okay, so I was told that I had to be afraid of SOMETHING ... hummmm, okay, ummmmm ... how about Godzilla and eggplant? Godzilla shows up and throws an eggplant at me and I'm a goner. Bees? I've had wolves. Don't stand next to a wolf when a bee is messing with him. Bees and wolves don't mix. A wolf is pretty cool until a bee tries to whisper in his ear. Me, I don't want to be in the middle of that wolf/bee chomp ..... Rennie
Ha...laughed when you said you "cliff-noted out of" the Great Gatsby. That's a new verb worthy of standard usage. I cliff-noted out of the Grapes of Wrath, myself, and got the friggin' highest grade in the class on my paper. And I was an English major. I've been too ashamed to go back and read the actual book. Oh the horror.
The following books owned me: Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_, Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_, and Umberto Eco's drowsy _Island of the Day Before_. I aspire to finish the latter two much more than the first one. Also, while I finished _The Fellowship of the Ring,_ I can't remember anything from my reading that takes place after, say, the scene in the bar where Frodo uses the ring for the first time. Even after seeing the movie, it didn't stir any memories, and displaced the ones from the early parts that I did have.
Oh yeah, Conrad's _Lord Jim_, too, but that was before my nautical phase-- I bet I could breeze through most of Conrad's sailing stuff (that is most if not all of it) without too much effort, now.
To clarify, I meant that most if not all of Joseph Conrad's writing is related to sailing, but I realized just now that I have read and enjoyed his _The Secret Agent_, which was not about sailing but about eccentric fin-de-siecle anarchists in London, one of whom attempted to blow up the Greenwich Observatory-- in short a fictional story based on that real event.
You read Conrad's _Youth_, LAN3? The entire text for that one is online ..... Rennie
I haven't, and thanks to Kirk putting the idea in my mind, I'm backed up with Thomas Lynch's books of essays. But thanks for the lead, and I'll go download it now.
LAN3~ yw, I often get reminded again of old favorites to revisit from Kirk's links. I enjoy most any good works about the sea ..... Rennie Lorca