^^^would read!

estela i am mostly reading magazines. at least i’m getting paid to

do you have the 10 steps to a brand new you! down now?

no but i been takin a lot of Cosmo quizzes and also i know soooo much about the leads in Twilight

do u know how to please ur man

wakeup BJ?

*scribbles notes*

oh my

label this thread nsfw please

today i read part of a large print romance over an old lady’s shoulder in the waiting room at the doctor’s, a spirited girl called cassandra had accidentally offended a duke and an older woman was advising her about what to do next, she said ordinarily she would never countenance anything so forward as a young woman of her station commencing a correspondence with a gentleman but this time was different because an explanation was warranted, so they wrote him a letter saying he could come and see them to get filled in and then they waited around all day for the return post which arrived at last but unfortunately his reply was two curt lines saying no explanation was necessary, signed A.D., so it all seemed pretty hopeless just as it should at the 67% mark. i didn’t get any further with the story because i became distracted by the old lady’s bookmark, which was a long list of capitalised praise words like wise, heroic, altruistic, top-notch, erudite, virtuous, excellent, remarkable- it was nice, i guessed a friend or a grandchild had given it to her, then i realised it was an acrostic that spelled out WHATEVER.

i love reading

whatever

estela is WHATEVER

i heard a woman in my store on friday, chasing her little girl round, yell out YOU LITTLE ROTTER and i thought of estela and loled

i love that word.

hey estela i finished heart of darkness yesterday but i don’t think i understood it.

q for english majors: how many papers did u write about heart of darkness being racist in college

i personally wrote 3, also i got in a VERY heated argument with a red-faced british exchange student who insisted that heart of darkness wasnt racist, because conrad was actually in africa, and was writing the truth about the cannibalistic savages living deep in the heart of the congo

i suppose one of those papers was more about how vs naipaul was racist, with conrads racism as a corollary

it was a VERY good paper by the way

i am re-reading neuromancer for the millionth time and loving it

i was not a liberal arts major so i only wrote boring philosophy papers on occasion. it was obviously racist but also somewhat not racist (mostly racist though). but i just felt it didn’t live up to the blurbs calling it the worst nightmare or whatever. i mean i kept waiting to get to the most nightmarish part. the ending was like huh? maybe i’m just not smart enough. there are other “great books” i “don’t get” so i just throw this one on the pile i guess.

law school sort of destroyed my ability to really read things tbh. i read way way too fast and like the way they teach you to read in 3rd grade, look for the “main idea” or whatever.

i need to stop or whatevering. WHATEVER.

for a lot of people, like for example me, heart of darkness is not a “great book” and maybe there isnt so much to “get” really

also what blurbs have called it “the worst nightmare” except like george plimpton writing in 1944

for example, the thread about oral sex on i love tmi was a “worse nightmare” for me than fuckin heart of darkness

i dunno i don’t remember. i don’t usually expect books to live up to blurbs really. i feel better that you said it’s not so great. i mean i liked it ok but, meh

yeah

here are the hottest items at the enoch pratt free library

What Others Are Reading At Pratt

Hottest title: Just take my heart : [novel]/ Mary Higgins Clark

Hottest author: Seuss, Dr

Hottest subject: African Americans—Fiction.

HOT HOT HOT!

i wrote one paper about heart of darkness for a post-colonial/colonial lit paper. i did not like the book—way way too grim.

hey estela guess what

estela, plz guess! the suspense is killing me!

i guess not.

tsk

“ ”

but it wasn’t that grim imo :(

i’m reading ‘the selected works of ts spivet“—it’s pretty good so far. not much about it on ilx except for one person who doesn’t like it and some others who agreed that it sounds stupid.

not really a book that id expect ilx to like frankly

just finished:

veronica by mary gaitskill

duplicate keys by jane smiley

both v v good—mostly character-driven, introverted stories. the smiley was a sort of airport thriller, in terms of the basic plot outline, but was actually an interesting study of friendships and relationships.

jaq, what was the name of that kansas/republicans book you were talking about? i think i will read it.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank—it’s kind of dated, published about 5 years ago.

i like 2 read

me 2

even tho the books i’m reading i am not loving

book about soccer formations

memoir about a guy’s mom

i am almost done with go tell it on the mountain. i read so slow these days :(

i am almost done with the human stain

was disappointed by the meaning of the title. i thought it was about a man who was little more than a stain.

lxy: i finally remembered that author’s name!!! it’s MINETTE WALTERS

the human stain was bad btw, don’t read it

now i am reading “memoirs of an anti-semite” and i like it

i read most of the human stain. wish i hadn’t.

i kept reading it because i wanted to know what would happen but every time something happened i was like UGH WTF even though when things happened in that book i thought “what’s the point of this happening”

i re-started that amelia earhart and was more into it this time but then i forgot about it again.

i am determined to read middelsex, which has gone from sitting near bed in ny to sitting near bed in seattle without more than 5 pages being read. gah. years i’ve been trying to read this book!

also really wanna read the james hamilton patterson stuff.

i am bad at reading :(

james hamilton patterson will be fumigated 4 u.

aw <3

feeling better?

I’ve upgraded to meh. Mr. Jaq is still deep in the viral clutches.

the used bookshjop on dixon gave me $15 credit for three books. good!

the clerks got in a funny discussion about carbon footprints and how not having a baby is the best way to reduce ur footprint. i snickered as i looked through the stacks

the thin man

the miracle of castel di sangro

what i loved

from ‘what i loved’

Lucille’s complaints were banal-the familiar stuff of joyless intimacy. I’ve always thought that love thrives on a ceratin kind of distance, that it requires an awed seperateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification

still working on memoirs but it has 5 parts so i take breaks in between

reading because it is bitter and because it’s my <3 by joyce carol oates

i really liked ‘what i loved’!

i finished two alice munro short story collections (she is amazing, maybe the best short story writer ever, can’t wait for the new book coming soon!), ‘the things they carried’ by tim o’brien (v v good kind of war-story vignettes), and ‘bad behavior’ by mary gaitskill. now onto a collection of essays by siri hustvedt and ‘another you’ by ann beattie.

i like that excerpt!

hey, if you’re into a book, and read it before bed, how long after you wake up do you start thinking about it?

i hate (like) when i wake up on a saturday or sunday and pick up the book again right away and lay in bed for 2 hours being really hungry and really having to pee. i don’t know the answer to your question but i think it is 0 seconds. i’m going to go read a book and drink rum drink in my bed.

sounds like the life

drink rum drink is fun to read

i really liked ‘what i loved’!

closest i’ve come to crying @ a book in a looooong time

sandbox book club pick

crying because it moved you or crying because you hated it so much??

i think i mentioned this on an ILB thread, but one of my favourite things about hustvedt’s writing is how she slips in all these really sinister events and stuff, but in the end they’re really only marginal to the story—they’re never what the plot revolves around.

i am very intrigued by this book.

if i still have my copy i will send it in yr care package that i still have not sent but will hopefully make it by xmas <3

i finished because it is bitter, etc. i liked the first 2/3 but the last 1/3 made me wanna barf. it was all about this girl’s exquisite fairytale wedding. i wanted more disasters to happen to her instead.

then i read balzac—le colonel chabert. i wouldn’t care if all the non-balzac books in the world got burned and only balzacs were left tbh

i am re-reading the half-mammals of dixie bc it makes me nostalgic by gently mocking while simultaneously appreciating my home state.

loving graham greene

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

the fire engine that disappeared

exile on main st: a season in hell with the rolling stones

hell of articles

i dragged a file called “FUTURE READING” halfway around the world, to ab out the remotest place you can get, and i had the funny feeling of wait why did i bring this crap all the way here?

oscar wao in his speech reminded me of nedddddddd

i feel like i need to read that bc EVERY SINGLE PERSON on public transportation in the last year has been reading it.

tender is the night—fitzgerald (even the back cover calls it an immature work. yep)

i started but didn’t finish a philip roth book about nixon. it was written in 71–72 and i’m sure it was ‘incisive and hilarious’ then but whatever it was boring.

1/3 of nostromo by joseph conrad. still carrying it around so i guess i’ll finish it at some point.

brave new world. had never read it.

clandestine by james ellroy. i read it in a day.

just started snow country by yasunari kawabata. love the cover.

what a beautiful cover!

i have just received the new (SIGNED!!!!OMG!!!) alice munro book from my lovely husband as a super early b’day present!!!

i have recently read

iron & silk—mark salzman. anecdotes from his 2yrs teaching english in a remote little chinese town in the early 80s. light weight, a little to0 not-very-modest-at-all but entertaining

another you—ann beattie. like a companion piece to richard ford’s independence day. pretty good.

and i just started

good faith—jane smiley. i love her stuff. sort of epic, really slow moving yet absorbing. v v intelligent.

peter hessler (ny-er man in china) wrote a cute funny light book about living and teaching in china. not that u would want to read two like

that so close together, but maybe of interest to someone

lol rob just told me about that book

might be in the basement!

jergins you go to library there or what?

i finished medical apartheid by harriet washington

i started the execution of willie francis by gilbert king (it’s about a thing that led to a supreme court case in 1947, louisiana ex rel. francis v. resweber in case u were wondering)

i want to read cousin bette but i got all these long nonfiction library books i gotta finish

I just finished reading Little Women for the first time and am all teary-eyed.

god little women is so great!!! one of my favourite books from my childhood. you should read the sequel, little men, next! it’s also great (and sad, too).

I wouldn’t have read it, smoove, except for your recommendation—after we did that facebook list of books you’ve read a few months ago—thank you so much for that! I wish I’d read it when I was 10 or 11, but I’m so glad I found it now.

oh wow—that’s awesome! as a kid, i got little women/little men as part of a set of ‘companion series’ books, along with heidi (so so so great), black beauty (terribly sad) and call of the wild (also heartbreaking)—they were my favourite books and i read them a million times.

harbs what i did was go to the biggest city in fiji and then track down the best bookstore. which is a little underlit shack in a market. then i spent

twenty backbreaking minutes going througj all their stock. lotta

tom clancy and NEBRASKA! and shit like that. the classics section was gold tho. now ive been hauling aroumd a dozen books, getting rid of each one asi finish it.

i like cousin bette, harbl

i love balzac, t. silaviver

;-)

who DOESNT love “balzac” am i right

ball-sac

(scrotum)

oh yeah you know me i love scrotums

(ball sacs)