BOOKS THREAD

don't have tv, and i cannot get the radio to tune into the dodgers-phillies. so i'm reading a book that's been on the shelf for two years: hemingway's short stories.

i already love the guy, but this is making me worship him. it starts with "the short happy life of francis macomber." what a goddamn heartbreaking beauty of a story.

only one question for the scholars here: i know what a five-letter woman is, but what is a four-letter man?

 

well then, guess the dogs live on for at least one more day. thanks.

now on to papa's next story.

 

I love Hemingway, but I always forget how much I love him until I pick up one of his books. Then I remember and vow to read Hemingway more often. But I like to read different things, so I'll bounce from genre to genre and author to author. Then I get back to Hemingway and the cycle starts all over again.

 

The second Papa story I read last night was "The Capital of the World," which is much shorter than the first. But just as sad yet oddly uplifting. The way Hem bounced from person to person back to Paco was really neat. The line Paco's sister gave to the coward bullfighter trying to get a little something-something made me laugh:

"You eat dinner and now I'm your dessert?"

It's the perfect line at the perfect time.

Also, the opening graph is funny by the way Hem introduces us to Paco in the larger context of all the Pacos.

 

National Book Awards finalists announced today:

Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)

 

I did a search for this one on here and nothing turned up - so, I'll toss out Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle. It is my personal favorite. I go back and re-read it every couple of years.

His Last Convertible is also very good, IMO.

 

Both have been mentioned favorably here, but my search skills suck, too.

 

Just finished "1920 - The Year of Six Presidents." Not bad, although Pietruza seemed a bit hurried to tie up loose ends at the end. Plus, I could have dealt without some of the sidebars.

The chapter on women's suffrage was interesting. I didn't know that Tallulah Bankhead's dad was an Alabama congressman and future Speaker of the House. And one interesting point tied into the fact that Warren Harding WAS the biggest horndog to every occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

His illegitimate daughter from Nan Britton died only a few years ago, in 2005. She was a housewife in Glendale, Calif, then moved to Oregon. She named one of her three boys Warren.

 

I'm about 200 pages into that now, Birdie. Going by real fast, because I dig Pietrusza's style, but it definitely seems hurried. I learned a lot more about Wilson in MacMillan's "Paris 1919" and he just skimmed right through Gen. Wood and the primaries. But the Harding chapter is worth the price of admission itself for its juiciness, and the TR/Taft stuff has been very good. Can always recommend Pietrusza for an excellent read, and this one is, too.

 

This is just awesome stuff, b-scribe. Tallulah Bankhead's dad and Warren Harding's love child in one post.

 

Any Le Carre fans out there? His latest ("A Most Wanted Man") is pretty good -- better than his last two, I think.

It's marred by what I feel is an unsatisfying ending (and not for the reason that some will think it unsatisfying), but up until then it's definitely good stuff.

 

Glad to please, Cranberry.

It's a curse, but I live with it.