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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (58211)	9/17/2002 9:25:39 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I am not acquainted with that book. I an not very well acquainted with contemporary authors, it is too hard to figure out what to read. I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" a few years ago, after finishing Conrad's "The Secret Agent", and could not for the life of me figure out the swoon. With books like "The Magic Mountain" or "The Glass Bead Game", there is something to the claim of philosophical heft, but TULofB was pretty lightweight. Similarly with Italo Calvino: I had seen him praised in several venues, and discovered that he was an inferior Borges. I like E.L. Doctorow ("Ragtime", "The Book of Daniel"), although the last thing he wrote that I read was "Billy Bathgate". I am a fan of Saul Bellow, most especially "Herzog" and "Mr. Sammler's Planet", and of Kurt Vonnegut, most especially "Slaughterhouse Five" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater". I like very much John Barth's "Chimera", as well as Philip Roth's "The Counterlife". I also continue to have a fondness for realistic novels I read when I was much younger, such as "The Last Hurrah" (made into a movie with Spencer Tracy); "The Devil's Advocate" (set in post- War Italy); and "Long the Imperial Way" (a semi-autobiographical novel by a soldier in the Manchurian campaign). But for many years, when I read novels, they were mostly things like "Tom Jones", "Pride and Prejudice", "Vanity Fair", "David Copperfield", "Moby Dick", "The Ambassadors", "Lord Jim", "Sons and Lovers", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Anna Karenina", "Fathers and Sons", "The Red and the Black", and so forth. Very much trying to cover the field, as it were.......