Now reading...

[A Lark Ascending]

Finished this early in the week...

As good a military history book as I've read. Balances narrative and analysis perfectly. What make it is the use of eyewitness accounts that gives you a real sense of what it must have been like to be there. Never realised how gruesome it was - I always associate mass horror with the American Civil War and World War I. But the accounts gere of the squares just standing there to repel cavalry whilst the artillery pound into them chill the blood. And the complete lack of logistical organisation after the battle to deal with casualties with people lying out there five days later. Then you turn on the news and see Syria.

No, not the lot. 'King Lear' - first Shakespeare I've read for many a year. Extraordinary play. Not an easy volume to handle whilst lying on the couch but it was cheap! Hope to read a lot of these in the coming years. 

Reading too many books at once at present - the John Peel book, a thriller, the Shakespeare bio mentioned further up and this:

 

Really don't know what to make of this. The first 50 or so pages are really quite dull - a sort of history of LSD, the pre-60s American avant-garde, the Beats etc. Gets interesting once he gets round to the music. 

But suffers from that thing with so many books written by enthusiasts who haven't really based their writing on objective research. Projects his own prejudices onto the music and presents this as objective truth. So he decides that the reaction against psychedelia in the late 60s (The Band and all that) has been overrated and was as much game playing as the hippy era itself. Which I suspect is the case, but...

Can't work out his point - seems to want to see that popular culture from the 60s onwards owes everything to LSD. But I'm not sure if he is saying that.

Reminds me of another 'fan' book about British jazz from a few years back where a bunch of personal prejudices were stitched together as a history...though this one is more entertaining and isn't cursed by pseudo-sociology. This sort of thing might be fine as an internet blog, bulletin board exchange or pub debate. But putting it in printed form requires rather more discipline. 

Some atrocious factual errors too - can't believe he made these mistakes as he seems so knowledgeable about the music of the era. Get the impression it was the sort of thing we all do typing at speed but the errors were never picked up later - The Band as the backing group of 'Screaming Jay Hawkins?; a couple of other glaring ones I can't recall.

I was too young to have been aware of the 60s when they happened; imagine anyone who was there would be driven nuts by this book. I'm preparing to go nuts when I get to the 70s. But I will read on.     

  

[jazzbo]

Re-reading this tome. For me a fascinating work.

 

I'm still re-reading this one, with other material around it, and this book is making me reach into other books to verify and supplement what is here.

This is a dense seditious mofo of a book. Elements of it have ratified thoughts I have had during my years of research of the religions of the ancient world and the big picture it conveys is hard to refute and tables-turning. I've still weeks ahead in this tome, and in time will read its sequel. This is Alzheimer's prevention at its best (for me and my interests).

[Matthew]

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels -- 1957-1960.  Starting to reread Kerouac, which I haven't done in quite awhile.  This time around, I'm not getting the craziness, but a melancholy feeling of missed chances in life.

[mjazzg]

Marilynne Robinson - Lila

beautifully written first fifty pages.....hungry to finish but want to savour at the same time. i don't remember Gilead having quite such an immediate impact as good as that was

Finished this early in the week...

As good a military history book as I've read. Balances narrative and analysis perfectly. What make it is the use of eyewitness accounts that gives you a real sense of what it must have been like to be there. Never realised how gruesome it was - I always associate mass horror with the American Civil War and World War I. But the accounts gere of the squares just standing there to repel cavalry whilst the artillery pound into them chill the blood. And the complete lack of logistical organisation after the battle to deal with casualties with people lying out there five days later. Then you turn on the news and see Syria.

No, not the lot. 'King Lear' - first Shakespeare I've read for many a year. Extraordinary play. Not an easy volume to handle whilst lying on the couch but it was cheap! Hope to read a lot of these in the coming years. 

Reading too many books at once at present - the John Peel book, a thriller, the Shakespeare bio mentioned further up and this:

 

Really don't know what to make of this. The first 50 or so pages are really quite dull - a sort of history of LSD, the pre-60s American avant-garde, the Beats etc. Gets interesting once he gets round to the music. 

But suffers from that thing with so many books written by enthusiasts who haven't really based their writing on objective research. Projects his own prejudices onto the music and presents this as objective truth. So he decides that the reaction against psychedelia in the late 60s (The Band and all that) has been overrated and was as much game playing as the hippy era itself. Which I suspect is the case, but...

Can't work out his point - seems to want to see that popular culture from the 60s onwards owes everything to LSD. But I'm not sure if he is saying that.

Reminds me of another 'fan' book about British jazz from a few years back where a bunch of personal prejudices were stitched together as a history...though this one is more entertaining and isn't cursed by pseudo-sociology. This sort of thing might be fine as an internet blog, bulletin board exchange or pub debate. But putting it in printed form requires rather more discipline. 

Some atrocious factual errors too - can't believe he made these mistakes as he seems so knowledgeable about the music of the era. Get the impression it was the sort of thing we all do typing at speed but the errors were never picked up later - The Band as the backing group of 'Screaming Jay Hawkins?; a couple of other glaring ones I can't recall.

I was too young to have been aware of the 60s when they happened; imagine anyone who was there would be driven nuts by this book. I'm preparing to go nuts when I get to the 70s. But I will read on.     

  

are you retired or something? all this lazing about reading......

 

[jlhoots]

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Beautiful Struggle & Between The World & Me

[A Lark Ascending]

are you retired or something? all this lazing about reading......

 

Dave and George put money in my bank account every month to do this. All I have to do is turn up and vote Tory every 5 years. 

[mjazzg]

are you retired or something? all this lazing about reading......

 

Dave and George put money in my bank account every month to do this. All I have to do is turn up and vote Tory every 5 years. 

I knew I was going wrong somewhere. Remind in four and half years will you please

[ejp626]

Marilynne Robinson - Lila

beautifully written first fifty pages.....hungry to finish but want to savour at the same time. i don't remember Gilead having quite such an immediate impact as good as that was

I ended up liking Gilead much more than I expected.  I understand what she is doing in Lila and in Home, but I am just not sure I want to spend time in these other characters' lives.  But I may one of these days.

Currently, midway through Machado de Assis's Philosopher or Dog? which is a sort of sequel to Epitaph of a Small Winner.

I'm also reading Margaret Atwood's Payback, which is a non-fiction exploration of debt and indebtedness.

Next up, more Canadiana: Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? and Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table.

Edited October 17, 2015 by ejp626

[niels]

Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers
Fantastic collection of essays on Herzen, Tolstoy, Belinsky a.o.

[ejp626]

Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers
Fantastic collection of essays on Herzen, Tolstoy, Belinsky a.o.

I read that last year, along with some of the writers he was describing.  A very good set of essays, even if he goes a bit over the top in praising Herzen.

[niels]

Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers
Fantastic collection of essays on Herzen, Tolstoy, Belinsky a.o.

I read that last year, along with some of the writers he was describing.  A very good set of essays, even if he goes a bit over the top in praising Herzen.

I have to say that reading Herzen has been high on my list for a long time now (especially My Past and Thoughts), and these essay's certainly got me excited to finally start with these memoirs. When you say you think Berlin is getting a bit over the top, do you mean that in regards to Herzen's prose or regarding his ideas? 

When I read his ideas, I always get the impression that many of these can be directly linked to existentialism (long before anyone spoke of this term).  Furthermore his seemingly firm rejection of all extremes, whether it be extreme conservatism, liberalism or socialism is a moral conviction I also see in people like Albert Camus or Václav Havel. And because these are people I hold in very high esteem (to say the least), I have the feeling that diving in  Alexander Herzen's memoirs would be of high interest for me.    

 

 

Edited October 18, 2015 by niels

[ejp626]

I would say that Berlin wanted so desperately to find a Russian socialist thinker who opposed the communism that stemmed from Marx's writings that he often exaggerates the break.  You can find several places in Herzen's late letters where he is still calling for revolution, for example.

I thought Herzen's memoirs were quite interesting (I read them slightly abridged in the two volume set from Oxford), but at some point or other Berlin calls them as good or better than Tolstoy's War and Peace!  Come on, man.  Don't blow these things up to that extent.  It does them a real disservice.

I've actually meant to blog about this for a while, but just haven't gotten around to it.

After you finish Berlin and read Herzen, you might be interested in reading Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, which draws very heavily on both these sources.

[jlhoots]

Patti Smith: M Train

[Matthew]

Patti Smith: M Train

How do you like it? I've heard very good things about the book, and I'm being very tempted...

[jlhoots]

Patti Smith: M Train

How do you like it? I've heard very good things about the book, and I'm being very tempted...

I like it a lot. Just Kids is good too.

[mjazzg]

Deborah Solomon - Utopia Parkway, The Life & Work Of Joseph Cornell 

[Dave Garrett]

Patti Smith: M Train

A great story about an event that transpired at a reading in Illinois earlier this week:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/a_beautiful_story_about_patti_smith

[paul secor]

Patti Smith: M Train

A great story about an event that transpired at a reading in Illinois earlier this week:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/a_beautiful_story_about_patti_smith

I'm not a Patti Smith fan, but that's a wonderful story.

[paul secor]

Robertson Davies: The Cunning Man

[Larry Kart]

Anecdote from Robert Craft's "Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories": 

 During a Stravinsky visit to London, Isaiah Berlin wangled seats for Stravinsky and crew to a new production of “Figaro,” orchestra seats that would enable Stravinsky to leave after the first act and rush to the Albert Hall for Monteux’s 50th anniversary performance of “Le Sacre.” "But when the second act of ‘Figaro’ followed the first without intermission, Isaiah had to extricate the Stravinskys from a fully occupied front row and hustle them off…. The departing composer apologized to his neighbors in a stage whisper: ‘Excuse us but we all have diarrhoea.’”

[jlhoots]

Timothy Hallinan: The Hot Countries

[Matthew]

robert lax

poems

(1962-1997). 

This is a great volume from the very underrated poet Robert Lax.  It's forcing me to re-examine how I read poetry.

 

Edited October 20, 2015 by Matthew

[BillF]

The third Trevor novel I've read recently, this one echoing Felicia's Journey with its gothic content and Love and Summer with its small community setting.

 

Edited October 21, 2015 by BillF

[ejp626]

I'm just starting Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are?

Her first two collections have a complicated, but largely positive view of growing up in rural Ontario.  That's oversimplifying, but I was shocked when I came to "Privilege" where she is describing the situation in the rural school Rose attends.  Munro makes this sound like some Hobbesian nightmare where the teacher turns a blind eye to all the terrors that the older kids inflict on the younger kids - and the younger kids inflict on each other.  It's practically Lord of the Flies set in Hanratty, Ontario (she was actually writing about Wingham, Ont.).  The relationship between Rose and her step-mother Flo isn't much better.  It looks like the whole collection will be pretty dark.

Edited October 21, 2015 by ejp626

[BillF]

I'm just starting Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are?

Her first two collections have a complicated, but largely positive view of growing up in rural Ontario.  That's oversimplifying, but I was shocked when I came to "Privilege" where she is describing the situation in the rural school Rose attends.  Munro makes this sound like some Hobbesian nightmare where the teacher turns a blind eye to all the terrors that the older kids inflict on the younger kids - and the younger kids inflict on each other.  It's practically Lord of the Flies set in Hanratty, Ontario (she was actually writing about Wingham, Ont.).  The relationship between Rose and her step-mother Flo isn't much better.  It looks like the whole collection will be pretty dark.

Was introduced to Munro's work on a short course on Canadian and Australian fiction which I took a dozen years ago. She impressed me more than any other writer on the reading list. Recall really liking her Progress of Love and Love of a Good Woman.

 

 

Edited October 21, 2015 by BillF