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| 2010-09-02 | B002LLNOY0 | Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) | Hancock, Karen | | | | 
Light of Eidon was an entertaining diversion, if a bit predictable.
Christians may find this book quite inspiring—even on a fantasy world there exists God the Father, with His Will for our lives from which we can run but not hide, and his Son come to dwell amongst us in human form so that we may know Him and so that He can Atone for the great debt we owe His Father (debt incurred by trying to deny Him and His Will).
Hancock adds a twist to Christian allegory that C.S. Lewis left out of his Chronicles of Narnia, namely the idea that there are multiple peoples of faith who share some beliefs and scriptures in common. The existence of these multiple faiths can make it difficult to discern the truth faith from false ones, but Light of Eidon is surprisingly ecumenical for a Christian allegory in that a theme it raises is that people from different faith traditions can nevertheless come together, in part because of the commonalities of their divergent backgrounds.
After reading this book, however, Christians on Earth might come to wish that the Christian God offered such visible signs of his existence as does Eidon.
Readers of this review might be interested to know that I came to read Light of Eidon not because I heard about it and found it interesting enough to purchase but rather because it was available for free in Kindle format. Despite having found Light of Eidon enjoyable enough to read it through completely, I was not hooked so much as to want to purchase subsequent volumes in the Guardian-King series.
| | 2009-10-29 | 0553242946 | The Persian Boy | Renault, Mary | | | | I’m reading this book for my gay mens book group. | | 2009-08-19 | 1906413045 | The Enemy of the Good | Arditti, Michael | | | | 
A book group I’m in is going to read Arditti’s The Celibate, but when I went to purchase that book I saw his book The Enemy of the Good had just come out in paperback, so I purchased it as well. (By the way, Amazon.com dicked me around for a couple weeks on getting The Enemy of the Good, not mentioning that they didn’t have it in stock when I ordered it and taking a few weeks to say they were still trying to get it, upon which time I canceled my order with Amazon and bought a used copy via half.com—that’ll teach me to violate the #amazonfail boycott.)
At any rate, back to the subject at hand, The Enemy of the Good, I really enjoyed this book. It has four parts, each told in third person but from the point of view of a member of the Granville family, the father of which, Edwin, is a retired Anglican bishop who retained his office despite revealing publically his loss of faith. The first part is told from the point of view of Edwin’s son Clement, a gay painter who, despite his father’s agnosticism or atheism, is still a believer and considers himself Christian, although in the same liberal kind of way that I consider myself Christian. The second part focuses on Clement’s sister Susannah who decides to convert to Chassidic Judaism. The third part of the book deals with Clement’s and Susannah’s mother Marta, who was the sole member of her Polish Jewish family to survive the Holocaust, as she struggles with the illness of her husband and their father (Edwin). The fourth part returns to Clement.
In some ways The Enemy of the Good is kind of soap opera-ish, dealing with family drama and with spectacular cliff hanger-ish endings to each part (although, unlike actual cliff hangers, you can simply start reading the next section right away if you like), but I found the writing quite enjoyable and most of the situations depicted not too contrived as to be unbearable. I did find myself not liking the situation that ended the third part and started the fourth part of the book, but as I got into the fourth part of the book, I understood why Arditti set the situation up, so it was okay. Of the four parts, the first part, focusing on Clement’s completion of a work commissioned by a cathedral and the controversial reception his work receives, was my favorite.
Despite the family drama, or perhaps because of it, Arditti is able to incorporate quite a bit of theological and philosophical thought and debate into the book, giving voice to many viewpoints. Whether you think there’s nothing worthwhile to be gained these days from religion and you think people who believe in God and the “literal truth” of the Bible to be fools, or whether you’re one of those paradoxical people who’ve combined Christianity and liberalism to make up your world view, I think you’ll find the perspectives contained in The Enemy of the Good make for good reading and good thought.
| | 2008-11-30 | 0670888087 | The Danish Girl | Eberschoff, David | | | | This fictionalized account of the first transgendered MTF to undergo surgery, Einar Wegener AKA Lili Elbe, was quite interesting. Eberschoff retains the core of Einar's/Lili's story although he makes significant changes in the account of Einar's wife, named Greta in this book. The pace of the book's first two parts is better than that of its third part, which I thought dragged a bit. Still, the whole book's worth a read. | | 2007-07-03 | 1401303641 | Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage | McGreevey, Dina Matos | | | | Of course reading Dina McGreevey's book only just now means I'm a bit behind the news cycle, since she made the rounds a few months ago to get her say about her life with New Jersey's gay former governor Jim McGreevey, but I really had no interest in giving either one of the McGreeveys any of my money, and so I had to wait until my turn to check the book out from the library came up. This book is as good (and as bad) as any ghost-written autobiography rushed out to get a celebrity's (or pseudo-celebrity's) point of view out into the court of public opinion before the public forgets who they were. To hear Mrs. McGreevey tell it, she was utterly in love with Jim McGreevey and didn't see any warning signs, not even, for example, when he had an intermediary propose marriage to her on his behalf. How romantic! Mrs. McGreevey makes a big deal of meeting Pope John Paul II on her honeymoon and how she thought that getting his blessing a good sign about the future of her marriage, never mind that she and her new husband met the pope for about 60 seconds in line with a bunch of other people attending a papal mass — surely if John Paul had known he was meeting a Catholic woman who'd just been married to a divorced Catholic man by an Episcopal priest, he wouldn't have been pleased, would he? Still, whether she was willfully ignorant of signs she should have seen or whether she was blinded by true love, you have to feel a little sorry for her by the end of her tale, when the governor, having announced his gay Americanness and his resignation, practically boots her and her daughter out to fend for themselves. By his own admission he's a liar and an adulterer, so even if Dina exaggerates some, that leaves a lot in her story to believe about him that isn't very nice. I'm listening to the governor's Confession on audiobook now to get the other side of the story. Check back later for a report on that. | | 2007-07-03 | 0679740678 | The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | | | | Apparently this book, while not the first instance ever of alternate historical fiction, was one of the first to sell well. I came across it after having read Fatherland by Robert Harris and searching for more such fiction. Both Harris's and Dick's books contemplate alternate histories in which the Nazis won WWII. In the former, the US stayed out of the war and retained its independence; in Dick's FDR is assassinated early in his term, leaving the country in the throes of the Great Depression and leading to defeat in WWII by Nazi Germany and Japan, who divide America between them. For whatever reason these stories of what might have been interest me, and Dick heightens his readers' interest by including another alternate history novel within his own alternate history novel. That novel within a novel, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, details a world in which Germany and Japan lost WWII, but that world is not our world. It is Grasshopper's author after whom Dick's novel is named, and the novel ends in an encounter with that author in which what is real and what is fiction come into question. The only other work of Dick's with which I'm familiar so far is A Scanner Darkly, the film based on his novel, another work in which what is real is not easy to discern. | | 2007-07-01 | 038505419X | Advise and Consent | Drury, Allen | | | | Advise and Consent I heard of in a review of Fellow Travelers, and so, having just read the latter, I was intrigued enough also to read the former. The books share similarities, both being heavily about Washington politics and the 1950s fear that the twin evils of Communism and homosexuality would destroy America, but, as is natural for two books whose writing is separated by almost 50 years, they are different as well. Fellow Travelers I could not put down, caught up in the story and wanting to know what happens next; Advise and Consent I almost stopped reading because its first section ("Bob Munson's book"), the introduction to Washington wheeling and dealing, just bored me. Knowing part of what would happen later in the book, I plodded forward, and, luckily, sometime in the second section ("Seab Cooley's book") and throughout the third part ("Brigham Anderson's book") I was as caught up by the story as I'd been in Fellow Travelers. A word of warning, however, is that the final parts of the book ("Orrin Knox's book" and following) include page after page which, had I been Drury's editor, I would have urged him just to drop.
Advise and Consent's primary focus is the machinations surrounding the confirmation of a proposed Secretary of State, Bob Leffingwell, unlike Fellow Travelers's focus on witch hunts for Communists and homosexuals. During his confirmation hearings, Leffingwell is accused by a witness of having been part of a Communist cell back in his college days. He denies it, but is he lying? The good upstanding senior Senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson, finds out that he is, but being an honorable man, Anderson gives the President a chance to withdraw the nomination, a bad call on Anderson's part since the President in turns comes across some dirty laundry from Anderson's past and uses it to destroy him.
What was the dirty laundry on Anderson? Apparently the good Mormon, now married with a child, had a homosexual love affair in Honolulu after having served his country in WWII. Advise and Consent, written in the 50s, cannot mention directly, however, the love that dare not speak its name. The Senator who is the President's henchman doesn't accuse Anderson of being a homosexual (the word never even appears in the book), saying instead only that Anderson is "morally unfit." The photo that tipped Anderson's opponents off to his gay love affair is not anything lewd, in one Senator's words, "innocent-appearing," although it bears a gaydar-alerting inscription.
Although Anderson meets the fate that befalls many pre-Stonewall homosexuals in American literature (it can't be too much of a spoiler to reveal he kills himself rather than let disgrace befall him and his family), I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Anderson's senatorial friends showed him, both before and after his suicide. Knowing the allegations against him and that, in Anderson's words, "they may be" true, his friends still vow to support him, and after his death they want to avenge his honor. I was also surprised by Drury's seemingly sympathetic view of homosexuality. In one passage, he has Anderson reflecting on his life and thinking that "he was a good father, a good [...] husband, a good servant, a good Senator, and a good man; and central to all this, in a way he understood thoroughly in his own nature, was the episode in Honolulu." Perhaps not such a radical message only ten years before Stonewall, but not one I expected to find in a book published in 1959.
Read what I thought about Otto Preminger's 1962 film version of this book. | | 2007-06-18 | 0375423486 | Fellow Travelers | Mallon, Thomas | | | | I'd never heard of Thomas Mallon before hearing about this book, one that apparently fits in with Mallon's other works of historical fiction, in which he sets a story he's created amongst actual events. In this case the story is a gay love story of sorts, and it's set in 1950s Washington in the midst of McCarthyism at its height. The book's title, Fellow Travelers, is a term often applied to Communist sympathizers, who were of course Joe McCarthy's primary target, but in this case the term applies more to the novel's protagonist, Hawkins Fuller, a WASPy State Department employee, and his Irish Catholic congressional staffer lover Tim Laughlin, examples of a secondary target of McCarthy's. Mallon does a good job of setting the tone of early 1950s America, and his characters are conveniently but realistically placed to position us amongst the players in the politics of the Army/McCarthy Hearings and subsequent events. I was quickly engrossed by the story, feeling sympathy primarily for Laughlin because of his conflictedness over his Catholicism and his growing love for Fuller. The last third of the novel, after the main activity both with McCarthy's hearings and between Laughlin and Fuller had subsided, I found less compelling, but even so, by the end of the novel I had some sympathy also for Fuller, a product of his culture and times. | | 2007-04-19 | 0807407488 | Aleph Isn't Enough: Hebrew for Adults (Book 2) | Motzkin, Linda | HEB101 | | | This is the second book used in the Hebrew class I'm taking. We don't use it until April 19th. I'll write more about it then. | | 2007-04-19 | 965403106X | Darkonim 1 | Kroin, Uri and Dolly | HEB101 | | | This is the third book for the Hebrew class I'm taking. This one focuses on modern Hebrew. We don't use it until April 19th, so I'll write more about it after that. | | 2007-04-01 | 0451412133 | The Old Contempibles | Grimes, Martha | | | | In Grimes eleventh Richard Jury novel, Jury takes getting attached to a figure involved in the case to the ultimate degree, falling in love with and intending to propose marriage to her before she dies. Grimes has her latest versions of her usual strong-headed independent children in this book, but it's still enjoyable. The ending has very strong echoes of a certain Agatha Christie novel set on a train. | | 2007-03-27 | 0807407267 | Aleph Isn't Tough: An Introduction to Hebrew for Adults, Book 1 | Motzkin, Linda | HEB101 | | | This is the first book for the Hebrew class I'm taking. It focuses on teaching us the Hebrew alefbet, but instead of doing it in order of the alefbet (Alef, Bet, Gimmel, ...), it does so by groups of sounds, for example, starting with Bet, Shin, Tav for consonants and Patach and Kamatz for vowels. The book also includes some basic Hebrew roots and vocabulary words. The back of the book has nice reference charts listing all the letters in typeface, block writing and script (cursive) writing. We're using another book later in the quarter to learn some conversational phrases in modern Hebrew. | | 2007-03-27 | 0451412079 | The Old Silent | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' tenth Richard Jury book has the twist that Jury watches the murder being committed. | | 2007-03-25 | 0816638624 | A Single Man | Isherwood, Christopher | | | | A Single Man is the story of a man over a single day, from the moment he wakes up to his last moments of consciousness that night. Over the course of that day we're privy to all that man's thoughts and actions. Isherwood shows how much of our ordinary lives are based on acting and performing for one another, hiding our true thoughts and feelings, self-censoring in order to get along. It's amazing how well we get to know the protagonist of this book just from a day in his life. For me the book was also interesting as a snapshot of what life in Southern California in the early 60s was like, especially for gay men. | | 2007-03-18 | 0316328898 | The Five Bells and Bladebone | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' ninth Richard Jury book | | 2007-03-17 | 0316328871 | I am the Only Running Footman | Grimes, Martha | | | | I started re-reading Martha Grimes' Richard Jury mysteries because when I read her latest earlier this year, I was confused by the ending. Finishing this one, as with the previous one, I realize that Grimes must sometimes enjoy ending books rather suddenly and with some ambiguity. I guess she likes to make her readers think when they finish a book. | | 2007-03-15 | 0316328863 | The Deer Leap | Grimes, Martha | | | | The seventh in Grimes' Richard Jury series, The Deer Leap features familiar Grimes characters and brings some of her common motifs such as children to play, but this book isn't as light and airy as previous ones, especially when it comes to the ending, which left me hoping the novel's main character (no, not one who'd appeared in past novels) survives but rather thinking she doesn't. Definitely not an upbeat "Murder She Wrote"-type ending with all the regulars recapping the episode. | | 2007-03-13 | 0316328847 | Help the Poor Struggler | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' sixth Richard Jury novel introduces a new recurring character, chief superintendent Brian Macalvie, a rather gruff, hard-nosed detective who admires American movies and other things from the states and whose respect Jury manages to gain. Grimes gives us another kid for Jury, Plant et al. to interact with, this time Lady Jessica Allan-Ashcroft, and Grimes again gets confused with British titles, making Jessie's uncle-guardian merely The Hon. Robert Ashcroft instead of the successor to the title of his late brother, the Earl of Curlew, whose wife, strangely, apparently was not Countess of Curlew but rather Countess of Ashcroft. Oh well, I guess Americans aren't supposed to understand the peerage system, and those who do are overanalyzing Grimes' books, which are supposed to be (and are in fact) pleasant diversions. | | 2007-03-11 | 0375400559 | Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood | Laurents, Arthur | | | | I just finished this autobiography by a not-so-famous (to me at least) playwright, screen writer and director who I heard of only a month or so ago when I saw an interview with him on a DVD of Alfred Hitchock's film Rope. Laurents, who dated the cute actor Farley Granger for a time, apparently lived fairly openly in Hollywood and New York with his long-term partner, lesser known actor Tom Hatcher. The view into what it was like to live as a gay man in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, before the gay rights era, makes this book worth reading, even though the book is rather soap-operaish, sparing no details on the various squabbles Laurents had with the rich and famous from prima dona actresses to credit-grabbing directors and producers. The many photos, interspersed throughout the text rather than centralized in one or two places, add a lot to Laurents' story. | | 2007-03-10 | 0451411617 | The Jerusalem Inn | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' fifth Richard Jury book brings Jury together with his friend Melrose Plant via another implausible coincidence, but it works. We get to see another of Grimes' favorite devices, having Jury and Plant interact with kids, and Jury makes another romantic connection, though his not following through is this time not his own fault. | | 2007-03-09 | 0451411390 | The Dirty Duck | Grimes, Martha | | | | Fourth in the Richard Jury series, this book, set in Stratford, reminded me of another book I recently read because this book's plot also deals with Shakespeare and reveals Grimes' English professor background. In addition, rereading this book 20 years later reveals even more so than revisiting her first book did the vast changes since they were written. Moreover, not content just to have Jury and the others in the book figure out whodunnit, Grimes sets them the task of trying to figure out which poem contains the lines "Beauty is but a flower / Which wrinkles will devour." With no Internet they can consult books listing poems' first lines, but these lines are not the start of a poem. Plant uses his knowledge of meter in poetry cleverly to come up with a method for finding the poem, but it still takes him some time to do what today would take 5 seconds of googling. Pretty sharp of him (and of Grimes). | | 2007-03-03 | 0451410890 | The Anodyne Necklace | Grimes, Martha | | | | Richard Jury sticks closer to London in this book, third in the series, investigating the London murder of a suburban English girl who, like many girls in the 80s, coveted things like designer jeans (remember how nothing got between Brooke Shields and her Calvins?).
| | 2007-02-28 | 0451410688 | The Old Fox Deceiv'd | Grimes, Martha | | | | The second in Grimes' series of Richard Jury mysteries, this book features the first instance of Grimes' favorite plot device, namely an implausible coincidence bringing Jury's new friend Melrose Plant to whatever corner of England Jury's latest murder investigation happens to be in. Two characters in The Old Fox Deceiv'd, Bertie and his dog Arnold, reminded me so much of a boy and his dog who feature in Grimes' latest Richard Jury novel, Dust, that I had to compare names to be sure they weren't the same. It wouldn't have been that farfetched -- people you meet in one Richard Jury murder investigation do pop up in later books. | | 2007-02-24 | 0451410815 | The Man with a Load of Mischief | Grimes, Martha | | | | As with another murder mystery series, having recently read the latest of Martha Grimes' Richard Jury offerings I decided to go back and read this book, her first one. I'm sure I read this shortly after it first came out, when I was still in high school, because I was a big murder mystery fan, but it was a fun trip back to an earlier time, before cell phones and Internet. I don't remember what I thought of Marshall Trueblood the first time I read this book, back when I was in the closet and thinking, foolishly, that there weren't any other gay people in the world; one thing I admire about Grimes is her treatment of gay characters, including in her most recent Richard Jury novel, Dust.
Seeing the introduction of Jury's ex-peer friend Melrose Plant again, made me realize Grimes, who is an American writing mysteries set in England, mixes up British titles and styles. Plant disclaims his titles but still sometimes gets addressed as "Lord Ardry." Yet that makes no sense since his title was "Earl of Caverness," which means, were he still a peer, he'd be addressed in common usage as "Lord Caverness." Plant's aunt Agatha gets addressed as "Lady Ardry" but she was never Countess of Caverness but instead is the widow of Plant's uncle, The Hon. Robert Ardry, younger son of Plant's grandfather. Sons of earls aren't even lords (unlike earls' daughters such as Lady Diana), so Agatha would be at most the Hon. Mrs. Robert Ardry, not Lady Ardry and not Lady Agatha. Of course Agatha's a social climbing American, so perhaps Grimes mixes up all this as a reflection of Agatha's confusion. | | 2007-02-16 | 0345416260 | Pope Joan | Cross, Donna | | | | A friend of mine told me about this book, which is a fictional account of the life of Pope Joan, a quasi-historical figure purported to have been the Roman Catholic Church's only female pope. Whether you believe Joan was a real person or not, Cross's story is entertaining and offers insights into the history of Europe and the workings of the Church at a time when not all Europe was yet Christianized and when life wasn't easy, particularly for women. | | 2007-02-12 | 0670037869 | Dust | Grimes, Martha | | | | I've read all of Martha Grimes' Richard Jury mysteries, usually about as soon as they come out, having been a big fan since the first one, The Man With a Load of Mischief, from back when I was still in high school. I enjoyed Dust too, which features all the old familiar characters and a plot that keeps one's interest, but I was flummoxed by the book's ending, even after a few re-readings. Looking at customer comments about Dust on Amazon.com, I see that I'm not alone. Unlike some other authors of popular mystery series, Martha Grimes hasn't gone senile, I don't think, but she definitely keeps moving away from the "cozy murder mystery" genre. | | 2007-02-06 | 155583955X | Shakespeare's Sonnets | Park, Samuel | | | | Set at Harvard in the late 1940s, this book could be just another story of closeted rich gay boy trying to conform to family expectations, but, as the title implies, the plot's also about Shakespeare's famous sonnets and who they're to. That Shakespeare might have been gay isn't so radical now (though it's also not widely accepted). If you're gay or an English major or a gay English major, this book's worth a read. | | 2007-01-26 | B000ECX0O2 | Rope | Hitchcock, Alfred | | | | I decided to watch this movie after seeing it mentioned somewhere as being based on the story of gay kidnappers/murders Leopold and Loeb. It's entertaining, though Hitchcock's gimmick of trying to shoot the entire film in sequence, zooming in on actors' backs when it was time to change reels of film, is awkward. True to Hollywood at the time, the homosexuality of the main characters is never mentioned, though John Dall and Farley Granger both do a good job of conveying their characters' relationship. James Stewart's performance is disappointing -- his character is supposed to have been gay in the play, but Stewart doesn't know how to play gay or how to convey properly his character's responsibility for what he taught his students. Farley Granger was quite a hottie and is gay in real life; he gives an interesting interview along with screenwriter Arthur Laurents in the special features on the DVD. | | 2007-01-25 | 0425195201 | The Cat Who Could Read Backwards | Jackson Braun, Lilian | | | | After being terribly disappointed by Braun's latest offering in her long-running Cat Who series, I decided to go back to the beginning, to her first book in the series, written in 1966 (before I could even read, though I was alive). In this book, Qwill is not rich and at the beginning doesn't even have a cat. The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is still light reading, but it shows why people became addicted to Braun's series. | | 2007-01-21 | 039915390X | The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers | Jackson Braun, Lilian | | | | I've been a fan of Lilian Jackson Braun's Cat Who mysteries for a long time, as has my mother who often lends me her copies to read. They're not high literature or even the best writing in the murder mystery field. Rather they're "cozy mysteries" or the murder mystery equivalent of romance novels, light airy books to take your mind off the world for a few hours. Unfortunately with this 29th book featuring Qwill and his cats, the series comes to an end for me. The writing is awful, the dialogue insipid and the ending intolerable, at least for fans of the series. Other online reviewers of this book agree with me, and some even speculate that Braun, who must be about 94 years old, is impaired or dead and that a bad ghostwriter was used for this book. Bless her heart if Braun is still alive, but if she or whoever does manage to pump out another Cat Who book, I'm not reading it. | | 2007-01-17 | 1594489254 | The Ghost Map | Johnson, Steven | | | | I heard Steven Johnson talking about this book on NPR, so I reserved it online at the library and finally got it this month. The map in question, reproduced in the book, marks deaths from a cholera outbreak in a nineteenth century London neighborhood, and the story of its creator, John Snow, and how he came to discover cholera's cause is what the book's about. This is nonfiction, but Johnson's a good story teller. | | 2007-01-11 | 031242227X | Running with Scissors | Burroughs, Augusten | | | | All in all this book is a good read, lots of funny stories from the author's childhood, reminding me in a way of David Sedaris, another gay author who uses his family as material, telling stories that are probably a bit larger than life. Some people in this book have taken issue with how Burroughs recounts his youth, perhaps because Burroughs, who unlike Sedaris has changed his name, changes details a bit too much, and perhaps because some of the details of Burroughs' life are a bit dark, especially if true. | | 2006-12-23 | 0465044387 | The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde | McKenna, Neil | | | | Perhaps because McKenna is gay, perhaps because he has access to new materials, but McKenna's premise is that Wilde was gay, not bi. McKenna also shows that, perhaps stereotypically for gay men but also true for many, Wilde was a slut. Today, thanks in part to Wilde's actions over 100 years ago, gay men can get away with being slutty and don't have to marry women to cover for it, but in Victorian England, it was pushing things too far. Wilde lived beyond his means (not uncommon for a man of his class), treated his wife terribly (also not uncommon), but he spent his money on and cheated on his wife with boys, and McKenna gives lots of examples, showing also the incredibly poor judgment Wilde had. Because it's history, we know where Wilde will end up, but it's excrutiating to see how many times just a little caution or discretion might have saved him. | | 2005-12-13 | 1401300391 | Light Before Day | Rice, Christopher | | | | Christopher Rice is cuter than his mother, but she's still the better writer. Unlike another novel I read around this time, I still do remember having read this one. It's not completely horrible, but I do remember finding some of the writing painfully distracting, not something that makes you forget where you are and what you're doing, which all good books do. | | 2005-12-12 | 1401352243 | Breakfast with Tiffany: An Uncle's Memoir | Wintle, Edwin John | | | | I'm a gay uncle myself, but so far I haven't been put to the test of full-time parenthood. This is non-fiction, but it does have a fun style to it (as Booklist reviewer Michael Cart says, it starts out kind of Uncle Mame-ish), though Wintle's writing about serious stuff. | | 2005-12-12 | 074327394X | Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules | Sedaris, David (ed.) | | | | I think David Sedaris is the bee's knees, both when he writes and especially when he reads aloud what he's written. Who knew he was pretty good at selecting short stories too? | | 2005-12-12 | 0972456295 | Looped: A Novel | Winston, Andrew | | | | OK, I'm cheating and putting in entries now (Fall 2006) for books I read last year by going through e-mails from the library telling me when books I'd reserved online were available. I look the book up on Amazon.com, read about it, and say to myself, oh, yeah, I remember that book, but for the life of me, I don't remember this one at all. I don't want to say anything bad about Looped, since I can't remember it, but that's not saying something good, now is it? | | 2005-12-12 | 1594200580 | The City of Falling Angels | Berendt, John | | | | I very much enjoyed Berendt's earlier novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, made famous by the 1997 film of that name, and this novel, which shares some structural similarities, is also enjoyable. Both novels are based on actual events, this one being about the fire that destroyed Venice's Fenice opera house, but both novels are also not strictly non-fiction, featuring Berendt as an active participant in the narratives and changing some details to make for better story telling. Whether Berendt sticks to the facts or not, he does know how to write engaging books. | | 2005-10-05 | 0679438890 | Original Sin | James, P.D. | | | | OK, it had been a while since I'd read any P.D. James, and having just gotten one of her latest Adam Dagliesh mysteries, I decided to go back and re-read an earlier one. Like Christie, James' books are worth looking at more than once. | | 2005-10-04 | 1400041414 | The Murder Room | James, P.D. | | | | I started reading P.D. James mysteries not terribly long after reading Agatha Christie, that is to say, when I was a kid, but luckily James is still around and writing new ones. Also, I feel a bit of a Dayton connection to P.D. James (admittedly a very tenuous one) because the late Roz Young of the Journal Herald and later of the Dayton Daily News, herself a P.D. James fan, wrote of her correspondence with James and of meeting her a few times. So reading this book was satisfying in several ways. | | 2005-09-06 | 0758203284 | All American Boy | Mann, William J. | | | | A gay man looks back at his childhood in a small town and considers the consequences of his choices then. Well worth the read. | | 2005-09-06 | 0758204876 | Baked To Death: A Simon Kirby-Jones Mystery | James, Dean | | | | OK, there is an abundance of light gay mystery novels, each of which is great for a brief escape from the cares of the day. Dean James takes the standard ingredients—England, murder, gay romance—and mixes in vampires, making for an interesting variation on a reliable recipe. | | 2005-01-08 | 0812519671 | The Towers of the Sunset (Recluce series book 2) | Modesitt, L.E., Jr. | | | | If you read The Magic of Recluce and wondered how a society could get started that values Order so much it would cast out its members who induce Chaos, then this second book in the Recluce series will answer many of your questions. Modesitt discards first person storytelling but still features an attractive young male protagonist who sets out on a journey to find answers to the questions he has about life and society. | | 2005-01-07 | 0812505182 | The Magic of Recluce (Recluce series book 1) | Modesitt, L.E., Jr. | | | | The first book in a series, Magic of Recluce is told in first person from the point of view of Lerris, a young man who has tons of questions about his homeland, Recluce, and how his society and world work, a good gimmick because we learn as he does. As is so often the case in worlds which have magic, everyone's kind of stuck in the Middle Ages when it comes to technology, or in Recluce's case, the 1800s since they do have steam engines, although, as you'll learn, using them involves interesting moral decisions involving Order and Chaos, the two forces governing everyone's lives in this book. If you're into fantasy series, this one seems worth getting into, although I'm a bit late to it myself. | | 2005-01-06 | 0743486226 | Angels and Demons | Brown, Dan | | | | I hadn't heard of this book when I read Dan Brown's most famous book, but this book, written a few years before, features the same protagonist, Robert Langdon, and is another thriller involving the Catholic Church. I enjoyed this book too, but it shows that Brown's books are rather formulaic. Pit a man and a woman against global institutions engulfed in conspiracy, and then, during their battle for truth and justice, reveal parts of their troubled pasts and their growing realization that they are ready to love again. | | 2005-01-05 | B00007KSCX | Deception Point | Brown, Dan | | | | Of course I read Dan Brown's most famous work, The DaVinci Code, but I hadn't read any of his other books until today. This book isn't about the Catholic Church (it's about the presidency and NASA, among other things), but I can tell that Brown's books have some things in common. One is that they are enjoyable page-turners. However, another is that they also require a substantial amount of suspension of disbelief -- unless you're naturally a conspiracy theorist. | | 2005-01-04 | 006059361X | They Came to Baghdad | Christie, Agatha | | | | Agatha Christie met her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, in Iraq and spent much time with him in the Middle East. With this book Christie gives a fun glimpse into post-WWII Iraq, then still in the sterling zone and part of Britain's waning sphere of influence. The names of the places mentioned in the book will sound familiar to modern viewers of CNN, but what the book's heroine, Victoria Jones, sees probably doesn't exist anymore. | | 2004-12-11 | B0001A0MPW | The Sittaford Mystery | Christie, Agatha | | | | Written in 1931 and set in the snowy moors of Devonshire, England, this book is from fairly early in Agatha Christie's career. Growing up I was a big fan of Christie's, and I'm just old enough to remember anticipating the posthumous release of her final Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries. I came across The Sittaford Mystery on a newsgroup, and although I had probably already read it, since growing up I read just about everything Christie wrote, I didn't really remember it. Sittaford features none of Christie's famous characters (not Poirot or Miss Marple or even Tommy and Tuppence) which is perhaps what makes it a refreshing novel to choose when one wants to sit down and spend an evening in front of the fire with Christie after a long absence from her. | | 2004-12-02 | 1180006240 | The Stone of Chastity | Sharp, Margery | | | | At Wright State in the basement of Rike Hall are some bookshelves with old books being given away for free. I started perusing it with my friend Derek before class when we took SOC200 together on quarter. I think this book is one that Derek picked up for me there. I only now got around to reading it. I'd never heard of Margery Sharp before, although I had heard of her most famous work, The Rescuers.
This book is for adults, not kids, and is about an eccentric professor researching a stone that when walked over can reveal whether a woman is chaste, that is whether, if unmarried, she's still a virign or, if married, she's been faithful to her husband. It's also about life in an English village, kind of in the way Agatha Christie commented on such life in her Miss Marple mysteries but without any death. A pleasant read, if you ever happen to come across a copy. | | 2004-11-13 | 0758204078 | Looking for It | Ford, Michael Thomas | | | | File this one under entertaining gay diversion. It's like a gay soap opera with a bunch of intertwining subplots that connect in not always surprising ways. It's got it all, love, death, relationship strife, and hot sex, particularly the rough sex that self-hating homophobe Pete always manages to get into. Yes, it's a shame about Pete's situation and what he does, so feel bad that there people like him really exist, but then stop worrying because this is fiction and you know you want to go re-read all the parts with Pete in them. | | 2004-11-09 | B00005JNCX | The Motorcycle Diaries | Salles, Walter (director) | ML304 | | | This entry is about the film, not the book, continuing a tradition with other movies I watched for this class, ML304. I had wanted to see this movie anyway, in large part because I think Gael Garc?a Bernal is cute, but the prospect of earning some extra credit for a class was a good bonus incentive. The movie's worth seeing, even if you're not particularly interested in the story behind Che Guevera. I'd heard of him, of course, but didn't know anything about him before this class, not even that he was one of Castro's cohorts in the Cuban revolution. I did find out in the course of my readings on Bolivia (my assigned country for the class) that he was captured and killed there, something pointed out in the final credits of this movie.
The Motorcycle Diaries is a good introduction to Guevera because it explains, perhaps in a somewhat romanticized way, how he came to embrace communism. At the start of the film he's a somewhat spoiled medical student, fairly privileged even if he wasn't as rich as his girlfriend's family, but more serious than his friend Alberto. When the two set out, their journey is about having a good time. By the end of the film, however, even Alberto is no longer worried about getting laid. He and Ernesto have seen how the bourgeoisie treat the proletariat. People lose their land and have to beg for work at the mines, just as we talked and read about in class, though interestingly in this case a wife goes with her husband (often women are left behind in isolated rural towns to fend for themselves). At age 23 Guevera was idealistic -- I could see the wheels in his mind turning as he asked one displaced farmer about whether he and the other farm workers were presenting a united front to the land owners. Guevera is depicted as painfully honest (almost in a German way -- don't ask his opinion if you don't want a truthful answer), and he won't tolerate rules that serve no real purpose, as seen in the later part of the movie at a leper colony in the Amazon. Guevera's striving to treat everyone justly certainly fits in with the ideals of communism (and with the American [U.S.] ideal of equality, something that might resonate with this film's audience so long as they didn't think too much about its being a Marxist ideal too).
I looked up Guevera's age when he died and see that he was 39, just a bit older than I am now. I was wondering whether Guevera would have been as idealistic had he lived to be older--so many ?berzeugte Marxisten (staunch Marxists) about whom we've read in GER403 this quarter ended up a bit jaded after experiencing the flawed implementations of communism--but I think if Guevera wasn't jaded by age 39 he probably wasn't going to become jaded later. The real Alberto Granado appeared at the end of the film and didn't look exactly jaded but rather that he'd experienced a lot in his life. He too wrote a book, Con el Che por America Latina -- I wonder, do Marxists in Cuba earn profits on their work, especially if it's used in a commercial film? The irony of this movie is that Guevera is certainly being commercialized, even more than ever. Would he have really wanted his Notas de viaje (Notes of the Trip, a more appropriate title given that the motorcycle didn't make it past Chile) used in such a way?
If you've read reviews of this movie (such as those by Roger Ebert or Dayton's own Aaron Epple), you might have noticed that people complain that the film doesn't point out any negative aspects of what Guevera and Castro set up in Cuba. That's fair, especially given Granado's rather romanticized appearance at the film's end, but this movie is about a trip made by the young Guevera, not his entire life journey. | | 2004-10-28 | 0758203233 | He's the One | Beck, Timothy James | | | | When I was a kid and feeling down sometimes I would read one of my mother's Harlequin romance novels just to escape. I didn't want to be one of the heroines, but I did want to escape for a while and dream about meeting the perfect man.
I still need to escape once in a while, and He's the One offers a better solution than Harlequin paperbacks did, at least if you're a gay man. This book won't make it into the literary canon, but if you want a book to help you to get away from politics or school or work for a few hours with a story of finding someone handsome to love you and if you want to read some light sex scenes (nothing graphic though), this book's the one, or at least a good example of one.
Another reason I liked this book, which may be a turn off for you if you're not geeky, is that the protagonist has worked with computers for a long time. He remembers having worked with Mac Pluses and Mac IIs, something I've done too. Don't despair though because he also remembers being a high school football jock, something I never was, so there's something for everyone.
Also, one of the relatively minor characters comes from Yellow Springs and mentions Dayton, in case like me you're a Daytonian and get mild kicks from seeing books mention it. I wonder if Timothy James Beck went to Antioch or (no, none of the four writers behind the Beck pseudonym! went to Antioch) dated someone from YSO, since YSO is mentioned only once, as if it's a special wink to someone.
I'll spare you major plot details, but you can hardly be surprised when you read this book that everything turns out okay in the end, despite Beck's attempts to make you worry a little. That's just like a Harlequin -- you don't really have to wonder whether the separated lovers will find each other again, but it's fun to read about their turmoil while they figure things out. | | 2004-10-17 | 0312280971 | File Under Dead | Zubro, Mark Richard | | | | Being so busy with school I haven't done much reading for pleasure, but today I sat down and read this book from start to finish. I've always liked murder mysteries -- Agatha Christie provided a lot of escape for me when I was a kid. Now, however, I can read mysteries featuring gay sleuths such as Tom Mason or Mark Manning. These combine one part gay romance (amateur detective has handsome lover as well as lots of money), one part gay activism (it's important to be out and to help gay kids come out) and one part murder mystery (gay male Jessica Fletcher finds bodies all over and figures out whodunnit before the reader loses interest). In File Under Dead Tom, who's an openly-gay teacher, has quite a busy spring break at the gay youth center he volunteers at. Jessica Fletcher had to wrap up her mysteries within an hour, and Tom Mason has to wrap this set of murders (yes, there's more than one) before he has to report back to school. He manages to do so in a way that will pleasantl distract you whether you're lounging poolside at a gay guesthouse in Key West or, if you can't manage that, if you're sitting at home on a cold October Sunday avoiding your homework. | | 2004-10-10 | | Adenauer: His Authorized Biography | Weymar, Paul (trans. Peter De Mendelssohn) | GER403 | | | This is the English translation of Paul Weymar's authorized biography of Konrad Adenauer. Dayton Metro Library had both versions in storage, but neither seems to looked upon as the best resource for Adenauer information any more as both versions are out of print. | | 2004-10-10 | | Das Adenauer Bildbuch | Gruber, L. Fritz | GER403 | | | This book is also no longer in print, which is rather a shame, as it's a nice tri-lingual (English, French and German) coffee table book with nice black and white photos of Adenauer's life up through the middle of his time as chancellor. | | 2004-10-10 | 085468039X | Konrad Adenauer: 1876-1967 | Prittie, Terence | GER403 | | | Although the title on the dust jacket reads Adenauer: A Study in Fortitude, the title inside (and that corresponds with the book's Library of Congress number, 70-163245) is Konrad Adenauer: 1876-1967. At any rate, this is the book I used for my report, despite Prittie's accurately predicting that he was "still too close the Adenauer era to expect [that this book would become] 'the' definitive biography." Nevertheless I found this book enjoyable to read, and as it covered the Spiegel scandal and the last part of Adenauer's life, it was sufficient for me. | | 2004-10-10 | | Konrad Adenauer: die autorisierte Biographie | Weymar, Paul | GER403 | | | For my GER403 class, each of us had to select an appropriate topic (related to Germany and the Second World War or the Cold War) to report to the class on. I got Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Dayton Metro Library has several books about Adenauer, including this one in German, which is the authorized biography written in 1955 during the peak of Adenauer's popularity. (If you want a copy and don't live in Dayton, you could order a used copy from amazon.de.) I also checked out the English translation, but I actually relied on a later biography for most of my report. | | 2004-10-10 | 0837185696 | The Adenauer Era | Hiscocks, Richard | GER403 | | | Although I checked this book out too, I didn't actually end up even looking at it for my report on Konrad Adenauer. | | 2004-10-05 | 3150086426 | Der arme Heinrich: Eine deutsche Sage | Hauptmann, Gerhart | GER361 | | | I only just got this German edition since the UD bookstore was late in ordering it. I'll write more later about it after I've read it. | | 2004-09-30 | 0826407277 | Plays: Before Daybreak, The Weavers, The Beaver Coat | Hauptmann, Gerhart (ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina y Vedia; trans. Peter Bauland, Theodore H. Lustig) | CPL310 | | | This is not one of the required books for this class, but each of us had to read a play or novel from a supplemental list and report on it to the class. Hauptmann's play "Before Daybreak" was one of two for the first report day and I am also reading Hauptmann auf Deutsch for my GER361 class, so that made my choice easy. CPL310 is in English and not limited to German authors, so this edition is a translation. "Before Daybreak" was fairly entertaining, even though I could tell early on that Loth was pretty much a shit who was going to break Helen's heart.
A warning about this edition, however: if you click on the ISBN to bring up the Amazon page for this book, you'll notice that Seth Davidson says in his review that "[t]his translation published by the German Library is unreadable." My professor, Dr. Hye, prefers another
translation as well (though Seth Davidson hasn't reviewed it), but considering that he put it on two-hour course reserve at Wright State's library while I could check out this version from UD to peruse at my leisure, this was the one I went with. | | 2004-09-20 | 6303832431 | Camila: Love Against All Odds | Mar?a Luisa Bemberg (director, writer) | ML304 | | | This is a film, not a book, but I'm listing it anyway because it's required for a class, ML304, Spanish American culture. We're watching six movies that our professor thinks will teach us something about Latin America's culture and history.
The subtitle of this film, Love Against All Odds, explains a major portion of this film: in 19th century Argentina a young woman and a priest fall in love and defy her father and the church by running away together, only to be tracked down and executed by the government, which at that time enforced the rules of the Catholic church, which apparently wasn't pro-life back then as the couple's unborn child died along with them. Parts of the movie are pretty sappy, but there is a good shot of Imanol Arias' butt.
The movie is based on actual people, Camila O'Gorman and Ladislao Guti?rrez, whose story apparently was surpressed for years afterwards by the government of Argentina. More important for us ML304 students is probably the treatment of women at the time (Camila's father says women must be controlled either by a convent or a husband), the role of the Catholic church (definitely no separation of church and state), and the glimpses of Argentine history shown by the movie. Most American (Dr. Petreman went to great lengths to explain to us that citizens of the United States are not the only Americans but then admitted that even Latin Americans generally use the term the way we do) students have never heard of the United Provinces of the R?o de la Plata, of Juan Manuel de Rosas (the dictator mentioned in this film) or of the struggle between the Pacto Federal (federalist pact) and the Liga Unitaria (unitarian league) over whether Argentina should have a strong centralized government. Camila doesn't explain all that history but does make reference to it, which might spur some students to do some more investigating on their own.
By the way, Amazon.com lists this film as out of stock, but I checked it out for free at the Dayton Metro Library. | | 2004-09-14 | 3518400045 | Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Band 4 | Brecht, Bertolt | GER403 | | | Wie ich hier erklärte, lesen wir nur zwei Szenen von "Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches". Dieses Buch enthält die ursprüngliche Version auf Deutsch. | | 2004-09-14 | 1559701897 | Fear and Misery of the Third Reich | Brecht, Bertolt / Willett, John (trans.) | GER403 | | | This volume also contains The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage and Her Children, but it was for Fear and Misery of the Third Reich that I checked it out. We're reading two scenes from Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches, "Die j?dische Frau" and "Der Spitzel," in my German class, and I figured it'd be good to have an English translation as well. I don't know what Dr. Hye thinks about that, but my other German professor this quarter, Dr. Schellhammer, said that reading translations in addition to the original was a good way to be sure we got the full sense of the text. | | 2004-09-14 | 0773488693 | The Moral Dilemma of the Scientist in Modern Drama: The Inmost Force | Hye, Allen E. | CPL310 | | | This was not actually an assigned text for CPL310, but it's written by the professor teaching the class and covers the theme of the class as well as many texts we're reading not only in this class but also in GER403. Wright State's copy is on reserve for the course, but I was able to check out a copy at UD. | | 2004-09-01 | 0385720793 | Copenhagen | Frayn, Michael | CPL310 | | | This play has just three characters, German physicist Werner Heisenberg, his former mentor Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and Bohr's wife Margrethe Bohr. All are long dead (Heisenberg in 1976, Bohr in 1962), and they are looking back at a visit Heisenberg paid the Bohrs in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. About the only thing certain about what happened during that visit is that no one can be certain what happened, a clever tie-in to the Uncertainty Principle developed by Heisenberg. Reading the play is sometimes confusing as there is only dialogue, no stage directions, and thus it's sometimes difficult to understand where characters really are and why one talks in the middle of the other two. Dr. Hye told us that when he and his wife saw the play in New York, the staging was minimalistic, with characters circling around each other like atoms. There is a PBS version, a part of which we saw in class, that makes who's saying what and where clearer, probably because it was actually filmed in Copenhagen. | | 2004-09-01 | 0393964582 | Frankenstein | Shelley, Mary; J. Paul Hunter (ed.) | CPL310 | | | I also read this book for ENG204, but it fits in with the theme of science and morality being covered in this class. | | 2004-09-01 | 0486287769 | Great American Short Stories by American Women | Ward, Candace (ed.) | ENG301 | | | | | 2004-09-01 | 0393090671 | Modernes Deutschland im Brennpunkt: A Cultural Reader | Hye, Allen E. (ed.) | GER403 | | | Although this book was published in 1978, long before German reunification (and put together in 1976, using what were then state of the art computers and a custom program in order to compile all the glossary entries, a tedious process that Dr. Hye described for us), understanding World War II and the Cold War period is crucial for understanding how Germany has developed into the nation it is today. Each text is in the original German but is introduced in English, and the many footnoted glossary entries make reading easier for those with a fairly limited German vocabulary. | | 2004-09-01 | 0312259131 | Ways of Making Literature Matter: A Brief Guide | Schlib, John and Clifford, JOhn | ENG301 | | | | | 2004-08-26 | 3150022533 | Deutschland: ein Wintermärchen | Heine, Heinrich | GER361 | | | An opponent of the nationalism spreading throughout Germany, Heine got in trouble with Prussia, which was expanding its territory including into Heine's beloved Rhineland and which banned Heine's writings. Heine lived in exile in Paris so that he could continue to write freely, or at least fairly freely, since his publisher in Hamburg, a free city-state, still had to contend with censors. In 1843 Heine traveled to Hamburg to visit his publisher and his mother and the rest of his family and then through the Rhineland on his way back to France. In 1844 he wrote this epic poem about his travels, taking some liberties with the facts, for example, reversing the order of his travels and imagining conversations with a river (Father Rhine) and a long-dead emperor (Frederick I Barbarossa [red beard]). Along the way he manages to take funny potshots at his various enemies. (I also read an English translation that I found in the downtown Dayton library.)
(Wenn Sie Deutsch lesen können, können Sie dieses Buch online lesen.) | | 2004-08-26 | 3150052734 | Urfaust | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang | GER361 | | | This is the version specified for class, chosen by Dr. Schellhammer because it is cheap. Intended for native German speakers, this edition has no notes or additional material apart from a brief Afterword. The version I found in UD's library is more user friendly for non-native speakers given its introduction, footnotes, glossary and appendices. | | 2004-08-23 | 0394582357 | Cole Porter: A Biography | McBrien, William | | | | I saw the film De-Lovely at Neon Movies last week (you're too late; it's gone now), and I was impressed that the film didn't shy away from showing Cole Porter's gay affairs, even showing Kevin Kline kissing Edward Baker-Duly (briefly). Still I was curious about Porter's gay life, so I put this book on hold at the downtown library. | | 2004-08-23 | 0451525434 | Dubliners | Joyce, James | ENG301 | | | One of the books for ENG301 | | 2004-08-23 | | Germany: A Winter's tale | Heine, Heinrich (Herman Salinger, trans.) | GER361 | | | I got this English translation from the downtown library. Maybe it's cheating to read a translation first, but the German version's not available at UD's bookstore yet, and classes haven't started yet. (I did finally get the German version.) | | 2004-08-23 | 0553269151 | Inherit the Wind | Lawrence, Jerome and Lee, Robert E. | CPL310 | | | Based on the famous Scopes evolution trial in Dayton, Tennessee but with the names changed to protect the innocent, this play shows the politics involved in the clash of science and religion and of truth and tradition. Lawrence and Lee wrote this in the 1950s, feeling pretty exasperated at McCarthyism, and they probably wouldn't be surprised to see how religion is being used in the name of politics 50 years later. | | 2004-08-23 | 1559701900 | Life of Galileo / The Resistible Rise of ARturo Ui / The Caucasian Chalk Circle | Brecht, Bertolt (John Willett, trans. - Galileo) | GER361 | | | As with Germany: A Winter's Tale this is the English translation of a work I'll be reading in German for class. This is three of Bertolt Brecht's plays; "Galileo" is the one for school. | | 2004-08-23 | 039532047X | Shoeless Joe | Kinsella, W.P. | CPL310 | | | I checked this version out from the downtown library; it's for the Comparative Lit class I'm taking this fall. This book was the basis for the movie Field of Dreams. | | 2004-08-23 | 0896961710 | The Celebrant | Greenberg, Eric Rolfe | CPL310 | | | This version is from the downtown library. I'm starting to think the theme of my Comparative Lit class may be baseball stories. | | 2004-08-23 | 0805067523 | The Copenhagen Papers | Frayn, Michael and Burke, David | | | | I got this book from the downtown library, thinking it was one of those required for my Comparative Lit class, but instead it's some kind of sequel to Copenhagen, a play that we're reading in CPL310. | | 2004-08-23 | | The Physicists | D?rrenmatt, Friedrich (James Kirkup, trans.) | CPL310 | | | This too is an English translation of a famous German work, but it's not for my GER361 class but rather for Comparative Lit. It's also from the downtown library and, like a lot of the books I'm reading this quarter, too old for an ISBN. | | 2004-08-20 | 0393044246 | Faust | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (Walter Arndt, trans.; Cyrus Hamlin, ed.) | | | | We're not reading Faust for GER361 but rather "Urfaust," Goethe's earlier version of the story, but since I've never read Faust I found this English translation of it in the UD library. A Norton edition, it includes many notes and others sources, such as an article about translation and comments from Goethe's notes and letters about Faust. | | 2004-08-20 | | Urfaust: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust in its original version (1775) | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (R.H. Samuel, ed.) | GER361 | | | This is one of the books we're reading for my Survey of German Literature class at UD this semester. The bookstore doesn't have it yet, and I couldn't find the version specified by the professor on Amazon.com, but I did find this older (too old for an ISBN) version in the library at UD.
Although the text is in German, this version has an interesting preface and introduction as well as appendices and vocabulary in English. I'd heard of Goethe's Faust, of course, though I haven't read it yet, but I'd never heard of there being a previous or original version of it.
I also looked for an English translation of "Urfaust," but not finding one, I checked out a translation of the later and complete Faust. | | 2004-08-17 | 039512736X | El Camino Real: Understanding Our Spanish-speaking Neighbors | Jarrett, Edith Moore and McManus, Beryl J. M. | | | | My mother was making space on her bookshelves, sorting out books to give to Planned Parenthood, but she set this book aside for me. This was her high school Spanish textbook, from Western Hills High School in Cincinnati, and Rule IV on the inside cover states, "Pupils not to receive class standing unless books are returned and fines settled." She told me the school got new books after she was done with Spanish so they let the students keep their books.
I'd looked at this book before, as a kid, although it didn't spur me on then to take Spanish (I took French instead). It's interesting to look at this book now, not only because I've got a better understanding of languages but also for its dated perspective on "our Spanish-speaking neighbors." For example, did you know that "the white shirts and trousers still worn by many Indians were designed for them by the Spaniards over four hundred years ago" (page 2)? Lucky Indians! I guess the only reason Spain invaded the New World was to clothe its peoples. | | 2004-08-17 | | Readings in Scientific and Technical German: An Introduction to General Science in German | Curts, Paul Holroyd | | | | This is the second of two books my mother gave me after she thinned out her bookshelves. She's never studied German and isn't sure how she got this book. It's too old for an ISBN (so was the other book she gave me but its reprints finally got an ISBN). If you want a copy of this book, you can't get it at Amazon, but AntiQBook has it. Wayne M. Spray penciled his name in the inside front cover of my copy; he also had to give a report on Thursday, May 13th (1937? -- that date was a Thursday that year) at 2pm on his reading.
Reading articles or books in English about general science can be interesting from time to time but auf Deutsch is still a bit beyond me, or at least not the subject matter that would motivate me to attempt it. Still the glossary at the end of the book is interesting. | | 2004-07-10 | 3257229534 | Der Vorleser | Schlink, Bernhard | L?neburg2 | | | Der Vorleser (The Reader) is the second book we read in my German literature class at Universit?t L?neburg, sharing some parallels with the first book we read, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, in that both feature relationships between an older woman and a younger man and, perhaps more importantly, both show how members of younger generations in Germany reflect on the deeds of their elders during the Second World War.
For me this book was easier to read, perhaps because there wasn't much dialect in it and perhaps because I'm just getting better at reading in German the more I practice. I did miss some details in it but caught the overall themes I think. Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice it to say that Hanna, the lead female character in the book, is ashamed of something and spends a great deal of time trying to hide it, but you might be surprised at exactly what she's ashamed of.
As with Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, Der Vorleser too has been translated to English if that's your preferred reading language. | | 2004-06-25 | 3423128399 | Die Entdeckung der Currywurst | Timm, Uwe | L?neburg2 | | | This is the first book we read in our literature class this summer at Universit?t L?neburg. There is an English translation if you can't read German (The Invention of Curried Sausage.
If you don't know, currywurst is bratwurst served with a tomato curry sauce, very popular in Germany. Berlin and Hamburg both lay claim to having invented currywurst, and in this novel, Uwe Timm, who comes from Hamburg, puts forth a story explaining how currywurst originated in his hometown. My class took a trip to Hamburg to see the places mentioned in the book and of course to try currywurst.
How and where currywurst was developed is however only part of what this book is about. Alternating between present time and Hamburg in the last days of the Second World War, this book is one of many that help to tell how younger Germans, growing up after the war, have tried to digest just what went on and what roles their parents and other older Germans took in the war.
This class was the first German literature class I'd ever taken, and this book was the first full-length (despite this book being billed as a novella and having only 7 chapters, it was a very long 186 pages) one that I'd ever attempted in German. Add in the Hamburg dialect that Timm uses in parts of the book, and it was a bit of a challenge for me to read, although a worthwhile one of course. | | 2004-06-23 | 3190116008 | em Hauptkurs -- Arbeitsbuch | Perlmann-Balme, Michaela and Schwalb, Susanne | L?neburg1 | | | This is the workbook that goes with this textbook. | | 2004-06-23 | 3190016003 | em, Hauptkurs: Deutsch als Fremdsprache f?r die Mittelstufe | Perlmann-Balme, Michaela and Schwalb, Susanne | L?neburg1 | | | Pretty standard German textbook, with chapters each with a topic such as professions, the future or cars, with related vocabulary and with a grammar concept. Having taken three years of German I didn't think I knew all the vocabulary (that'll take forever), but I did think I had the grammar pretty well down pat. I was wrong though -- there was still stuff for me to learn. | | 2004-06-23 | 3551761655 | Fake 5 | Matoh, Sanami | | | | I hadn't been a fan of yaoi mangas (Japanese gay male comics) and actually didn't even know what they were until I came across them browsing at Bruno's, the gay bookstore in Berlin. I like to visit gay bookstores when I travel, and while I was in Germany I wanted to pick up some German reading material. I came across these comics and figured they'd be good for an entry-level reader, or at least provide a break from more advanced stuff.
However an added twist is that although translated to German, the book is laid out Japanese-style, with page 1 at what Westerners would consider the back of the book and with panels and dialogue moving from right to left.
Still, as with any comic book, when one gets tired of reading, there are pictures. The bonus with yaoi mangas is that the pictures are of cute gay twinks! | | 2004-06-23 | 3423125241 | Hyperion am Bahnhof Zoo: Hautnahe M?nnergeschichten | Stamp, Hans and Ripkens, Martin (eds.) | | | | This is another book I picked up while browsing at Bruno's and is a collection of gay-themed short stories. Berlin's main train station is by the Zoologischer Garten, and all these stories are set in Berlin.
With all the other things I was doing and reading while in Europe I haven't really cracked this book yet, but it looks like it'll be good when I want to practice my German reading one story at a time. | | 2004-06-23 | 3190272557 | Lehr- und ?bungsbuch der deutschen Grammatik: A Practice Grammar of German: New Edition | Dreyer, Hilke and Schnitt, Richard | L?neburg1 | | | This is more of a reference book than a textbook, although it does include exercises for practice. The same book is available with the explanations of the grammar done in various languages including German and Spanish. I got the English version, so I didn't have to get headaches trying to figure out even more German while I was trying to learn German, but I don't feel too bad about that since my Spanish and Mexican classmates got the book in their native language too. | | 2004-05-16 | B00008WFXL | DaVinci Code, The | Brown, Dan | | | | Absolutely everyone including all of my friends read this book, so I had to too. I have to hand it to Dan Brown, that he knows how to write a book that keeps the reader's interest. I did stay up late wanting to finish reading. Some people have some problems with parts of the plot, but the book wasn't offered as a documentary. Look elsewhere if you want an academic or theological inquiry into Jesus' physical time here on Earth. | | 2004-05-10 | 0415267781 | Changing Europe: Identities, Nations and Citizens | Dunkerley, David, Lesley Hodgson, Andrew Thompson, and Stanislaw Konopacki | | | | This book was for the Expanding European Union: Politics and Culture class at Universit?t L?neburg this summer, but that's a June session class and I'm going in July. | | 2004-05-10 | 0275977056 | Europe Unites: The EU's Eastern Enlargement | Poole, Peter A. | | | | This book was for the Expanding European Union: Politics and Culture class at Universit?t L?neburg this summer, but that's a June session class and I'm going in July. | | 2004-05-10 | 1555838383 | Someone You Know : A Novel | Zebrun, Gary | | | | I bought a bunch of books for a class this summer in Germany, so I figured I could buy one fun gay fiction book too, and this is it. I'm not going to read it until I'm on the plane though. | | 2004-05-10 | 0192853759 | The European Union: A Very Short Introduction | Pinder, John | | | | This book was for the Expanding European Union: Politics and Culture class at Universit?t L?neburg this summer, but that's a June session class and I'm going in July. | | 2004-05-10 | 0415270111 | The Uniting of Europe (The Making of the Contemporary World) | Henig, Stanley | | | | This book was for the Expanding European Union: Politics and Culture class at Universit?t L?neburg this summer, but that's a June session class and I'm going in July. | | 2004-05-06 | 1851095454 | Diverse Sexuality and Schools: A Reference Handbook | Campos, David | ED303 | | | One of several books I checked out for a paper on gay/straight alliances in schools | | 2004-05-06 | 0847693686 | Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling | Letts IV, William J. and James T. Sears (eds.) | ED303 | | | One of several books I checked out for a paper on gay/straight alliances in schools, this one focuses on making elementary schools more welcoming places for gay students and for students with gay parents (what a cool concept!) and thus doesn't have much on gay/straight alliances. | | 2004-05-06 | 0415910943 | The Gay Teen: Educational Practice and Theory for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adolescents | Unks, Gerald (ed.) | ED303 | | | One of several books I checked out for a paper on gay/straight alliances in schools | | 2004-04-18 | 0829814477 | Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible | Stone, Ken (editor) | | | | I bought this book at this weekend's Alliance of Baptists convocation. Downtown Dayton doesn't have a bookstore any more, but even when it did, Wilkie's and Bookfriends didn't have the widest selection of queer books (they did have some) and certainly not much on queer theology.
My friend Lisa Wolfe, who is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at United Theological Seminary, talked a few weeks ago during book group about The Woman's Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This book isn't quite the queer version of that but does seem to offer a queer pespective on the Old Testament. | | 2004-04-18 | 082981535X | The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives... | Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. | | | | I bought this book at the same time I bought Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, sort of as a complement since this focuses on Jesus and the New Testament. I think I'll find both these books interesting, not because I need anti-gay verses in the Bible to be explained away (I don't, since I don't believe the Bible is the literal word of God but rather human interpretation) but because seeing how to view the Bible through a gay hermeneutic (a term often used in theological discussions that I learned from Lisa Wolfe; it means roughly lens or perspective) isn't something I've done much.
(More about what I think about this book is in this blog entry.) | | 2004-04-15 | 0867092947 | Authors' Insights: Turning Teenagers into Reade... | Gallo, Donald R., editor | ENG486 | | | For my ENG486 class we had to find resources on the author of our optional book (mine was Todd Strasser's The Wave). I found mostly web resources, but I did find an article in this book by Strasser about teaching kids to write fiction. The full title of the book is Authors' Insights: Turning Teenagers into Readers & Writers, and Strasser's article is "Nineteen Different Answers and One Black Eye."
I haven't read the whole article yet, but Strasser's key point seems to be that only people who desire to write fiction can learn how to write fiction. Makes sense to me. | | 2004-04-14 | 0689811136 | How I Spent My Last Night on Earth | Strasser, Todd | | | | When I went to the library to pick up The Wave for ENG486 and figured it'd be good to see what else he'd written. | | 2004-04-14 | 1573226122 | Lord of the Flies | Golding, William | ENG486 | | | One of the required books for ENG486. I read it a long time ago in junior high, and I guess teachers are still making kids read it, which is why we're reading it now, to come up with tons of great ways to interest kids in it. | | 2004-04-14 | 0313307237 | Understanding Lord of the Flies | Olsen, Kirstin | | | | This book is subtitled "A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents." Since we're reading Lord of the Flies for ENG486, I figured I'd check out some literary analysis books on it too. Although this book is also for students, it seems aimed at an older audience than the other book with the same title that I checked out today. | | 2004-04-14 | 1560067861 | Understanding Lord of the Flies | Koopmans, Andy | | | | Since we're reading Lord of the Flies for ENG486, I figured I'd check out some literary analysis books on it too. This one's more from a young adult perspective, as opposed to the other book I checked out today that has the same main title. | | 2004-04-13 | 0670518263 | Nuns and Soldiers | Murdoch, Iris | | | | I saw the film Iris on cable recently, and while I think Roger Ebert is right about the film (it wasn't that good), I realized I hadn't read any of Iris Murdoch's work. I figured that my uncle, who has a PhD in English literature and has tons of books, would have some of hers. He did and he lent me some, including this one, although I could not for the life of me find an ISBN on or in this book. I'm starting this one first, but it'll be a while before I finish since before bed is my main reading time for pleasure given all the reading for class I have. | | 2004-04-13 | 0670809403 | The Good Apprentice | Murdoch, Iris | | | | To see how I got into Iris Murdoch, look here. | | 2004-04-13 | 0099283794 | The Message to the Planet | Murdoch, Iris | | | | To see how I got into Iris Murdoch, look here.
I could not for the life of me find an ISBN on or in this book. This one and some of the others were old enough not to have a UPC barcode, but the others had their ISBNs on the copyright page. | | 2004-04-13 | 014007614X | The Philosopher's Pupil | Murdoch, Iris | | | | To see how I got into Iris Murdoch, look here. | | 2004-04-13 | 0805202862 | The Sovereignty of God | Murdoch, Iris | | | | To see how I got into Iris Murdoch, look here. | | 2004-04-10 | 044021971X | Ironman | Crutcher, Chris | | | | This was an optional book for ENG385 last quarter and for ENG486 this quarter, but I didn't pick it either time. However, I learned in ENG486 this week that Chris Crutcher made a commitment to include a gay character in each of his books, which got me curious about this book. I read it this weekend, and sure enough, it not only has a gay character, but the protagonist also learns something important about gay people. That's not the main point of the book (a kid learning to control his anger is), but it's refreshing to see it woven into the plot. | | 2004-04-03 | 0965073475 | The New York Times Big Book of Science Questions.. | Ray, C. Claiborne | | | | My uncle gave me this book. It's full of questions and answers about stuff like cats' tongues and earwax and earthquakes. A good bathroom book. | | 2004-04-02 | 0060526769 | The Heart of Christianity | Borg, Marcus J. | | | | It's time for the spring small groups at Cross Creek, and I've joined the one reading this book. I've read others of Borg's books including Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and The God We Never Knew, and his approach to Christianity is one I can really buy into. If you're really attached to the Bible being literally true or Jesus being divine, Borg's books probably aren't for you. If you want to know about the historical Jesus or about the Bible as a historical product, you'll probably find Borg interesting. | | 2004-03-29 | 1929229143 | A Framework for Understanding Poverty | Payne, Ruby K. | EDS333 | | | This is one of the books for my EDS333 (Learning Differences) class this quarter. Most people think of children with disabilities (blind, deaf, mentally challenged, etc.) when they think of children with special educational needs, but children living in poverty also have special needs. Public education has been based on the assumption that students come from white middle class backgrounds, and that's certainly not true, especially in urban schools. | | 2004-03-29 | 013019073X | Creating Inclusive Classrooms | Salend, Spencer J. | EDS333 | | | Another book for EDS333 (Learning Differences). | | 2004-03-29 | 0205351433 | Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice | Slavin, Robert E. | ED303 | | | This is the book for my ED303 class, which I'm taking online. Some of this I've seen before in PSY105, but the educational perspective is new. | | 2004-03-29 | 0618192344 | Foundations of Education (8th edition) | Ornstein, Allan C., and Daniel U. Levine | ED301 | | | This book is intended as an introduction to public education. Some of it is mildly interesting, but I haven't found it as useful as some of my other textbooks this quarter. | | 2004-03-29 | 087120228X | Inspiring Active Learning | Harmin, Merrill | EDS333 | | | Another book for my EDS333 (Learning Differences) class. I haven't looked at it yet. | | 2004-03-29 | 0435085220 | Opening Texts | Andrasick, Kathleen Dudden | ENG486 | | | I haven't read much of this book yet, but Andrasick talks about mixing the New Criticism and Reader Response approaches to literary analysis. Some of her strategies are covered by other authors such as Nanci Atwell. | | 2004-03-29 | 0689832362 | Parallel Journeys | Ayer, Eleanor with Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck | ENG486 | | | Very interesting memoir about the Holocaust, told from two perspectives, that of a young German Jewish woman and a young German Hitler's Youth boy | | 2004-03-29 | 0205373194 | Praxis Guide for Slavin | Bridges, Barbara Rogers | ED303 | | | This guide to using Educational Psychology to pass the Praxis II pedagogy tests came bundled with that book. | | 2004-03-29 | 014131088X | Speak | Anderson, Laurie Halse | | | | This was an optional book for ENG486 that I did not pick (I chose The Wave) but that I did buy to read later. | | 2004-03-29 | 0440993717 | The Wave | Strasser, Todd | ENG486 | | | An optional book for ENG486 (the other choices were Ironman and Speak), The Wave is based on a true story about a classroom experiment in 1969 that turned out unexpectedly. A history teacher wanted to teach his students about the rise to power of the Nazis. I think the book's more interesting for the idea than for the writing. It might go well with other World War II/Holocaust-themed books. | | 2004-03-27 | 0440205417 | Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye | Lowry, Lois | ENG385 | | | This was not on the book list for ENG385 but instead was a book that I read for my final project for the class, which was on Lois Lowry. It's not as gripping as The Giver or Gathering Blue but is still a pleasant read. It would fit in with the theme of journeys or quests, or it could be good for an adopted kid to read. | | 2004-03-27 | 039589543X | Looking Back | Lowry, Lois | ENG385 | | | I'm doing my final ENG385 project on Lois Lowry, and what project about Lois Lowry would be complete without her memoir? I haven't read this book yet, but glancing through it, I think the pictures are great and that it seems very readable for young adults as well as other readers. | | 2004-03-25 | 0349116652 | Tears of the Giraffe | Smith, Alexander McCall | | | | My friend Derek lent me the first book in this series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, a couple of months ago, and I enjoyed it. He went to London over spring break and bought a couple more in the series (bringing them back with him without declaring them to Customs!), so he lent me this one next. It's a good series, entertaining, a pleasant diversion. | | 2004-03-22 | 0434734535 | Bad News | St. Aubyn, Edward | | | | How I learned about this book is in the entry for Never Mind.
In this book Patrick, who's grown up to be perhaps what you'd expect the son of evil David Melrose to be, learns his father is dead. | | 2004-03-22 | 0749398396 | Never Mind | St. Aubyn, Edward | | | | I read about this book and its two sequels, Bad News and Some Hope, in the New York Review of Books (my uncle subscribes and gives it to me after he's read it). The article actually reviewed the American edition, published as a trilogy, but I couldn't find that. I did, however, find the original British editions through OhioLink, a wonderful state resource that not only provides university students with access to electronic subscription journals and databases but also enables us to borrow books from any participating college in the state.
David Melrose is the star of Never Mind, and watching him take delight in being evil to the people around him is pretty entertaining, despite the effects his evil has on his son Patrick, who stars in the latter two books. | | 2004-03-22 | 0434734543 | Some Hope | St. Aubyn, Edward | | | | How I learned about this book is in the entry for Never Mind.
This is the third in the trilogy. I haven't read it yet, but it will be interesting to see how Patrick turns out. | | 2004-03-19 | 0441009123 | Chasm City | Reynolds, Alastair | | | | This novel is billed along with its predecessor Revelation Space and and its sequel Redemption Ark as space operas. I didn't read the first one but the other two have made for pleasant diversions. | | 2004-03-19 | 044101058X | Redemption Ark | Reynolds, Alastair | | | | This novel is billed along with its predecessors Revelation Space and and Chasm City as space operas. I didn't read the first one but the other two have made for pleasant diversions. | | 2004-03-09 | 0440229383 | Whale Talk | Crutcher, Chris | ENG385 | | | This was an optional book for ENG385 (the other choices being Many Stones and Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry). I chose this one since I saw that it was about misfits in high school. It is about that, but it touches on more issues, racism being a primary one. A very good read.
(4/10/2004 I noted when reading Ironman that I learned in ENG486 that Chris Crutcher decided to include a gay character in each of his books, but thinking back I can't remember the gay character in this book.) | | 2004-02-24 | 059042792X | My Brother Sam is Dead | Collier, James Lincoln & Collier, Christopher | ENG385 | | | This was one of the optional choices for ENG385 (during the war themed literature circles). I liked it because it presents a point of view from the American Revolution not very much seen, that of Americans who wanted to remain loyal to the British crown. Every war has at least two sides, and I think it's good for kids to see that opponents of the American Revolution weren't necessarily bad people (I know that makes me sound like a hopeless liberal). | | 2004-02-24 | 0598371258 | Out of the Dust | Hesse, Karen | ENG385 | | | Another optional book for ENG385, this one is written from the perspective of a girl in the Dust Bowl during the Depression and is written in free verse poetry. I thought it was very good, but then I'd been exposed to a novel written in free verse style before, namely Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. | | 2004-02-24 | 0590481428 | Toning the Sweep | Johnson, Angela | ENG385 | | | An optional book for ENG385. I forget which theme this was part of. | | 2004-02-24 | 0440228352 | Whirligig | Fleischman, Paul | ENG385 | | | An optional book for ENG385, this was part of the quest/journey theme. | | 2004-02-13 | 1400034779 | The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency | Smith, Alexander McCall | | | | My friend Derek lent me this book about a woman in Botswana who sets up the country's woman-run detective agency. An easy, entertaining read, this book gives you the chance to learn about another part of the world just north of the setting of another book Derek lent me last month, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. | | 2004-01-31 | 0716730901 | Why People Believe Weird Things | Shermer, Michael | | | | I read about this book somewhere (where, I don't remember now) and did what I often do when I read about an interesting book, which is to go to the Dayton Metro Library web site and reserve the book if they have it.
I don't always have time to read the books I put on hold, but yesterday and today I've been sick, so I read this one. A decent distraction but not surprising, explaining things such as how psychics work (something also covered by South Park), what evidence there is that the Holocaust really happened, and what evidence there is that evolution is a valid theory.
Perhaps the most interesting weird thing was Frank Tippler's idea that some future supercomputer will resurrect everyone who's ever lived. How on earth anyone would really believe it's possible to recreate the personality and memory of someone whose physical body was destroyed years (hundreds? thousands?) ago, I have no idea. | | 2004-01-27 | 0440940605 | I am the Cheese | Cormier, Robert | ENG385 | | | A required book for ENG385, this, like most of the other books we read or discussed in class, was one I had not heard of beforehand. It's a tough read, even for an adult (Cormier said that he wrote it with an adult audience in mind), because of flashbacks, shifts in format, and ambiguity. Not that young adults shouldn't read it, but they might need some guidance (for example, a minilesson on flashbacks, to start with). | | 2004-01-22 | 0805740341 | Lois Lowry | Chaston, Joel D. | ENG385 | | | I decided to do my project on a particular young adult author, Lois Lowry, and found this book of criticism on her works. | | 2004-01-22 | 0136984991 | Prentice Hall Literature: Bronze | Prentice Hall, Inc. | ENG346 | | | We have to do a textbook critique so I checked this one out of the Educational Resource Center at Wright State. I'll let you know what I think of it shortly. | | 2004-01-22 | 0416009220 | Shakespeare Reproduced | Howard, Jean E. and Marion F. O'Connor (editors) | ENG410 | | | We have to answer the question "Which is the merchant and which the Jew?", and I found an essay in this book on that very question. | | 2004-01-14 | 0618055819 | Gathering Blue | Lowry, Lois | ENG385 | | | We read Lowry's The Giver for ENG385, and Gathering Blue is another book about a dystopia. We had some debate in class about which of the two books people preferred, but I like them both. | | 2004-01-13 | 1404336621 | The Uncommercial Traveller | Dickens, Charles | ENG346 | | | ENG346 is Reading Workshop, a class about learning how to teach kids about reading, and one thing we're learning is that we should give our students time in class to read books of their choice. We learn by doing so we each have had to choose books ourselves to read for about 15 minutes each class. I chose this book because I'd read some Dickens in ENG353 last spring but had never heard of this title, which I was able to in e-book format, meaning I wouldn't have to carry yet another book to class. | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714529 | Antony and Cleopatra | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | Another of the required texts for this class. | | 2004-01-05 | 0030255619 | Deutsch im Berufsalltag | Hager, Michael | GER325 | | | This is the text for my beginning business German class this quarter. We used it last year also for GER399, the intermediate business German class. (Yes, we started in the middle then. You have to take German classes when they're offered, which is every other year.) | | 2004-01-05 | 0325004897 | Education Inc. | Kohn, Alfie and Shannon, Patrick (editors) | ENG341 | | | A political book for a political class (you wouldn't have thought ENG341 would be political, but it is) | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714545 | Hamlet | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | Another of the required texts for this class | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714561 | Henry IV Part I | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | The first of the required books for this class | | 2004-01-05 | 0801312604 | How Porcupines Make Love III | Purves, Alan C., Theresa Rogers and Anna O. Soter | ENG346 | | | Required for my Reading Workshop class, this book is billed as an explanation of the reader-based approach to literature teaching in middle and high school. | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714766 | King Lear | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | Another of the required texts for this class. | | 2004-01-05 | 032103788X | Literature for Today's Young Adults | Nilson, Alleen Pace and Kenneth L. Donelson | ENG385 | | | This book is supposed to be the definitive guide to young adult literature. | | 2004-01-05 | 0440219078 | The Giver | Lowry, Lois | ENG385 | | | A required reading for this class. I'd never heard of it before taking ENG385 (I wasn't familiar with most of today's young adult literature). This is a good book even for adults to read as it touches on issues similar to classics such as Brave New World or 1984. | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714626 | The Merchant of Venice | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | How do you think Antonio feels about Bassanio? | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714855 | The Tempest | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | Another of the required texts for this class. | | 2004-01-05 | 0140714898 | Twelfth Night | Shakespeare, William | ENG410 | | | One of the required texts | | 2004-01-01 | 0099284820 | Disgrace | Coetzee, J.M. | | | | Derek gave me this book. He bought it last summer when he was bored working in Cottonwood, Arizona. It's about a Communication professor in South Africa who has a name somewhat similar to mine but who is straight and divorced and fucks up big time with a student, hence his disgrace. | | 2003-12-31 | 0130979988 | A Handbook to Literature (9th edition) | Hamon, William and Hugh Holman | | | | I got this book because it was required for some English class I took, but I don't remember which. It's useful though if you want to look up some literary term. | | 2003-09-07 | 0393958043 | Alice in Wonderland | Carroll, Lewis (Donald J. Gray, editor) | ENG460 | | | Another book for ENG460, Fantasy Literature | | 2003-09-07 | 0195025415 | Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories | Rabkin, Eric S. (editor) | ENG460 | | | A required book for ENG460, Fantasy Literature | | 2003-09-07 | 1878818341 | The Quilt and Other Stories | Chughtai, Ismat | ENG470 | | | We read this book for ENG470 Constructions of Gender but it would have been appropriate for ENG359 Post-colonial Lit as well (actually there was some overlap in texts for these two classes). Chughtai is interesting not because she's one of the foremost Urdu authors (this book is an English translation of course) but also because she was unafraid of selecting controversial topics, including, for example, the title story in this book, "The Quilt," written in 1942 about a lesbian relationship and landing Chughtai in trouble with the censors. | | 2003-09-07 | 0486214451 | The Story of King Arthur and his Knights | Pyle, Howard | ENG460 | | | A required book for ENG460, Fantasy Literature. | | 2003-09-07 | 0867093625 | Writing with Passion: Life Stories,Multiple Genres | Romano, Tom | ENG345 | | | This was one of the required books for ENG345 Writing Workshop. For this class we had to do a multi-genre projects (writing in multiple genres about a subject we've researched and publishing the project in a visually creative fashion), and Tom Romano is the expert on multi-genre projects. | | 2003-07-25 | 0844225533 | When in Germany, Do as the Germans Do | Flippo, Hyde | | | | I got this book not for a class but because I had some Amazon gift certificate money to spend. It tells how life in Germany is different from life in the US when it comes to home, business, school, traveling, and shopping. | | 2003-06-07 | 3453172027 | Nirgendwo in Afrika / Irgendwo in Deutschland | Zweig, Stefanie | | | | After I saw the film Nirgendwo in Afrika I decided I wanted to try to read the book on which the movie was based. I got a copy (click here to read about it on amazon.de because it's not available on amazon.com) that included not only that title but also its sequel, Irgendwo in Deutschland, about the family's return to Germany. Although I've been taking German for a few years now, it's slow going reading a novel in German. I haven't gotten very far and don't pick up this book every day. Still I don't feel too bad; it's like an elementary school student trying to read an adult novel. | | 2003-01-04 | 037570129X | Autobiography of Red | Carson, Anne | ENG204 | | | We read this book as a companion to Herakles. This book features the monster Geryon but recast in a modern setting, and he's gay! Most of the class didn't like the book, perhaps because of that but perhaps because it's written in verse, but I thought parts of it were hot.
| Price on campus: |
12.00 (new) |
| Priceat WSU College Store: |
9.00 (used) |
| Price at Amazon: |
9.60 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 0393975800 | Beowoulf: A Verse Translation | Heaney, Seamus (translator) | ENG204 | | |
| Price on campus: |
12.00 (new) |
| Price at WSU College Store: |
9.00 (used) |
| Price at Amazon: |
9.60 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 1558610650 | Changes | Aidoo, Ama Ata | ENG359 | | |
| Price on campus: |
10.50 (used) |
| Price at WSU College Store: |
10.50 (used) |
| Price at Amazon: |
13.95 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 0030286972 | Deutsch im Berufsalltag | Hager, Michael | GER399 | | |
| Price on campus: |
74.30 (new) |
| Price at WSU College Store: |
N/A |
| Price at Amazon: |
69.95 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 0571196349 | Difficult Daughters | Kapur, Manju | ENG359 | | |
| Price on campus: |
11.25 (used) |
| Price at WSU College Store: |
11.25 (used) |
| Price at Amazon: |
10.50 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 0486268705 | Dubliners | Joyce, James | ENG251 | | |
| Price on campus: |
1.50 (new) |
| Price at WSU College Store: |
1.25 (used) |
| Price at Amazon: |
1.50 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 0393964582 | Frankenstein | Shelley, Mary | ENG204 | | |
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10.70 (new) |
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8.25 (used) |
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11.40 (new) |
| | 2003-01-04 | 015600500X | Funny Boy | Selvadurai, Shyam | ENG359 | | |
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10.70 (new) |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0486287769 | Great Short Stories by American Women | Ward, Candace (editor) | ENG251 | | |
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1.90 (used) |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0679723110 | Grendel | Gardner, John | ENG204 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0195131169 | Herakles | Euripides (Tom Sleigh, translator) | ENG204 | | |
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8.25 (used) |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0393975428 | Jane Eyre | Bronte, Charlotte | ENG204 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0486294536 | Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories | Woolf, Virginia | ENG251 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0486268756 | The Gold-Bug and Other Tales | Poe, Edgar Allen | ENG251 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0486270645 | The Necklace and Other Short Stories | de Maupassant, Guy | ENG251 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0312080832 | The Turn of the Screw | James, Henry | ENG251 | | |
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11.35 (used) |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0435905252 | Things Fall Apart | Achebe, Chinua | ENG359 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0393960129 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Rhys, Jean | ENG204 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0862321107 | Woman at Point Zero | El Saddawi, Nawal | ENG359 | | |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 015506617X | Writing Essays about Literature | Griffith, Kelley | ENG251 | | |
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29.25 (used) |
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| | 2003-01-04 | 0486270602 | Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories | Hawthorne, Nathaniel | ENG251 | | |
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1.50 (new) |
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1.15 (used) |
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| | 2002-09-01 | 0965086518 | The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica | Schimel, Lawrence (editor) | | | | I have several anthologies of short stories oriented towards gay men, and I don't remember exactly where I first saw this one, but I do remember that I used it during a short story writing class I took. I suppose the difference between porn and erotica is that the latter has better plots. | | 2002-06-30 | 1555837417 | Onyx | Picano, Felice | | | | I've started reading a book by one of my favorite gay authors, Felice Picano. It has a rather bittersweet beginning about a long-time couple, one of whom is caring for the other who suffers from AIDS, but I trust Picano to tell a story worth following. | | 2002-06-28 | 0312280807 | Light at Dusk | Gadol, Peter | | | | I started this novel today. Yes, it has a gay twist, starting out with an architecture student in Paris who is visited by his ex-lover, but then this ex-lover while out in the city is part of a strange incident. Rich in details of the city and of diplomacy made the book enjoyable. | | 2002-06-23 | 0140063447 | Bismarck | Crankshaw, Edward | | | | Of course Bismarck's been mentioned in my German classes and touched on briefly in HST103 but you have to read about him if you really want to learn anything about German unification. | | 2002-06-23 | 3518030507 | Grimms M?rchen | Schumann, Willy (editor) | | | | I've been reading this book, auf deutsch. We'd read "H?nsel und Gretel" in GER103, but I discovered this volume while browsing the downtown library's foreign books section. | | 2002-06-23 | 0312287194 | Sex and Murder.com | Zubro, Mark Richard | | | | I just read this book for fun. Usually I find murder mysteries entertaining, even more so if they have a gay twist. However, this one was rather plodding, with bunches of computer jargon that sounded forced and didn't ring true to me, and its ending wasn't particularly satisfying. Disappointing, especially as I'd liked earlier books by Zubro.
(A later Zubro offering, File Under Dead, I liked much better.) | | 2000-07-01 | 0312245521 | Name Game | Craft, Michael | | | | I read this book before I started my blog and my books database, and I don't remember all the plot details, but I do remember that I can turn to Michael Craft or Mark Richard Zubro whenever I want a nice gay murder mystery as a diversion. | |
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