• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

What are you reading?

My partner and I have been reading aloud in the evenings from Proclus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher. It's been pretty interesting! I'm much more tolerant of mysticism than the editor of the volume.

In the mornings, I start out with a few poems from Mendelsohns' new translation of C.P. Cavafy's ouvre. An old favorite poet, but I have been enjoying the new take on the language.

My afternoon book, when I can find time for it, has been Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adachi. A somewhat challenging but interesting read.

I'm also part of a faculty reading group that is working through James Baldwin's work, especially focusing on The Fire Next Time.
 
To continue the trend I've been on I followed Amazon's lead and ordered Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, which is a compilation of interviews he's done throughout his life. Originally I was going to jump around, but now am going to go in sequence. So far I've only read part of the first interview, when he was a young, cocky, thirty year old. Quite funny.

And with baby I've decided to take a new approach with books, rather than predominantly one at a time, I've taken a set of about 10, put them in my study, and am going to pick through them all periodically with no real time horizon. Lately there's no real ability to sit down and read for a few hours, so I just pick the one up I'm interested in and read a bit of it when I can. So a few I'm slowly reading now:

- The Fifth Discipline - A classic business book released in the 80s about organizational learning. Surprisingly good so far, my expectations for business books are very low.
- Death of a Lady's Man - Already back to this poetry of Cohen's, I'd like to really take my time with it
- The Sociological Imagination - A classic of sociology I picked up at our local used shop
- Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (D.T. Suzuki) - Skimming through this as I've already read so much by the same author
- How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk - I bought this a long time ago and am dreading it. These books pander to clueless parents and are quite boring, and this one is thick. But I'm determined to check it out.
- Collected Poems by Federico Lorca - Cohen's original inspiration. I'm going to really take my time with this one and not rush through it.
- The Flame by Leonard Cohen - The last release around Cohen's time of death. I bought it a long time ago and oddly never went through it. Regretting that now with our lack of time.

There are a couple others, but books I've already mentioned in-thread and not finished yet.
 
I have to disagree with your opinion of How To Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk. First, it's filled with explanatory illustrations such that you can get the gist of the ideas in only a few minutes. Second, I found it to be insightful. I changed my method of talking with my son based on this book, and more than once I found myself saying, "I wish my parents had talked to me this way."

I've worked in retail for two decades and have seen a lot of parental interactions with their kids. I am quite convinced that if some people talked with their friends the way they talk with their children, then they wouldn't have any friends.
 
James Brown said:
I have to disagree with your opinion of How To Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk. First, it's filled with explanatory illustrations such that you can get the gist of the ideas in only a few minutes. Second, I found it to be insightful. I changed my method of talking with my son based on this book, and more than once I found myself saying, "I wish my parents had talked to me this way."

I've worked in retail for two decades and have seen a lot of parental interactions with their kids. I am quite convinced that if some people talked with their friends the way they talk with their children, then they wouldn't have any friends.
Click to expand...

To be fair I haven't started it yet. But the issue I have with many parenting books isn't that they're bad books, but instead that they're too text-heavy for the substance they offer. Those I've read so far usually make you work pretty hard just to pick up a few new concepts, which could be outlined in a long-form article. You see the same problem in business books - authors latch on to a handful of very good ideas that are valuable, but not that complicated, then they write hundreds of pages of unneeded text.

I really shouldn't knock this particular title before I've even opened it, but my expectations from the last few haven't been set very high. I know I'll gain from it, but I'm expecting a few useful paragraphs, then skimming through pages and pages of examples.
 
Politesse said:
In the mornings, I start out with a few poems from Mendelsohns' new translation of C.P. Cavafy's ouvre. An old favorite poet, but I have been enjoying the new take on the language.
Click to expand...

Is there a translation you'd recommend? I own a copy of his collected poems, this one translated by Edmund Keeley, but it was mostly by force as I found the copy at one of our local, used bookshops.

It's reviews seem to be pretty good.
 
rousseau said:
Is there a translation you'd recommend? I own a copy of his collected poems, this one translated by Edmund Keeley, but it was mostly by force as I found the copy at one of our local, used bookshops.
Click to expand...

Well, as I said, I've really been enjoying the one I'm going through now, by Daniel Mendelsohn. I also highly recommend this excellent interview with the translator, if you are a Cavafy.fan. The Keeley collection was the one I discovered his work through. I find Mendelsohn's version to be a bit more straightforward and minimalist, which suits the mournful character of Cavafy's Greek as I understand it.

This is reminding me that you started a nice thread on poetry while I was doing spring semester planning, and I never got round to hunting it down again.
 
Politesse said:
rousseau said:
Is there a translation you'd recommend? I own a copy of his collected poems, this one translated by Edmund Keeley, but it was mostly by force as I found the copy at one of our local, used bookshops.
Click to expand...

Well, as I said, I've really been enjoying the one I'm going through now, by Daniel Mendelsohn. I also highly recommend this excellent interview with the translator, if you are a Cavafy.fan. The Keeley collection was the one I discovered his work through. I find Mendelsohn's version to be a bit more straightforward and minimalist, which suits the mournful character of Cavafy's Greek as I understand it.

This is reminding me that you started a nice thread on poetry while I was doing spring semester planning, and I never got round to hunting it down again.
Click to expand...

I just did a bit of rooting around and as far as I can tell Mendelsohn might be the gold standard. I should look into a copy, and maybe finally finish Keeley's version too?
 
rousseau said:
Politesse said:
rousseau said:
Is there a translation you'd recommend? I own a copy of his collected poems, this one translated by Edmund Keeley, but it was mostly by force as I found the copy at one of our local, used bookshops.
Click to expand...

Well, as I said, I've really been enjoying the one I'm going through now, by Daniel Mendelsohn. I also highly recommend this excellent interview with the translator, if you are a Cavafy.fan. The Keeley collection was the one I discovered his work through. I find Mendelsohn's version to be a bit more straightforward and minimalist, which suits the mournful character of Cavafy's Greek as I understand it.

This is reminding me that you started a nice thread on poetry while I was doing spring semester planning, and I never got round to hunting it down again.
Click to expand...

I just did a bit of rooting around and as far as I can tell Mendelsohn might be the gold standard. I should look into a copy, and maybe finally finish Keeley's version too?
Click to expand...

I mean, can you have too many? :D
 
Politesse said:
rousseau said:
I just did a bit of rooting around and as far as I can tell Mendelsohn might be the gold standard. I should look into a copy, and maybe finally finish Keeley's version too?
Click to expand...

I mean, can you have too many? :D
Click to expand...

With the difficulty I have finding new stuff I like, might as well have two copies of Cavafy. That poetry discussion thread is so open for recommendations.
 
I forgot to mention in the last post that I'm also reading The Favourite Game by Leonard Cohen, his first novel. Here is the review I left of it on Goodreads:

Leonard Cohen's first novel. I've put off reading it because even as an ardent Cohen fan I imagined that I would find a semi-biographical novel written by a twenty-something a bit of a slog. Cohen himself stated that it's not meant to be a biography, but it's pretty close to it. Having just read his actual biography titled 'I'm Your Man', there is pretty high consistency between this book and the early years of his life. Although there is definitely an artistic and obscuring element.

On the whole it's pretty much what you'd expect - another young man over-estimating how interested people are about the early years of his life. To Cohen's credit he was a very good writer, even then, but it's clear to see that much of the wisdom he'd pick up throughout his life just wasn't there yet. That makes this an interesting read for the most serious Cohen fan, but likely something that can by passed by if you're just looking for interesting literature.
Click to expand...

I also skimmed through How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and it was pretty much as predicted. Definitely valuable for some parents, but I didn't find it super helpful. There was one chapter I liked a lot, though, on not limiting your kids self-perception. That's something I'd not read anywhere else or really thought about.
 
rousseau said:
Death of a Lady's Man (1978) - Hard to describe, but absolutely phenomenal writing
Click to expand...

I went through the above quickly, as I was going through the rest of Cohen's catalogue that I hadn't read before. Going through it again now, slowly and carefully, and I have to say it's a cool book. If you're at all into poetry it's worth owning.
 
Louie Louie by Dave Marsh. All about the song that is Exhibit A of early 60s garage band rock. Overwritten to an extreme, but that's the fun of it -- it's like what you'd get if someone wrote an intellectualized appreciation of Fizzies or 3-D horror movies.
 
I finally read a bit of Federico Garcia Lorca's Collected Poems last night (Lorca being the original poet to inspire Cohen). It's a massive book and I've just scratched the surface so can't generalize, but it's surprisingly enjoyable so far. Very sensuous writing, as you'd expect from someone who lived in Southern Europe.

I also ordered a book last night containing both the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, his two final and most famous works. Translated by Stephen Mitchell.

For quite some time I was buying all of my poetry at local shops in town, when it finally dawned on me that everything decent in their poetry sections was being picked clean pretty quickly. So I've turned to Amazon, and not looked back.
 
Good luck with War and Peace -- and did you know, Tolstoy's original title was War, What Is It Good For? I read it back in 8th grade, which would make it 1968. Good God. I'm sure I missed a lot of the book's deeper points on character, on society, on war, etc. I own a nice copy of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, and it is on my bucket list. (I've never read Anna Karenina, and really need to.) Curious: do you have a goal of so many pages to read, per day? With a book that long (the Maude version runs 1351 pages) I never get done unless I hit a certain quota every day.
I'm now reading a MacKinlay Kantor novel from 1936 with an absolutely dipshit title: Arouse and Beware. But the book is good. It's historical fiction, a compact account of two soldiers who have escaped from a hellhole Confederate prison and are trying to get to the north. It was filmed in 1940 as 'The Man from Dakota', which TCM will air on Wed. the 19th, so I want to have it read by then.
 
ideologyhunter said:
Curious: do you have a goal of so many pages to read, per day? With a book that long (the Maude version runs 1351 pages) I never get done unless I hit a certain quota every day.
Click to expand...
I do not have a goal of X pages a day. I read constantly and compulsively enough that it's not difficult for me to get through a lot of pages. The slightly difficult thing, for me, is to keep the compulsive reading focused on one book rather than scattered between many books, which slows things down and leads to a risk of getting derailed from one book to another. (When reading for recreation like this that's not a big deal, of course.)
 
One of my current books Is Hillary Clinton's Living History about their White House years. I read the book, glance up at the telly where Trump is being himself, then back to the book, shaking my head and wondering what on earth could have happened there.
 
Finishing up Nabokov's Lolita. Strange to think I never got around to reading it before now. Good read, immersive, beautiful writing style, unconventional love story; enjoying it thoroughly.
 
Fiction: I've just started is Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky after reading Children of Time.


Non-Fiction I'm starting to go through The Mind illuminated as I go through my meditation journey.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom