So I read portions of this a few months ago for book group, but nowhere near enough for it to count as having read the entire book, thus the 25.5. I’m not actually counting this book, but writing a brief review because I loved one of the poems so much. We read probably 20 or so poems from the book (so not even half), but I feel I can count it as a half because we had a good discussion about them.
Of course we read Howl which was interesting enough, but there were some references that were just over my head. That’s one of the good things about the book group we’re evenly divided generational and one of the guys heard Ginsberg speak back in the 60s and another always has the best stories from the time the author’s were writing and really puts things into perspective.
The Berlin Stories brings together two of what Isherwood wrote while inspired by the city of Berlin. His most famous character (who I did not know), Sally Bowles, comes from this time of his life when he lived in Berlin. He lived here prior to and leading up to World War II. The two stories in this book are The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin.
Dan Savage’s The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided To go Get Pregnant was a humorous and interesting story about the adoption process from Dan and his boyfriend’s perspective. I’ve heard Mr. Savage speak and I thought he was incredibly humorous and he had a great one liner about men sleeping with men (“Gay relationships have to have good communication. We’d better talk every time we have sex, I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie there and take it for the next 20 years.”) and although I haven’t had a chance to read his weekly article, I have read his blog a few times.
White Teeth was a much more interesting read than I thought it would be. It was originally selected as one of the book group books for our AmeriCorps book group, but that sort of fell to the wayside a few months ago and I’d already purchased it.