Let me first say that I'm sorry for the delay in posting after our last meeting--I've been inundated with the day-to-day of getting a new Varsity soccer season up and running. At any rate, we had a good meeting at the end of last month--Lumpkin, Enloe, Parker and me gathering to discuss All the King's Men. Unexpectedly, and rather inexplicably, Fox and Hounds was closed for cleaning and renovations ("who ever heard of a bar's closing for cleaning" mused Chip), so we all sauntered next door to The Big Easy, which was, in retrospect, a far more appropriate locale for discussing this particular novel.
I'll leave it for others to comment further about the book, except to offer this: while I luxuriated in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren's descriptions (a consensus opinion among us), I had trouble at times reconciling this voice as coming from a 1st person narrator--if I take a step back and think about it a little, I just can't see Jack Burden speaking or writing this way.
Anyway, what's next for us? In keeping with the roughly bimonthly schedule we've adopted since reconstituting, looks like we should plan our next meeting for late March or thereabouts--we'll work out a date soon to suit the schedules of our regulars. The book choices we agreed upon putting up to a vote are as follows: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess; A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter; Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, by Albert Camus; and White Noise, by Don DeLillo. I should mention that all of these works are nice and short . . . probably a welcome change after Crime and Punishment and All The King's Men. Weigh in by the end of this week!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Interesting, the problem you had with the poetry of Warren's 1st person narration sounds very similar to the reason I could never get through The Brothers K.
Anyway, votes probably don't count from afar, but Don DeLillo's supposed to be all the rage these days.
Passing along this email I just received from Fincham:
My opinion means absolutely nothing since I only read cookbooks now and I never attend the meetings. However, I do have some commentary to share with you.
1.On the Road/Kerouac - Cliff Notes readily available - should be an immediate disqualification.
2.Clockwork Orange - I tried to read this one once and it made be all bobbly woggly in me diffidum arsenum - I suggest you substitute
"Jabberwocky". It's much shorter and has the same net effect.
3.A Sport and a Pastime - read this one over on Amazon - appears to have no pictures or recipes.
4.Resistance, etc. - Camus - also perused this on Amazon and found this review "Is Sartre smarter than Camus? Camus knew enough to fear most -isms and -ologies where Sartre did not..." I'm concerned this might come down to a tastes great/less filling type discussion. My real concern is whether or not Camus was juicing with steroids when he wrote these essays. Somebody needs to hold a congressional hearing and call out the asterisks.
5.White noise - This one got my vote even though it also appears to be devoid of glossy, semi-pornographic food photos and doesn't carry an endorsement from Rachel Ray.
Since I won't be attending the meeting, I'll update you with what I'm reading. Charcuterie, The craft of salting, smoking, and curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polycn. I'll make this one suggestion. My book is a true thriller because if I fail to read closely and pay attention, I risk botulism. That's real-man-reading. Enjoy your sissy books.
I'm a big fan of post-modernism, and DeLillo's been the rage for awhile, so I vote for his brilliant White Noise. It's cultural commentary at it's finest.
Nice choice you effing whores!
Post a Comment