but I've never read the book. So far, I'm finding it to be an entertaining read.

 

The Pilgrims Progress - John Bunyan

 

Home to Woefield
A quirky, laugh-out-loud funny novel about a 20something idealist Brooklyn girl who inherits a "farm" on Vancouver Island and attempts to run it with a band of local misfits...told from the perspective of the four main characters.

 

I have to ask, what made you want to read The Pilgrims Progress?

 

My mom read that shortly after my older sister was born, at a time when my dad was completing his residency and would be gone frequently through the night. She said it terrified her so much that she's never be able to see the movie.

 

It was an excellent book, I thought, and made one of the most spectacularly successful translations of literature to film that I can think of. The book was enthrallingly horrifying, and the movie was both terrifying and beautifully done-- one of the best horror movies ever made. And I mean real horror movies, not just slash-'em-up gore-fests.

Interesting choice. I recall it being rather a slog to get through-- very heavy-handed, and unpleasantly didactic in that rigid, seventeenth-century Protestant way. I remember being deeply disappointed with how poorly it compared to Dante's Divine Comedy. What prompted you to take it up?

 

You may be right. Dante is rich with not only philosophical imagination-- some rather radical for his time-- and with sharp political commentary (again, for his time), but is crafted to be a poetic monument, not merely a sermon in allegory. And if anything, that goes even more so for Paradise Lost, which forgoes the political commentary for even more grandiose poetic aesthetics.

But I suppose in the end, I can't blame Pilgrim's Progress for what it is. To quote Tolkien, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its forms." Applicability, or the fertility of a text for exegesis or interpretation, is a different matter, and a quality for which I have great appreciation. But allegory, in its rigid messaging from the author, I never cease to find unlovely and insipid.

 

You can say that twice. I find the theology of Satan in Christianity to be egregiously ineffective and self-contradictory, but as a literary conceit, Milton's Lucifer is really wonderful, and quite compelling.

We really should. He was such an extraordinary person and artist. I continue to believe that Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion represent the best works in the English language of the 20th century.

 

Paradise Lost lost me very quickly. Perhaps I'm too stupid to understand & appreciate Milton. Perhaps Milton loved his own cleverness so much he didn't know when to get to the point. I'm going with a combination of the two.

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Mentioning lost, I've found very few interesting items in the used books that I've purchased. One cool one is a goldtone metal bookmark from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is the initial of my wife's first name. She wasn't impressed, she's not much of a reader.

The best thing that I found was a poignant love letter, a very touching letter. In it a woman pours her heart out to someone that she has loved for several decades, unrequited love. Apparantly she never broached the subject because the object of her affections was a married woman.

 

Finished up Beggars in Spain while I was in Cali ( ), and I'm about halfway through the Name of the Wind. It's pretty fantastic.

 

Just started Fahrenheit 451, another one that I've never gotten around to.

 

I'm feeling guilty.

I bought for a whopping 50 cents,

and actually plan to read, one of these days,

The Hunger Games.