Now reading...

[BillF]

Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited.

I well remember the British TV adaptation of this. Obviously, being about 12 I really didn't understand why, apart from being able to snigger at the gay thing (it was the 80s, forgive me) and the odd boob shot. Let's see if it makes sense now.

I never went for that one with its glorification of the Oxbridge set, though it's probably the most popular of Waugh's books. For me the great Waughs are the early satires, Handful of Dust in particular. And The Loved One, with its Englishman in California, might appeal to board members on both sides of the pond.

Edited July 24, 2009 by BillF

[jostber]

Alex Halberstadt - Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life And Times of Doc Pomus

[Guest Bill Barton]

American Musicians II - Whitney Balliett

Speaking Freely - Nat Hentoff

Born Under the Sign of Jazz - Randi Hultin

[fasstrack]

Faith and Violence (Thomas Merton); children's poetry by Nikki Giovanni (forget the name, it's from ca 1970); other children's books including Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; Straight Life, Art & Laurie Pepper (for at least the 407th time, equalled in my reading life only by Manchild in the Promised Land). I want to get a book called Adventures in Brotherhood----about candid observations on Christian practice, b/c I met the author, a Mr. Pitt, and he is a fascinating man, well into his 80s or even 90s.

Edited July 21, 2009 by fasstrack

[jazzbo]

[Jazzmoose]

Harry Harrison: the Deathworld Trilogy. This would have been better than Star Wars...

[jazzbo]

Yeah. Just wouldn't have made millions and millions.

[medjuck]

Geraldine Brooks: People Of The Book

Hey, me too!

Good taste is timeless.

Would love to hear your guys' thoughts on this book if you don't mind! I've been considering picking this one up. It sounds interesting, but I must admit I was drawn to it at first by the very cool cover!

I thought that the writing was a bit cliched at times but it's a page turner and worth a read.

[Van Basten II]

Complete tales and poems by Edgar Allen Poe.

[Nate Dorward]

A pile of Rex Stout, & George Borrow's Lavengro, one of the weirdest & most interesting of 19th-century bildungsromans (topics include snakes, gypsy language & culture, extreme anti-Catholic sentiment, obsessive-compulsive disorder, epilepsy, the nefarious publishing industry, polymathic language-learning.......).

[paul secor]

Hamilton Basso: the View from Pompey's Head

[Jazzmoose]

Brad Warner - Zen Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate.

I meant to ask and forgot...how was this?

[AndrewHill]

I'm trying to start "The House That Trane Built" Impulse story again. Hopefully, I'll get farther along than last time.

[paul secor]

I've been reading a number of essays from Eliot Weinberger's collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale.

Recommended.

[jazzbo]

[A Lark Ascending]

Furst's eighth novel, I think, of a series set in the period leading up to and during WWII. This one starts in the Mediterranean around the time of the fall of Crete in 1941; a marvellous evocation of the precarious life of a small merchant ship. It's about to shift to the Baltic, just in time, I'm assuming, for Operation Barbarossa.

I've fallen behind with these novels - there have been two more since this came out in 2004. Fully intend to catch up in the next couple of weeks.

Edited July 30, 2009 by Bev Stapleton

[jlhoots]

Craig Johnson: Another Man's Moccasins

[7/4]

Brad Warner - Zen Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate.

I meant to ask and forgot...how was this?

A lot of of narrative with the occasional zen idea dropped in. I love his books.

edit: The one to read, if you haven't read any of his books, is the first - Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality.

Edited August 1, 2009 by 7/4

[Jimmer]

Complete tales and poems by Edgar Allen Poe.

Is it the collection published by Vintage? I've had a couple of copies of that edition over the last twenty years. I've been reading some classic horror stories, too, by Ambrose Bierce - the Penguin collection, Spook House: Terrifying Tales of the Macabre. I've enjoyed these so much that I ordered the Dover collection Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce last weekend. Fortunately, there are only three stories in common between these collections, so they are an easy and affordable way to get most - if not all - of Bierce's horror tales in good editions.

[BruceH]

I used to have that Vintage "Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe." Great big huge paperback, but still didn't cost too much, by today's standards. Actually, I might still have it somewhere, in some box.

[Jazzmoose]

I have got to read Bierce; I can't believe I've put it off this long...I've been meaning to try his stuff for thirty plus years now.

[Niko]

Jeroen de Valk's Chet Baker Bio once again (while listening to the Rassinfosse/Baker/Catherine cd) such a great book, maybe of all the jazz biographies i've read the one that helps you get to know the artist as a person the best... somehow de valk figured out that he could write a great baker bio mostly by extensively interviewing people in the Netherlands who knew him from the seventies on - and i'd say he was definitively right...

afterwards my two books of lovecraft stories that reappeared again (bringing the index of treasured but lost items in my appartment down to two...)

[BillF]

maybe of all the jazz biographies i've read the one that helps you get to know the artist as a person the best

I'd be interested to know which books you'd name under this heading. For me, the first that come to mind are Art Pepper's Straight Life and Hampton Hawes's Raise Up Off Me.

[paul secor]

Kate Christensen's novel, The Great Man

[Niko]

maybe of all the jazz biographies i've read the one that helps you get to know the artist as a person the best

I'd be interested to know which books you'd name under this heading. For me, the first that come to mind are Art Pepper's Straight Life and Hampton Hawes's Raise Up Off Me.

still got to read the hawes bio... guess a huge difference between the two books you named and de valk's is that these are autobiographies... i really liked straight life, but somehow i don't feel an autobiography can really do justice to personalities like pepper or baker (after all - this generation of white musicians must have been the one of the most difficult group of characters in jazz history?(raney, getz, haig, marmarosa, and so many others) but what do i know, baker does not come across particularly troubled or unhappy in that book... btw, just out of a different world with all the difficulties that brings) it's just revealing to read the baker interview in de valk's book seeing he doesn't know about a good deal of the albums he releases, misplaces others by more than ten years, doesn't know the name of jean louis rassinfosse who had recorded six albums with him in the last few years... this type of thing wouldn't have made it into an autobigraphy... and then, i feel a complex person like that is much better described by the impressions of a few dozen others than by their own words... also de valk maintains an excellent balance between writing about the music, writing about the person and setting the two in relation (expect no deep musicology though)

one excellent book which falls somewhat in between is aj albany's book about her father joe albany (we used to have a thread about that one) it's not much about the music and of course highly personal but still i'd say you certainly learn more about albany than in what i'd expect would have been in his autobiography...

a particularly bad example concerning getting to know the person is buddy collette's autobiography... the book sure is informative but could hardly be drier - i wish (and am almost convinced) buddy collette is a more interesting person than comes out in the book...