Bad Sex Awards

Contest heats up for Bad Sex awards

"Ian McEwan may have been passed over for the Booker, but he may yet end the year with a gong in his hand. Although the climax of On Chesil Beach revolves around the fact that it is, in fact, an anti-climax, it is enough to garner him a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex award."

What are they afraid of?

Peterborough, you should be ashamed
The Catholic school board has pulled 'The Golden Compass' fantasy book from schools.

Love me love Joan Didion

Love me, love my favourite book:
Anyone who's going to share my life must, to some extent, to share my literary tastes. Fair enough.

Terrorist

Terrorist, a post-911 work of fiction, is John Updike's 22nd novel; had I not read his name on the cover I would not have guessed, after reading it, that it was written by him. I looked forward to reading it as I do anything by Updike but this novel proved to be a major disappointment.
It is the story of homegrown terrorist, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy,the issue of a red-haired, green eyed, free-spirited mother and an Egyptian father who deserted the family when Ahmad was just a toddler. You'd never know that Ahmad was born and raised in America by an American mother or that English is his mother tongue. He spouts cliches that sound like they were drafted for a character in a cheesy movie-of- the-week ("The American way is the way of infidels."Really!).
Mum is a whiter-than-white, fun loving, strong willed Irish American lass. Joryleen, Ahmad's only friend, is a dark black girl who sings like an angel in the church choir and turns tricks like a devil at the behest of her pimp thug boyfriend,Tylenol (yeah,that's his name). Jack Levy, the burned out guidance counselor, is a stereotypical lapsed Jew. Levy's wife is fat. I suspect the frequent references to her weight are intended to make us feel revulsion for her and to empathize with Levy when he indulges in a bit of adultery. It didn't have this effect on me; I felt nothing for her, nor for any of the other characters.
Having been abandoned by his father and mostly neglected by his hedonistic mother Ahmad falls under the sway of an imam who leads him down a dangerous path. The story seems dreadfully contrived. Levy's sister-in-law works for a top security monger in Washington. She also has frequent phone conversations with her sister (Levy's wife). They just happen to talk about one of Levy's underachieving students who has recently graduated and is driving a delivery van for a Lebanese family. This shared piece of information sets off a series events and leads to Levy being in an explosive-laden truck with a terrorist, headed perhaps for annihilation, perhaps not. Frankly I didn't care. I just wanted the book to end.

The Grimani Breviary

The Grimani Breviary

The original can never leave Venice and is housed in the Library of Saint Mark. The Levenger version is linen-and-gold-bound and comes in a matching slipcase. It has 110 color plates from the original Breviary with extensive scholarly commentary. The Breviary contains a foreword by Ross King, a noted author and art historian. There are 2,000 copies available and it sells for $150.

My blogger buddy, Lori, blanket tagged her readers with this book meme which lists books tagged as unread in Librarything.
Bold what you have read, italicize your DNFs, strikethrough the ones you hated, and put *asterisks next to those you read more than once.
Lori added a dimension — underline the books on your bookshelf (in your TBR pile) but I can't figure out how to underline in Blogger (I'm a dope) so I'll make the TBRs red.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
*One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
*Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Wanna know something? The ones that are sitting on my shelf waiting to be read? Probably not in this lifetime. I have hundreds of others that are ahead of them in the queue. It's probably time for me to post photos of my wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall bookshelves. No one would believe the immensity of my collection otherwise. I have 3 bookcases of cookbooks alone!

Isn't it a little early for year end lists?

100 Notable Books of the Year - 2007 - New York Times
I haven't read any of the books on the list - I have to wait until they appear at the Book Depot. They always show up there eventually. The website is awful but they really do have a good selection, honest.

RIP Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as 'The Naked and the Dead' and 'The Executioner's Song' died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

We'll always have Paris: Sex and love in the city of Light

It's impossible to find a harsh word about this book by long time Paris resident, John Baxter. The Paris ex-pat blogging community loves it but I suspect it's because the novel makes for a topical blog item. The book is essentially a collection of bits and pieces about the naughty Gay Paree of the 20s and 30s interspersed with personal experience (ill-mannered guests and his wife's difficult pregnancy). I spend a lot of time in Paris and I love to read about my favourite city but this book didn't grab me. Call me jaded or perhaps just hard to please but I found it superficial and not particularly informative. I'd advise those looking to experience a sense of what Paris is really about to read Adam Gopnick's From Paris To The Moon, Edmund White's The Flaneur or even Gertrude Stein's Paris France.

Literary couple bring own dinner

Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson brown bagged it at last night's Giller Awards dinner. They were protesting the Four Seasons' role in a massive resort development in Grenada that threatens an endangered species: the Grenada dove. Years ago I remember 2 Ontario MPPs doing the same when a caucus retreat was held at a non-union hotel.
I didn't know about the endangered species issue until I read the Toronto Star article today so I guess this protest is achieving the goal of raising awareness.

I think this is so cool

via