Thursday Thirteen #56
Thirteen Books, DVD or Authors On My High-Priority List Now That the Libraries Are Open Again
1. Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation.
I had only made it fifty or so pages into this before the libraries closed in April. I had to wait in queue twice for my turn.
2. Anything by Ken Wilber
3. Marcus J. Borg's The Heart of Christianity.
Because someone just recommended it to me.
4. The last five or more titles published by Joyce Carol Oates.
A recent visit to the bookstore alerted me that I've missed at least that many. How did that happen?
5. Same thing for Stephen R. Donaldson's novels.
I've been thinking for some years that I would like to re-read his two Thomas Covenant Chronicles since I read them the first time over a decade before my exit from fundamentalism and I've been curious to see what new things I might see in the story after my explorations in religion and philosophy. I discovered at that same book store visit that he has just published a second volume in a third trilogy set in the same world. How did I miss that? Now I need to decide if I want to re-read the first six books first....
6. Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
I read the first five and then decided to stop and wait for him to complete the series and then start from book one again. He issued the final volume last year and I was planning to get started after NaNo last year but after news of the impending library closures the first week of December, I decided to wait.
7. Anything by Neil Gaiman.
I had just discovered him last spring. Brought home a couple of his novels for Ed who read them and agreed that they were my kind of story.
8. Anything by Holly Lisle.
Ed has been reading her for years and trying to get me to try one. Since I've been participating in her Friday Snippets since early June, I have regretted I never read one of her novels. I just read her Plot Clinic which I won in a 70 Days of Sweat drawing and am hoping our library system will have her World Building and Language Building and Character clinics too.
9. Shakespeare plays on DVD
10. Shakespeare from A-Z
This book compiles info about Shakespeare, the plays and his time in an encyclopedia format. It includes synopsis of each play, entries for every character and info about the production of the plays through time and famous actors who played Shakespearean roles.
11. Dracula
Both the novel by Bram Stoker and the movies made based on it are of interest to me because of my current reading of Elizabeth Kostava's The Historian.
12. Anything by Dorris Lessing, this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
I discovered Lessing in the eighties and once had my own well thumbed and underlined copy of her The Golden Notebook. But like several other of my favorite novelists, I lost track of her latest during the nineties after the weight of my reading shifted to the non-fiction because of my quest.
While I'm at it I want to return to last year's Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Another one I'd just discovered last winter. I had waited in queue for months for my turn with several of his novels and never got the chance to read them.
13. The movie, House of Sand and Fog, on DVD.
I read the novel in 2000. I had been in queue for my turn with the movie for months and my turn was next the week the library closed. I'll have to get in queue again as they did not preserve the requests records.
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Of course, I'm not going to find many of these in the tiny Phoenix branch. I will have to put my requests in. But I have to go in to the library to do so as they aren't adding back the option of requesting materials online until mid November.
The Medford and Ashland branches opened yesterday but they both entail bus rides. I'm waiting for Phoenix to open next Monday morning. I'm planning to be waiting on the doorstep.
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8 tell me a story:
i love joyce carol oates.
Bram Stoker's Dracula is a good, interesting, read. I hope you enjoy it. I just finished it yesterday and am now reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And I'm happy to hear that your library is finally open again.
Happy TT!
Well, you blinked, that's how you missed five new Joyce Carole Oates books. (does she really have that many Es in her name, or am I being weird? Or both?)
That woman produces books the way... gosh, I don't know. Rabbits mate, I suppose.
I hadn't known about a new Thomas Covenant series, either -- and I read Publisher's Weekly!!! How'd that one get past me???
Plot Clinic sounds like one I should read ... this week!
Although no one ever mentions it, I really "needed" Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark when I read it in 1973, the year I was divorced. The protagonist is Kate Brown, who is "on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with self that lets her, finally, come truly of age" (from the back cover).
I got about halfway through Orhan Pamuk's Snow before life got in the way, and I just never got back to it. Which book do you plan to read?
Great list. Congrats on getting your library opened up again. Enjoy!
Yea!! Have fun Monday.
Ed
I LOVE 'Dracula', always have, and when I finally read the actual book in my 20's I was blown away by how great it was. Then I had to remind myself it didn't become a classic for nothing.
I saw House of S & F on DVD. It was excellent. I am a big Stephen King fan but I have found his Dark Tower books completely unreadable, though I am constantly finding positive references to them in various TTs. Maybe I should try again.
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