Full Thread: What are you reading?
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Old February 12th, 2007 #6
steven clark
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Join Date: Dec 2003
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I just finished reading Joe Queenan's IF YOU'RE TALKINMG TO ME, THEN YOUR CAREER MUST BE IN TROUBLE...kind of funny observations about the media and culture. Queenan is a columnist and I first found him through AMERICAN SPECTATOR. I mostly read him for style. I am reading Thomas Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE. It's a well-written story of a man who can't achieve his ambition to be a scholar, and how women and his own inability to break out of his social stratus keep him down. Really good writing. Hardy's last novel...the public went crazy over his nihilism, but it's really a strong work, as is all of hardy's writing. He went onto poetry after JUDE, and if you can't read his novels, read his poetry. His sense is very fatalistic, very tied to the earth. A lot of people say JUDE is an example of fate destroying man, but I look at it more as Jude being unable to overcome his earlier screw-ups...and of course the hypocrisy of English divorce law at the time.