More great books
Since last time...
John Hersey - Hiroshima - A bone chilling accounting of what happened when the first nuke was dropped on Japan and in the aftermath, as told by eyewitnesses. In its original form as a magazine article, it preempted all other items in the New Yorker, the first and only time that's happened. As a book, the Book of the Month club gave it free to every one of its members. Can you imagine a journalistic book having that kind of impact today? Especially if the book in question was definitely sympathetic to the victims, and those victims were the enemy?
Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace - Not actually a great book; if you want that check out Forever War. But excellent science fiction none-the-less.
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men - Short, sweet and depressing. Arguably like The Old Man & the Sea in that it features men against an impossible obstacle; in this case, grinding poverty and no hope for much better.
Got caught up on the Bill Shakespeare portion of the resolution:
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3 [Richard, Duke of York]
I'm really starting to understand the War of the Roses; once the basic history (or at least Shakespeare's version of same) 'clicked' I started cruising through these avidly. I'm currently reading Henry VI, Part 1; Shakespeare wasn't above a good prequel.
Titus Andronicus
Which proves handily that the slasher genre isn't a new invention. Titus is bloodier and more brutal and just as silly as pretty much any horror film you've ever seen.
Weird tangent: it seems lots of people are making money off reading. You can read Julia Child, The Bible, or The Encyclopedia Britannica. Clearly my next step should be to blog about Shakespeare, with one entry per act. Fame fortune and profit would then come my way. But I digress.
I also read the companion book to the TV series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey. If we take as true the rather dubious proposition that a book can convey all that is good about a form of music, then we must acknowledge that this book does for the blues. It's chock full of short pieces; some news articles, some anecdotes, some fiction, all describing some aspect of the blues or a musician or some other such thing. Incredibly powerful and moving at times... and 1/100 of the power of listening to John Lee Hooker (to name a personal favorite) scream out anger and discontent. Still, worth checking out. I'm fairly knowledgeable about the blues and rock & roll and I learned plenty I'd never heard before.
Oh, and I do read lots of other things too; just not stuff that I feel compelled to post about. On the year I'm up at 53 books. It'd be higher, but it turns out that great books sometimes take longer than trashy fantasy novels.
John Hersey - Hiroshima - A bone chilling accounting of what happened when the first nuke was dropped on Japan and in the aftermath, as told by eyewitnesses. In its original form as a magazine article, it preempted all other items in the New Yorker, the first and only time that's happened. As a book, the Book of the Month club gave it free to every one of its members. Can you imagine a journalistic book having that kind of impact today? Especially if the book in question was definitely sympathetic to the victims, and those victims were the enemy?
Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace - Not actually a great book; if you want that check out Forever War. But excellent science fiction none-the-less.
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men - Short, sweet and depressing. Arguably like The Old Man & the Sea in that it features men against an impossible obstacle; in this case, grinding poverty and no hope for much better.
Got caught up on the Bill Shakespeare portion of the resolution:
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3 [Richard, Duke of York]
I'm really starting to understand the War of the Roses; once the basic history (or at least Shakespeare's version of same) 'clicked' I started cruising through these avidly. I'm currently reading Henry VI, Part 1; Shakespeare wasn't above a good prequel.
Titus Andronicus
Which proves handily that the slasher genre isn't a new invention. Titus is bloodier and more brutal and just as silly as pretty much any horror film you've ever seen.
Weird tangent: it seems lots of people are making money off reading. You can read Julia Child, The Bible, or The Encyclopedia Britannica. Clearly my next step should be to blog about Shakespeare, with one entry per act. Fame fortune and profit would then come my way. But I digress.
I also read the companion book to the TV series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey. If we take as true the rather dubious proposition that a book can convey all that is good about a form of music, then we must acknowledge that this book does for the blues. It's chock full of short pieces; some news articles, some anecdotes, some fiction, all describing some aspect of the blues or a musician or some other such thing. Incredibly powerful and moving at times... and 1/100 of the power of listening to John Lee Hooker (to name a personal favorite) scream out anger and discontent. Still, worth checking out. I'm fairly knowledgeable about the blues and rock & roll and I learned plenty I'd never heard before.
Oh, and I do read lots of other things too; just not stuff that I feel compelled to post about. On the year I'm up at 53 books. It'd be higher, but it turns out that great books sometimes take longer than trashy fantasy novels.