The thing about the book The World According to Garp that tickled me was that the author tells you everything that happens to every character in the book after the story, even a newborn baby.
I took what Richard said about the book over on the movie thread as another reason I need to re-read this book, becuase that is a detail I had forgotten. What I remember most about the book is that it is a book written by a writer about a writer and is very much about the writing process. I very much doubt whether John Irving's ideas appliy to any writer other than himself, but The World According to Garp is nonetheless a fascinating insight into his own writing process. So I pulled the paperback out of my "book trunk," the very same trunk I kept all of my comic books in 50 years ago, when I had few enough to fit in a single trunk.
Although I have read the book only once, 42 years ago, I have on occasion pulled it out to read just "The Pension Grillparzer," the (short) story-within-a-story (novel) that was written by T.S. Garp which is spead across chapters sic and seven. I don't know this for certain, but I suspect "The Pension Grillparzer" is one of John Irving's own short stories, one which he later expanded into the novel The Hotel New Hampshire. (Similarly, I will also read chapter eight of Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, "The Sound of the Moose", to read on it's own.) Garp's in-story novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, is where Irving's novel gets its name. There's a whole lot of John Irving in T.S. Garp, I think.
I like re-reading novels at different stages of my life, just to see what new perspectives I bring to them over time. Here's another thing I had forgotten about Garp: one of the chapters is titled "The World According to Marcus Aurelius." that didn't mean too much to me when I was 18, but I wonder what I would get from now that I have (recently) read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius? I've added it to my "to re-read" pile, but there are things on my "to read" pile I need to get to first.
My high school best friend's name is Jon Hickman, not the comic book writer you know, but they often mistakenly receive each other's e-mail. Anyway, my friend Jon is having his first children's book published on March 1. Overview: "A delightfully illustrated book about Louisiana Purchase O'Leary, who was a real person. She was born in 1902 and died in 2003. As an infant, she lived in a tent in what is today Forest Park in St. Louis City." It is aimed at children ages 4-10, so if you know any kids who might like this book, please give it a look. It is available for pre-order right now through Barnes & Noble.
I just finished A Man by Keiichirō Hirano. Its a Japanese book translated into English (in case you thought I read Japanese, lol). It is about the lady who marries a man a nd starts a family, but then he is killed in an accident. She then finds out that he isn't the person she thought he was, and then hires a lawyer to find out his real indentity. The story focuses mainly in the lawyer and his investigation. I thought it was a good premise, but it really dragged in the middle IMO. It still comes to a satisfactory conclusion.
Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, the authors memoir of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. It's harrowing and the kinds of events described happened, even if some have questioned the accuracy of some the author's specific claims. As an account of how child soldiers are trained and used, however, it is invaluable.
Poul Anderson's The Snows of Ganymede, a dated but fascinated 1950s work by the noted SF author. For all of its retroactively incorrect future history, it's a little chilling to read that in America, back in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, saw a rise of anti-intellectual religious extremists whom some politicians cultivated because they saw them as a useful voting block. The actual story involves genetic engineering, terraforming, colonization, and an encounter between some brave engineers and a colony on the titual Jovian (but not particularly jovial) moon inhabited by the descendants of some of the aforementioned extremists.
War of the Wing-men, a 1950s SF by Poul Anderson: it does not concern a pair of bros arguing over who can best help their buddy pick up a woman, but rather about humans getting involved with the local politics while tryiing to survive on a planet where the food is deadly. I've also just finished Jill Lepore's Joe Gould's Teeth (yet another piece about a now mostly-forgotten NYC character from the first half of the twentieth century) and Tea Krulos's American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness (the title pretty much covers it).
I just re-read The End of the Dream, by Philip Wylie (1972). It's a story of ecological disaster, told from the viewpoint of Will Gulliver, one of a handful of survivors living in the far-off year of 2023, who is compiling stories of the various man-made disasters that wrecked the environment and brought about the extinction of most of the human race.
It's an interesting book in some ways, but it hasn't aged well. There aren't a lot of well-developed characters here, it realy is mostly just a litany of disasters. The book's attitude towards non-whites is well-meanng, patronizing-but-racist stuff of the "non-whites are often as intelligent as whites" variety. There's also a section on sexuality that (a) has nothing to do with ecolocgy, and (b) seems to be advocating incest and pedophilia.
Overall, while there are interesting elements to the book, it's not something I can wholeheartedly recommend.
I finally finished he New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. At over 800 pages and 33 stories it truly took me a while. As much as I like pulp fiction, I was running out of steam and was wanting to move on to something else.
Now I am reading Predictally Irrational by Dan Ariely. Popular economics uses a model that consumers will make selections in their best interest. This book deals more in reality and behavioral economics in which people don't alwasy make decisions in their best interest, and they do it in such away that their decisions are predictable. Its an interesting read so far.
Replies
Too many to remember.
"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you."
"All of you who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand."
"If you're traveling at the speed of light, and turn on the headlights, does anything happen?"
"Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP:
The thing about the book The World According to Garp that tickled me was that the author tells you everything that happens to every character in the book after the story, even a newborn baby.
I took what Richard said about the book over on the movie thread as another reason I need to re-read this book, becuase that is a detail I had forgotten. What I remember most about the book is that it is a book written by a writer about a writer and is very much about the writing process. I very much doubt whether John Irving's ideas appliy to any writer other than himself, but The World According to Garp is nonetheless a fascinating insight into his own writing process. So I pulled the paperback out of my "book trunk," the very same trunk I kept all of my comic books in 50 years ago, when I had few enough to fit in a single trunk.
Although I have read the book only once, 42 years ago, I have on occasion pulled it out to read just "The Pension Grillparzer," the (short) story-within-a-story (novel) that was written by T.S. Garp which is spead across chapters sic and seven. I don't know this for certain, but I suspect "The Pension Grillparzer" is one of John Irving's own short stories, one which he later expanded into the novel The Hotel New Hampshire. (Similarly, I will also read chapter eight of Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H Goes to Maine, "The Sound of the Moose", to read on it's own.) Garp's in-story novel, The World According to Bensenhaver, is where Irving's novel gets its name. There's a whole lot of John Irving in T.S. Garp, I think.
I like re-reading novels at different stages of my life, just to see what new perspectives I bring to them over time. Here's another thing I had forgotten about Garp: one of the chapters is titled "The World According to Marcus Aurelius." that didn't mean too much to me when I was 18, but I wonder what I would get from now that I have (recently) read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius? I've added it to my "to re-read" pile, but there are things on my "to read" pile I need to get to first.
HELLO, MY NAME IS LOUISIANA PURCHASE O'LEARY:
My high school best friend's name is Jon Hickman, not the comic book writer you know, but they often mistakenly receive each other's e-mail. Anyway, my friend Jon is having his first children's book published on March 1. Overview: "A delightfully illustrated book about Louisiana Purchase O'Leary, who was a real person. She was born in 1902 and died in 2003. As an infant, she lived in a tent in what is today Forest Park in St. Louis City." It is aimed at children ages 4-10, so if you know any kids who might like this book, please give it a look. It is available for pre-order right now through Barnes & Noble.
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens.
I just finished A Man by Keiichirō Hirano. Its a Japanese book translated into English (in case you thought I read Japanese, lol). It is about the lady who marries a man a nd starts a family, but then he is killed in an accident. She then finds out that he isn't the person she thought he was, and then hires a lawyer to find out his real indentity. The story focuses mainly in the lawyer and his investigation. I thought it was a good premise, but it really dragged in the middle IMO. It still comes to a satisfactory conclusion.
Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, the authors memoir of his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. It's harrowing and the kinds of events described happened, even if some have questioned the accuracy of some the author's specific claims. As an account of how child soldiers are trained and used, however, it is invaluable.
Poul Anderson's The Snows of Ganymede, a dated but fascinated 1950s work by the noted SF author. For all of its retroactively incorrect future history, it's a little chilling to read that in America, back in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, saw a rise of anti-intellectual religious extremists whom some politicians cultivated because they saw them as a useful voting block. The actual story involves genetic engineering, terraforming, colonization, and an encounter between some brave engineers and a colony on the titual Jovian (but not particularly jovial) moon inhabited by the descendants of some of the aforementioned extremists.
War of the Wing-men, a 1950s SF by Poul Anderson: it does not concern a pair of bros arguing over who can best help their buddy pick up a woman, but rather about humans getting involved with the local politics while tryiing to survive on a planet where the food is deadly. I've also just finished Jill Lepore's Joe Gould's Teeth (yet another piece about a now mostly-forgotten NYC character from the first half of the twentieth century) and Tea Krulos's American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness (the title pretty much covers it).
I just re-read The End of the Dream, by Philip Wylie (1972). It's a story of ecological disaster, told from the viewpoint of Will Gulliver, one of a handful of survivors living in the far-off year of 2023, who is compiling stories of the various man-made disasters that wrecked the environment and brought about the extinction of most of the human race.
It's an interesting book in some ways, but it hasn't aged well. There aren't a lot of well-developed characters here, it realy is mostly just a litany of disasters. The book's attitude towards non-whites is well-meanng, patronizing-but-racist stuff of the "non-whites are often as intelligent as whites" variety. There's also a section on sexuality that (a) has nothing to do with ecolocgy, and (b) seems to be advocating incest and pedophilia.
Overall, while there are interesting elements to the book, it's not something I can wholeheartedly recommend.
I finally finished he New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. At over 800 pages and 33 stories it truly took me a while. As much as I like pulp fiction, I was running out of steam and was wanting to move on to something else.
Now I am reading Predictally Irrational by Dan Ariely. Popular economics uses a model that consumers will make selections in their best interest. This book deals more in reality and behavioral economics in which people don't alwasy make decisions in their best interest, and they do it in such away that their decisions are predictable. Its an interesting read so far.
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