For a class I'm teaching: Reading the OED by Ammon Shea. About the 3rd or 4th time I've read it. It's interesting and it works pretty well. Students who don't tend to like books are digging this one and have bought extra copies for gifts for parents, etc. I mean, what college student doesn't like learning about the history of English when you have words like "Lant" (a verb meaning to add urine to ale in order to make it stronger) and a word that appeared not long after to designate a "surface that had not been urinated upon" ("unbepissed")? For another class I'm teaching: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, and about 5 or 6 partially credited graduate assistants. The book is getting pretty good reviews in higher ed students, but my students... mostly in their first year of college, are eathing its lunch. There's some serious holes in its logic and some possible problems with its methodology. Damn good discussions as a result.
A bit of local Columbus history; a lot of story summaries from various newspapers from the early 20th Century. The style of the articles is quite different from today's writing.
I was listening to an NPR show this weekend that featured Jack Gantos, a prize-winning young-adult author I'd never heard of. Mention was made of his memoir of the time he spent in prison for running drugs. Interesting background for a prizewinning Children's author. Found his book at my public library on the way home and knocked it off in about 3 hours. Pretty damn good. Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos. Back when I was in Jr. high and high school, are books didn't narrate stories of rapes or of prisoners having broken lightbulbs stuck in their anuses... at least I don't remember such scenes in Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon, one of my fav reads over the years and "Charlie" or was it "Charly"? an excellent accompanying movie. I don't remember that either.. Sounds like it could be painful.
Yeah, I heard that interview on Wait... Wait.... as well. Almost didn't want to get back to the rest of the show.... And yeah, children's and juvenile literature is in a waaaaay different place than it was when we were younger.
My wife picked up a copy of this for me. I like the way McGinness writes so I'll looking forward to this. Yeh, I know I'm late getting on it but that shouldn't make it less enjoyable.
I wonder if mention of this book will bring out the McGinniss haters again. It's been while, but in the years after this book first came out, posting an image of this book was like a homing beacon for people that don't like his approach to this book, to soccer, etc.
Interesting isn't it. The way I'm reading it is of an American who has discovered what a lot of American's on these board have. (and you see it here weekly when someone signs as a newbe and want to share his feelings) He's become very pasionate about it so much so that he wants to, and does, write a book about it. I'm only about 1/4 in now and I've seen a lot of errors and misconceptions but none worse than I read on the boards every day. I'm a travel person, I've lived and bought homes in 4 different countrys and I try to get out to visit a different country as often as I can. ("Different cultures, different customs". Peachy Carnahan. Literary reference. ) So I'm getting as much out of his living in an interesting country, just for a few months, as I am reading the football part. I've watched, played, coached and reff'd football in several different countries for over 60 years, none of his comments on the game are new to me, especially after reading posts here for 10 years. McGinniss's writes books, that's how he makes money and I believe he wrote this one "from the heart" about his (new) passion and "his" experiences. It's entertaining and I'll give him license for that. McGinniss does tend to polorize people, doesn't he? He wrote about the Kennedy's. Got labled as a Kennedy hater. He wrote about the Palins, and got labled......not just labled but sleezed in the same republican way as anyone who said anything about the Bush admin. (Not starting a political thing, just the fact's marm) His other books have engendered the same polarity. So, I'm just enjoying the read...! And just for that, I'm changing my sig. to a quote from the book...
I never thought I would see someone else that had read that book. I do not even know how I acquired it but it was on my book shelf a couple of years back and I read it. I remember it being mildly entertaining. He knows how to write and he had an interesting story to tell.
Rereading for a class I'm teaching... Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary. Students are having a hard time reading it, but they're plowing through and most of them find something amusing or offensive on every page, which is the idea. for my own, I just read for the first time Joseph Heller's Something Happened because I'd come across a few people who see it as his best book. I don't. It's not bad, but it seems like Heller was trying to cover his bases as a post WWII Major American Novelist (MAN). In order to knock off guys like Norman Mailer or James Jones, he had to write his war novel. His innovation there was to update the WWII novel for the 1960s, which he did very well, given that he wrote Catch-22 in the late 50s and published it in 1961. For Something Happened, Heller had to get his MAN in the workplace cred. So he basically gives us a 1960s version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (more sex, more drugs, fewer WWII flashbacks). A bit less impressive due to the fact that it came out in 1974.
Devil's Dictionary is fantastic. Bearce would have fit in at home with today's modern cynic humor that is so popular with the Internet/commedians. I loved Miracle of Castil... I probably read that thing at the perfect time to read it though, I read it when I was just a bit of a soccer fan becoming a bigger soccer fan, pretty much the perfect target. I could care less for the author (especially the sleazy stuff he did while researching the Palin book), but I did read once about how he came to write Miracle and it started with him walking out on a contract to write about the OJ case. He apparently decided the case was lost after the jury was selected and he wasn't going to sit through the resulting train wreck (and how right was he? I remember seeing one jurror on tv aftewords get asked about the DNA evidence and she replied, "That stuff meant nothing to me, blood is blood, you can't tell a person's blood from anothers, you can't even tell a persons's blood from a billy goat's"). So Joe returned his large book advance and went to Italy and stumbled upon a true classic of soccer writing. I haven't reread Miracle, partially because I remember it as being a true great and I don't want to be distracted by anything I've learned since then that would contradict it! Like I said, right time, right place for that book to be just perfect for me.
So I got this… (Death Comes to Pemberly) …for my wife (birthday) and she wanted me to read it, too. I’m a huge Austen/Pride and Prejudice admirer and I’ve liked James’ stuff too, so I probably would have read it in any case. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. It was only okay, at best. James’ writing seemed constrained by the fact that she was using someone else’s characters (and revered characters, at that). Ultimately it was neither a rewarding evocation of Austen nor a particularly compelling murder mystery. It was lopsided, for one thing. Elizabeth and Darcy seemed to be stuck working through the same emotions and issues that they’d dealt with in P and P, while other major characters (Wickham, for example) had moved on and were more vital and interesting, thereby. That might have worked, actually (one could argue that outsiders like Wickham are forced into agency if only because of their outsider status, while more successful folks like Darcy and Elizabeth consolidate and maintain), but for the fact that it seemed accidental. I think James was just more comfortable extrapolating from the P and P version of Wickham than she was for the two main characters. Since Elizabeth and Darcy were the main characters in this book, their passivity made the book...boring.
I have read the 9/11 Commision Report, 102 Minutes and Ghost War, so I am looking forward to this one. "A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is the definitive history of the long road to September 11"
I remember reading the New Yorker excerpts that became that book. Wright is one hell of a great journalist.
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow I loved his biography of Alexander Hamilton, and this one is every bit as good. Institutional Memory by Gary Frank
Strange Toys by Patricia Geary Sort of an 80s voodoo novel, after which the author apparently dropped out of sight.
Patricia Geary was teaching freshman comp and undergraduate lit classes at LSU when my wife and I were in grad school there. Don't remember ever talking to her, but she used to wear a cape. Pulled it off pretty well. I've knocked off a couple of novels by a couple of seriously prolific writers. Hondo by Louis L'Amour. Better than I expected. A couple of surprises and a pretty good application of the stock characters and situations of the genre. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon. I've read a few of his Maigret novels, which are police procedurals set in Paris. This is a crime novel about a businessman who goes off the deep end when his business fails. This book was published in 1938, which Wiki tells me is the same year Sartre published Nausea. Simenon's novel is better, but because of his career as a pulp writer, he wasn't going to get credit for that for quite awhile.
Another Christmas gift book: Empire of the Summer Moon, by SC Gwynne. I'm only part way through it. It's alternately fantastically good and really annoying. The descriptions of events are everything the cover blurbs say they are: vivid, astonishing, etc. They're well written and convey place and time wonderfully. However, I've just moved into the chaper called High Lonesome, in which he does some historical and cultural "analysis" of the Comanche, and that's not nearly as good. First, he sticks in a throw-away line about historical analysis blindly supporting the depiction of Indians as noble savages who engaged only in semi-violent ritualized warfare. There have been arguments like that made, in specific times and places. But that was a long time ago and the leaders in that field have long ago abandoned that kind of crap for nuanced, evidence based analyses of particular histories. Second, he keeps talking about the Comanches as primitives. He talks about band organized societies and/or hunter-gatherers (and there's a difference that he fails to articulate) as evolutionarily behind agriculture based societies. And he talks about certain beliefs (eg absence of codes of Good and Evil) and behaviors (torture and generalized amoral bloodthirsty prosecution of violence) as inherently belonging to that level (bands) of socio-economic evolution. In my opinion, no book that relies on pastiche and arguments that were exploded thoroughly 50 years ago deserves to be called "meticulously researched" (as one reviewer put it). For example, it's easy to read enough to learn that there are band societies that do, in fact, have notions of good and evil and--while no human society has ever been anything but violent in some degree--are far closer to the non-violent end of the spectrum than the Comanche were. There's nothing inherently band-like or hunter-gathererlike about the swathe the Comanche's cut through the Great Plains. And Gwynne himself briefly notes that the Comanche began as a small, persecuted group that benefited (enormously) from being the first Indian population to adapt well to horse culture. The violence they practiced might be better explained by the particular features of the broader political environment in which they lived than by reference to scurrilous assumptions about primitivism.
This is basically Anita Thompson writing her view of Hunter and giving some inside details about him, his day-to-day life and view on life. Good stuff so far. It is only a couple hundred pages. If you are an HST fan, I highly suggest checking it out.