What Larissa Reads

waiting for the next season of LOST?

2008-09-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

Here are all of the literary references since the show began: (from Lostpedia)

After All These Years
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
Bad Twin
Book of Laws
Holy Bible, The
A Brief History of Time
The Brothers Karamazov
Carrie
Catch-22
The Chronicles of Narnia
Coalwood Way, The
Dark Horse
1The Dark Tower
Dirty Work
Dune
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Evil Under the Sun
The Fountainhead
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Harry Potter
Heart of Darkness
Hindsight
Holy Qur'an, The
Hotel
I Ching
The Invention of Morel
Island
Julius Caesar
Jurassic Park
Kings of Love
Lancelot
Laughter in the Dark
Left Behind
Lord of the Flies
Memoirs of a Geisha
Moby Dick
The Moon Pool
The Mysterious Island
Oath, The
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
The Odyssey
Of Mice and Men
On Writing
Our Mutual Friend
O Pioneers!
The Outsiders
Pearl, The
Perfume
Rainbow Six
Rick Romer's Vision Of Astrology
The Shape of Things to Come
The Shining
Slaughterhouse-Five
Stand, The
Stone Leopard, The
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Survivors of the Chancellor
A Tale of Two Cities
The Third Policeman
Through the Looking-Glass
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Turn of the Screw
Valhalla Rising
VALIS
Watership Down
The Wizard of Oz
A Wrinkle in Time

I've read a lot of these and taught more than a few.
The Washington Post had a book club going so maybe I should follow along/catch up with what they've read and discussed.
Watership Down - July '07
Wizard of Oz - August '07
Watchmen - September '07
Turn of the Screw - October '07
A Brief History of Time - November '07
A Wrinkle in Time - December '07
Through the Looking Glass - January '08

Cruising along and catching up

2008-08-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

Talk about your time-sucking activities...

Last week I read Breaking Dawn, the new teenage vampire novel by Stephenie Meyer. This is the fourth novel in the series and though I might normally enjoy reading about super-hot & super-tall werewolves (because, up until this novel, Jacob was my favorite character) I really didn't enjoy this 600+ page novel. The one thing that caused giggling in the corners of bookstores, libraries, classrooms, and living rooms everywhere is gone. The absence of sexual tension made the book way too tedious for me - and no one dies. Well, except Bella who will now be the smartest, most beautiful, and bestest vampire that ever lived. WHATever.

Now I'm reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and it is laugh-out-loud funny. People kept telling me to read it (Amy Habberstad) but never loaned it to me or even told me what it was about. So, I had to spend my hard earned money on it one day after the gym. I keep crying from laughing so hard at pasta jokes and random words in Italian. Not to mention jokes just for Connecticut residents. I'm only 1/3 of the way through and will next read this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, another after-gym Title Wave purchase.

I'm really really super lazy

2008-08-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I have been reading. I finished Mayflower in mid-July and haven't really been engaged by anything I've picked up since. Mayflower was fascinating though and I find myself randomly rattling off statistics about the Pilgrims, the Indians, and those rotten Puritans who used to beat up Quakers in the street. The Quakers figured in pretty prominently though and it was fun to read about them and my ancestor who came across on the Mayflower as an indentured servant.
I also realized that I wish I remembered more from my American history classes. Fortunately, most of it sounded familiar so I attribute the gaps to old age instead of a poor education. I need more - any recommendations for history non-fiction? I was thinking about reading John Adams but need to locate a copy.

Well, I tried to start another book I checked out from the school library. I forget the title, but it is one of a genre of high school "coming out" books that deals with issues surrounding homosexuality for teenagers. The library aide recommended it for me because I teach a class called "Teen Issues in Literature" so the subject matter is relevant. The book is okay, not too preachy which is my pet peeve with YA lit. But I'm not gay, I'm not a teenager, and I'm not a boy. It's hard for me to relate but I want to get through to the end so I can recommend it to students.

I also started reading You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates. I can't "get into" it. I'm not sure why but I have a couple of other books by her around that I should try instead.

With two weeks of summer vacation remaining I am waiting for the next book in the Mormon teenage vampire series to arrive from Amazon tomorrow. I should start rereading some of the summer reading material I assigned. I also need to get some more motivation for posting to my blog!

a foray into nonfiction

2008-07-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

I finished Marya: A Life by Joyce Carol Oates this morning. She's just a brilliant writer and the only reason it took me a couple of weeks to read the novel was because I've been (and am still) traveling.
I don't know much about Joyce Carol Oates but the book definitely had a semi-autobiographical feel and it was such an unusual structure; it's not the usual story arc but really more snippets of life experiences. Though the main character has some horrid experiences I like that there isn't an attempt to analyze her or let her writhe in self-pity so the book ends up edgier and more provocative than I expected.

I just wandered my around my parents' apartment - they have hundreds and hundreds of books - and picked up Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, a nonfiction book that won the National Book Award in 2006. I looked for their copy of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian but my mom thinks it was given away. I saw Barack Obama's book on the floor in the living room and may pick that up next.

Books have trailers?

2008-07-08T18:41:00.001-07:00

A post on a forum alerted me to the fact that books now have their own trailers, posted, of course, on YouTube. Here's the one for Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. This books has been recommended to me and I may pick it up later this summer.
I can't say that the trailer has much influence on me one way or the other, certainly not like the effect a movie trailer may have, and I wonder if it's just an example of viral marketing.

well...

2008-06-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a class on video editing with Final Cut Express and it is HARD.

Anyway, I finished The Tenth Circle about two days before I started seeing previews for the movie version on Lifetime next week. I will set my DVR. Someone posted all of the info about it (thank you!) as a comment on the post below. I'm still not sure I liked it.

Since then I've read Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates. Certainly some obvious allusions to the OJ Simpson case but it was a really good, short novel. I enjoy her writing style because it's deceptively simple though she is able to draw you in to the stories and the characters.

I need to start another novel but have really just been readin TIME and Runner's World for the last week. Good magazines. My next book purchase will be Final Cut Express 4: Visual QuickStart Guide. UGH.

update

2008-06-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

I just took a quiz on Flixster called "Pharmaceutical or Tolkien Character?" and scored a 70%. It was pretty seriously geeky and I think used character names from The Silmarillion which I was geeky enough to buy, but not to read.

So, I just couldn't "get into" the McCarthy book - I'll get back to it later this summer. For now, I am reading The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult. I think it falls into a genre somewhere between Young Adult lit and chick lit. I know she's really popular (perhaps for her controversial subject matter?) and I like the graphic novel within the novel, but I don't really like the book. I really dislike all of the characters but the father and, strangely enough, the accused rapist. I'm making weird faces to myself as I write this post so let me move on.

I spent over a week between putting down McCarthy and picking up Picoult reading almost nothing. Well, magazine articles in TIME, Bicycling, and Runner's World, if those count. Also, snippets of books on potty training (they need to come with magic wands) and lots and lots of story books. It was relaxing and sometimes I just need a break from literature.

I've also been following my father's blog and dreaming of hitting the road.

remembering

2008-05-28T22:56:00.001-07:00

Okay, I think last night it clicked in. I remember now who John Grady and Billy "are" from the other two books. I think it's a tough jump to go from an easy, breezy read like The Host back to Cormac McCarthy.

C. and I had a big day. We went on a decent bike ride (7 miles) and met friends for a playdate at a park. In the evening we went to see a movie and eat dinner in the theater pub. He is soooo adorable and I loved spending the time with him.
We were both worn out when we got home. After a while (and a minor tantrum) he curled up next to me on the sofa and read his little book called Tails. I read it once and then he took it and read it a few times himself. After a few minutes the reading stopped, the book slipped to the floor, and C. had fallen asleep while reading for the first time. Not bad for just three years old.

Pulitzer Prize winners

2008-05-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Since I'm an English major, not a bird watcher, I need my own little life list. It's pathetically short. Here's mine so far:

1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner)
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Lippincott)
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole (a posthumous publication) (Louisiana State U. Press)
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Harcourt Brace)
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf)
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf)
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf)
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (Charles Scribner's Sons)
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Viking)
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Amistad/ HarperCollins)
2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)

Summertime!

2008-05-25T20:01:00.001-07:00

I checked 6 books out of the school library before I left for the summer on Friday.
1 Cormac McCarthy
2 Jodi Picoult
3 Joyce Carol Oates

Anyway, I started the third in Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy, Cities of the Plain. It's been a while since I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing though so it was hard to get into it when I started last night.

After I finish these six (I hear Jodi Picoult books are fast reads) I am going to pick up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz because it just won the Pulitzer. I was keeping a list of Pulitzer prize winners I've read because I was trying to get through them all. I got waylaid by A Confederacy of Dunces but really should return. Well, I did read The Road last summer.
I think my next post will be my list of Pulitzers...