I dropped it when they got to some other world for a competition amongst youths. I will have to get it again.
That’s when it starts getting good. First book is definitely the weakest though. First half of the 2nd book slams on the gas and doesn’t let off. It never becomes high literature but it’s fun af
2023 National Book Award Shortlists Announced https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw...national-book-award-shortlists-announced.html
About a quarter of the way through war and peace. Enjoying it a lot. Not a difficult read if you’ve read a couple other Russian works. Long as f tho
I'm watching a documentary about William Marshal on Youtube (linked below). Now I kind of want to read Ivanho but I'm worried that it'll be a lost cause. Has anyone read or attempted to read it?
Never heard of either of those. I love my kindle paper white. But also have only used kindles. So maybe I’m missing out and don’t know it
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/magazine/jesmyn-ward-let-us-descend.html How Jesmyn Ward Is Reimagining Southern Literature The novelist is competing with giants like William Faulkner, while mapping territory all her own.
Has anyone read anything good on the Israeli Palestinian conflict? Obviously wouldn't be quite up to date, but want to learn more about the history.
Nothing hits the heights of Red Sparrow, but I like the Box 88 series by Charles Cummings. Only 2 books out so far, but pretty solid.
My indie store collects books they'll donate to the local adult literary center. But there's also a used store I bring them to sometimes in exchange for store credit
I normally find one of the free little libraries around me and drop off boxes I don’t want to keep there. Sometimes find some new books to read as well. That’s what I’ve been doing with all of my dad’s books I didn’t want to keep
i like that idea. i'm going to do that but i legit have like 100 i'm going to want to get rid of at end of the year
That sounds tight I’m going to look into seeing if there is anything like that here if not imma just take a box or two to goodwill
Goodwill, little free library, or give away at work. I think there's a site where you can trade one used paperback for another...I think you may have been the person who posted about it. Can we see what's up for grabs? Maybe not worth shipping but I like book giveaways
I’m about 50 pages into this. If you enjoyed this I think you would like the Stella rimington books I read earlier this year
the second box 88 book, at least through ~200 pages, is really good. looks like the third one is released in 2-3 weeks. i already pre-ordered it.
Looking for something new. Just finished sunlit man and jade trilogy. started James islington first trilogy but it hasn’t captivated me yet like his most recent book.
How did you like Jade City? I assume youre looking for fantasy - I absolutely loved Gods of the Wyrdwood by RJ Barker. It's going to be a series, but only one book is out. Under the Northern Sky Trilogy by Leo Carew. Stand alones Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsy Lapvona - Ottessa Moshfegh Babel - RF Kuang
Jade city was not my style. Kinda like the more magically stuff. It was good don’t get me wrong just like others better.
Publisher Penguin Random House has launched a new writing award in the US celebrating freedom of expression in response to a rise in book bans across the country. The Freedom of Expression award invites applicants to write about one banned book that changed their life and why. The $10,000 (£8,168) prize will be awarded to a high-school student planning to attend university in 2024. “In the midst of censorship efforts, it’s crucial that we protect and celebrate freedom of expression, especially for young people whose voices we need and want to lift up now more than ever,” said Claire von Schilling, director of corporate communications and social responsibility at Penguin Random House. Book bans in US public schools increased by 33% over the last school year according to a September report by Pen America. It found that the authors whose books were targeted were most frequently women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ individuals. The award is run alongside four other prizes – for memoir, poetry, fiction/drama and spoken word – in the publisher’s Creative Writing awards, each with a $10,000 (£8,168) prize. The winners will also receive ongoing mentorship opportunities. The competition opened on 16 October and will close on 16 January, or when 1,000 applications have been submitted. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ches-high-schoolers-award-to-combat-book-bans
How Philip Roth’s Raunchiest Novel Made It to the Stage For their adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater,” John Turturro and Ariel Levy sought to preserve “the nasty side of existence” evoked in the book. Spoiler For John Turturro, it was time to honor Philip Roth. Turturro, the veteran actor, had been friends with the novelist for nearly a quarter-century when Roth died in 2018 at 85. They first met, Turturro recalled, after Roth saw his performance in the 1994 film “Quiz Show” and picked him to star in a one-man stage adaptation of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s 1969 best seller about a young man with a penchant for self-pleasure. That play never got beyond readings. Plans for other works had similar fates. Two years after Roth’s death, Turturro appeared in the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America,” David Simon and Ed Burns’s adaptation of Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel. Still, Turturro said, he felt he wanted to “complete the conversation.” Now he’s starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth’s 1995 novel about a lascivious 64-year-old ex-puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath, which is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Theater. The book, a National Book Award winner regarded both as maybe Roth’s greatest novel and his black sheep, is certainly his raunchiest and most transgressive. (What Alexander Portnoy does with a piece of liver, Sabbath does at his lover’s grave.) Roth’s nearly 30 works of fiction, has John Turturro elected to embody the most estranging, the most irredeemable, the quite simply filthiest character in Roth’s canon? “He’s like a stand-up comedian. That lends itself to the theater,” Turturro, 66, said of the Roth who wrote “Sabbath’s Theater.” “When he’s on a rant you go from Lorena Bobbitt to Mussolini to Ibsen to Macbeth, all in the same breath.” There were other reasons, too. Turturro was attracted to the novel’s house style: Its manic, sarcastic, abasing observations, largely written in the third person but never far from Sabbath’s perspective, seemed made for the theater. As Sabbath, Turturro is onstage virtually the entire play, speaking for much of that time and cycling through emotions like excitement and pity, desire and tenderness, depression and optimism. “You let the whole creature out,” Ariel Levy, the New Yorker staff writer with whom Turturro adapted the script, told Turturro during a joint interview, quoting from “Sabbath’s Theater.” She added: “And that’s what [Roth] sensed about you.” Turturro replied: “I was not afraid of it. I don’t have to be the hero.” Not having to be the hero is an important qualification for the actor playing Mickey Sabbath. His exploits include an obscenity arrest, a phone-sex scandal and compulsive lecherousness — up to and including stealing his friend’s college-aged daughter’s underwear from her childhood bedroom. Judith Thurman, the New Yorker staff writer and close friend of Roth’s, said “Sabbath’s Theater” was Roth’s favorite of his own books, the one he chose to read from at his 80th birthday celebration. “It is his most impious book, in a lifetime of impiety,” said Thurman, adding: “I think he would have been delighted that Ari and John had the nerve to do this. Nerve was one of the qualities in an artist that he most admired.” For both Turturro and Levy, Sabbath’s offensiveness, his audacity, his utter lack of embarrassment alchemized into Roth’s most life-affirming book, one that finds the protagonist recalling all the people and things he has loved and lost — his brother, his mother, his first wife, his vocation (his fingers are now arthritic), his longtime mistress. As Sabbath puts it in the play (in one of many lines of third-person narration transposed to Sabbath’s voice): “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.” recounted a miscarriage, and she said that while working on the play she thought of her husband’s having lost a brother while a young man, as Sabbath does. “We did this workshop in London at the National Theater, and somebody there asked, ‘Why now?’” Levy said. “And John said, ‘Because we’re all going to die.’ And that’s it. The depth and the death, grief and being haunted and sometimes feeling the dead are as real to you as the living.” The conventions of theater permit Sabbath’s many ghosts to haunt him not just in his mind’s eye but physically on the stage. In one scene, a nightgown represents the corpse of a mother mourned by her daughter, Sabbath’s first wife, Nikki; Sabbath, feet away, is simultaneously in the present tense with another character and conjuring the memory of Nikki, who herself disappeared decades earlier. “The ghosts of Mickey’s loved ones are more real to him than the living,” Bonney said. Enacting the novel’s fragmented nature by jumping back and forth in time was crucial to its dramatic success, she added. “We’re taking people on this ride of the mind as opposed to a regularly plotted story.” Such staging was revelatory to Levy, 49, who had never worked professionally in theater. “When you’re just writing, all you have is words, words, words, words, words,” Levy said. By contrast, she added, in theater, “you have other things going into the storytelling, like the way a person’s body is or their voice.” PERHAPS THE GHOST foremost summoned by the production is Roth’s. Turturro’s lanky frame is the opposite of Sabbath’s, but it echoes Roth’s, and the actor acknowledged that his Sabbath is partly a gloss on the novelist. “He definitely has a Philip-like quality — dark, antic, hectic, comic at the same time,” said Thurman, who saw a reading of the play in 2021 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. When it came time to seek a writing partner for the script, Turturro said it was important to find someone who would be faithful to Roth’s language. “I was thinking about playwrights,” Turturro said, “but then I was thinking, ‘Would they want to come in and rewrite Philip’s work?’” Instead Turturro pitched Hilton Als, a longtime theater critic who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Als suggested Levy. By then it was the spring of 2020, so Levy and Turturro met over Skype and got to work. “We didn’t write anything,” Levy said. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.” During rehearsals last month, Levy, considering how a scene should be blocked, grabbed her pummeled copy of the novel, found the original rendering and consulted it like scripture. One challenge was turning the novel’s stream of consciousness into scenes with characters, along with soliloquy-like asides from Sabbath. Their script stipulates that the 16 characters besides Sabbath be played by just two actors. In this production, Jason Kravits portrays Sabbath’s put-together, respectable friend Norman Cowan as well as his 100-year-old cousin, Fish; Elizabeth Marvel plays his mistress, his wives and his mother. Turturro said the decision was inspired by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” in which Deborah Kerr plays three characters. “You know that thing in life where people seem like iterations of each other?” Levy said. “One actress being all these women makes so much sense.” Alongside Turturro’s Sabbath, the signature performance might be Marvel’s turn as Drenka Balich, Sabbath’s 52-year-old Croatian mistress. A mother and a lover, a force of life and sex, Drenka has long been Exhibit A for those defending Roth from charges of misogyny in his depictions of women. “Drenka is such a heroine on so many levels,” Levy said, “so interesting and complicated and older, just a combination of traits you don’t see flipped together. You see it in life, but you don’t get to see it onstage, on the screen.” Is 2023 ready for Mickey Sabbath? If so-called cancel culture — which Roth forecast in “Sabbath’s Theater” and, more directly, in “The Human Stain” (2000) — were to come for any Roth novel, it would surely be this one. essay published this year and partly titled “in praise of filth,” the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote that he “can’t imagine a book like ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature.” Yet to Greenwell it is precisely the novel’s depiction of various repellent activities that lends the novel its moral force. “By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath,” Greenwell added, “Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts.” Turturro wants theatergoers to make their own judgments. “My job is to keep the audience awake,” he said. “Whatever you think, you think.” Levy added: “It’s not a good play to bring your grandma to. Although, it depends on your grandma. My grandma would have loved it. She was dirty. She was really dirty.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/theater/sabbaths-theater-philip-roth-john-turturro.html
PW with their best of 2023 lists https://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2023/fiction https://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2023/nonfiction https://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2023/sf-fantasy-horror
WaPo with a tour of Stephen King's home library, pretty cool. Didn't seem to give the same kind of photo access that Egan did last month Later, we came across a signed first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” published in 1968. “I love Cormac McCarthy,” he said. Asked if he knew him, King said: “No. I mean, you didn’t know Cormac McCarthy, but I read everything. I read ‘The Passenger,’ and I thought, this guy is like 87, 88 years old, and he’s as good as he ever was. Just blew me away. I mean, I didn’t understand all of it. It made such an impression that I wrote this story called ‘The Dreamers’ that’s going to be in a new book. And it’s dedicated to him because I stole his style for that story; it made the story possible.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/book...ing-home-library/?itid=sf_top-table_p001_f001
I actually like Philip Roth by whoo boy was American pastoral pretty bad I feel like a bunch of the Pulitzer winners are duds
so i guess porn novels masquerading as romance books are now huge? i'm thinking about dusting off my pen :)
"In the fantasy world of slawville, the Pitboss is leading the football team to a national championship, powered by his magical tittles...."
sam tittman had the best boobs in all of northwest arkansas. little did everyone know, when he was milked, lasers shot from them. tittmans tits were a secret government weapon, and they would soon be used in a life or death battle to save human civilization