Doris Lessing: Five Selections

“Oh, Christ!” Doris Lessing is reported to have said when told she’d won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. The 87-year-old author has been a favourite for the Nobel for at least three decades now — her collected works would fill an entire bookshelf, and she is still widely read and discussed. Her oeuvre is so vast that it’s hard to capture the full impact of her writing, but here’s a look at some of her work.

The Grass is Singing: (1950)
The Golden Notebook: (1962)
Children of Violence: (1952-1969)
Canopus in Argos: (1979-1983)
The Diaries of Jane Somers: 1984

Read the full article by Nilanjana S Roy in the Business Standard here.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - Wendy's Review

There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill? -From East of Eden, page 413

I have yet to be disappointed by anything John Steinbeck writes ... and East of Eden is no exception.

Set in the heart of the Salinas Valley, the novel spans three generations of two families whose lives overlap - the Trasks and the Hamiltons. Samuel Hamilton, an Irish immigrant and dreamer who believes in the goodness of mankind, raises his family without financial wealth but rich with love and family unity.

He came to Salinas Valley full-blown and hearty, full of in inventions and energy. His eyes were very blue, and when he was tired one of them wandered outward a little. he was a big man but delicate in a way. In the dusty business of ranching he seemed always immaculate. His hands were clever. He was a good blacksmith and carpenter and woodcarver, and he could improvise anything with bits of wood and metal. -From East of Eden, page 8-9

Adam Trask descends from wealth, and the conflict of sibling rivalry and moral weakness.

These usually bought land, but good land, and built their houses of planed lumber and had carpets and colored-glass diamond panes in their windows. There were numbers of these families and they got the good land of the valley and cleared the yellow mustard away and planted wheat. Such a man was Adam Trask. -From East of Eden, page 13

Narrated in the philosophical voice of Samuel's grandson (who flavors this all-American classic with his thoughts and observations of the politics and economics of life in America at the turn of the century), Steinbeck uses the timeless story of Cain and Abel to draw his characters - and with this adds a greater depth to a novel rich with symbolism.

As in all of Steinbeck's novels, the characters drive the story. Lee, a Chinese servant, surprises and delights the reader with his wisdom and gentle nature. Cathy (later Kate) surpasses the stereotypical evil character, allowing reader empathy to exist side by side with revulsion and demonstrating no one is all good or all bad. The overriding message of East of Eden seems to be that man (or woman) are free to choose their path regardless of inheritance or circumstances - in fact, perhaps in spite of them.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. -From East of Eden, page 132

Now there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win. -From East of Eden, page 303

Steinbeck's fine sense of place resonates throughout the novel. It is easy to see why East of Eden is considered his greatest work.

A classic which is a must read, this novel is highly recommended; rated 5/5.

Doris Lessing: 2007 Laureate

And the announcement is in! Doris Lessing is the 2007 Nobel Laureate for Literature: "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

More on Doris Lessing:

• DorisLessing.org
• Wikipedia

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Laura's Review)

One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel Garcia Marquez
458 pages

First sentence: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Reflections: I learned something reading this book: I learned that I do not particularly care for "magical realism." I was initially attracted to this book because it's one of the "1001 books you must read before you die," and because the author has received such critical acclaim. It seemed like a must-read. When I decided to read it to satisfy both the "Reading across Borders" and "Spring Reading Thing" challenges, it became a must-read. I perservered, but in the end I am left with little to say about this book.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a multi-generational family saga. Magical realism, according to Wikipedia, is "an artistic genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting." I was reminded of American folklore like Paul Bunyan. The characters had unusually strong abilities, and fantastic events like plagues happened often, and yet the setting in which this occurred was a sleepy rural village that you might find anywhere.

The writing is lyrical and in that sense I can understand why Marquez is so highly regarded. I just couldn't connect with the style and I think this may be one of those books that would be more appreciated if read as part of a literature course, where you can explore the themes and hidden meanings of events that take place in the story. As leisure reading, it left me flat.
My original review can be found here.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Laura's Review)

East of EdenJohn Steinbeck
600 pages

First sentence: The Salinas Valley is in Northern California

Reflections: East of Eden is an epic novel which tells the story of two interconnected families, and explores the themes of good and evil through a loose retelling of stories in the book of Genesis. It is set in Northern California in the early 1900s. Samuel Hamilton is an Irish immigrant who settled in the area and bore a large family; one of his daughters was Steinbeck's mother. Adam Trask grew up in Connecticut and, after the death of his father, moves west with his new wife Cathy. Cathy is the very embodiment of evil, yet Adam is blind to her manipulative ways. She bears twin sons, Caleb (Cal) and Aron, but leaves them as infants and goes to work in a brothel. Adam is left to raise the boys with the help of Lee, a Chinese housekeeper.

Throughout the novel, each character grapples with issues of good and evil. This is especially evident in Cal, who struggles to overcome the darker tendencies he inherited from his mother. The father-son relationships are sometimes strained and quite poignant. Steinbeck reveals the evil present in each person, while also showing the individual struggles and choices that can overcome evil.

This book was published in 1952, late in Steinbeck's career. Ten years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize, "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." While this book did not have as much impact on me as Grapes of Wrath, I found the story captivating and thought-provoking. ( )

My original review can be found here.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Laura's Review)

The Grapes of WrathJohn Steinbeck
502 pages

First sentence: To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

Reflections:I know this is a classic, and there would be little debate about its place in American literature. I probably don't have any unique commentary on this work. But I was surprised at how much I was "sucked in" to this book, and how much it stayed with me during the times I was not reading.

The powerful themes in this book, for me, were 1) the desperation of the migrant families, and 2) the intense drive to keep families together. Steinbeck is able to convey the sense of desperation so vividly, both through the Joad's experiences and through the chapters describing the world around them: the car salesmen, the people who buy off farmers' assets, the growers/canners in California, the effect of the heavy rain. And then Ma Joad's intensity around keeping the family intact throughout, and her ultimate failure to do so, is just heartbreaking. I can't imagine what it felt like, in an age without email and mobile telephones, to have one of your children go off in search of a better life on their own.

I know the ending is meant to cast a ray of hope, but I was left wondering what would happen next to these poor people, stranded in a barn in a flood with no money, no food, and no hopes.

Another thread running through my mind as I read was about society's apparent need to find a lower class who can be mistreated. In this book, and in that time period, it was the migrant workers. Today, we have found immigrants to do similar labor and their living conditions in many cases are not much better than the Joad's. There are many other groups who are also marginalized. Why is this? And why is it so difficult to eradicate this pattern of hate and discrimination?
My original review can be found here.

Laura's Progress List

I love reading prize-winning authors, and am already on a quest to read all the Booker and Pulitzer prize winners. So why not add one more? I also enjoy "reading across borders" (books by authors from outside the US), and a number of the Nobel winners represent countries I haven't "read" yet.

In fact, I've read pathetically few of the Nobel authors. I've included links to reviews where I have them. I'll post further reviews as I read more authors.

2007 - Doris Lessing

• Love, Again

2003 - J. M. Coetzee

• Elizabeth Costello (but I didn't finish it! Is that cheating?)

1993 - Toni Morrison

• Song of Solomon
• Beloved
• Paradise
• Love

1982 - Gabriel García Márquez

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - completed 4/6/2007 (review)

1962 - John Steinbeck

• Grapes of Wrath - completed 1/17/2007 (review)
• East of Eden - completed 10/6/2007 (review)

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

12 short stories about Latin Americans in Europe.

Back blurb: In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortune-telling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-president of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact.

In these twelve masterful stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, Garcia Marquez conveys the particular amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow and aspiration that is the emigre experience.

My take: This is a fantastic book! If you aren't quite ready to plunge into Garcia Marquez's full length books, this one will give you a feel for how he writes. Despite some of these stories being only a few pages long, the stories will stay with you. They are beautifully un-verbose and showcase his gift for storytelling in magical, mystical prose. That is Garcia Marquez's magic.

If you've ever been in a foreign land, you can easily empathize with these characters' feelings of alienation and dislocation; of existing yet being unrooted from your realities and somehow making ones' self fit. The fit may not be quite right, but one manages.

Being of some Spanish influence, I believe that Filipinos (especially immigrants, overseas workers, and simply those visiting Europe and Americas) will see themselves in these characters and how they will tend to cling to familiar and often comforting traditions. You can change the exterior, but deep down you know who you are.

One of the most disturbing stories for me was the one where a woman simply wanted to use the phone ... but nonetheless ended up in an asylum. Over time she did become half insane. It is the tragedy of communicating, yet not being believed.

I have many favorite short stories here. Each story can be read leisurely in a few minutes. I suggest you not to rush through the entire thing in one sitting but savor each story, let it stay with you, and maybe even re-read it.

I've marked my favorite stories, through I loved each story in its own way.

• Bon Voyage, Mr President
• The Saint
• *Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane
• *I Sell My Dreams
• "I Only Came to Use the Phone"
• The Ghosts of August
• María dos Prazeres
• Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen
• Tramontana
• Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness
• *Light is Like Water
• *The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow

The stories in this collection were originally written in a span of some 20 years, during the 70s and 80s. It wasn't published until 1992. Garcia Marquez draws from his own experiences as he spent some years as an exile from his native Colombia.

Nobel Prize 2007

It's that time of year when the Nobel Prize is awarded for achievements around the world. Read more about it and view the videos announcements (once up) on the official Nobel prize website.

The dates of announcements for 2007 awardees are as follows.

• Physiology or medicine (Oct 8)
• Physics (Oct 9)
• Chemistry (Oct 10)
• Literature (Oct 11)
• Peace (Oct 12)
  
• Economics (Oct 13)
  

The Nobel Prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. Each prize consists of a medal, personal diploma, and a cash award.

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

[Crossposted here]

Back Blurb: Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl 's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

My take: Whoa, what an incredible book! This is about self-awareness and self-identity. Who are we? Are we simply the product of our environment, of what we read, of what we absorb? Is there a "you" who exists apart from these influences? Is it even possible to exist without these influences?

Self identity is also tied up to nationality, as Pamuk is a Turkish writer, he has numerous references to the history and the Turkish identity. And the day-to-dayness of Turkish life.

I read this book in under a week. The storyline was gripping. There were parts that I wanted to skip whole sections because I found it dragging. But I didn't give into the temptation, and this has lent to the multi-dimensional-ness of the characters and the world in which they move in.

I loved the ending of the story of the prince. It is this book wherein it wasn't the ending per se that mattered, but how the ending reflected how the character found himself.

Great books make you think, and they make you think hard and deep about yourself, even if it hurts.

For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. - John Donne-

For Whom The Bell Tolls is first and foremost a war novel. Spanning a scant three days, the novel is the story of Robert Jordan - a young American professor - who is attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. Jordan's mission is to blow up a bridge which is guarded by the fascists. He enlists the aid of a band of Communist guerillas, spending several days with them at a cave in the mountains.

Hemingway introduces a broad range of characters, including Maria - the beautiful Spanish girl with a tragic history - who Jordan falls in love with practically on sight. The novel has all the makings of a classic, and in fact has been called Hemingway's greatest work. Despite this, I found myself struggling to continue reading through the first half of the story.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time inside his character's heads, repetitively showing us their thoughts and motivations. The dialogue tends to plod along, filled with 'thees' and 'thous' and odd phrases such as:

"Go and obscenity thyself," Pablo told him. -From For Whom The Bell Tolls, page 211-

I found myself tempted to scan through large portions of the book during the early going, and only hard-nosed determination kept me reading.

Luckily, the book redeems itself around page 270, when finally the reader gets to experience some action. It is the latter pages that Hemingway shows his skill as a writer, painting the tragedy of war in broad strokes and revealing the humanity of his characters.

I wanted badly to love this book. I have enjoyed other Hemingway novels (The Old Man and The Sea, for example when I was in High School), and have been captivated by Hemingway's short stories. But, I'm afraid I cannot recommend this one. Had I not been reading this for a challenge and a group read, I would have quit less than 50 pages in. If the reader is diligent and can wade through the dryness of the first half of the book, they will be tragically rewarded in the end.

Rated 2/5.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (Wendy's Review)

The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley [go oft awry]
And leave us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy!
by Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759 - 96)

John Steinbeck's classic novel, Of Mice and Men, is one of three novels he wrote exploring the California agricultural labor phenomenon of the 1930s (the other two were The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle).

In this novel, Steinbeck focuses on the friendship between two men - George and Lennie - and their shared dream of owning land and a home of their own. The story is simple and occurs over the span of three short days on a Salinas Valley ranch where the two men have found work as farm hands. Thematically, Steinbeck explores the idea of dreams and how plans may go awry through forces beyond one's control.

Given the time in which the novel was written, his handling of the mentally handicapped Lennie is tender and compassionate. Steinbeck describes setting beautifully, and wraps it around the characters whose personalities emerge through their dialogue and relationships with each other. There is enough foreshadowing to predict the novel's tragic end.
Highly Recommended; rated 5/5

Travels With Charley In Search Of America by John Steinbeck (Wendy's Review)

I have never passed an unshaded window without looking in, have never closed my ears to a conversation that was none of my business. I can justify or even dignify this by protesting that in my trade I must know about people, but I suspect that I am simply curious.

-From Travels With Charley In Search Of America, page 90-

John Steinbeck is best known for his fiction. So I was surprised when I learned that he had written several nonfiction books, including Travels With Charley In Search of America - a bittersweet and philosophical travel memoir. In 1960 Steinbeck felt he had lost touch with his country, and this feeling (along with what might have been a late mid-life crisis) prompted him to make a journey from New York to California and back again. He chose to take no companion with him except for his aging standard poodle, Charley. They journeyed in a truck named Rocinante which Steinbeck outfitted with a camper shell and all the supplies he would need. Steinbeck's plan was to avoid the major highways, instead following the wavy backroads of America where he could see the country and meet the people.

This book is a delight on many levels. Steinbeck's wonderful descriptions of Charley made me laugh out loud at times.

Actually his hame is Charles le Chien. He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. -From Travels With Charley In Search Of America, page 7-

In establishing contact with strange people, Charley is my ambassador. I release him, and he drifts toward the objective, or rather to whatever the objective may be preparing for dinner. I retrieve him so that he will not be a nuisance to my neighbors - et voila! A child can do the same thing, but a dog is better. -From Travels With Charley In Search Of America, page 51-

Steinbeck is amazingly prophetic in this slim book. He expounds upon the environment ('...I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness.' - page 22-), entertainment ('...what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback?' -page 109-), migrant workers ('I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.' -page50-), and racism ('And I know that the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple.' -page 207-).

In true Steinbeck style, he recreates the natural world using beautiful and simple language, and then weaves the heart of the people into the setting in which they live.

This book made me want to read more of Steinbeck's nonfiction, including a book of nearly 1000 pages of his letters to family and friends over his lifetime (Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten and published in 1975).

Travels With Charley In Search Of America is a must read and highly recommended; rated 5/5

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Wendy's Review)

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. -From the Grapes of Wrath, page 349-

In John Steinbeck's most renown novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad gets released from prison and returns to a home decimated by technology:

"Le's look in the house. She's all pushed out a shape. Something knocked the hell out of her." They walked slowly toward the sagging house. Two of the supports of the porch roof were pushed out so that the roof flopped down on one end. And the house-corner was crushed in. Through a maze of splintered wood the room at the corner was visible. The front door hung open inward, and a low strong gate across the front door hung outward on leather hinges. -From The Grapes of Wrath, page 41-

Thus, this sweeping novel takes us on a journey with the Joad family as they join thousands of migrant workers seeking a better life in the West. Steinbeck fills his novel with homespun characters and the bitter reality of life in the 1930s during the Great Dust Bowl migration.

This novel has been banned, burned and challenged since its publication in 1939 for reasons such as "vulgar language" and "sexual references." In addition, Steinbeck angered many for his honest depiction of the political and economic landscape in the 1930s, where large landowners artificially inflated the cost of goods by destroying surpluses and drove down wages by luring thousands of workers to a California that could not support their numbers.

Steinbeck is a genius at characterization and using symbolism to draw images for the reader. Tom Joad represents all the survivors who joined together and found strength in numbers; who fought back when the future looked the bleakest; who rose up to fight for their families; and who refused to lose dignity even while camping in Hoovervilles.
The women who people this novel are wonderful - strong, authentic, the glue that holds the family together. Ma Joad's tough, realistic character drives the novel and tugs at the reader's heartstrings:

She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone. - From The Grapes of Wrath, page 74-

Beautiful descriptions of a desolate country; use of symbolism; amazing characterization; compelling dialogue; a vivid and honest portrayal of the family; and an ending which will shock…are all reasons why Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one of the few great American novels. A must read. The Joad family will stick with the reader long after the final page has been turned.

Highly recommended; rated 5/5

Following are some of my favorite passages from the novel.

About the countryside:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight. -page 118-

About Granma:

Behind him hobbled Granma, who had survived only because she was as mean as her husband. She had held her own with a shrill ferocious religiosity that was a lecherous and as savage as anything Grampa could offer. Once, after a meeting, while she was still speaking in tongue, she fired both barrels of a shotgun at her husband, ripping one of his buttocks nearly off, and after that he admired her and did not try to torture her as children torture bugs. As she walked she hiked her Mother Hubbard up to her knees, and she bleated her shrill terrible war cry: "Pu-raise Gawd fur victory." -page 78-

About symbolism (the turtle):

He came over the grass leaving a beaten trail behind him, and the hill, which was the highway embankment, reared up ahead of him. For a moment he stopped, his head held high. He blinked and looked up and down. At last he started to climb the embankment. -page 14-15-

About community:

In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was a dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning. A family which the night before had been lost and fearful might search its goods to find a present for a new baby. -page 193-

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee (Wendy's Review)

Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? - From Slow Man, page 149

This was my first Coetzee novel, and it will not be my last. In Slow Man, Coetzee tells the story of Paul Rayment, an older man who loses his leg in a freak bicycle accident and must decide the path of his life following this devastating event. Paul is a man who has lived a relatively solitary life and regrets his lack of children. He gave up his career as a photographer when colour replaced black and white and digital imagery replaced light-sensitive emulsions because '...to the rising generation the enchantment lay in the techne of images without substance, images that could flash throught he ether without resideing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue.' (- Slow Man, page 65). 

As the reader meets the other characters (Marijana, Marianna, Drago, and the bold Elizabeth Costello) she is treated to a literary puzzle about love, loss and mortality. Coetzee engages the reader with sharp dialogue and an edgy wit. He plays with the meaning of words and names - which had me re-reading passages and marking pages for later contemplation.

Slow Man is a demanding novel despite its brevity. At times it is difficult to know which character and whose story can be trusted. Perhaps this idea is best captured as Paul ruminates about his career as a photographer:

He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable. Whereas stories - the story of the needle in the bloodstream, for instance, or the story of how he and Wayne Blight came to meet on Magill Road - seem to change shape all the time. - Slow Man, page 64

I cannot say more about this novel without giving away important plot points - and so, I will simply recommend that readers read Coetzee's book for themselves.

Recommended; rated 4/5

Welcome!

Welcome to Read the Nobels!

The challenge: to read books authored by Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This blog is dedicated to reviews about the individual books, and your thoughts on the laureates themselves.

There is no time limit. You may post your old reviews.

Interested in joining?
You may contribute to this blog by posting in your own blog or posting directly here (you need to be signed up in Blogger). To sign up, send an email to readerrabbit22 AT gmail dot com with "Read the Nobels" somewhere in the subject line. You will then receive an invitation to join. Please include your blog URL (if you have one) and your name as you'd like to have it appear in the members' list (on right sidebar "The Nobel Readers").

A few simple rules on labeling your posts:

• Label with the year and the name of the laureate (e.g. 2006: Orhan Pamuk)
• Make another label with your name
  
• Do not label with the book title ... as there are just too many books!

Have fun and here's to our adventure in reading!