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What are you reading?

Swammerdami said:
I like physical bookstores. Some of my favorite books are ones I saw randomly on shelves, books on subjects I'd never consider searching for at an on-line bookstore.

An example I'm reading now is Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archeology by C.W. Ceram -- not a topic I particularly sought but it caught my eye in a used bookstore. Rather than just drily recitating key discoveries, the author does a great job of vividly depicting the key persons, settings and events.

I'm reading some other books also, e.g. Mission to Paris, a spy thriller by Alan Furst; and am re-reading two fascinating books by the biochemist Nick Lane.
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I never thought I'd see the day, but I'm using physical bookstores less these days. Most of what I want to read lately is esoteric enough that it never hits the shelves of any of our locals. I still visit, still browse, but more and more don't walk out with anything. I'd say about 75% of what I buy these days is from Abe Books online, and I check out a lot from the library.

Although recently I discovered that my favourite local sells ex-library books at a discount in their basement, and all the weird, academic library books that no one wants are now exactly what I want.
 
Currently reading Killer Priest by Mark Gado, which is the true-life story of Father Hans Schmidt. The book combines the best of religion with the best dating tips. (For anyone who wants just the facts, see Schmidt's wikipedia page.) Back in 1913, Schmidt cut the throat of his pregnant mistress (actually, he said they were married, and he had conducted the service himself), dismembered her, and put her in the Hudson River in several installments. He was arrested just a few hours after conducting confessions in the church.
The book is hampered by Gado's ill-considered additions of novelistic touches of what the various figures felt or said. But the facts are garish and twisted enough to keep a reader like me on the case. (There are tons of pervo things that would take several long paragraphs to convey.)
I'm convinced Hitchcock knew about this case -- he was a true crime buff -- and used some of it to garnish the script of Rear Window.
 
sensiblesue said:
Might as well get one of my favorite threads going over here in the new place:

Continental Drift by Russell Banks. This fellow was the keynote speaker at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference several years ago. He was not a very likable guy--seemed aloof and sort of stuck on himself--but he writes with a confidence that few can manage. This is a remarkable novel of twentieth-century America.
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Just finished reading Dolls, Dolls, Dolls by REbello. It is about the book and movie versions of Valley of the Dolls. Valley of the Dolls was one of three movies that I saw in the late 60s in my late teens that shocked me by being just awful. The other 2 were Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf & Barbarella. In all 3 cases I had read the source material first--in the case of Barbarella an English translation of one issue of the French comic. I think this comic was better than Albee's play and Susann's novel. But all three movies were bad--Valley of the Dolls the worst except tht it didn't have the pretentiously, ostentasiously black-and-white cinematography of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. According to Rebello, poor Patty Duke thought she would get an Oscar nomination, for her Valley performance. (After all, I note, Elizabeth Taylor had got the nod the year before for much the same performance with her screeching Martha.) However, Taylor wasn't playing a diva singer--and Duke is just awful at that. (Taylor did a bad turn as a singer in the 1970s in A Little Night Music, a movie which she sinks.0
 
Purest coincidence. I was reading The Baby Boom. Assuming that was by some right wing US commentator. Forgotten the name, and had to leave it on the ship, half read.

Next book I pick up is Tom Ballard's I Millenial. I like the way he thinks, if a little whingy. Not sure comedians are good at economics but I can't argue with much that he says, and there are a few laughs.

Saving Lessons in Chemistry for the flight home.
 
I'm always reading about 5 books at a time and if I'm really motivated, I might finish one of them. When I want something very light,
I read Flappers to Rappers: American Youth Slang by Tom Dalzell. The interesting thing about slang is how often the same word becomes popular in different decades. Who knew that groovy originally came from the 30s or 40s, or that hep cat and hip cat were both around at about the same time, until hep finally became square and hip lasted long beyond the times when it diverged into hippie.

When I want to read something more serious this week, I'm reading "The Patriarchs" by Angela Saini. I've only read one chapter and in that one, the author researches and explores a rare matrilineal society that existed for a long time in a part of India, until European influences among others slowly influenced it to change. That society sounded more like a bonobo society, compared to the patriarchal ones that remind me more of chimps.

But, I think her primary purpose in writing the book is to explore and figure out how patriarchal societies became the most common. Of course, certain religions had a lot to do with it and if White Christian Nationalism should become the dominant culture, we women are fucked, and not in a good way.
 
The Lankavatara Sutra by D.T. Suzuki. The only existing English translation of this Mahayana text, thought to have been written around 350 - 400 CE, with an uncertain place of origin. Suzuki spent 7 years of his life on the project, and I managed to buy it for 2.50 CDN.

Apparently the historical debate is about whether the text came before or after Nagarjuna, who was a major Buddhist philosopher.
 
rousseau said:
The Lankavatara Sutra by D.T. Suzuki. The only existing English translation of this Mahayana text, thought to have been written around 350 - 400 CE, with an uncertain place of origin. Suzuki spent 7 years of his life on the project, and I managed to buy it for 2.50 CDN.

Apparently the historical debate is about whether the text came before or after Nagarjuna, who was a major Buddhist philosopher.
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I lied. It's no longer the only existing English translation, but I believe it was the first one.
 
By coincidence, my weekend reading took a turn for the bizarre. I had picked up a signed copy of Kwame Dawes' poetry, "Duppy Conqueror", a few weeks ago, and finally found a moment to take off to the lake with it on Saturday. The next day, I dug into a textbook I'd been asked to review, Jeremy Black's "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History". Both were short works suitable for an afternoon's read, but that's about all they had in common, despite theoretically both being reflections on the same world events. It was a very strange experience. reading a mournful, poetic lament for lost histories, written by a Black African-Jamaican, just a few hours before reading a bombastic, all but overtly biased attempt by an old school British historian to obscure or outright bury his nation's culpability in the pernicious slave trade that built Jamaica as we know it.

In case you couldn't tell, I give very high marks to Dawes' book, and recommend giving the other a pass... I'm kind of shocked that it survived peer review in the current climate. But not too shocked. Everyone wants to hear that it wasn't really their fault, even respected priests and scholars. Maybe especially respected priests and scholars.

Dawes puts it this way, in his 1995 poem "Prophets":

You see, I've always known this stuff -
this stuffing of history - to be
the baggage of your sterile sermons

secretly concealed behind those curtains
while you down the best part of the wine
after we've just dipped and sipped small

behind your Oxford tongue, acrobatic
around that clean sermon of bloodless salvation;
locked up in some closet, all this stuff

is sitting there, and if it wasn't for that smell,
that thick muggy smell seeping through,
I would never know you had all this stuff

30 years ago he wrote that. Some things never change, eh?
 
A book on Lost English. Funnily, some Aussies still use some of it. It’s a stop gap book till Bilby had finished his Richard Osman books. He got some very good books for Christmas that I feel I cannot read until he has.
 
Justice is Coming by Cenk Uygur

Founder and host of The Young Turks, which I've been listening to since the Bush years. Knew most of what he talked about, but there were some interesting new facts, lots of notes giving references. Goes into how we got here, from the supreme court case that was misleadingly (and purposely) summarized as giving corporations rights, Republican push to increase corporate power, and Democrats getting sucked in by the promise of campaign donations, and the media that pretends none of this is corruption.
 
I have just finished a continuing education course/seminar on James Baldwin, wherein we read various essays, short stories, and a novel, most of which are banned in Texas schools. Damn he is a great writer! I can't believe we never read him in high school, college or even graduate school. Actually, I can believe that.
 
Just got a new, interesting one in the mail. The Great Jazz Pianists by Len Lyons, which I discovered via Reddit. It looks like it includes a survey of piano history in jazz, then a write-up and interview with about thirtyish different jazz pianists.

It's right up my alley as I've been collecting records from jazz pianists for a number of years now.
 
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