I thought I might finish this one before the end of the 31st, but it was not to be: we spent too much time taking down the Christmas decorations and watching football. Mostly the tree was my problem. This year we brought home a fifteen footer that took up almost the entire width of the front room. When we were looking at houses my wife and I each had a thing we wanted - she wanted all of the bedrooms to be on the same floor, and I wanted a high ceiling in the front room so I could put as big a Christmas Tree as I wanted in there. She ended up in much better shape than me, because I forgot to also wish for a double door so I could get the tree in and out easily. It took us more than an hour to get this behemoth into the house this year. Knocked a post off of my deck, put a hole in the drywall by shoving the door into it too hard for too long, knocked the handrail out of the stairwell, marked up the door frame, put some new marks on the ceiling . . . and that was when the tree was fresh. So getting it back out was always going to be a trick. I ended up renting a chainsaw and cutting sections I hoped would fit out the door when turned on their side. Now there are six chunks of the tree atop the snow berm on the street out front waiting for the Scouts to come collect them Saturday during the annual recycling event. Long story short, I have not yet finished this so it'll be first in 2016: Larry Correia's Son of the Black Sword. I requested it at the library long enough ago that I have no memory of why. It's a pretty good book - not my normal thing - about, well, a guy with a sword.
Should we start a new thread, as it is now 2016? Also, I suppose I should post the stuff I'm reading from time to time Although I doubt anyone is interested in that stuff. Here are my current books on tap:
Trilogy (The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod) by H.D. Assigned it for an intro to poetry class. Might be a bit too hard. But the "reader's notes" should help a bit. The H. D. Book by Robert Duncan. Written in the early sixties, published in the late 60s and 70s in really small press magazines, collected and made available about 15 years ago as a free Pdf, and finally published in a cleaned up form by the U of California Press
I am having a good time with this one, a unique novel that was first serialized in the Miami Herald in the mid-1990s and then published whole. It's a suspense thriller written by thirteen well-known authors in/from Florida, each taking a chapter. The main characters include Booger the manatee and a 102 year old environmentalist, a guy who accidentally drove into the bay and a cop in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it's very, very funny. I give you Naked Came the Manatee:
The Opium War - Julia Lovell I also thought I'd finish this in 2015, but a busy Christmas and drunken New Year's period meant I didn't get to much reading. Nice to have things returning to normal. This is a decent read that would be of interest to fans of both Chinese and British history.
I love Jayson Stark. Back in the late 80s, Stark was a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and every Tuesday during the season he got the whole third page of the sports section to do his "This Week In Baseball". Absolutely the best sports column ever. The cafe next to my office opened at 6:00am and I'd be there first thing poring over This Week in Baseball for an hour. Best morning of the week. Anyway, I went to party at a friend's of a friend and Stark was there. I don't think anyone else there knew that he was a sportswriter and I embarrassingly went all fanboy on him. I think I really scared him. He skeedaddled off to the other side of the house and never made eye contact with me the rest of the party.
This ultimately disappointed, and the format which was so much fun early became the problem later on as the people writing the last few chapters had to pull threads together that weren't necessarily coherent. I'd call the first six or so chapters excellent, the next four acceptable, and the final three poor. And with poor staying with you the book overall feels poor too. I am on to the John Cleese bio several of you read early last year. Enjoyable stuff.
Ah yes: Savaged By a ********ing Rabbit. Quite good. Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax (2015) by Michael McGregor. If he was known at all, Lax was a key figure in the biography of the monk/poet Thomas Merton, since the were great friends in college and immensely influenced one another. But Lax went on to live his own quiet, interesting life as a poet and unaffiliated spiritual master among fishermen and sponge divers on the Greek island of Patmos. Tough to write a biography of a guy whose life wasn't that eventful (well, for the last 60 years of it), bu this is pretty well done.
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress – Mark Twain 'Every rivulet that gurgles out of the rocks and sands of this part of the world is dubbed with the title of "fountain," and people familiar with the Hudson, the great lakes and the Mississippi fall into transports of admiration over them, and exhaust their powers of composition in writing their praises. If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn.'
The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac After reading On the Road in 2013 I went through a bit of a Jack Kerouac phase, also reading Maggie Cassidy and Tristessa. I took some time away after the latter wore me out. I'm glad I came back to this. Even if a lot of the Buddhist stuff went over my head, it was still a good travel story.
The Marvels -- Brian Selznick I am a uuuuuge Brian Selznick fanboy. Continuing on his earlier works of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, The Marvels is the latest in a new form of literature. Selznick's illustrations are more than just pictures, they are the story and his artwork is impressive. I've been waiting for this work for a year and my son told me that he wanted to give it to me for Christmas, so I had wait past the mid September release date. Then the book got lost here at the house and finally I ordered a second copy after New Years. The tension in the Val1 household was palpable. This is his most audacious and ambitious work of the three. He tells the story of four generations of a family seamlessly through 300 illustrations. It's stunning. And then the wheels fall off. It turns out that Selznick fell in love with a living history museum in London, one that the creator billed as a "living novel" and the creator made his own stories for the house, the family that supposedly lived there, and all their possessions. And in the same way that Peter Schaffer, for instance, created Amadeus to account for the fact that Mozart died writing a requiem mass, Selznick is trying to tell the story of a man who creates a similar living museum. The story of the four generations? It was nothing more than the background material for the house. It's anticlimactic, it's a let down, it's like a cruel shaggy dog story. It doesn't help that the book shifts entirely to prose at this point, and Selznick is an illustrator who is telling a story. His prose is average, at best, and there is way too much exposition. The book ends with a resounding thud. Ah well, Richard Adams wrote Shardick, Frank Herbert wrote Children of Dune, Stephen King wrote Buick 88. This was Selznick's mulligan. I still highly recommend Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck. But it's funny, I've been pumping those two works ceaselessly for four years now. Other than my daughter, I'm not aware that anyone has taken me up on them. Which is a shame, they are superb.
Started this over the holidays. Enjoying it so far, which has mostly been a history of science and philosophy...
NW - Zadie Smith This tells the story of four Londoners and their attempts to make a life for themselves away from the council estate that they grew up on. After a slow start I really found this hard to put down. Looking forward to checking out the author's other novels.
Kliph Nesteroff: The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy (2015). American comedy from vaudeville to Marc Maron's WTF! podcasts, breezily written and presenting a rather grim picture of life in show-business. Most of the drunks are the comics, and the thieves and scoundrels are the club-owners, network execs, etc. who make their money off funny people and the drunks who come to laugh with/at them
Zane Grey -- The Heritage of the Desert An early western by Grey, published in 1910, that "vaulted Grey to prominence and began a prolific career involving writing, adventuring, and movie making." Adapted for film in 1924, 1932, and 1939.
Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy This is quite unlike Hardy's famous later work, but is a nice rural love story.