she.

no, she did research there & loved the place.

Anybody ever read Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah? I go back to it about every third summer. It's kind of wild.

Yes, 1984 is great. Animal Farm is a good week-end read.

Mine:
A Brave New World (I bought a copy, just haven't got around to it)
The whole Divine Comedy, have read 2 translations of Inferno, got halfway through Purgatory and put it down.
a shitton of Steinbeck (mainly Of Mice and Men) and Kerouac.

What London, or Highgate cemetary?

don't bother reading of mice and men. it's dull.

Cannery Row is one of my favourite novels, period.

you've read all the good parts, the rest is shit.

I'm not a Steinbeck fan either.

For whatever reason, I can't get into new "literary" novels. I have favorite old ones, many of them, but I haven't found many in the last 10 years or so that really fire my imagination. If I read new novels, they're usually in the spy/thriller genre.

I wouldn't describe Steinbeck as being particularly literary. If anything he's looked down on slightly by high-brow types for being quite populist.

of mice and men was the only one i ever read and i found it to be pretty boring and trite, but i don't have anything against john steinbeck.
i do have something against william faulkner though.


something else i've always intended to read is more shakespeare aside from romeo & juliette.

& I didn't call him literary. Two different trains of thought there. Sorry, I should have made them more distinct. I was responding to earlier posts on Steinbeck, and then explaining my dislike of current literary novelists.

I can see how you'd think I was making that connection though.

One shouldn't hold anything against any writer. They have it tough as it is.

Though I'm not particularly fond of Stephen King.

i don't have anything against any of them i don't think. i just really really hate everything william faulkner has ever written and i tried to like it really hard.

yeah but why though? i still havent heard.

Faulkner's not an easy read. But he's sort of like listening to Dylan--when he clicks, it's like a light bulb goes on and suddenly it's all clear. But you have to have patience, and I think the only reason I enjoyed what I read by him is because I had great teachers teaching his stuff.

Faulkner is someone I really think I should read.

I should read more Gabriel Garcia Marquez too.

it just really does not appeal to me. all that southern novelist shit, not just him. i have no problem with the way it's written or what have you, it's actually written well but the subject matter is just echchhhhhhhh

ah!

I have it, never read it. I'm seriously have about 30-50 novels that I've never once opened. Library was giving them away, so I took them.

Yeah, the paragraph translation I have bores me to no end. I loved the Inferno translation that kept verse form.

On the subject of Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath is an excellent novel, although I was younger when I read it and can now point to a dozen other novels that are worth reading over that one.

I'd really like to "get" Faulkner.

I've tried more times than I can count to read Heart of Darkness and have never been able to finish it. I feel like it's one of those books that really pays off at the the end...