brief book notes

reading A Moveable Feast has me falling fast and hard for hemingway all over again. the man had style. (you still have time - pick up the new edition and meet with us...)

while i'm surprised by it, it looks like i haven't raved about abebooks.com enough. they have hundreds of independent booksellers looking to sell you the book you want in the edition that you want. if you've never been there, try it. quick shipping, good prices and you don't have to shop at a giant like amazon.

i think i may be intrigued enough by the synopsis that i'll have to pick up a copy of this book. those kooky canadians, they get me every time.

bars and books are reading The Dud Avocado for the coming month - while i'm not a huge fan of the huge crowd, i think i'm going to read along with them. if you're more patient than i and can wait your turn, i recommend you go - it is a great crowd and a book i've been meaning to read for some time.

a bit more on the book front:

if you have not read The Graveyard Book by neil gaiman, please, please pick it up. i know many of us scoff at the idea of reading YA fiction, but just because it is meant for a younger age group doesn't mean you'll glean any less from it now. his acknowledgement page made it very necessary to my life that i reread both books of The Jungle Book sometime this summer.

Black Box [Amos Oz]

With all due respect to Tolstoy I'm telling you the opposite is true:
Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in
sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas
happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who
have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years,
each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two
happinesses are alike.

not only does mr. oz write astoundingly beautiful gems like the above, but he speaks truths while doing it.

last night was bars and books. i enjoyed myself, but more than anything it has planted the idea of beginning my own book group that is maybe possibly smaller... anyone interested?

What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo?

if you have not yet read this book, i must insist that you do so immediately. christian just described it as "epic and real and small, all at once" and i could not agree more. the swagger and intelligence of his prose delights every part of me (and yes, i may be a sucker for both the spanglish and the footnotes...).