I love to see a reviewer so eager to post they can't wait!!
Please cross-post here or add Sunday morning book review to your tag (although books may be enough, Lambert?)

fell asleep.

Gob's question is nice...I was thinking of asking if a book really changed your life in your 20's?

Modern Library:
1. Ulysses by J. Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby by F. S. Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by J. Joyce
4. Lolita by V. Nabokov
5. Brave New World by A. Huxley

I'll have to check again but last time I checked the Board, they were primarily traditional older white men. If still true, I think having that experience might have influenced their selections here. Great books, but mainly focused on the (now older, then younger) white male experience, in most cases frankly with little empathy for other experiences...Huxley, though, hmmm...
The five have a lot of great writing.
They bring us all into that experience (which is an argument that has been made about the purpose of various required book lists.)

if you read this, please comment on the above comment.

Radcliffe Publishing Course:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Readers, through Modern Library, not the Board:

1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
2. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
3. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
4. The Lord of the The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

are from the late 1990's.

It's now about 10 years later.

What’s your favorite book that nobody else you know has read or even heard of?

Mine is The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J.F. Federspiel, published in an English translation by Joel Agee in 1983. I picked it up on a whim in a used bookstore and have treasured it through many downsizings of my personal library. The epigram on the frontispiece is Life is strange and the world is bad (Thomas Wolfe). The book tells the life of Typhoid Mary (yes, a real person) in novel form. Federspiel achieves the rare feat of telling many unhappy truths straight out while taking you by the hand, so to speak, and walking companionably and pleasantly with you to the sad end.

Such a balance is, in my experience, intensely personal for the reader rather than a universal property. Saramago’s Blindness, for instance, was that kind of book for someone I know, while I found
it blazingly beautiful but also nightmare-inducing.

(Cross-posted from my impatient post. And I forgot to say before, the book is illustrated, which I love.)

Policy not party!

In no particular order, the top five for me on this Sunday morning are:

A Room of One's Own by V. Woolf

Emma by J. Austen

Housekeeping by M. Robinson

The Wind in the Willows by K. Grahame

Pig Earth by J. Berger

Policy not party!

top five series, maybe.

D.R. Meredith's John Lloyd Branson mysteries/romances.

Madeline L'Engle's "Wrinkle in Time" series.

Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series.

Three-way tie for fourth place: David Weber's "Honor Harrington" books, Eric Flint's "163X" alternate-history series, and Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan Adventures."

The voice of the MSM left here in Britain is The Guardian. It is published Mon-Sat*, and its Saturday edition is the Brit-left equivalent of the Sunday NY Times.

The Saturday Guardian's REVIEW section (REVIEW, the print edition title, is called CULTURE on the website) is replete with book reviews and related materials. Yesterday's REVIEW features:

- an article called "40 Booker judges on 40 years of the prize"
- an article on Tom Stoppard, the playwright
- reviews of more than 15 new books and 3 audio books
- and other sections on arts, poetry, & paperbacks
- a letters section
- Doonesbury & crossword
- & more

like joining a bookclub, MOST useful...enjoy!

This week REVIEW mentioned a book I thought you might like to hear about (I have not yet read it):

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America, by Joe Bageant.

The REVIEW discusses the British edition (288 pp, PORTOBELLO). The book review's first paragraph may make you laugh, before you start to cry:

"The subtitle for the US edition of this book was Dispaches From America's Class War. You might think it would be the Americans, not the British, who would run a mile from publishing a book with the phrase "class war" in its title. Class is not even meant to exist there, whereas everyone here [in Britain] knows that it does."

read more of this book review at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep...

The Guardian CULTURE - BOOKS section can be found online here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books

*its companion, The Observer, is published on Sundays

If you have more than 5, go for it!!

Actually the lists go up to 100, so...

Here's the next 5 of the ML reader's list:
6. 1984 by G. Orwell
7. Anthem by Ayn Rand
8. We the Living by Ayn Rand
9. Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
10. Fear by L. Ron Hubbard

(I'm thinking Objectivists and Scientologists might have been voting here...which says stuff about the readers too...)

ML Board:
6. The Sound and the Fury by W. Faulkner
7. Catch-22 by J. Heller
8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath by J. Steinbeck

Thanks!
I have been starting to read that newspaper and book sections in Europe have been expanding...do you happen to know if this one has expanded recently?
Any ideas on why the internet-savvy Europeans would be expanding their newspapers in the exact opposite way from the U.S. right now?

Since I got to London in 1987, the Guardian has been my BEACON. I'm an architect, not a literature expert, so please consider what I'm saying as the words of an everyday educated reader only -
but I believe that beneficial effect of having public media, i.e., the BBC (funded by taxation) has created a high standard for the media*. The Guardian and the Independent are excellent examples of this high standard, and of the two, I prefer the Guardian. Even the Telegraph, locally called "the Torygraph" to indicate its rightwing political slant, is good.

On the other hand, the UK paper press business model is under pressure from the web, just like USA print media. The Financial Times is said to be particularly at risk.

That's all I can say just now. Must now turn to RL task of feeding cats...

*Speaking of the BBC, the BBC' RADIO 3 is especially wonderful, and many of its selections are available as "listen again" online. Online at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/

1) Reschedule more multiple Austin or Vinge reviews? Or other?
I'm thinking maybe a sign-up with dates because the Vinge attempt hasn't been working out that well...

2) Book club? Should we all read a book together? Then we can really do massive reviews of a book! Sort of like a book the whole city reads--a website book.

If you vote yes, please clarify (suggestions welcome):
-a pb 2.0 kind of book
-sci-fi (maybe idealized society?)
-fiction (classic? escapist?)
-non-fiction
-political
-other

3) Our Own Fiction corner?
We have had the honor of reading and reviewing Sarah's and Chicago Dyke's fiction. Does anyone want to write and post more?

4) Are there any particular book reviews requested? For example, would you like to have more new mysteries reviewed so you can pick one to read?

5) Can we have a report on your local newspaper and its book coverage? Would you tell us if your paper covers books?

For example, my report is: the 2 free local weeklies here do not do book reviews except for the occasional book review of a local author (usually a press release); regular paper used to have a book reviewer who doesn't work there anymore and was not replaced, now only covers local and state authors (usually at signings, with short press release description of book, sometimes runs copies of local author's book review from a larger paper (i.e., the paper does not rereview books locally anymore.) I'll have to check the next 2 nearest biggest papers--I have a sinking feeling that they are not reviewing books or have cut the number of reviews.) It's weird, I kinda didn't notice even though I'm into this stuff--it was gradual, felt like individual circumstances...

Thanks everyone!

I have sudden RL so will post in two parts.

If you read one book this year on Camelot--or on politics, as long as Kevin Phillips doesn't have anything new out--read this one, "Counselor" by Ted Sorenson. Phillips gives ideas about how to handle and understand what's happening today, which is why he's important to read. Sorenson does not do this; it's hard to see how much of what he writes about could be used today--but if you are waxing nostalgic for government that was trying hard, this one will make you weep.

According to this book, although Sorenson himself would never put it this way, the JFK we know in speeches and books is JFK "crossed with" Sorenson. The subtitle is in fact "A Life on the Edge of History." Sorenson found JFK inspiring, and he tried to reflect JFK's ideas in his speeches, but Sorenson also purified those ideas and strengthened them. This is quite interesting since it is the real life actualization of some of those ideas that created much good--and this explains for me things like JFK's original objection to the Peace Corps when he had already supported the ideas in speeches. Sorenson was also given the work of other experts in the JFK administration to work with as far as drafting speeches and other things; JFK in consultation with political people he knew well and trusted, including Sorenson, picked very strong Cabinet secretaries, even Presidential rivals, to head various departments--and let them largely run the departments on their own. Sorenson brings us to the very sand in which those political consultants' chairs rested.
Not all of the book is this detailed--it would be numerous volumes if it were and it's already 556 pages--and Sorenson still cannot talk about some information. But he hits a lot of highlights we already know of and some we do not, including JFK's time in the hospital when McCarthy was censured. I was struck by this description of Kennedy:

"Perhaps (JFK) was, more than I knew, a fatalist about the consequences of his poor health, and had therefore concluded that his life would be short and he should make the most of it, both in his service to the world and in his personal enjoyment of it." (p. 116)

(Continued later...)

Big tomes. If the libraries all burn we should save:

1. The King James Version of the Bible

2. The Collected Works of William Shakespeare

3. Collected works of Emily Dickinson

4. Ulysses (Homer)

5. Ulysses (Joyce)

#3, for me, is the obvious outlier. What can I say?

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

the things where the primary texts aren't English?

And what if the KJV really did end up being the only Bible?

(there's some serious stuff in there that's anti-democratic, and might not be so much an accurate translation as an effort to keep the King happy, IIRC) --

things like the Rubaiyyat, or Don Quixote?

3) Our Own Fiction corner?
We have had the honor of reading and reviewing Sarah’s and Chicago Dyke’s fiction. Does anyone want to write and post more?

CD and MJS have written and posted wonderful fiction extensively here. I'm very confused about the quote above at the moment. Could someone enlighten me about reviews of my fiction at Corrente?

We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0

Not really obscure (won the Australian equivalent of the Booker), but a very well-crafted, interesting, and beautifully written novel.

If on a winter's night a traveler... and Baron of the Trees, both Italo Calvino.

Flaubert's Parrot. Julian Barnes.

The Scarlet Letter.

Bartleby the Scrivener.

Grendel by John what's his face. Especially good to read Beowulf just before or just after.

John Ciardi's translations of Dante. Unexpectedly brutal, expectedly rhythmical. My favorite of the interpretations.

To the Lighthouse and Jacob's Room.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima, who was a nutjob but this is a great book.

If you're doing a fiction corner, may I play? I quit writing fiction ten years ago, but I'm starting to hear voices---in that good storyteller way, not in that "you need medication" way.