What I've been reading

Lately I've been doing more reading than writing, which accounts for the sporadic updates to the blog. I just finished a couple of novels -- a departure from my usual non-fiction fare, but not exactly light reading. The first one was The Stranger by the French existentialist Albert Camus. The other book I read was The Natural, an early work by Bernard Malamud.

If you're in the over-30 crowd, you might remember the 1984 movie adaptation of The Natural starring Robert Redford. Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:

The Natural was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in 1984. The movie is not considered to be faithful to the book, since important details are changed, particularly the film's upbeat ending, which differs significantly from the novel's ending. While Malamud wrote a dark satire of a fallen hero, the film version took a traditional "Hollywood" approach.

The film had a happy ending??? It figures. But it ruins the story. Also, I don't see how a movie could do justice to Malamud's prose. Here's a little sample:

     [Roy:] "Everything came out different than I thought." His eyes were clouded.
     [Iris:] "In what sense?"
     "Different."
     "I don't understand."
     He coughed, tore his voice clear and blurted, "My goddamn life didn't turn out like I wanted it to."
     "Whose does?" she said cruelly. He looked up. Her expression was tender.
     The sweat oozed out of him. "I wanted everything." His voice boomed out in the silence.
     She waited.
     "I had a lot to give to this game."
     "Life?"
     "Baseball."

A little tie-in to my neighborhood... There is a scene in the book where the protagonist is shot in a hotel room by a deranged woman. This actually happened to a baseball player named Eddie Waitkus at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1949. The hotel is no longer there, but there is one remaining structure from the resort complex: the Edgewater Beach Apartments. It is a distinctive pink building at the north end of Lake Shore Drive, and I once posted a picture of it on this site.