Monday, May 14, 2012

It's Monday, What are you Reading



It's Monday...what are you reading? is weekly meme hosted by Sheila from Book Journey.  I love to see what everyone is reading and how they like it.





This is what I have read in the past week....
(I did do a short post on them, if you want to read what I thought)











This is what I started to read this morning....
In One Person by John Irving.




Goodreads says this:
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases,” The World According to Garp. His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”


I'm very excited.  A Prayer for Owen Meany was one of my favorite books of all time.

and this is what I am listening to on audio:
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides



Goodreads says this:
It's the early 1980s the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafes on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.


As Madeleine tries to understand why it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead, charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus who"s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives



What I bought yesterday at Barnes and Noble:
( we made a quick trip to Reno to pick up a car for my son.  Had a nice lunch with friends, went to a wine store and then to Barnes and Noble.  It was nice Mother's day---since I had to spend it without my children)







It's been a good week!

3 comments:

Tanya Patrice said...

How are yo liking The Marriage Plot so far. I read it and can't say I loved it. Calico Joe is also one that I want to read.

heather said...

I love Bryson. I don't think I've read that one yet.

Lesa said...

I am reading "The Joy Luck Club." I am participating in a Literacy Day Blog Hop on September 8 where a bunch of food bloggers are all going to post recipes inspired by books, so I am going to spend the summer reading books that mention a lot of different foods! Let me know if you would be interested in participating; it seems right up your alley! I can give you more info if you would like.

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