Sunday Morning Book Reviews

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.

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?

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...)