Now that you mention it. . . Mansfield Park, a novel by Jane Austen. Whenever I read novels of this era, I'm always wondering, do any of these people have jobs? Not really, but they have ways of generating income. Slavery, in this case.
Speaking of Jane Austen, she gets name checked in this delightful piece of ephemera. Enjoy it, nerds. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wy...ed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fballoon-juice.com%2F
Work In Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool and Priest a memoir of the first 28 years of the life of The Colbert Show's official chaplain, James Martin, S.J. Interesting book by a guy born one year before I was; though he grew up in Suburban Philadelphia rather than the midwest, it was amazing how similar the jobs are, the life in high school and college, etc. Though my three summers (and one Christmas break) cleaning factories with Captain Clean was much worse than his summer caddying for rich assholes. But it did pay three to four times the minimum wage, and so far I haven't developed any tumors from the toxic environment, so it evens out.
A Short History of Judaism and the Jewish People - Steven Leonard Jacobs Ok short history, but needed a better editor.
There's A Hair In My Dirt by Gary Larson. This a cartoonish story of an earthworm and a human girl called Harriet. Larson, the author of the popular The Far Side cartoon wrote this book in the years following his retirement from cartooning. It's an interesting read.
The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy Neo-noir crime novel based on the still-unsolved Black Dahlia murder of 1947. Pretty good, but almost runs off the rails in the last 50 pages.
My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy, another memoir by a guy born into post WWII America, this one by a pretty skilled poet and critic named Edward Hirsch. The story is told in short fragments of memory connected to an aspect of growing up in Chicago and, later, various suburbs, mostly the Jewish suburb of Skokie. I knew Hirsch was Jewish, but I didn't know "Hirsch" was his step father's name. His birth name was Rubenstein. Had he stayed with that name, his life would've been a bit different (I doubt if he goes to college at Grinnell in Iowa, where he had an incredibly liberal arts and literary education. Decent poet, though I like his essays and criticism better.
An 88 page book doesn't take long to knock off... Richard Cooke on Robyn Davidson: Writers on Writers, part of a series of Australian books published by the U of Melbourne by, as the title suggests, Richard Cooke, whom I've never heard of before this book, about Robyn Davidson, whose travel book Tracks covered her journey from Alice Springs to the Western Coast of Australia with three camels and a dog (one of the best travel books I've ever read). The highlight of Cooke on Davidson is his insight that since Davidson published this book in the late 70s, travel writing by women has undergone a change for the worse: basically, because of publisher demand, women can't write an "adventure" type story that men can write; instead, the "self-help" genre has usurped the travel genre for books by women. They can't just travel, they have to travel to overcome trauma and become whole. That was a damn fine point and clarified something I'd felt, but not articulated, about decent books like Eat Pray Love and Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Rim Trail (no disrespect to Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed: it's a business decision by the publishers).
Northern Heist - Richard O’Rawe Crime novel inspired by the unsolved £26.5 million robbery in 2004 of Northern Bank in Belfast, N. Ireland.
Good Friday — The Death of Irish Republicanism - Anthony McIntyre Author is a former IRA volunteer who spent 18 years in Long Kesh prison, and later completed a Ph.D. in political science at Queens University, Belfast. Book is a collection of his writings from 1998 to 2008 about the Good Friday Agreement and ensuing peace process, which he views as a sell-out of Irish Republicanism. Very interesting reading.
Lawrence In Arabia by Scott Anderson. It's a historical tale of Lawrence's time during WWI. Well written. It's an interesting read.
Something To Do With Paying Attention a novella about the transformation of a standard-issue midwestern "wastoid" transforming himself to a career civil servant with the IRS by none other than David Foster Wallace, who actually took a few dozen courses in accounting at the universities where he taught in order to sound legit when writing about the profession. Densely written, with paragraphs that often go on for pages; definitely needed my A-game to read it (at 136 pages, it's about 11% of the bulk of Infinite Jest, and it's completely devoid of footnotes. From what I can tell, it's an excerpt that was largely, though not entirely, the crux of DFW's posthumous novel The Pale King. And I have to critique the editor for one thing: the narrator attends several colleges, one that doesn't exist, and two that do, DePaul and UIC. Alas, UIC, when the narrator attended it 1) didn't have a high rise dorm, and so far as I can tell, still doesn't, and 2) was actually called The University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, giving it the distinction of being the only Tier One research university in the country to be named after a freeway exchange. That's on the editors, IMO.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I was not ambitious enough to read this 14th century romance in the original Middle English. I read the Brian Stone translation (Penguin Books). A good story, but the poetry is lost in translation. I might try the original sometime in the future.
IIRC (and it has been like 44 years since I read it) Sir Gawain is easier to read in the Middle English than Chaucer was. Liturgies of the Wild: The Myths That Make Us, and interesting book on how myths and, more often in the book, folk tales and fairy tales, present interesting psychological and cultural truths by English story teller Martin Shaw.
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. It's a novel about a man who is released from the state reformatory. He comes home to pick up his brother and finds out that two men from the reformatory have stowed away. Takes place in the 1950s. They then go on a trip to NYC. Looks like an interesting read.
One Church Many Tribes: Following Jesus the Way God Made You, an interpretation of the Gospels by an indigenous theologian arguing that the identification of Christianity with Europe has caused, to put it mildly, problems when reaching out to the indigenous populations. Richard Twiss, a Lakota minister, does a compelling job "decolonizing" a text that really should never have been a weapon of colonization in the first place (what with the star of the New Testament narrative being executed by an imperial force).
Has anyone recommended this book? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything It’s blowing my mind.
Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East a book that puts me in mind of the great Samuel Johnson's remark about an 18th century book he reviewed: "there is much that is good and much that is new in this book. However, that which is good is not new, and that which is new is not good. The good: a thorough account using recently unearthed sources showing the way that pre WWI Germany (not a typo -- pre WWI) funded and organized groups to oppose French and British colonies in the Middle East. The chapter on Jihad Made in Germany is solid (Germany's error was assuming that the Arab world would react as one to a fatwa calling for death to Britain and French people in the region. The only place where the fatwa had any traction, was, alas, the Young Turks being motivated to commit genocide against Armenians, which they did. This contact was maintained between the wars, to the extend that the groups that became the Muslim Brotherhood was on deck to round up Jews if Rommel had made it through Egypt. The Bad: Dude: Hitler did NOT get the idea of committing Genocide from his Muslim colleagues.
So I am way, way behind at posting here and will endeavor to catch up. These two are in preparation to teach a new seminar on the Nobel Peace Prize/Laureates: Jay Nordlinger's consistently skeptical Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, The Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World (Encounter Books, 2012) ultimately won't influence my seminar much, but that's because of my students/audience (first semester frosh in a one-hour-per-week setting) rather than any deficiency. I quite enjoyed it, though I am less skeptical than him. But it will influence me, to make sure I include the shortcomings and the political pressures that influenced prizes at times. It's an interesting read. I am assigning this one, which is best utilized (IMO) in conjunction with the full text Nobel Addresses from the folks highlighted herein. It is useful by itself as a primer on dialogue, as suggested by the subtitle.If the image doesn't work, it's Those Who Listen Change the World: The Little Book on Dialogue from the Nobel Peace Center.
Solito - Javier Zamora Memoir about Zamora’s 9-week journey from El Salvador to the U.S. when he was 9 years old to reunite with his parents. He was with a group of migrants, none of them his relatives, accompanied by various coyotes. He was around 30 when he wrote this, and does a wonderful job of describing things through his 9-year old eyes.
The Fox Hunt: A Refugee's Memoir of Coming to America, a great book covering Mohammed Al Samawi's escape from civil war-torn Yemin, an escape made necessary because of his interfaith peace work that led the Houthis and Al Qaeda of the A.P. to charge him with being a Mossad agent. Most of the story are some of his fellow peace activists, Jews and Christians, working with him through social media and in the real world to get him onto a boat (captained by a Hindu, so there should be four faiths mentioned in the title). He currently leads a multifaith think tank in D.C. The narrative shows that it could have turned out much differently