Random thoughts about Books

Well, if you're downing pints and thinking about Keynes and Hayek, you need the hip hop versions:

 

There's even a website & app for this now called GoodReads. Very simple and it lets you also mark books to read. Plus, you can read other people's reviews and follow your friends. Most reviews aren't great but they're better than Amazon reviews for the most part.

 

Stalker Who Inspired Bernard Malamud's The Natural Dies at 83

From the A.P. story linked to the article...

"The story began with what appeared to be just another young woman's crush on Eddie Waitkus, the Chicago Cubs' handsome first baseman. So complete was this crush that the teenager set a place for Waitkus, whom she'd never met, at the family dinner table. She turned her bedroom into a shrine to him, and put his photo under her pillow.

"After the 1948 season, Waitkus was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies — a fateful turn. "When he went to the Phillies, that's when she decided to kill him," [author John] Theodore said in an interview.

"Steinhagen had her chance the next season, when the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs at Wrigley Field. She checked into a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel where he was staying and invited him to her room.

" 'We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about,' she wrote in a note to him after a game at Wrigley on June 14, 1949.

"It worked. Waitkus arrived at her room. After he sat down, Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, 'I have a surprise for you,' then turned with the rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest."​

​

 

Well, I can imagine reading "Devil in the Grove" someday. Sharon Olds... No. Last year's music winner kicked ass, so I'll check out Caroline Shaw.

 

20 Books about Punk Rock

 

I Read All 23 John le Carre Novels: Here's My Report to Control

A Delicate Truth, Le Carré’s 23rd novel, is a meditation on “corporate rot,” in which multinationals and defense contractors represent the new invisible enemy. Among the corporate rotters are Miss Maisie, a dull, monied, right-wing caricature, and Jay Crispin, le Carré’s dark Gatsby—a “rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless of where he got them from.” Toby Bell, this year’s innocent, finds himself in the unhappy position of exposing a shameful counter-terrorism op that claimed the lives of a woman and her child. Le Carré is tilting at the Tea Party here (by name, no less), but more so at freelance intelligence peddlers and black ops coordinated by an “ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” Even the acknowledgments are more polemical than usual: “[Thanks] to Clare Algar and her colleagues at the legal charity Reprieve, for instructing me in the British Government’s latest assaults on our liberty, whether implemented or planned.” That word “planned”: ominous, isn’t it?

From his very first novel, le Carré has trafficked in portraits of decline, evoking the grays of post-Blitzkrieg Britain, where rationing (if you recall) didn’t end until 1954. In le Carré, we see as nowhere else the decay of an empire that found its conscience too late and never knew precisely what do with it.

You don’t see this in Fleming.​

​

 

NPR Interview With Melissa Mohr, author ofHoly Shit! A Brief History of Swearing

Transcript

Next, we're going to have a conversation about the English language. But first, here's a warning. We're talking about swear words, curses, obscenities. OK, this is a bit uncomfortable.

Melissa Mohr's new book is called "Holy (bleep)." It is a brief history of swearing. She offers insights into the development of curse words through the ages. And she told us that the second word in the book's title, which I'm not going to repeat, is one of the earliest obscenities she could find. But back before the Renaissance, it wasn't actually a bad word at all. In fact, it was pretty ordinary.

MELISSA MOHR: People lived very differently. The way their houses were set up there wasn't space to perform a lot of bodily functions in private. They had privies with many seats and it was thought to be a social activity that you would, sort of all, get together on the privy and talk while you did this.​

​

 

This was a great article and list. thanks for posting it.

 

To learn to read is to light a fire;every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo

 

That would also fit in one of the photography threads. And I would so hit this.... when she gets to a stopping point, of course...

 

Reading makes for great foreplay

 

Speaking of which 17th Century Sex Manual called "School of Venus: or, The Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules for Practice" rediscovered

The book, as you can see from this frontispiece, doesn’t pretend to be about anything other than sex. Venus has but a few major dramatis personae: Katherine (“Katy”), a beautiful virgin who’s completely ignorant about matters of sex; Roger, a suitor interested in changing that; and Frances (“Frank”), Katherine’s more-experienced “kinswoman” who tells Katherine all about sex in order to “fire her Blood” and make her “[long] to be at the Sport.”

A discussion between Katy and Frank comprises the first half of the book. Frank explains the mechanics of erections, teaches the vocabulary used to name erotic anatomy, and describes the normal course of a sexual encounter. Most of all, she reiterates the argument that everyone is "doing it"—even those Londoners Katy thinks of as respectable.

After Katy is persuaded, Roger just happens to drop by, and the two commence her sexual education. In the second part of the book,....​

​

 

The Case For Professional Book Critics. Thought about the recently sent-off poster "worms" when I read one passage:

But now it appears that I am wasting my time and that of other readers, for who needs the opinion of a professional critic when all one has to do is read the opinion of the pseudonymous commenter or Amazon reviewer? "Dull, grim and inpenitrable. [sic] To me it came across a heartless tale [sic], I did not find myself empathising strongly with any of the characters or caring if they succeeded of [sic] failed," said one customer review of Ulysses. Well hats off to her for at least trying; and indeed, as she says later on, the book is not for everyone.

That was a cheap shot, I know, and one could delve into history and find plenty of contemporary professional critics making far more obtuse and malicious judgments about the same book; and there are other, more thoughtful reader reviews of the same book on Amazon I could have picked to suit my purposes, only not as vividly.​

​

 

Agents are leaches in fields other than sports: Harper Lee's agent "stole" Mockingbird from the 87 year old author.

http://www.latimes.com/features/boo...kingbird-vanity-fair-20130709,0,6313195.story

 

Five "new" Salinger books forthcoming, says Entertainment Weekly...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...ger_books_will_be_published_according_to.html

Entertainment Weekly breaks down the supposedly upcoming titles:

—an anthology, The Family Glass, which will include the existing Glass family stories along with five new ones as well as a Glass family genealogy.

—a World War II novel inspired by Salinger’s enormously complicated relationship with his first wife, Sylvia, who may have been a Gestapo informant.

—a manual of the Hindu Vedanta religion, which Salinger followed for the last 50 years of his life.

—a novella based on Salinger’s own experiences that, according to the authors, “takes the form of a counterintelligence agent’s diary entries during World War II.

—“a complete retooling” of Salinger’s unpublished Holden Caulfield story The Last and Best of the Peter Pans, which will be packaged with the existing Caulfield stories as well as new stories and The Catcher in the Rye, “creating a complete history of the Caulfield family.”​

 

So, we get to see Salinger's take on his life, and his seclusion, with the future publishing of the aforementioned books.

And we'll also get that great tell all version of his life as both documentary and oral history on Salinger hits the silver screen and bookshelves respectively this week.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...40788e-0f66-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html

So, as a public service, and so you can get all your prurient impulses out of your system now and you can enjoy the works as they are published, here's the salacious nuggets of his life:

...and....

...and....