This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga - Peter Cozzens This is interesting because my great-great-grandfather was in the 87th Indiana. The book sometimes goes into way too much detail, but still manages to convey the excitement, confusion, and horror of the second day of the battle. “That ‘barren victory’ sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy." - Confederate Gen. D. H. Hill
Giving this a whirl: In case the photo does not show up, it's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. Americanah is a pretty powerful look at blackness in the US, Nigeria, and Britain told mainly through the experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze, a pair of Nigerians who were lovers in high school, went their separate ways with separate migrant experiences, and now may reconnect in Nigeria.
The Last Interview -- Hannah Arendt I haven't read anything by Arendt other than Eichmann in Jerusalem in high school. But I remember that book well. I read it in 11th grade, and along with Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, it was the first book I read where I was interested in the author's argument. You know, before then, I had just read books for information on the adventures of Lewis and Clark or the Civil War. Those two books helped nudge into becoming a history major...
I'm a fan of the official Chaplain to the Colbert Nation, Fr. James Martin, S.J. Hence... Jesus: A Pilgrimage (2014), which is in part an introductory reading of certain key passages from the Gospel, as well as a travel narrative about Martin's first trip to the holy land. Guy's a pretty good writer.
http://www.audible.com/pd/Comedy/Sh...hit+my+dad+says+audio&pmt=b&pcrid=35525600769 so far it's very very funny
Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence - Joseph Ellis This is the type of stuff they should be making the kids read when they take history class in high school. God I hated history in high school.
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans Donald Frame. My copy is an old hardback, way cooler than the one pictured.
Felix Holt, The Radical - George Eliot "there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence."
here's mine: it's not a very old edition but it's in old french... which made it hard to read at first, but i've become used to it. the cover is all beat to hell (it's not leather, and the inside covers are just plain yellow carton), but the actual binding is bulletproof; i've been reading it for 30 years, who knows how many people before me (there are margin notes in at least two different handwritings) and no one has ever had to baby it. it's a workaday, everyday edition, just like the thoughts in it. a day without montaigne is a day wasted.
********ez vous! Forty One False Starts by Janet Malcolm. I'm skipping most of the artist pieces, but she's a pretty solid literary journalist. And the introduction to my edition is written by Ian Frazier.
Snuff by Terry Pratchett I am about half way into it, and either he is still coping very well with his Alzheimers or he has found someone who is very good at filling in the gaps. In other words, it feels very much like a proper disc world novel.
Was looking for something else in the library, but found this instead. Not the sort of book I expected to find, but it's pretty interesting to me. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" by Kyle Gann. Part of a Yale University Press series called "Icons of America" that includes such things as this book as well as books about the history of the sky scraper, the little red school house, the Liberty Bell, and the Hamburger, as well as books about cultural works like this one, Gone With the Wind and figures as diverse as Henry Miller, Geronimo, and Fred Astaire. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/SeriesPage.asp?series=5 I'll keep an eye out for a few of these.
Someone wrote a book about that. Huh. I always thought of this piece as some sort of absurdist performance art. Like Warhol's Sleep. Almost an urban legend, if you will. Learn something new every day. Which is why this is my favorite thread on BS. Edit: From wikipedia... I find the existence of four versions of this score very interesting. Like we're debating the differences between Shakespeare's quartos and the First Folio.
The Great Code: The Bible AND Literature, by Northrop Frye. Interesting reading of the place of the Bible in English and American literature. The title comes from a William Blake aphorism that "the Bible is the Great Code of Art."
Another one I was surprised to find in the stacks of the library... American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip Gura. I was expecting an overview of the major figures like Emerson and Thoreau, but there is a lot of space given over to figures I'd only encountered in footnotes of other studies.