The Sound and the Fury - William FaulknerHard to describe or do justice to - but I will definitely be reading it again. I didn't know anything about Faulkner when I picked this up - I guess I thought he would be a more tasteful, less sappy Tennessee Williams (lumping all Southern writers together unfairly) - instead, it was truly mind-bending, weird, and great.
Continuing my tour of Southern writers - incredibly readable and very sad. The New York Times called it "The definitive novel on American politics" - I'm not so sure today - the kind of populist demagogue figure represented by Governor Stark (actually Huey Long, then-governor of Louisiana) isn't nearly as typical in American politics today as they were in the 1940s and before. Reading All the King's Men, the contemporary figure I was reminded of the most was Hugo Chavez.
First thing I've read by Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and lots of other stuff - and I wasn't disappointed. Until the last 50 pages, when I was disappointed by a kind of sappy, unsatisfying ending that killed all the suspense and intrigue that had been building until then. Still quite masterful, though.
Pretty good investigative journalism about one of the last undiscovered (and uncivilized) tribes of the Amazon, and their attempts to preserve their culture in the face of oil companies, the government, and globalization.
Hobsbawm takes an interesting and much-needed look at pre-political political movements (not a contradiction in terms, as you will learn if you read this book) - that is, social movements among the poor and illiterate of Europe before socialism and Communism were known of. By looking at banditry, mobs, the Sicilian Mafia, and millenarian movements such as Andalusian anarchism as social things (across the political spectrum - apolitical, radical, and reactionary) - we see (or at least I did) peasant self-organization as an alternative to state power. I thought his analysis of rural anarchism in Spain from the 1800s to 1936 was excellent, and functioned as an interesting parallel historical current to the much better-known urban anarcho-syndicalism during the Spanish Civil War.
I bought this to read on the plane, and I finished it before the plane ride was over. My book/dollars ratio was kind of skewed - if I had bought a Harper's, as I often do in the airport, I could have read it for about $9 less than this book. A few of the essays were worthwhile - Klosterman's insomnia driven, 24-hour VH1 Classic music video saga made me laugh out loud - but it felt like I had bought a book that was really an overpriced, heavier magazine - which it was, since he wrote all of the essays for magazines.
Last weekend we took a stroll in Rochecorbon with Elodie. Although only 5 km from Tours, you get the feeling of really being out in the country. Rochecorbon is notable for its magnificent troglodytic homes (houses built partially into the limestone cliffs), many of which belong to the proprietors of the Vouvray wineries. Vouvray is a regionally-produced sparkling wine, and Tourangeaux proudly point out that it can be superior to Champagne.
Courtyard of a home near the Vouvray wineries.
Rochecorbon is also home to a former monastery from the Middle Ages, which is now a large private school called Marmoutier. The grounds contain ruins of one of France's largest cathedrals, which is the site of an ongoing archaeological excavation.
Former wine caves in Rochecorbon.
