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Somehow I missed this comment. Is that an actual quote from the book?

The novel does sound a little disconcerting. Did you end up liking Field Grey? (Pardon me. I seem to have begun to dominate this thread. Sometimes I stick a book in this room so I won't forget to finish it, ha ha.) x

So I finished Fifty Shades. I had a lot of nonsense written above earlier, about what I thought mid-novel. But this reviewer says it a whole lot better.

I've never heard of this author. I see his work is getting some good reviews at Goodreads.

I'm serious. I'm listening to the audio book during my train transit. The reader speaks so slowly (I assume it's intended to be sultry) that I never make it through a full sentence before I arrive at my destination. I've lost my lunch SEVERAL TIMES from subject to predicate.

The Grey guy is a complete tool. He periodically stops all the action in the middle of a scene to tell Ana, "Breathe, Ana," when the girl is simply sitting there thinking moronic thoughts like, "Holy apples! HE IS SO HOT."  As a reader, I have (quite obviously) no other option but to sigh at his commanding voice and assume Ana is right: HE IS HOT. I'm saying, compellingly done.

Indeed. I'm reading it because it FLEW off the shelves at the bookstore where I work a couple years ago. As in FLEW. As in, every time I placed one in a customer's hand, she pulled me close and said, "Have you READ THIS. Oh, my!" Uh, no, lady. I haven't.

Well, I want to know what it is people were reading then. It seems to be comparable to an episode of reality TV. Mr. Grey is unbelievably beautiful (apparently) while evincing the personality of a tire pump. Ana is so beside herself with disgust at his arrogant attitude she is left with no other option but to sputter witlessly, endure his many material gifts, and ultimately -- well, I haven't gotten there yet.

There's a legal contract. There is a contract where he seeks permission to whip her and she is supposed to tell him she likes it, and never look him in the eye. And this guy is written as if readers are supposed to forgive him for this weird stuff because HE'S SO TORTURED.

DISTURBING with a capital D. If she actually goes for it (obviously she will) my inner goddess will have many reactions:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is decent. I find the way the story is told quite interesting (dramatic monologue.)

I'm thirty pages into Coetzee's novel. So far I find it exquisitely written. It reminds me of your style, Dill. I would recommend the first thirty pages to you. I don't know what comes, however, so would hesitate to recommend it without having read them...

I'm reading both of these for a class. I probably wouldn't have picked up Hamid's on my own, but I'm glad now that I've read it -- especially because I find the style so strange and interesting. It's a Muslim perspective on 9/11: a man from Pakistan is living in America, reaping benefits from our capitalist system, but starts to question what that system is doing to him, after 9/11, as well as contemplating his own reaction to 9/11, and that of the average American's in the context of the violence happening all over the world. There were places in the novel that I found uncomfortable to read, but that's a good thing. In the spirit of not being such an insular American.

Coetzee? At this point I want to read more of his work. The main character is a magistrate who begins to realize his eyes have been closed to human atrocities. I'm not sure exactly where it's set. It may be a fictional place, but there are references to "the empire." The author is South African. As I was reading yesterday, F, I thought he (this character) could be another contender for Atticus Finch. Wherever the story goes, I have a feeling there will be depth in it. Another map turned upside down. Coetzee's writing is full of feeling without being over-heavy or artificial. It takes its time...

I love the way you break down the excerpt to see the way sentence length effects the work as a whole. I'm going to remember that: "poem-format" the paragraph. It's like turning a map upside-down. (Still learning from you!)

True enough: the shorter sentences move the reader into the more languid passages. It's like White takes a pointer and says, here is where you want to linger. Here is the moment that counts. I think this is also achieved by the move into a second person viewpoint. The shift is subtle but places the reader directly into this moment. It's not experienced through a character, but personally.

The shift into conditional does something too? "For a second you seemed to be falling," quietly shifts into "but then suddenly the rope would begin to catch you..." For the rest of the paragraph, White speaks to the reader hypothetically, sort of like, "You're not here, but you could be." I feel that this makes the passages where the characters actually interact even more real. He effectively says, "If you were here, this is what you would do." Then he gives us actual characters doing what he's just taken us oh-so-close to doing ourselves. (I mean, throughout the rest of the book.) He is basically acknowledging the reader, saying, "Wouldn't you love to play with us? Wouldn't you love to swing on this rope? You are so close." I feel that this makes the fictional world he's created all the more real, because he actually writes the reader into it, and then subtly suggests, "You're not QUITE as real as these characters I've created, because you're not really here. They are. But you would love it here if you were." It's almost as if he suggests that the reader is the fiction, and the characters' world is reality, in the form of a swing the reader cannot QUITE experience, but he or she is very welcome to try.

All quite subtly, and it seems effortlessly, done...

The film is what I ordered! At my library we can borrow films/music/books. I plan to watch it with her this weekend if the order arrives in time. I already told her about it (a couple days ago), and she said, "Oh, I've heard of that story! Mississippi!" and said she looked forward to the film. I'll tell her the recommendation is from you. x

I've never heard of this! Just ordered a copy at my library...

I would love that!

Oh, ha! I wrote/analyzed before I read your remarks in full. I see we're on the same page.

Sorry! Ulysses S. Grant. They were meeting to discuss the surrender of Lee's troops.

Until Gone with the Wind, Charlotte's Web was my favorite book of all time. I read it over and over. I loved Wilbur and Charlotte. I felt that the web-spinning was magic. I never saw the adaptations: the book was the thing. My mother always encouraged me to read other stories, as did my school (there were many trips to the library from both home and school), but privately I felt that there was no reason to read other books because I'd already found the best one. I felt the same about Gone with the Wind for a long time, until I read Jane Eyre (at a friend's urging: he was astonished I loved to write and had yet to read Jane Eyre, which he felt would be "my book.") After that, I became hooked.

A couple years ago I was feeling a little disconnected and despondent, and I had a sudden urge to read Charlotte's Web again. It had been years, and my childhood copy had long been lost to cross-country moves. I had to have a new copy, immediately. I read it through, and all those old feelings of nostalgia came back, and I felt much better. I love that books can do that. Needless to say I consider Charlotte's Web a friend.

Someone texted me to offer me a ride home the other day, asking, "Are you on the train?" They meant, "Are you still on the train? If so, I can get you at the station so you won't have to take the bus." I said, "Yes, just boarded. Thanks." I meant I'd just boarded the bus, having left the train, so there was no need to pick me up. In my mind, everything is a train, even though it isn't. I thought I'd answered, "Yes, I am on the bus" because in my strange head a bus is also a train, and a train is also a bus. So of course, they went to meet me where I had just left!! And the thing is, I am fully aware of the difference between the words "train" and "bus." It's like the linguistic part of my brain runs it all together, but the common sense part doesn't. So I say train and mean bus and cannot figure out how I confused them. And I leave irritated people in my wake!

I too am an idiot.

When I was just learning to read, I used to read soda cans, cereal boxes, barbecue sauce bottles -- whatever was on the table at my eye level. I translated "12 fl. ounces" on my parents' soda can as "twelve floral ounces" because I didn't know what the fl. stood for, and floral seemed most probable to me. My siblings corrected me somewhere near adulthood when I had the occasion to read them something aloud with that abbreviation. I had never analyzed the improbability of my assumption that soda was weighed in floral ounces. They laughed and mocked me hardily. I still cannot read that abbreviation without thinking first "floral," and then adjusting myself to the less romantic measurement "fluid."