What are you reading?

[ONLY]

I am now reading (been few days now) The House Of Thunder by Dean Koontz (another one of my fav authors)

[Kenna]

Foxfire....

[Kobi]

The cancer chronicles : unlocking medicine's deepest mystery / George Johnson.

When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way--an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.

[Kätzchen]

I had time today to stop by a local library and while browsing books to read, I came across two books to check out, tonight. I am beginning this one tonight:

Arlen, Alice (2000). She Took To The Woods: A Biography and Selected Writings by Louise Dickenson Rich. Rockport, Maine: Down East Books.

Here's an excerpt from the Introduction to this biography about wilderness writer Louise Dickenson Rich (I read it on my way home tonight by train and I'm already hooked):

"My acquaintence with wilderness writer Louise Dickenson Rich began years ago in the midst of research I was doing for a book on traditional Maine sporting camps. I heard her name and glanced down the "Carry Road" (originally a canoe portage trail) leading to her place by the Rapid River in the Rangely Lakes region of western Maine. I also took note of a log home occupied, I was informed, by Louise's longtime friend and neighbor, Alys Parsons. At that point, though, there were places to go, people and a deadline to meet, so I moved on.

My sporting camp book came out and I started recieving mail from readers. Several petitioned, "Please write a book about Louise Dickenson Rich." A librarian from the Midwest was very specific:
"We Took to the Woods (the 1942 best-seller that launched Rich's career) is still checked out on a regular basis. There has never been a biography written about her and I feel you are the person to do it."

I started to pay attention.

Soon I was stumbling into Louise wherever I went..... " (pp. vii).

Alice then goes on to talk about how she finally won the support of Louise's brother, Ralph, who sent Alice to see his sister, who eventually gave her a bag of notions belonging to Louise. It's going to obviously be a riveting account of LDR's life and times in the wild's of Maine; but to become more intimately aquainted with who LDR is and her style of writing and what she wrote about, years ago, is toward the back of the book, which includes titles, such as: Fogbound, Wish You Were Here, First Monday in March, Written in the Stars, Grandma and the Seagull, The Red Slipper, Can't Find My Apron Strings and more. Then, the reader is treated to unpublished writings belonging to LDR and a conclusion which is followed by an expansive index (appendice).

I'm looking forward to snuggling down with this particular book over the next few nights and into the coming weekend.

ps/ the photo below was taken last night by an photographer who is native to my home state of Oregon: It's rare for us to even witness the Northern Lights in our area, but he took this picture on the high desert, on a lonely road outside of Bend, Oregon. It's already snowing in our 'neck' of the woods (winter is here).

[Bad_boi]

Eragon book 1.

[sis]

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller ...... I found a book group here in Guangzhou that meets once a month! I. Am. So. Excited!

Deb

[PoeticSilence]

Shuntaro Tanikawa: Selected Poems


Editorial Reviews-


From Publishers Weekly

Author of more than 60 books of poetry, Tanikawa is perhaps Japan's most well-known and accomplished living poet, and garnered a 1989 American Book Award for the Floating the River in Melancholy, a fully translated single volume now out of print. This first U.S. selected edition, translated by American ex-pat William Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura (who together edit a Yokohama literary journal), draws from 11 volumes spanning five decades of quotidian-based, wryly self-conscious work. While the surface of Tanikawa's poetry in these translations is practically hyper-literal ("I eat loquats,/ to do which/ I have to peel them;/ to peel them,/ I need hands"), the mind behind them is distinctly concerned with the shapes and inadequacies of meaning, and how it can be produced for an audience larger than one. At times, Tanikawa's awareness of his own practice is startlingly frank: "It is not clear what materials and techniques will go into the writing of this composition called `Starvation', and furthermore I doubt that it will stand as a valid composition." Tanikawa is clearly interested in a poetry that is colloquial at its core (he is the Japanese translator of the late Charles Schulz's Peanuts strip), free of traditional Japanese forms and interested in Western culture, though certainly not derivative of Western poetries. His sense of humor ultimately cuts through the questions of translation and cultural and linguistic differences to display the brooding charm that has won Tanikawa such acclaim: "I feel that I'd like being trapped forever/ but the snare rejects me humourlessly,/ pushing me back to the native milieu of people/ where humour is the only refuge." North American readers will find this a welcome refuge indeed.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc

[Kätzchen]

Was very tired last night when I made my former post above:

It's LDR's son Rufus - not Ralph (Louise and Ralph lived together) - that Alice Arlen, author of the aforementioned book that I am reading, was prompted to visit, in leiu of finding out more about the life of Louise Dickenson Rich (who turns out to be related to Emily Dickenson).