Books of the year from the Guardian. Writers such as Beryl Bainbridge | Julian Barnes | John Bayley | Harold Bloom | William Boyd | Alfred Brendel | AS Byatt | Simon Callow | Peter Carey | Ciaran Carson | Jonathan Coe | Bernard Crick | Margaret Drabble | Atom Egoyan | Jeffrey Eugenides | James Fenton | Mark Haddon | Richard Holmes | Michael Holroyd | Elizabeth Jane Howard | Nicolas Hytner | Frank Kermode | John Lanchester | Elmore Leonard | Oliver Letwin | Valerie Martin | Ian McEwan | Claire Messud | Karl Miller | Clare Morrall | Blake Morrison | Andrew Motion | Alice Oswald | Tom Paulin | DBC Pierre | Steven Pinker | Peter Porter | Eric Schlosser | Claire Tomalin | Rose Tremain | Anne Tyler | Mitsuko Uchida | Marina Warner | Fay Weldon | Irvine Welsh share their favorite pages of pleasure and more pages of pleasure Does anyone have any favorites from this year they'd like to share. I've run out of reading material. (insert snorting sound)...

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Posted by Norm at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Buy a banned book, read a banned book, or you could free a banned book, and that my friends is an outstanding idea. “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” — Benjamin Franklin...

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Posted by Norm at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess. just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love.—Siegbert Tarrasch The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game by J. C. Hallman is a must read if you love the game, or if you are just curious about what it is that evokes such passion. He has described what it is to be a chess player. He captures the yes I know I spend too much time at the game, and I don't give a damn. The I can't help myself. The I could stop, maybe I could, but I don't want too. It was a trip down memory lane for me, capturing many of the experiences I've had over the years. Many of the characters are the same I've encountered in my obsession with the game. Nick de Fermian who taught me about the beauty of the Queen sacrifice*, and Carol Jarecki the queen of arbiters that I had the pleasure of assisting several times at the National Open in Las Vegas to mention just two. The story of the Chess Artist is of the author...

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Posted by Norm at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The title Blood of Victory comes from a speech given by a French senator at a conference on oil in 1918:"Oil, the blood of the earth, has become, in time of war, the blood of victory." It was so then and so it is now. Alan Furst writes historical spy fiction. Using the period from the rise of Hitler in 1933 to 1945 in this the seventh in the series he's in great form. Serebin a Russian emigre journalist is recruited in Istanbul by the British. The plan to slow the flow of oil to the German war machine. From Bucharest to Paris and finally the Black Sea the plan is to sink barges in the Danube. The history and geography artfully described by Mr. Furst reflect painstaking research and an excellent writing style. If you still haven't read any of his books in spite of my recommendations now is the time to start, and once again a thank you to Jonathon Delacour who introduced me to Furst's writing only a year ago. I also recently finished Janet Evanovich's To The Nines, another fun read, but I'm starting to get the feeling that her writing is going the way of...

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Posted by Norm at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've never cared much for Jeffrey Archer's writing. I did enjoy a short story he wrote about chess though that is hardly a recommendation for his usual fare. I think it true that all things being equal those authors who have experienced adversity have the raw material for some great stories. Jeffrey's encounter with the legal system, his overall nastiness, and his rudimentary skills as a writer could serve him well in the future. Revenge springs from strong emotions, and it looks like Mr. Archer is ready to unleash a bit of his own. He's taking them all to court, but he could get back less expensively using a time honored method as this article from the Guardian makes clear. What do you think? Is the pen mightier than the court. Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, that is. Having paid his debt to society, his enemies will now pay theirs - to him. It's whips and scorpions time at Grantchester. According to the newspapers, Jailbird Jeff has a war chest and a war plan. He will drag his enemies expensively through the courts, as Mary did the luckless Jane Williams, beggaring them...

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Posted by Norm at 10:37 AM | Permalink

A Reader's Manifesto An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose by B. R. Myers Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back. In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose—"furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was"—and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics. Does Modern Fiction suck? Is one of those fancy award stickers really a message not to bother reading it. Mr. Myers leaves few unscathed, Annie Prolux, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, all come in for some serious criticism. If you are a reader this article is a must read. I'm currently looking for something to read. I'm going through the hell I go through every time I finish one...

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Posted by Norm at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here is a link to a short story by Pat Barker I think you'll like. Subsidence As politicians battle to justify the war in Iraq, Ruth learns her husband has been lying. By Pat Barker This morning there was a new crack in the bedroom ceiling, another tributary of the great river that snaked away into the shadows in the corner of the room. "I hope it doesn't mean anything," Matt said when she pointed it out. "Like what?" "Subsidence." "The surveyor would have mentioned it." "We bought the house from a surveyor. They were probably best mates." He was over by the window zipping up his trousers. She lay and watched him in the grey light, as he stuffed loose change, car keys, mobile phone into his pockets... Rain darkened the bleached blond grass by the road side. She thought, It's nothing. He's started going to another golf club and not bothered to mention it. Perhaps sensing her discomfiture Luke switched on the radio and they caught the tail end of a news bulletin. Weapons of mass destruction, dodgy dossier, 45 minutes, inadvertently misleading the House of Commons . . . "Do you think they'll find any?" "I'm sorry?"...

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Posted by Norm at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This years list of BBC Top 100 books Read it and weep Next week, the BBC reveals the results of a poll to find the nation's top 100 novels. But one man's masterpiece can be another's claptrap. Here, leading figures choose their literary bugbears, with an introduction by John Walsh "If I had to live my life all over again," said Woody Allen, "I'd do it all exactly the same ­ only I wouldn't read Beowulf." You know how he feels. The relationship between the reader and the Work of Literature is sometimes a chilly, argumentative one, full of ranting pretension on one side and fuming incomprehension on the other. Three hundred pages into The Magic Mountain or The Golden Bowl, the first-time reader of Thomas Mann or Henry James can start to shout internally, "Why are you telling me all this?" Reading a book you cannot abide, but have forced yourself to read because of its author's reputation, can make you feel as though you're chained to a madman (William Burroughs) or dining with a monster of solipsistic preciousness (Virginia Woolf) or stuck in a prison cell with an interminable, academic mega-bore (JRR Tolkien). From Archer to Joyce, the...

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Posted by Norm at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The road to 1984 Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new Plume (Penguin US) edition of George Orwell's 1984 George Orwell's final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Thomas Pynchon, Orwell - whose centenary is marked this year - had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion......

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Posted by Norm at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Which member of the Bush Administration said, "I actually read War and Peace in the Russian"? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Dubya. I try to read a book a week, over the past 25 years I've averaged about 45, but I'm a piker compared to these folks....

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Posted by Norm at 10:13 AM | Permalink

John Updike, never one to worry about plot and action doesn't disappoint in his latest, Seek My Face. What he does do, is what he has always done best, paint pictures with words. His sentences are exquisite. The toilet down the hall flushes: Kathryn rising from the seat, having patted her oily dark cleft with a pad of tissue. This downstairs water closet sometimes keeps running, the stopper balancing upright on its hinge and failing to fall, so that the water runs without filling the porcelain box and making the ball cock rise and shut off the flow. Hope listens for the telltale change of pitch in the toilet's murmur that signals a fallen stopper and a seal. She imagines she hears it, through the rush of an open faucet: Kathryn washing her hands. Had hope set out a clean hand towel? The other woman emerges with the curious stalking gait of hers, as if walking in her boots on uneven stepping-stones, a praying mantis gait. Hope wonders if she should follow the younger woman's example but foresees that the seat will be warm, an uncanny undesired intimacy, and decides she can wait. The tea will want out in an...

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Posted by Norm at 1:18 PM | Permalink

If you listen to an audio book are you reading it. I mean if someone asks have you read Harlan Coben's "Gone For Good" and you listened to it read by Dylan Baker as I did do you say oh yes I've read that or do you say you've listened to it. Do you volunteer that although it took five hours to listen to it that it was an abridged version, authorized by the author. Does that make a difference. If you listen to John Grisham's latest "King of Torts" and although it almost put you to sleep not a good thing to happen driving at 75 miles per hour on I-15 do you claim to have read that boring excuse for a story. Do you assume because this too was abridged that they simply left out all the good parts and that accounts for this slow-paced entirely predictable bit of tripe, that the abridgement just went terribly wrong, or do you conclude as I did that you were indeed fortunate that it was abridged, that the added words would have more superfluous fluff that would have made it even more boring and perhaps led to your death, a sleepy...

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Posted by Norm at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just finished reading Dating Can Be Murder a Samantha Shaw Mystery by Jennifer Apodaca recommended by another mystery reader that knows I enjoy Evanovich. If you like the spunky gal genre of mystery you'll like this. It is not of the same quality as Janet Evanovich, or the early Sue Grafton, or even Sara Paretsky, but it was a decent read. It had its moments as they say, and those women who read romances will find it to their liking. A soccer mom who discovers her dead husband was a rat, and his past is going to threaten both her and her family creates the tension and is the catalyst for her personal transformation. Most of the characters were just fair, but a dog named Ali was dynamite. Why read a book like this. It passes the time like a mindless television program and without the ads, and besides I learned the rules to a game called Bunko. I give it a two on a 1-5 scale but that may be stretching it. Well now that is out of the way I can get back to Updikes Seek My Face. All the war talk, alerts, and nasty politics are...

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Posted by Norm at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)