Lolita...........

What can I say? I should have read this book decades ago but I'm sure glad I finally read it now. My question is: How is it possible that Nabokov was able to elicit even the tiniest bit of sympathy for a perverted pedophile (is there any other kind of pedophile?) such as Humbert Humbert? Fascinating character and the writing is exquisite. I was in awe. As a matter of fact, this is a book that calls for a second reading some day. There are so many layers beneath the surface of every thought and sentence that it really is a necessity to read again. I'll be holding onto my copy.

Let the Great World Spin

This was such a GOOD (great! awesome!) book! Colum McCann knows his way around the written word. I was captivated the whole time. He took an historical event, Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Centers in 1974, but kept us (the readers) down on the ground to witness the lives of a select few people and how they were all somehow 'connected' around the time of this spectacular event. You'll want to pick this one up.

Ok. Ok.

Hello again from Mama Lampl. I just can't stay away so now that I see that we're reading at a more leisurely pace this year, I'll pop on now and then and post my oh-so-wise reviews, read all of yours, and get some more reading material ideas. Always a necessary and fun bonus.

A warm welcome to Macy. LOVE your name!

Karen, come back!

Mikey...oh Mikey!! Quit playing in the snow!

Andrew, I especially love your 'first-liners' entry.

Hi Julie!!

Hi Erica!!

Alrighty then. Here I go again......

"Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our king?" "No."

The Savage Detectives is about two visceral realist poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano, who leave Mexico City on the last night of 1975 and travel around the expanse of the globe, to Barcelona, to Tel Aviv, to Paris, Catalonia, Madrid, Mallorca, San Francisco, searching for themselves, for each other, for guidance, for a lost poet named Cesarea. The story is essentially a collage of hundreds of conflicting first-person monologues - told to an always absent interviewer, perhaps an inquiring mind, perhaps Bolano himself - which together paint two decades of a broken chaotic and insanely beautiful earth.

Roberto Bolano feverishly wrote this and his other sprawling epic, 2666, while fighting against the inevitability of a fatal liver disease. He died in 2003 at the age of 50, leaving behind nearly 1500 pages of the most heartbreaking, poetic, lucid prose I've ever read. 1500 pages of memories, of stories, of philosophy, of imagination. Bolano has deeply infiltrated my consciousness, my strange loop, and I'm very thankful for the afternoon that Zeke Sulkes mentioned his name and I thought to ask: who?

and now:

I'm a dork, and I've compiled a list of every first line I read in the 2009-2010 season, so with your permission, and without further ado, here goes:

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

If it were possible for me to narrate this story, I'd begin here.

Here they come, marching into American sunlight.

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops.

Eating in our time has gotten complicated - needlessly so, in my opinion.

The Dead Father's head.

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black Levi's suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia.

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

This is a joke book that I wrote.

I love people!

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office.

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature.

I get up, take a shower, have breakfast.

Let the wrestling match begin: my stories versus his stories.

poems like gunslingers sit around and shoot holes in my windows chew on my toilet paper read the race results take the phone off the hook.

Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.

David was six feet two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds.

Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.

Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair.

Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty and I was crazy.

My name has been a matter of some concern to me over the years...

Every morning I sit across from you at the same table, the sun all over the breakfast things - curve of a blue-and-white pitcher, a dish of berries - me in a sweatshirt or robe, you invisible.

From an early age onwards, I pondered what my mind was and, by analogy, what all minds are.

The last word in this sentence is a four letter noun.

I'm lazily sneaking this in from the end of Round Two, and because it's now Round Three, I won't say much, other than if you are at all interested in shifting your perception and thinking about the world (and life and mathematics and the self and the way in which your mind works) in a Completely new light, please please please read this book. Because, after all, haven't you ever caught yourself wondering what I is?

New Blogger!

It seems as though we have fallen out of love with the blog. I will still continue to post, most likely, because I've really enjoyed keeping track of my reads over the last few years, but I'm definitely not slammin' for 50 anymore.

My sister Macy is going to join the ranks of the bloggers (in a similarly leisurely fashion), so that's pretty fun!

I hope you guys are still out there and doing wonderfully!