What book do you read recently?

[trencherman]

Not a book but a great yarn from fifty or so years ago

Anon URL


Imitation of Life

Here is a great showbiz gossipy read for summer, winter or fall. I saw the movie as a very young person (pre 1968 MPAA film rating system) and saw it again on VCR cassette as a very mature person more than twenty years ago. This article sounds like a very good summary of the on and off screen story of the whole thing.

 

[camyoo]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

 

[havocs]

I finished Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon a few weeks ago.

 

[AutumnLeaves]

I'm working my way through Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series.
Just finished A Murder is Announced and have started 4:50 from Paddington.



I mentioned in another thread the Pink Video series from Marshall Thornton. Book 4 was released back in May/June. Good mystery series set in the 90s. First book takes place during and after the Rodney King riots.



yeah, I like mysteries.

 

[Dazbacca]

I'm working my way through Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series.
Just finished A Murder is Announced and have started 4:50 from Paddington.



I mentioned in another thread the Pink Video series from Marshall Thornton. Book 4 was released back in May/June. Good mystery series set in the 90s. First book takes place during and after the Rodney King riots.



yeah, I like mysteries.

Where did you buy it?

I have never seen an Agatha Christie book for sale at a bookstore.

The DVD's sure. But never the books. I just presumed they were all out of print.

 

[trencherman]

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Finished rereading for the nth time A. E. Houseman’s skinny book of poems A Shropshire Lad. A collection of less ambivalently gay poems by the famed first class English classicist. Belongs to every young gay’s knapsack along with a travel edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

 

[AutumnLeaves]

Where did you buy it?

I have never seen an Agatha Christie book for sale at a bookstore.

The DVD's sure. But never the books. I just presumed they were all out of print.

ABEBOOKS dot com sells good used books, most older titles for around $4-5. I could go to the library and check them out, but I sort of like keeping them as fond memories and for $5 it's cheaper than a movie ticket or a hamburger and far more satisfying.

I read the book and then rewatch the 80s and 2000s TV productions to see how they were adapted.

The Marshall Thornton books I buy on Amazon and read on my iPad. They run $6, but occasionally go on sale for a bit less. I've read a number of his books so when he started the new Pink Video series I purchased the first one trusting it would be good and really enjoyed it.

 

[Terminatrix]

I am currently re-reading IT, and it's not as scary as I remember it from when I read it at 14.

 

[tomcat34]

Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change by Jared Diamond

 

[trencherman]

I am a Proust completist

Marcel Proust’s Lost Gay Love Stories to Finally Be Published
AUGUST 12, 2019 BY ANDY TOWLE 2

Marcel Proust in 1895.
Nine gay love stories by French author Marcel Proust are set to be published this fall for the first time. The stories take the form of “fairytales, fantasy and dialogues with the dead.”


The Guardian reports: “Touching on themes of homosexuality, the stories were written by Proust during the 1890s, when he was in his 20s and putting together the collection of poems and short stories that would become Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days). He decided not to include them. In the 1950s, they were discovered by the late Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois, whose publishing house Editions de Fallois will publish them in French in October, 97 years after Proust’s death, under the title Le Mystérieux Correspondant (The Mysterious Correspondent).”

Wrote Luc Fraisse of the stories: “A question arises from the outset: why did Proust dismiss Plaisirs these texts that were mentioned in the initial summary entitled ‘The Castle of Eve’ and left some in a state of relative incompleteness? It is obviously necessary to weigh the answer with the greatest cirspection. No doubt he considered that because of their audacity they could have hit a social milieu where a strong traditional morality prevailed. Without recourse to biographical erudition, this interpretation is certainly not arbitrary if one thinks of the rigor of the ‘people of Combray,’ as evoked in the first part of Swann’s Side , for example. Indeed, the dominant theme of these works is the analysis of ‘the physical love so unjustly decried’ ( Swann ) in terms that announce and foreshadow Sodom and Gomorrah , either directly or through transposition.”

 

[gorgik9]

Marcel Proust’s Lost Gay Love Stories to Finally Be Published
AUGUST 12, 2019 BY ANDY TOWLE 2

Marcel Proust in 1895.
Nine gay love stories by French author Marcel Proust are set to be published this fall for the first time. The stories take the form of “fairytales, fantasy and dialogues with the dead.”


The Guardian reports: “Touching on themes of homosexuality, the stories were written by Proust during the 1890s, when he was in his 20s and putting together the collection of poems and short stories that would become Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days). He decided not to include them. In the 1950s, they were discovered by the late Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois, whose publishing house Editions de Fallois will publish them in French in October, 97 years after Proust’s death, under the title Le Mystérieux Correspondant (The Mysterious Correspondent).”

Wrote Luc Fraisse of the stories: “A question arises from the outset: why did Proust dismiss Plaisirs these texts that were mentioned in the initial summary entitled ‘The Castle of Eve’ and left some in a state of relative incompleteness? It is obviously necessary to weigh the answer with the greatest cirspection. No doubt he considered that because of their audacity they could have hit a social milieu where a strong traditional morality prevailed. Without recourse to biographical erudition, this interpretation is certainly not arbitrary if one thinks of the rigor of the ‘people of Combray,’ as evoked in the first part of Swann’s Side , for example. Indeed, the dominant theme of these works is the analysis of ‘the physical love so unjustly decried’ ( Swann ) in terms that announce and foreshadow Sodom and Gomorrah , either directly or through transposition.”

Very interesting post, thanks for the tip!!!

I hope there's an english translation as soon as possible - my French is virtually non-existant, besides "un bon vin blanc" and "bon jour" - and that doesn't get anyone through a single page of Proust...

 

[trencherman]

Very interesting post, thanks for the tip!!!

I hope there's an english translation as soon as possible - my French is virtually non-existant, besides "un bon vin blanc" and "bon jour" - and that doesn't get anyone through a single page of Proust...

One of the most monumental fails in all of literature was André Gide’s rejection of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu for publication. He probably would have decided otherwise had he seen these gay stories first.

 

[trencherman]

It looks as though I did not miss anything with Jane Austen

​

There are authors I never read for various reasons. Ayn Rand and Tolkien because they were a colleague at work I never paid attention to’s favourites. Jane Austen because Georg Elliot (Mary Ann Evans) is my type.

 

[tomcat34]

Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power by James Mahaffey

 

[RufusMc]

Re-reading Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimans 'Good Omens' as it's on Amazon, love it

 

[gjourney]

Learning English.
Just some reading and workbooks.

 

[RafaelNoiret]

I've just finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. It was amazing!!

 

[trencherman]

A magazine article but a good read nevertheless

​

The Secret History of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Last Tango in "thedailybeast.com" Not these two above but the real life guys.

 

[taurus2904]

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London — the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time — but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

 

[zimbalist1]

"The War of the Wolf" by Bernard Cornwell