Just recently finished these books:
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Joesf Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls
Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
I just started Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on the recommendation of my girlfriend. Of the above, I enjoyed Don Carpenter's the most. If any other FOT has read any of these, I'd love to hear others' opinions on them. Also, if anyone has any book discussion suggestions for the small Midwestern public library at which I work, I'd love to hear that too!
I couldn't get past page 50 of Life of Pi, dunno why.
Hard Rain Falling is amazing, I totally loved it.
-AG
Yeah, there was a bit of a brouhaha about
Life of Pi at my library - I wanted to use it for the subject of a book discussion, and out of the 8-10 old ladies who usually participate, only one showed up for the discussion. The rest either returned the book prematurely, or refused to participate (one old lady was heard to decline participation in a
Life of Pi book discussion because the lead character is Indian. Sad face.)
I was trolling through the list of reissues put out by the New York Review of Books, who are always good at ferreting out lost masterpieces, when I saw
Hard Rain Falling. They sort described it as
On the Road with terminal depression, and they were right. It's like if Werner Herzog had directed an adaptation of the biography Kerouac and set it in a prison. A truly, epically sad and profound book, but one that is also bizarrely compelling and funny at times. I bet AP Mike would LOVE this book.