One of my favorite authors. Great perspective, often lost in the scramble for quantitative solutions to the current economic crisis. Thanks for the link.

Peg? Personal friend? (Dinner or late night conversation must be fascinating.) If so, lucky you. Which reminds me of a very funny book written by Carl Hiaasen called Lucky You.
The reference I made was not to a book but an editorial. Waiting for her next book; hoping that it will be available for Christmas.

You're welcome. Any 'rec for an author you like as well?

Years ago, starting with Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West, I started compiling a "canon" of modern and contemporary female authors (lost all the books in the hurricane, but never mind).
So many books; so little time... Love, alphabetically: A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Gail Godwin, Barbara Kingsolver, Iris Murdoch, Carol Shields, Amy Tan (I just finished Tan's Saving Fish From Drowning and thought the dark whimsy in it made it her best so far.) And, always Austen.
We could keep this thread going forever -- giving everyone a break from the election countdown tension.
Other entries?

Oops. I need to learn how to do the HTML coding.

No no, not a friend. I just remember laughing when hearing her referred to on CBC as "Peg" by her friends. She is so much in the canon here, taught in schools for 30 years, that suddenly to hear that "Peg" just made me laugh. Unexpected.

She apparently has a new book out called "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth," which I think just came out last month. It's on Amazon.

Another Canadian, who I assume you know as well, Robertson Davies. If you haven't read him, I highly recommend The Deptford Trilogy, although anything he has written is well worth your time. I just finished David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed In Flames. Saw him speak recently and he will usually make you smile if not belly laugh.

Orlando: Give Carol Shields another go; no detachment in her last book, for sure. Lovely Bones was compelling -- and that ghostly narrative voice is the same device used by Amy Tan in Saving Fish From Drowning. I will try your other recs.
Is anyone else a fan of Annie Proulx?

I highly rec'd Snow and My Name is Red by the Turkish writer, Orham Pamuk. Both are very different. Both wonderful.

I could name a bunch of other people, mostly in translation. I tend to read novelists from outside the US.

Up next for me is Water for Elephants. We've got a date for November 6th. :)

Salman Rushdie. Tom Robbins. Neal Stephenson. Matt Ruff. Older? Thomas Wolfe. Northrop Frye. Michael Ventura's 80's/90's essays. Nietzsche. Anything to explode the hard-wired grooves cut in the mind. Atwood never did it for me, I'm afraid. Too cold. Like Alex Colville's paintings. Interesting, but not enough warmth.

I particularly loved her Stories from Africa.

That's the main advantage of having a quadrophenic personality - nobody can follow you if you don't want them to.

Seriously, it's more like this, O. I find most "thought" - and most writing - offers almost nothing in the way of new knowledge, insight. We all find this as we grow older. The connections get reinforced, the chutes of thought get carved into our minds. More and more we feel, " I KNOW what's coming."

So... I just push myself to get OUT of those connections whenever I can. Writers who do that, I've just come to appreciate more and more. And I didn't start that way - I started very conservative. But once they pop me out of the usual chute, I find that the other possible connections, ideas, networks, paths, number in the tens, then hundreds, then thousands. Which is overwhelming for me, and confusing, yes. Makes me irritable sometimes. But you have to have difference to learn something new.

Which is my defence for liking writers that I find "hard to follow," and for writing that way myself sometimes. It's not just to be an irritating bastard (though there's always that), it's to get out there where there's something to be learned.

Is that written by Sara Gruen? Earlier this year I read Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, both of which I think she wrote. Both were well-written page turners -- in part because the riding details were so authentic -- but I hope that she will ease up on the melodrama which struck me as an author asking herself anxiously: " Is it interesting enough? Rec'd though for anyone who loves horses and words.

I was dumbstruck by Snow. What a way with words.

Invalids isn't much good - earlier stuff only I think.

Here's my best shot today, post-dentist, about bottled water. Fine literature. ;-)

No beach books or mysteries. My candy is scifi, or non-fiction. Neal Stephenson because he's the best I know at being able to extrapolate not just our tech, but economics, politics, and make me laugh. (Also a brilliant historian in his own way.) But mostly, books have to make me laugh - either from imagination or insight or insult or whatever. Which all of the above do. Eliot I just read because he's the poet of the Age. I read Russell & Whitehead at the same time, but back in my 20's. I used to have 20 or 30 books on the go at once - always philosophy or non-fiction - and then, after some years, I just felt like there was nothing (or almost nothing) new. So then it became reading poets & novels & scifi the same way. * Side story on Joyce. An early (Irish) girlfriend decided I should be, needed to be, HAD to be the next Joyce. Which - natch - got under my skin, so I decided to never read him. Haven't budged since. True. *

Yeah, Sarah Gruen. I don't think it's a happy tale. But it comes highly recommended.

WW, thanks for posting this! It was a welcome diversion and a welcome reminder that in a couple of weeks, I'll have my Sunday afternoons back to curl up in a blanket and read. I can't wait.

Thanks. What are credit cards for if not for a book about debt?

Lately--I know it sounds weird--I have been re-reading a lot of apocalyptic science fiction: The Drowned World, and The Crystal World, by JG Ballard. Also recently reread the Manchurian Candidate. I guess this sort of like the homeopathic approach. I figure, in my magical way thinking, having given up on reason, that the best way to assure a new dawn is to immerse myself in the Hour of the Wolf.

I think Orlando was right, C4. Just say no to apocalypse and yes to Dr. Seuss. The green eggs were great comfort.