What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

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War and Peace

Catch-22

Dubliners

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Studs Lonigan; A Trilogy by James Ferrell
and
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

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What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848 by Daniel Walker Howe

Assignment in Eternity by Robert Heinlein

Out of Time and Space by Clark Ashton Smith

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The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benét

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Finished John Brown's Body.  This is truly one of the best things I have ever read.  The First Manassas scene is one of the best things I've ever read.  I was glued to my seat on the metro reading it.

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Finished John Brown's Body.  This is truly one of the best things I have ever read.  The First Manassas scene is one of the best things I've ever read.  I was glued to my seat on the metro reading it.

The epic poem by Stephen Vincent Benet?

Yes.  It's very good.

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"2001: A Space Odyssey".

That's a good one.  I had a phase from 7th-10th grade where I was obsessed with that book.  I'm not longer like that, but there's a certain sense of mystery in the book that I still enjoy.

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Finished John Brown's Body.  This is truly one of the best things I have ever read.  The First Manassas scene is one of the best things I've ever read.  I was glued to my seat on the metro reading it.

The epic poem by Stephen Vincent Benet?

Yes.  It's very good.

My impression of Benet's body of work in general is that it isn't very well-regarded in retrospect--basically as just a series of exercises in American nationalist mythmaking without a ton of literary merit separate from that. Would you say this is an unfair characterization, or is John Brown's Body in particular just a lot better than the rest of his work?

I've only ever read this and The Devil and Daniel Webster so I can't speak firsthand on all of it, but I believe you are correct in saying that his works are a series of exercises in mythmaking.  However, everything I've read of him has been entertaining as well.  John Brown's Body is not the best thing ever written, and I may have been a bit too infatuated with it when I made my earlier post but I still maintain that it is very well-written and certainly is worth reading.  I personally would argue that there are certain scenes with literary merit, but my perspective could be skewed having come into the book expecting a nationalistic tone.

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For Want of a Nail by Robert Sobel

Good book but the author vastly overestimates numbers in the book.  I'm pretty sure California's population could not increase 2000% in one decade.

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August 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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Those Angry Days by Lynne Olson

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Sea of Grass

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Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle

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Just finished The Town by Conrad Richter.  I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

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Is anyone aware of a good biography of Hannibal Hamlin?

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Reread Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel in which the president goes mad and is taken down by the junior senator from Iowa. Not a deep read but entertaining. I recommend it to all.