Who's reading what,when & the experience

maypacheco

try 'Inspite of the Gods' by Edward Luce - a lovely book on India - with all its contradictions, bureaucracy and mess, India still manages to keep going and will do so in the future as well...

Aishah

Looks a good read Maypachecho - is it fiction or non-fiction?

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"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

batistuta

Aishah, Inspite of the gods is about how the country is doing well inspite of the crooked Politicans, corrupt government officials and well, inspite of the 330 million gods that we have.

Patheya

my book of the year is elizabeth gilbert's 'eat pray love'.
its a gem of a book

incitatus

Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Only the 11th woman in the 106 year history of the award.
I've always found her a bit of a yawn so perhaps the rest should be silence.....

Aishah

'a bit of a yawn' - me too, incitatus! Have tried many times one book or another of hers and have given up before the first chapter has ended. Thanks Batistuta for answer - sounds like it's
non-fiction, although 'doing well' in spite of corruption etc? could be a bit of fiction there...!

capt_mahajan

While on the nobel prize, this list

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/l...ure/laureates/

is interesting.

Not my list of favourite authors, maybe I need to read better.

And Winston Churchill? For literature?

Aishah

Winston Churchill??? Was it for his Memoirs? Took a look at the list - not my favourites either - only Nadine Gordimer and V.S. Naipul would i say I enjoyed - some others there but more for study than pleasure at the time. Albert Camus was read in French and it was a hard slog.

Darmabum

I read that one last year on my flights to India. Good story. I read another by Elizabeth after reading that one, called The Last American Man. Also very good.

While in Pakistan, particularly Peshawar, in '89 - '90 I read a book by Doris Lessing called The Wind Blows Away Our Words. Dealt with Afghanistan resistance. Could have been that being surrounded by Afghani's it seemed better than it was; but a very powerful book at the time.

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure - Marianne Williamson

capt_mahajan

Aishah, there are some authors on that Nobel list I like, including one of yours.. (Gordimer).. Naipaul is not one of my favourites.

Others from that list I enjoy:

Hemmingway: almost anything
Gunter Grass: The tin drum
Marquez, as above.
Solzhenitsyn ( One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a favourite)
Tagore, poetry more than others.

Some on that list were attempted and abandoned.. too heavy or too dry for me. Some I can't understand

incitatus

I must admit that I laughed with delight when I heard that Pinter had received the laurel in 2005.
The main curiosity on the list is Pearl S Buck whose novels were one step above penny dreadfuls.
As always my favourite is Marquez - "Love in the Time of Cholera"
naturally.
I also find I can pick up "100 years of solitude" ,open it at random and start reading with total engagement.
It shares this felicitous characteristic with my other favourites 'Rouge et Noir" by Stendhal and "Wuthering Heights" by E Bronte.

Casey

There are some authors on the Nobel list that I appreciate:
Coetzee, Grass, Saramago
And ones who I really enjoy: Naguib Mafouz, Steinbeck, and Falkner.
I have never been a big Hemingway fan and there are a number that I haven't read but plan to at some point.

wonderwomanusa

Good for her!

I loved her first four "Martha Quest" novels, which take place in Rhodesia. And THE FOUR-GATED CITY and THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK were two of the best novels I read in the 1970s; haven't tried re-reading them but I remember them very fondly.

I don't like much of Lessing's more recent work, but those 6 books were truly terrific.

incitatus

The Golden Notebook is still highly regarded.
Personally I found Lessing's brand of Utopian Socialist feminism anachronistic especially when writers such as Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler who had been Communists rejected this thinking in the 1930's/40's after
having visited Russia.(see 'The God That Failed' published 1949)
Personally I find the work of American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman more interesting in that regard.

I see the first 4 decades of the 20th century as the most interesting in American thought since 1770-1800.

Anyone with any pretentions to being an intellectual became either a Communist or a Roman Catholic!

amyl

O yea.... out of the blue when skimming thru yet another book I picked up at Chinatown here - Joy of Compassion, the title of the love-book dawned upon me.

"Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited" by Brian Weiss. Sadly I realize that the book is lying on my shelf in India

Joy of Compassion by Lama Zopa Rinpoche cud not hold my interest. Tho some typical confusing thoughts about our existence on earth did stem while reading thru the first chapter, I doubt if I will turn every page till the end. It has a different perspective to the notion of Happiness and I have different opinions than what is put there. But such conflicts are good to provoke new thoughts and new revelation about this 'thing' called LIFE so might just stay with it for some more chapters.

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