For me, it's currently Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin', which I'm dashing through in time to do an oral report on for my memoir class. And in a word, the book's frustrating. I wait for it to settle down, but apparently it won't. Actually, now that he's into his dashing-around job-changing years at various newspapers, I'm just sorta rolling with it. I guess it's a memoir, but it sure is loose--not with the facts (I presume), but with the development.
I looked up Bragg on the lazy man's dream, Wikipedia, and found links to other places which limned his resignation from the New York Times a few years ago, because he'd taken credit for, or written himself, a story based on a stringer's notes and observations without giving credit to the stringer. Doesn't sound very sporting, and Bragg was apparently nonchalant and upfront about it, claiming to have done nothing that other writers haven't gotten away with. So since learning this, my estimation of him has gone down slightly.
The book is just ah-ight. The man had an amazingly hardscrabble childhood, and his mother sounds like a saint. I could read a whole book about her. Dare I say the book is more telling than showing? I extremely liked the chapter about when he went to the Baptist church; it's one of a few times where the writing is stopping to take a breath.
I don't really know how to focus this oral report I'm to do, yet, but I imagine I'll figure it out. I have two degrees in English, after all.
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