Spanning the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, I am reading Stuart Archer Cohen's This Is How It Really Sounds about a trio of guys named Pete or Peter Harrington, and their intersecting stories. It is set largely in Shanghai where one of the Peters has fled after bilking thousands of people out of their investments, legally but sketchily, and the intersection of their stories after that. Welcome to the new thread!
Got this one for Christmas and started reading it today. Set in the early days of the Soviet Union, a Russian count is sentenced to house arrest in a luxurious Moscow hotel for the crime of writing a poem.
Russell Kirk: American Conservative a 2015 biography written by Bradley Birzer. Without Kirk to shape a conservative movement as a mood, a predilection, and a predisposition, conservatism narrowed and divided, permitting one part of it -- the political -- to represent the whole. As of the writing of this book, loud, obnoxious, and plastic radio and television personalities dominate the voice of conservatism as it is understood by the American public. What a far cry a rant against a liberal arts major on a popular radio show is from Kirk's employment of a specific editor for the poetry to be published in {his quarterly journal} Modern Age. Kirk's conservatism in 1959 has almost nothing in common with the populist and popular conservatism of today's modern media. We might as well be comparing the Platonism of Petrarch with the brutality of Machiavelli
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot Large parts of this are tedious, but they are worth wading through because the rest is her best work. "The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unaccountable dissident."
I've watched a lot of their shows, I'm probably not the only one. So, when this was on the shelf in the library we picked it up. They seem like they enjoy life and what they do. I've built a few homes and remodeled a few as well so i like watching what they do and I find them fun. The book "The Magnolia Story" is just their story.
#2 on my quest to read a book about each President, took a little break over the holidays and had some cheap action adventure filth to read!
He should have titled this "The Life and Times Of Saint John Adams" Was he really that squeaky clean..
I've finished a trio of crime/mystery novels from Colin Cotterill, who has two series ongoing. I started with the more recent one, about a mid-30s crime reporter named Jimm Juree (and her family) in a broken-down resort in southern Thailand. Interesting enough to get me to start the other series about the only coroner in Communist-era Laos. These three:
Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West - Dale Morgan Smith made the effective discovery of South Pass, and was the first to reach California overland from the Missouri frontier, the first to cross the Sierra Nevada, the first to cross the Great Basin , and the first to travel by land up through California to Oregon.
Fascinating story if you like the story, the history of white (had to say that didn't I? ) America. Another of my favs is the all encompassing "Men to Match my Mountains" Irving Stone.
The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life a sort of biography/extended essay about the French philosopher by the American Catholic philosopher and mystery novelist Ralph McInerny
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett This is very good, but I kept having pictures in my head of the actors from the film, especially Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet
The Film Club by Canadian novelist and TV guy David Gilmour who, as the jacket says, lets his 16 y/o son drop out of school if he watches three films with him per week. An interesting father-son memoir, with a genrous side helping of mid-life crisis. A lot more images of the book turn up on a search if you add < -Pink, - Floyd >, incidentally.
Isaac Asimov -- Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare OK, it's the 22nd day of January, and I already know this will be one of the best books I read all year. I have read a fair amount of Shakespeare the past couple of years, as well as half a dozen bios of The Bard and I am currently reading Hamlet and doing an in-depth study of the work with the American Shakespeare Theater's producer's manual, so I have read about this guy. And this is the best, most interesting survey of Shakespeare and his plays that I have come across. It's like reading the 1911 Britannica, except that every contribution is by the same guy. This is a stunning work. After reading Asimov's chapter on Cymbeline, I know want to read the play. And I've never wanted to do that....
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald - Matthew Bruccoli Excellent and interesting biography. “Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing.” – John O’Hara
Harlan Ellison -- An Edge in My Voice Collected columns from L.A. Weekly and Future Life Magazine, 1980-83 (& one in 84). Terrific stuff.
Dearest Annie: You Wanted a Report From Berkson's Class; Letters From Frances LeFevre to {her daughter, future poet } Anne Waldman (2016), edited by Lisa Birman. Letters from a mother to her college age daughter in the early and mid sixties. An interesting portrait of a parent sibling relationship similar to the father son relationship in The Film Club.