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Post-Surgery Reads - Looking For Suggestions While I'm Recuperating


Ilaine

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Need to lay in a stockpile of books. Thinking of rereading Jane Austen and Borges, some popular but not TOO trashy new stuff. I like Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, John leCarre. Fantasy is fine, horror isn't, no mass murderers or hit men, please. No shades of grey. Nonfiction tastes run to cookbooks, economics (think Michael Lewis and Freakonomics), John McPhee. MFK Fisher, Harold McGee, John Thorne, stuff like that.

Any and all suggestions welcome. Don't hold back please. I have read minimum one book a week, maximum one book a day, for 50+ years. Even if I read it before, I can read it again. What are your favorites?

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[The following posts have been split into separate threads:

Flann O'Brien (The Hersch)

"The Voyage Out" (Ilaine)]

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Need to lay in a stockpile of books. Thinking of rereading Jane Austen and Borges, some popular but not TOO trashy new stuff. I like Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, John leCarre. Fantasy is fine, horror isn't, no mass murderers or hit men, please. No shades of grey. Nonfiction tastes run to cookbooks, economics (think Michael Lewis and Freakonomics), John McPhee. MFK Fisher, Harold McGee, John Thorne, stuff like that.

Any and all suggestions welcome. Don't hold back please. I have read minimum one book a week, maximum one book a day, for 50+ years. Even if I read it before, I can read it again. What are your favorites?

I just read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern which was an interesting read.

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Need to lay in a stockpile of books. Thinking of rereading Jane Austen and Borges, some popular but not TOO trashy new stuff. I like Philippa Gregory, Bernard Cornwell, John leCarre. Fantasy is fine, horror isn't, no mass murderers or hit men, please. No shades of grey. Nonfiction tastes run to cookbooks, economics (think Michael Lewis and Freakonomics), John McPhee. MFK Fisher, Harold McGee, John Thorne, stuff like that.

Any and all suggestions welcome. Don't hold back please. I have read minimum one book a week, maximum one book a day, for 50+ years. Even if I read it before, I can read it again. What are your favorites?

Assuming you'll be in somewhat distracting pain, you're going to want reading that is fulfilling but not too mentally challenging. Why don't you pick up "Runaway" and discuss it with us here? They're short stories, so you don't have to pay weeks of attention before taking a pause, but they're Nobel Prize-quality short stories.

I've read Pride and Prejudice, but would love to try "Sense and Sensibility."

I turned DIShGo turned on to the non-fiction "Endurance" (Lansing, 1959, cover up the pictures before reading it to avoid spoilers).

There's a book on Amazon called "Short Shorts" that are only 3-10 pages long each - really an odd sampling from a smattering of authors, but some are quite good.

Maybe "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold?"

And my favorite short story of all-time, "The Royal Game" - the most perfect structure of any short story I've ever read.

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"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri is a wonderful book. It is a Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of short stories. She is a gifted writer who packs a lot of punch in very few pages.

If you want to commit to a longer and more difficult book, I think everyone should read "Catch 22." It is brilliant. No hit men or mass murders, but there is some graphic war violence.

My favorite non-fiction book is "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand. It recently came out in paperback. If you read it now, you will be in the know when the movie about Louis Zamperini's life opens in December.

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I don't know why the first book that popped into my mind was Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven; maybe it's time for me to re-read it.  I looked over the 'net for a critical review that wasn't a plot synopsis and found this, which isn't much, but well-written critical reviews are rare.  It's a short novel but with layers and layers of complexity.

The book was my introduction to Taoism, though I didn't know it until years later when I stumbled on an essay about Taoism in LeGuin's writings.

As for non-fiction, a year and a half later I am still in awe of A Higher Call.  Not because it's well-written, but because the story is so powerful.  I wrote about it here.

good luck with the surgery.

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A confederacy of Dunces by John Toole.  One of the great American novels of character.  

I was going to suggest this one too.  Amazingly hilarious book.  Why it hasn't been made into a movie is a mystery.

Very interesting story about the author too..........Toole wrote it, committed suicide, and his mother shopped it around until someone read it and published it. He later won the Pulitzer posthumously. If you read the book, make sure you read the forward where they explain the backstory.

Just thinking about it now makes me want to read it again.

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I highly recommend the "Bruno" series by Martin Walker. Walker is British, but has been a DC-based international journalist and pundit who has turned to mystery novel writing in recent years. Martin Walker's wife, Julia Watson is a food journalist who created the Washington Eats website. The stories are set in the Perigord, where Martin and Julia summered for many years. The protagonist is Bruno Courreges, a sensitive and humane policeman in a small country town who avoids violence unless it is unavoidable. Bruno is also a talented cook, and there are wonderful scenes in all of the books involving food preparation and dining. The plots often hinge on local history--like the French underground, and Nazi collaborators; the wine trade; truffle smuggling. Start with the first one: Bruno, Chief of Police. The books are intelligent mysteries, a delightful immersion into the culture and history of a beautiful part of France, and a must-read for food-lovers.  Just the thing to take your mind off of the unpleasant aspects of medical care. I have totally fallen in love with his characters. I wish I hadn't already read them all, so that I could discover them anew.

of Martin at Politics and Prose, discussing one of the books in the Bruno series. It's long, but he's a very charming and erudite man.
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The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Tremendously diverting. If you've read that, or even if you haven't, No Name by the same author. To me, these are the perfect sort of book for rest and recuperation.

All of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The "Lucia" novels by E.F. Benson, best read in chronological sequence. It's rather unfortunate that the first novel in the series (Queen Lucia) is the least meritorious, although still enormously entertaining.

The "Gerald Samper" novels by James Hamilton-Paterson, which I've mentioned before (Cooking with Fernet Branca, Amazing Disgrace, Rancid Pansies).

The Diary of a Nobody.

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Great link.  I've read Confederacy twice, the first time a couple of decades or more ago.  About five years ago I picked it up and read it again.  I enjoyed and respected perhaps even more than the first time.  Reading through the quotes linked I see a third effort about to begin.

This should have been a movie.  Incredible characters and supporting cast; the right actor and screenwriter-it would be sensational.  The Coen Brothers?  Really do wonder why it was never made into a movie?

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Yep!  I was cracking up reading those quotes too and am thinking of reading it again.

For those of you who haven't read it (Confederacy of Dunces) and are reading the quotes and not laughing, don't worry, after you read the book, those quotes will become hilarious.

Here's good one for this site:  "Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul."

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Here's good one for this site:  "Canned food is a perversion,' Ignatius said. 'I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul." 

41UQhrekz7L.jpg In all seriousness, is there such a thing as canned sole for humans, and if not, why not?

I've got to go with The 500 here (although I hate to say this, but I just bought my hardcover copy two weeks ago at Staples - it was in the Bargain Books bin with a red tag on it: $3.99 each, or 3 for $9.99). ^_^

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Thank you all for your thoughtful suggestions. I have placed many of them on reserve at the public library. Well, so far have read the Circus of Dreams, and it was well worth the read. Lyrical and evocative. Still waiting for surgery, but with a broken foot I am not going far from my chair.

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Still recuperating.  8 weeks non-weightbearing in a wheelchair, 6 weeks in a weight bearing cast, 6 weeks in a removable boot, four of which have been endured and two more to go.

I read a LOT of stuff.  Only going to mention stuff I liked.

Read all the Bruno books Zora recommended and another non-Bruno book by the same author.  There sure are a lof of murderers and terrorists in that small town in Perigord.  The non-Bruno book may have been the best, about the caves full of prehistoric art.

Read the Lathe of Heaven, nice, read it before.

Pretty much everything by Neil Gaiman, except the illustrated ones.  Can't help it, they look like comic books to me.

Read a bunch of Michael Connelly books, he's the one who wrote The Lincoln Lawyer.  He does courtroom stuff well.

Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis, about high speed trading.

Murder at the Margin and a couple of other thrillers by M. Jevons, pseudonym for an economics professor at UVA.  Murders solved by the application of economic principles.  I am an economcs buff so I ate those up.  Murder at the Margin I bought in the fiction section at National Gallery.  Whoever is their buyer has interesting taste, I usually find something good there.  The other two I rented on Amazon and read on my iPad.

iPad seeing most of the action.  I already knew about Project Gutenberg but discovered Open Culture, lots of stuff which is still in copyright in the US is out of copyright overseas.  Read The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope.  Still working on War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  I keep getting the characters mixed up, they all have at least three names.  Formal name, first name, nickname, title if they have one.

The Peripheral by William Gibson.  What if you could travel back and forth in time by profecting your consciousness into a robot?  Gibson has an uncanny way of predicting the future but this one I doubt.  We still don't have jacking into the net, as in Neuromancer, still my favorite.  But we do have 3-D printers and computer created individual bespoke clothing.

Right now reading The Great Depression, A Diary, taken from an actual diary written during the events by Benjamin Roth, a lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit.  I expect to read more by this author.  She is perceptive, and percieves even tragedy in a positive light, and describes reality in a sympathetic manner.

That's all I can think of right now.

I could list the TV shows and the streaming video but this post is already long.

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On 9/15/2014 at 7:39 PM, Ilaine said:

Thank you all for your thoughtful suggestions. I have placed many of them on reserve at the public library. Well, so far have read the Circus of Dreams, and it was well worth the read. Lyrical and evocative. Still waiting for surgery, but with a broken foot I am not going far from my chair.

On 9/15/2014 at 8:44 PM, DonRocks said:

Broken_Ruler.png article-1209244-00D2E0A500000190-739_468

Can someone help me figure out what the hell I was saying here?  The first one is a broken foot. The second - I have no idea.

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On 9/8/2014 at 10:58 PM, DonRocks said:

There's a book on Amazon called "Short Shorts" that are only 3-10 pages long each - really an odd sampling from a smattering of authors, but some are quite good.

And my favorite short story of all-time, "The Royal Game" - the most perfect structure of any short story I've ever read.

Post-surgery, your mind is starving for stimulation, but also post-surgery, when you get tired, you get tired almost instantaneously - it comes on within minutes if not seconds. For this reason,  think "Short Shorts" and the collection of Stefan Zweig stories, "The Royal Game, and Other Stories," is perfect. 

Just today, I re-read "The Three Hermits" by Tolstoy out of "Short Shorts," and I'm currently re-reading "Amok" from Zweig, before embarking upon "Letter from an Unknown Woman." I laud Zweig as my #1 author of the mid-20th century.

When I finish "Letter from an Unknown Woman," I'm going to watch the eponymous film.

On 9/7/2016 at 8:07 PM, DonRocks said:

Can someone help me figure out what the hell I was saying here?  The first one is a broken foot. The second - I have no idea.

Looking at this on a fresh mind (if you can have a fresh mind with a fever at 4 AM), I'm pretty sure the pun is "Rules / Rulers are meant to be broken." The "Broken Foot" was probably an attempt to tie it into your situation, and while clever, doesn't seem to be reconcilable with the second photo.

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