jazzbo Posted July 22, 2009 Report Share Posted July 22, 2009 Yeah. Just wouldn't have made millions and millions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medjuck Posted July 22, 2009 Report Share Posted July 22, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Van Basten II Posted July 23, 2009 Report Share Posted July 23, 2009 Complete tales and poems by Edgar Allen Poe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nate Dorward Posted July 23, 2009 Report Share Posted July 23, 2009 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.......). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul secor Posted July 25, 2009 Report Share Posted July 25, 2009 Hamilton Basso: the View from Pompey's Head Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted July 25, 2009 Report Share Posted July 25, 2009 Brad Warner - Zen Wrapped in Karma, Dipped in Chocolate. I meant to ask and forgot...how was this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndrewHill Posted July 25, 2009 Report Share Posted July 25, 2009 I'm trying to start "The House That Trane Built" Impulse story again. Hopefully, I'll get farther along than last time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul secor Posted July 30, 2009 Report Share Posted July 30, 2009 I've been reading a number of essays from Eliot Weinberger's collection Oranges & Peanuts for Sale. Recommended. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jazzbo Posted July 30, 2009 Report Share Posted July 30, 2009 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A Lark Ascending Posted July 30, 2009 Report Share Posted July 30, 2009 (edited) 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlhoots Posted July 31, 2009 Report Share Posted July 31, 2009 Craig Johnson: Another Man's Moccasins Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7/4 Posted July 31, 2009 Report Share Posted July 31, 2009 (edited) 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimmer Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BruceH Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Niko Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillF Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul secor Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 Kate Christensen's novel, The Great Man Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Niko Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillF Posted August 1, 2009 Report Share Posted August 1, 2009 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... Two books that didn't do it for me were Stan Britt's biography of Dexter Gordon (British author too far from his subject?) and Red Callender's autobiography (lack of writing skills?) Anyone else want to nominate particularly successful jazz biographies/autobiographies? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Posted August 4, 2009 Report Share Posted August 4, 2009 (edited) Glenn Miller and His Orchestra by George T. Simon. I happen to enjoy this book tremendously, but, then, I love Glenn Miller. Finished this one today and it left a very sad feeling about Miller. He does not seem to have ever been a very happy person, and opened up to very few people in his life. I think his major disappointment in life was being a average trombone player, he felt that he could never reach the level of a Dorsey or a Teagarden, but then, who could? Even his arranging wasn't anything to write home about, and, at times, he comes off as a flat-out jerk in how he treated his musicians. Even, or maybe especially, with his Army Air Force Band, which is one of the greatest band ever (IMHO), his dissatisfaction was high. Still, even with all this, he was able to produce great music, and I've fallen very much in love with it. There is some speculation on what Miller would have done if he survived the war, some saying that he would have gone the Stan Kenton or Woody Herman route. I'm afraid I would disagree with that sentiment, Miller stikes me as someone would have gone the Lawrence Welk route, the "give the people what they want" kind of band, and sadly, he would go for that because of the money involved. Miller did like his money, and was very concerned about being popular. Being inventive, jazzy, that might be nice musically, but financially, that's a losing proposition. It would have also been interesting to see how Miller, or if, he would intergrate his band. In Simon's book, Miller comes off as a biased, if not racist, kind of person. Edited August 4, 2009 by Matthew Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Van Basten II Posted August 4, 2009 Report Share Posted August 4, 2009 (edited) Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard 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. I have the exact one you pictured. Edited August 4, 2009 by Van Basten II Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimmer Posted August 8, 2009 Report Share Posted August 8, 2009 I have the exact one you pictured. 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. Unlike Poe, Bierce's stories are often very short descriptive sketches, sometimes only three or four pages long, and they can also seem to be a bit forumlaic. That said, I'm impressed by how well Bierce can create a whole creepy atmosphere in such a confined space and with such simple, direct and surprisingly modern language. In some ways his stories seem like a precursor to those one or two page horror stories that used to be published in Gold Key/Whitman comics, and the surprise endings remind me of some episodes of The Twilight Zone, which is fitting since his story "An Occurance At Owl Creek Bridge" was made into an episode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlhoots Posted August 8, 2009 Report Share Posted August 8, 2009 Carlos Fuentes: The Death Of Artemio Cruz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carnivore Posted August 8, 2009 Report Share Posted August 8, 2009 'Angler - The Cheney Vice Presidency' by Barton Gellman Excellent portrait of possibly the most focussed, ruthless and efficient operative in the history of American politics. Nothing to admire and plenty to loath in his manipulation of people, the Constitution, and the law - not to mention facts. However - morality aside - and the ex VP's amorality is gigantic - if Obama had someone running heath care reform with even a tenth of Cheney's abilities we'd have an effective bill signed by Christmas. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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