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I'm in Tehran, hanging out with Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire) and experiencing the lives of Moslem women.

A European: Kafka or Dostoevsky.

Thank you for a very fair review. Perhaps if I had read your review before I read the book I would have tolerated it better. My negative feelings were mostly related to the characters who were shallow and not at all self-knowing. Was April's desire to help Frank find himself (not much there...

One off-beat literary traveler I have enjoyed is Martin Cruz Smith. He writes detective novels (mostly) with a Russian detective as the central character. That detective gets around: a north Pacific fishing trawler in Polar Star, contemporary Cuba in Havana Bay, wartime Tokyo in December Six. He...

I haven't read Brodsky, but I have read Pamuk and Mahfouz. I don't know how much literary quality I am losing because of reading translations, but I admire them both. Mahfouz is a true story teller. His trilogy, set in Cairo, gave me an intimate feeling of a family, living as well as they can...

Don't knock it until you have tried it. I just try to get in my weekly quota of walking, and in Connecticut climate (too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet, too dark) that is not easy. Walking outdoors I alternate between observation and meditation. Walking indoors, an audio book works for me...

Like other commenters here I was disappointed in the book, but more in Ruth than in Tim. She seemed so one track, unable to enter into what might be driving Tim and seeing him principally as a sex object. Or maybe that was the point. Regarding her career and commitment to teaching teen agers...

Ac / dc? I alternate a lot. I usually have two books going at a time, one fiction and one non fiction. In addition, I usually have a third book on my mp3 player which I listen to on the treadmill, and that book can be just about anything. When I finish the fiction, I go to my reading shelf...

Yes, indeed it is different. But parallel in that heterosexual love as we experience it is not possible. In one book by fiat and in the other book by biology. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the man from earth (stable as a male) is perceived as a pervert.

A book with a parallel premise is Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It is set in a world where people have no stable sexual identity but alternate between male and female. So there are no gender identifies because everyone is both.

How should you read Shakespeare? Let us count the ways.... Get a good edition that feels pleasant in the hand and just sit down and read. (In college we worked our way through one of those one-volume complete plays editions printed on tissue paper. It was double work, plus a bad idea to drop...

I only read the book (Three Cups of Tea) because someone gave it to me. The first half is particularly good, not just Mortenson's quest to build schools, but also the account of his hiking in the Himalayas -- he almost died after failing to climb K2 -- and how he came to know the mountain people...

The best so far this year: Mortenson and Relin, Three Cups of Tea Chinhua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs Emile Zola, Nana Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee Sandor Marai, Embers Thomas Ricks, Fiasco...

I have enjoyed the comments here, especially the remarks about memory and Nabokov's power to use it and evoke it. In a few weeks I will be leading the discussion of this book for our senior learning group. These readers bring varied backgrounds to the discussion and enjoy being stirred up a...

Yes, there is some garbage out there on the web, but there would probably be an equal amount in the library if the librarians didn't screen it for us. On the internet, we have to do it for ourselves. I'm struck also by how much more research I do now than I did when I had to get in a car and...

Is Nabokov showing off or enriching us with his wide-ranging vocabulary? Just in Chapter 5, I pick out hyperborean ecchymotic susurrous xanthic enuretic I have a sense from the context or from their roots what they must mean, enuretic especially. I don't interrupt my reading to look...

I am not rushing through this book. I read it years ago, mostly for the story of Nabokov's life. Now, with help from these comments, I'm finding much more. My edition of the book (Quality Paperback Book Club) has a map of the country estate and family photographs. In the Foreword, Nabokov...

It's a recognized phenomenon and not easily explainable. Nabokov made it seem real to me, with his details about the different colors. One letter was a different shade of green from another. What struck me about that passage was how he used his experience to show his bond with his mother. She...

Did you enjoy Life of Pi? I did, even though I did not expect to.

I am an admirer of Ursula LeGuin and have read most of her books. I especially like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Both sit somewhere in the border between science fiction and imaginative fantasy. I recommended The Lathe of Heaven because, although it says a lot, it is short...