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What are you reading?

For something a little more esoteric, local left-leaning, literature type booksellers Brown and Dickson announced a store-wide 50% off sale today.

A married couple co-owns the store, who are both regular authors themselves, and the husband just released a book about a cutting edge, Gay Canadian artist who lived in London, Ontario and died of aids in the 80s. I wanted a copy but their own books can be a little steep, the sale knocked it down far enough however that I just bought one. For 12.50 well worth a Friday night read.

At half off I also bought some of the same owners poetry, too.
 
spikepipsqueak said:
In the middle of That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the finest short stories ever written David Miller.
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That looks great. I'm a BIG fan of the short story form.

My favourite anthology is 'The Art of the Short Story', because it includes some bio about each author, and a short critical analysis or some explanatory text by the author themselves, alongside each story (though not all cases of it being by the author are about the particular short story featured).

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Stor...the+short+story&qid=1564167462&s=books&sr=1-2

Published 2005 so not that much out of date.
 
Stephen King often includes an Afterword in his Short Story anthologies explaining where he got the ideas for each story, how they came about, etc.

Some people don't like seeing how the sausage is made, but I enjoy it.
 
Southern Exposure (1946) by Stetson Kennedy, an analysis of conditions in the Jim Crow south at its 'height', which is an oxymoron. This book couldn't have received any positive reviews in the southern press, as he unsparingly delineates the hellscape endured by the laborer class and the connivance of law enforcement in forced peonage (aka the convict lease system and the notorious vagrancy laws.)
 
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett.

After decades of neglect, I'm working through the Discworld pantheon.
 
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Bullock.

I got to the "good" part where he acquires power and starts having people murdered a week or so ago, and now he has his eye on the Sudetenland. There's also a nice chapter I just finished about his ideological views (materialism and a crude form of Social Darwinism, according to the book).
 
Torin said:
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Bullock.

I got to the "good" part where he acquires power and starts having people murdered a week or so ago, and now he has his eye on the Sudetenland. There's also a nice chapter I just finished about his ideological views (materialism and a crude form of Social Darwinism, according to the book).
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Don't worry. The Czechoslovak army is very strong, well positioned, and quite capable of resisting German incursions. As long as the Czechoslovakians retain the support of the British, Italians, and French, the Germans won't have any chance of successfully invading the Sudetenland.
 
Just finished an amazing non-fiction book called "Italian Fantasies", by Israel Zangwill.
 
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - About halfway through this book. I can see how it has earned its accolades. I do find it a bit hard to keep track of the characters because of the different names they can be called.
 
I've recently finished The Magician's Assistant by Ann Pachett and am currently re-reading The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

While the books and authors are very different, both books are beautifully written and both evoke myths and dreams and an altered sense of reality. In the Magician's Assistant, a woman has recently lost her husband and the love of her life, who was gay and whose lover had recently died of AIDS. She moves through her grief, and her dreams are inhabited by conversations with her husband's dead lover while at the same time, she learns that her husband was not who he claimed to be and indeed, has a mother and sisters still living. As she processes her grief, she also deals with the practicalities of meeting for the first time, her mother in law and sisters in law and navigates those relationships in a vastly different environment than the one with which she was familiar.

The Snow Child is set in Alaska, during homesteading days and centers on a middle aged couple who decide to homestead Alaska, struggling to establish a farm in a very harsh and very beautiful environment. Just as the wife is beginning to think she cannot continue, they catch a glimpse of a little girl who has taken the scarf and mittens from the snow child the couple built in a very rare moment of happiness and escape from their hardships. Over the course of some years, they gradually form a relationship with this child whose existence is doubted by their few neighbors and who often seems more enchantment than reality.

In each book, the authors write beautifully, with vivid descriptions and a sometimes dreamlike, mythic and allegorical way.

They play with perception and reality and each starkly contrasts dreamlike sequences with some very solid reality.
 
Stumbled on a copy of The Collected Poems of Cavafy yesterday at the bookstore in town I don't usually visit. At seven dollars it was a steal. Will have to get in there more often.

Also showed a bit of restraint recently and only have one book out of the library right now, which I'm going to attempt to read word for word, in it's entirety. Which is The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young.

After I get through that I want to take out The Politics of Cultural Pluralism by the same author and try to read it word for word. I checked it out a number of months ago and it was one of the most difficult books I've looked at, so I wanted to give it proper time and attention.
 
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Not a lot of factual information that is new to me but insights and interpretations I've never considered.

The way common myths allow co-operation.

Gave me an understanding of the minds of the deeply religious and the historical underpinnings of the mindset. Also should be required reading for any religious person who has ever spoken about Science as a capital letter monolith, a force for evil and the diametric opposite of religion. (Though, TBH, the book also gave me an insight into how science looks threatening to the religious.)

Good read. Highly recommend it.
 
rousseau said:
Stumbled on a copy of The Collected Poems of Cavafy yesterday at the bookstore in town I don't usually visit. At seven dollars it was a steal. Will have to get in there more often.

Also showed a bit of restraint recently and only have one book out of the library right now, which I'm going to attempt to read word for word, in it's entirety. Which is The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young.

After I get through that I want to take out The Politics of Cultural Pluralism by the same author and try to read it word for word. I checked it out a number of months ago and it was one of the most difficult books I've looked at, so I wanted to give it proper time and attention.
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Quite enjoying The Collected Cavafy, much more than I thought I would.

His style is similar to mine in that it's a bit more explicit, and he has some interesting ideas. I've also not read many complete collections, so it's fascinating reading them in chronological order. After he hit 40 he really flourished.
 
rousseau said:
rousseau said:
Stumbled on a copy of The Collected Poems of Cavafy yesterday at the bookstore in town I don't usually visit. At seven dollars it was a steal. Will have to get in there more often.

Also showed a bit of restraint recently and only have one book out of the library right now, which I'm going to attempt to read word for word, in it's entirety. Which is The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State by Crawford Young.

After I get through that I want to take out The Politics of Cultural Pluralism by the same author and try to read it word for word. I checked it out a number of months ago and it was one of the most difficult books I've looked at, so I wanted to give it proper time and attention.
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Quite enjoying The Collected Cavafy, much more than I thought I would.

His style is similar to mine in that it's a bit more explicit, and he has some interesting ideas. I've also not read many complete collections, so it's fascinating reading them in chronological order. After he hit 40 he really flourished.
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If you enjoy his poetry, I strongly recommend Daniel Mendelsohn's video interview on translating Cavafy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9PpFtiChw
 
The Uninhabitable Earth. Reading it a few pages at a time, because it's so disturbing. Jesus Tapdancing Christ. If only Trump and his core base would read.
 
The Essentials of Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki, edited by Bernard Phillips.

I checked it out of the library a few months ago, and liked it so much I bought my own copy this month, have been going through it and making notes.

Very beautiful collection of Suzuki's essays, compiled near the end of his life. If you can grasp the historical element - zen being a kind of ancient psychotherapy - it proves to be quite the interesting read. I've also noticed how similar some of the concepts are to those I found in The Happiness Trap (Acceptance and Commitment therapy) recently.
 
As it happens, I've just dug into Andrew Skilton's Concise History of Buddhism. Not exactly as easy a read as the title would seem to apply, but already useful and refreshingly non-partisan for a work of its type. I also picked up but haven't started in on Conze's Buddhism. I have several Buddhist students this term and wanted a refresher on the tradition so I won't make an ass of myself in lecture over something silly.

Also in queue: Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon, a recently re-published ethnographic interview with one of the last surviving African men to have a living memory of surviving the Middle Passage.

And my evening reading of late has been the Oxford guide to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
 
The Gardener and the Carpenter. A parenting book arguing that the more recent 'parenting' model is broken, and that parenthood should be more focused on providing the conditions to allow your kids to experiment, be creative, and learn from a diverse set of people and inputs.

The premise is on point, but it reads like another stretched out book that could have been reduced to a long form journal article. I'm ok with reading a couple hundred pages, and I get why people who aren't versed in science would find it interesting, but there's so much noise I'm finding it a slog to get through.
 
Obit and The Dead Beat, about obituaries and the people who write them.

I'm enjoying them.

From the dead beat:

Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.
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Also, because I admire a good long sentence (a long sentence that's good), these from the same source:

Thomas exercised a Southern flair for shaggy tales about odd, inherently funny people like the queen of chopped liver, the king of kitty litter, and the Goat Man (“You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down with goats and smells like a goat and it won’t be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man”—so that one began). [71 words.] He wrote his loosey-goosey riffs on short deadline, and “he sometimes ran into career turbulence because of an acknowledged tendency to carry things like sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and enthusiasms further than at least some editors preferred,” as Michael T. Kaufman wrote diplomatically in McG.’s opituary in 2000. [47 words.]
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