yes, to one of the family bulldogs
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Alan - I loved the baroque cycle, and it took me a year to read them all. that’s very unusual for me - normally I’d read a trilogy like that in 2 months or less. I think it was such dense reading with so many interconnecting but very disparate threads - I could only read it a little at a time.
"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles. What I'd call historical fiction depicting the time period 1922 to 1954 Moscow, Russia. From the book jacket: "..in 1922 the thirty-year-old Count Rostov is deemed an 'unrepentant aristocrat' by a Bolshevik tribunal and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin."
It's 462 pages but is a masterwork, really wonderful. The author is American but depicts real-life events and cultural human behaviors so well that it's effortless to read. If you want to dive into something for the summer, this is it.
I went to the library to get his first novel, "Rules of Civility" because I liked this one so much.
I breezed through the first book and after starting the second, became busy with life. I'm retiring August 1st and just a few weeks ago began training my replacement, which turns out to be an all consuming task. I usually read before bed but lately I can only do a few pages before the words begin to get blurry. I'm hoping to push through and finish the second before retirement and then breeze through the third.
I picked up The Fire and the Fury at a local yard sale. It's actually quite good. Reading it feels like sitting with a ball of tangled yarn or fishing line and working through it to figure it out--the "it" being how and why he wound up where he is and how and why he has managed to keep it going despite unbelievable challenges, such as absolutely NO experience, NO sense of decorum or diplomacy, NO interest in anyone but himself, NO knowledge of policy or historical patterns that have shaped the country, NO knowledge of the Constitution. Fascinating analysis of all the players and how they fit into the puzzle that is Trump.
Has anyone read anything by Jonathan Franzen? There was a feature on him in the NYT Magazine yesterday and I wondered if any of his books are worth a read.