2006 updated:
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt
Chasing the Devil's Tail by David Fulmer--Fiction
Our Lady of 121st Street by Stephen Adly Guirgis--Drama
In Arabia, We'd All be Kings by Stephen Adly Guirgis--Drama
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips--fiction
I've been reading "English" stuff, in anticipation of our trip. Which is next week--man that came up fast. I've been reading some short stories too, all English as well. I'm currently reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth and enjoying it quite a bit. The Line of Beauty was very good. Imagine Henry James writing a novel with lots of gay sex and drugs set in London in the 1980's and go from there. Hollinghurst has written a novel with no likeable characters yet managed to make it very compelling and something of a page turner. He does love his adverbs though and and everything is always two things at once, be it a person, a sentence, a glance, a behavior and each of the two things is usually adverb laden. Wish I had the book at hand to provide an example. I occasionally found this irritating but came to suspect that perhaps he was using style to further indict his characters. I'm not sure this deserved the Booker prize over Cloud Atlas but both are excellent novels.
