Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I tried so hard to read and enjoy LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, but on page 108 I gave up the ghost. The writing is rich and detailed, but I find the plot moves too slowly and the plot is very unrealistic. I don't believe it. I hate to quit on a book, but sometimes you have to cut your losses.

Michael Korda - IKE (a biography)

Though I am a Democrat, I have the utmost respect for Dwight D. Eisenhower, both for his military career as the Supreme Allied Commander at the end of WWII, and for his presidency. For Eisenhower was the last good Republican President.

Eisenhower was a genius at finding consensus: he performed a military miracle in leading the combined British, French, and American forces in the invasions of Africa and Europe. The most important day in the 20th century for Western Civilization was June 6, 1944 with the Allied invasion of Normandy, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. As President, Eisenhower governed by consensus---getting everyone to agree on the best solution to every problem. He was a centrist. He governed from the middle, as opposed to the current President, who governs not from trying to find consensus, but from his own narrow point-of-view, not caring about the consequences.

This is a light overview of Eisenhower's career. I would call it the People magazine version of Ike's life, but this is just what I sought.

I read this biography to remember the 50's---better times in the body politic--- and to contrast that time and that President with the horrible President we are afflicted with now.

Time will only enhance Ike's stature and diminish that of George W. Bush.

W. Somerset Maugham

I just finished two of his novels. His magnus opus is supposed to be Of Human Bondage. I did The Painted Veil and Up at the Villa. I enjoyed both. Maybe I'll read the former one day.

Both are tightly written narratives with a straight-forward story line. I suppose Maugham is writing about well-to-do English people who get themselves into difficult situations. That's how I would describe both of these novels. The other thing is that Maugham is marvelous at defining character. You feel like you really get to know his characters.

Up at the Villa is the best one. It's a good suspenseful story with memorable characters.

Somerset Maugham is a very good writer.

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Just finished reading this.

My sentiment about this novel is, to quote Fred in his post on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, "Would somebody tell me what I just read?"

I had to force down the reading of this book like I were eating rancid meatloaf or cottage cheese.

What boring drivel this is. Meh.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

What a wonderful, wonderful story!

Cowardice. Courage. Redemption. Regret and grief. This novel is about so many things. Social class. America versus Afghanistan. Fathers and Sons. Political change. And it's about so much more than just this.

I kept hoping Amir would see Hassan again. That he would confess his wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness. That they'd reunite and rekindle their friendship. Their story, what happened between them, how much they meant to each other, is as heartbreaking as anything I have ever read. It's powerful.

Hassan was such a loyal friend. He protected Amir, notably from Assef, just like Sohrab did. They ran kites together. They loved each other, and that endured through everything. What is lost between them is sad, and it's sad that the invasion by the Russians and the eventual usurpation of power by the Taliban turned their homeland into a oppressive, poor shell of rubble, one that kept them forever apart.

Amir learns not to let others fight for him, to stand up for something. He becomes the man Baba wanted him to be. That Baba saw his son marry, which brought him happiness, that Amir's relationship with his father blossoms, and that Amir learns much about Baba, is poignant.

This is such a marvelous novel.

Tashakor, Fred, for this recommendation!

"The Future Canon"

In this article from New York Magazine, professors and others pick what recent authors/works they think will be taught as part of the canon in years to come.

1. MORRIS DICKSTEIN, Distinguished professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center

Atonement, by Ian McEwan. “Books largely survive because of the quality of their writing, and he writes beautifully.”

2. MOLLY HITE, Chair of the English department, Cornell

Their Dogs Came With Them, by Helena María Viramontes. “It came out about a week ago. I swear, it’s the Middlemarch of East L.A.—a very big, extraordinary, multi-charactered story set around the building of the L.A. freeway.”

3. CAROLINE WEBER, Associate professor of French, Barnard

Zadie Smith. “She has such a distinct, self-assured voice that wears its brilliance very lightly.”

4. DIANA FUSS, Professor of English, Princeton

Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman. “The most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century. Few novels since Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are this adept at capturing the nuances of human emotion.”

5. MICHAEL WOOD, Professor of comparative literature, Princeton

Amitav Ghosh. “He’s experimental; he changes from one book (The Calcutta Chromosome) to the other (The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace, historical novels about Southeast Asia). It’s good to stretch people’s minds without stretching them to the breaking point. He will be read in 50 years, I’m sure.”

6. JAMES SHAPIRO, Professor of English, Columbia

J. M. Coetzee. “He may not be the most dazzling stylist, but his books continue to haunt me. There’s a moral seriousness to them that rivals George Eliot’s.”

7. BENJAMIN WIDISS, Assistant professor of English, Princeton

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware. “People compared it to Joyce. He’s extraordinary at complexity both visually and verbally, with a sort of meticulous attention to the minutiae of individual consciousness.”

8. STEPHANIE LI, Assistant professor of English, University of Rochester

Colson Whitehead. “Apex Hides the Hurt was not reviewed very well, but I think it’s going to need a longer period of time before critics and scholars return to it. At this kind of historical moment in American literature, I think [his] sense of comedy is somewhat lost.”

9. JAMES ENGLISH, Chair of the English department, University of Pennsylvania

Jonathan Lethem. “He’s someone who kind of sets compositional problems for himself as a novelist. In that way, he’s a little like Nabokov, who would carve out an intriguing artistic and formal challenge with each novel, and that’s relatively rare among contemporary novelists.”

10. BRIAN EVENSON, Director of literary arts, Brown

I Looked Alive, by Gary Lutz. “For me, he’s the one who best represents the next phase after the maximalist, postmodern writers. A lot of the older postmodernism feels very male, and this book captures more the sexual confusion that I see as typifying the age that I grew up in as a young writer.”

11. ANDRÉ ACIMAN, Chair of the comparative-literature department, CUNY Graduate Center

Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. “People right now are busy writing Holocaust memoirs, which are very necessary, but in 50 years, these will become historical documents, and the high literature will migrate to books like Austerlitz.”

12. CATHARINE STIMPSON, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, NYU

Jhumpa Lahiri. “Obviously this is a career which will grow and grow, taking up themes of global importance, but with a capacity to understand heartbreak. But if anybody thinks they know how canons are going to be formed, they are guilty of hubris bordering on stupidity.”

Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome

What a great little novel!

This is my favorite kind of fiction---a tight narrative with a surprising and ironic ending.

It's a simple story that raises profound questions.

Please read and enjoy.