I dream of waking up one morning and find that I'm Cormac McCarthy. He's my favorite living writer. The Road was also brilliant.
What are you reading?
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I dream of waking up one morning and find that I'm Cormac McCarthy. He's my favorite living writer. The Road was also brilliant.
Finished The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Even though I knew there had to be some twists and turns, they come out of nowhere and turn things around quickly.
Just started Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman. Only 50 pages in and I have high hopes for it. The MC is a hoot!
Just started Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman. Only 50 pages in and I have high hopes for it. The MC is a hoot!
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And all this time I thought I was the only one with that fantasy. He is by far my favorite writer of the last... oh idk fifty years.
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"The Violinist's Thumb" -- Sam Kean Not easy reading for me as I am no biologist but I am on the home stretch and it is a very entertaining read.
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The Night Circus
The Night Circus, which is not going well. It seems to have one and only one trick: to be ponderously portentous.
I do appreciate how attractively it was produced.
The Night Circus, which is not going well. It seems to have one and only one trick: to be ponderously portentous.
I do appreciate how attractively it was produced.
Julian Barnes' The Sense of An Ending was an absorbing read, but I'm not filing it on my "to be re-read" shelf; his Staring At The Sun is one I do re-read occasionally, and I wish I still had a copy of Flaubert's Parrot.
I'm reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Much better than the movies, I have to say.
Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: (She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse) - Paul Carter
I really enjoyed Auraria. If you see this or other books by this author, give it a try.
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The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. Nonfiction, and a re-read, but four decades and more gone between reads. The paperback edition I have was printed in 1965 and the binding is falling apart as I read. I took it up because of a discussion I had the other night with my 24-year-old son, who is an avid autodidact, and had come across another book in which were listed the 1000 things literate Americans should know about. He's checklisiing them.
But in the A's on the alphabetical list was Archduke Franz Ferdinand I, about whom he told me he knew absolutely nothing. So, I gave him the 75-cent lecture about the assassination in Sarajevo that is blamed for starting WWI. Which led me directly to suggest that he read Tuchman's book, which then quickly led me to consider re-reading it myself.
It's a masterpiece and a classic, a breakthrough history that turned into a major bestseller back in the early 1960s. Barbara Tuchman was an "amateur" historian, in the sense that she didn't have an academic position. But she was a voracious researcher and magnificent writer, with a knack for finding the key elements of a story and making those both accessible and vivid for the reader. As an example, most other histories of WWI are likely to start with the Sarajevo event. Tuchman, instead, writes an amazing first chapter describing the funeral of King Edward VI of England in 1910, and the attendant pomp and circumstance of the gathering of interrelated, interdependent and interscheming European royalty who attended. Her point, clearly established, is that this event was the Last Hurrah of the 19th Century, and the War to End War was already pending, even if the shooting didn't start for another four years. This chapter alone is an essay worth reading.
I've subsequently read several other of Tuchman's fine books, including The March of Folly and A Distant Mirror. Never been disappointed. A truly fine writer.
caw
But in the A's on the alphabetical list was Archduke Franz Ferdinand I, about whom he told me he knew absolutely nothing. So, I gave him the 75-cent lecture about the assassination in Sarajevo that is blamed for starting WWI. Which led me directly to suggest that he read Tuchman's book, which then quickly led me to consider re-reading it myself.
It's a masterpiece and a classic, a breakthrough history that turned into a major bestseller back in the early 1960s. Barbara Tuchman was an "amateur" historian, in the sense that she didn't have an academic position. But she was a voracious researcher and magnificent writer, with a knack for finding the key elements of a story and making those both accessible and vivid for the reader. As an example, most other histories of WWI are likely to start with the Sarajevo event. Tuchman, instead, writes an amazing first chapter describing the funeral of King Edward VI of England in 1910, and the attendant pomp and circumstance of the gathering of interrelated, interdependent and interscheming European royalty who attended. Her point, clearly established, is that this event was the Last Hurrah of the 19th Century, and the War to End War was already pending, even if the shooting didn't start for another four years. This chapter alone is an essay worth reading.
I've subsequently read several other of Tuchman's fine books, including The March of Folly and A Distant Mirror. Never been disappointed. A truly fine writer.
caw