I love the Great Gatsby. Maybe my favorite American classic...maybe.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." God, Fitzgerald was good.

Dave -

I just started 1Q84 (audiobook, unabridged). Not too far into yet, but so far it's definitely got my attention. Let me know what you think!

Reading the first book in Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli's graphic novel DMZ. So far it's quite good. Excellent illustrations, good plot, memorable characters. I might be hooked in.

Now reading David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars."

Just started Ken Follett's Fall of Giants.

idbowman wrote:

Dave - I just started 1Q84 (audiobook, unabridged). Not too far into yet, but so far it's definitely got my attention. Let me know what you think!

Not my favorite. I had a hard time staying interested in it.

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

I last read it in...1994. I figured it was time to revisit this work, especially in light of the first installment of Peter Jackson's big screen adaptation coming soon.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Autumn, time for me to pick up Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau again for the umpteenth time. I've read them a lot through the years but always enjoy reading them again anyhow. After those, I'm thinking about Bleak House.

The Terror by American author Dan Simmons. Love a good horror book.

Next part of the 5-part autobiograby of Thomas Bernard, The Cellar. What can I say, this stuff is pure genius. Sometimes I wonder if there is any author worth reading anymore after getting into Bernhard. Depressing! And so is the book.

No Easy Day by "Mark Owen"

Making my way to the end of the second book in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Simply put, this is proving to be one of my very favorite reads of all time. Written between 1946 and 1959, they tell the fantastical tale of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl and Lord of Castle Gormenghast. The books are utterly unlike anything else I've ever read, being fantasy in the sense that they take place in a giant castle that more or less encompasses the whole of the character's universe, but so far there hasn't really been anything supernatural; quite the contrary, it's all marvelously mundane, more Downton Abbey than Middle-Earth. Peake's writing is a thing of wonder, given to exhaustively long sentences, head-hopping, meandering asides, and all the other great tricks that modern critics rail against as a matter of course--even at his most purple, Peake is a virtuoso of the language, with a glorious wit. Take these three examples, being descriptions of several principle players, as indicative of the style:

The chief valet of the old Earl, Mr. Flay:

"Mr. Flay appeared to clutter up the doorway as he stood revealed, his arms folded.... It did not look as though such a bony face as this could give normal utterance, but rather that instead of sounds, something more brittle, more ancient, something drier would emerge, something more in the nature of a splinter or a fragment of stone. Nevertheless, the harsh lips parted. "It's me," he said, and took a step forward, his joints cracking as he did so. His passage across a room -- in fact his passage through life -- was accomplished by these cracking sounds, one per step, which might be likened to the breaking of dry twigs"

And good Doctor Prunesquallor:

"The doctor with his hyena laugh and his bizarre and elegant body, his celluloid face. His main defects? The insufferable pitch of his voice; his maddening laugh and his affected gestures. His cardinal virtue? An undamaged brain."

And finally, the horrible cook:

"Abiatha Swelter, who wades in a slug-like illness of fat through the humid ground mists of the Great Kitchen. From bowls as big as baths, there rises and drifts like a miasmic tide the all but palpable odor of the day's bellytimber. The arrogance of this fat head exudes itself like an evil sweat."

Obviously, Gormenghast won't be for everyone, but as a lover of the fantastical, the Gothic, the grotesque, and the sublime, I'm finding it to be both a hoot and a holler.

Finished The Terror this weekend. Highly recommend.

I am currently in the middle of " Thirty-one Years on the Plains and in the Mountains" by William F Drannan.
Great read if your into hunting and trapping.