Day 221 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Oprah Winfrey and a lot of other people are reading Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, and I think you already know why.  It's the Oprah pick.

I appreciated The Corrections, and I see why people longed for a follow-up.  You care about the people!  You wish they wouldn't waste their lives.  But, hey, lots of us waste our lives.  That's why we care about these people!

Meanwhile, I am finally getting around to reading the Summer 2010 Granta, a literary treasure.  At least I am in the right year, and, yes, the right season, as fall has not quite struck, even if most of the ads in the journal are already outdated.  Excellent writing, as usual.  I always learn so much!  Stories about Khartoum, about Nigeria....

But I was blown away by "The Last Thing We Need," a short story by Claire Vaye Watkins, a story in letters, even!  I love reading fiction that makes me ache, that makes me want to connect to other people while I can, while we are alive together.

I wrote a poem today.  And tonight I will see a play, Woman in Mind, by Alan Ayckbourn.  I get to sit with my mom and dad.  Life is a treasure.

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Day 204, and today several people came into the bookstore looking for very specific things, for a reason:

1) another woman found Graham Greene's The Quiet American for a local book group, an excellent new paperback edition, the sort I covet, for the light but sturdy feel and lovely graphic.   Happy to covet my neighbor's book, and let her have it.

2) a fellow had read the Chicago Tribune article on 5 great Midwestern novels and came in looking for them, along with anything by Jonathan Franzen.  I found a couple editions ofWinesburg, Ohio for him right away, after thinking I might not because my friend Kim had just found a $1 copy on the half-price cart.  He chose the attractive Modern Library hardback, small, but with the heft of true literature.  He found another book, too, but I can't remember what, so it was probably one of the ones with Sinclair in it, which puts up a mental block that then sets me off on that memory of always getting Main Street and The Jungleconfused because their authors are Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, complicated by the fact that I am old enough to remember Sinclair gas stations and the big green dinosaur on trips to Ohio to see the grandparents, and once you get lost in dinosaur land, the Midwest is gone forever.

He did not find Franzen's Freedom, announced in the feature article to which the 5 midwesterns was attached, because it is brand new, as of today, nor The Corrections, which we have had several copies of in the past.  (But after he left, I found the sudden arrival of a Franzen hardback on a little pile on the floor.  It wasThe Discomfort Zone, a memoir, and I've put it on the new arrivals shelf by the door for when this fellow comes back.  On his bicycle.  With his helmet.)

And a family came in to cool off before the official start of the hot and humid farmers' market, Tuesdays on the street in front of the store, and walked out with

1) Barbara Kingsolver, both The Poisonwood Bible and The Prodigal Summer, and

2) our fabulous first edition, first printing of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace, and so were treated to the story about Babbitt's Books being Wallace's favorite bookstore.

And tonight, I cannot get the spacing to work right on this post....a bit of a bee in my bonnet.

And that's my own morning glory with a bee down its throat in a photo taken by my son before he went back to college again.

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Day 48 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

This will be another hodgepodge, random potluck of what people are reading. Michelle is reading John Grisham. Judy is reading Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba, a memoir by a cartoonist with Tourette's, about his challenges with that and with his father, compared (by Amazon) to The Tender Bar, by J. R. Moehringer, a memoir about a boy sort of raised by a "bar" of kind, drinking men. I would like my father, who had a similarly challenging father, to read that one.

Kevin said he was reading The Amazing Life of Oscar Wao, but I have a feeling is really reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, a novel about a scifi/fantasy nerd from the Dominican Republic. That boils it down rather too much, around a sinking stone, so to speak (of soup), as the novel sounds very funny, poignant, and probably oddly informative as well, spelling out the significance of the fuku curse on people who tangled with dictator Rafael Trujillo.

In fact, descriptions of the style of this book remind me of the mixed hilarity & poignancy of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, not to mention some other "dick lit" guys.

Which leads me to Zachary Mason and The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a novel that is "intertextual" with Homer's Odyssey, without requiring that you know the epic to appreciate the novel (just as you don't have to have read all the Gospels or the entire New Testament plus some Buddhism to appreciate Lamb by Christopher Moore). I'm not calling this dick lit; I'm just noting that some might, based on the incorporation of humor, a male main character, and one (female) reader's reference to Odysseus as a "real man" (in the way Jesus was in Moore's novel) with flaws. Another reader compares Diaz to both Neil Gaiman and Jorge Luis Borges, which prepares us for a real treat--good storytelling and metafictional labyrinthrian twists and turns.

Bob is reading The Lost Books (now or soon), so perhaps he will tell us more about it. He was, at last report, just finishing up The Diviners, by Rick Moody, which more than one reader compares to The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen as being a novel with edgy humor and the oomph of social criticism. In The Diviners, Hollywood takes the criticism.

Which makes one long for simpler pleasures, sweeter entertainments. Fortunately, Beth is reading Spread a Little Happiness: The First 100 Years of the British Musical, by Sheridan Morley, the son of comic actor Robert Morley.

And that's enough for this pot of stone soup.

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