What Are You Reading

[belfastboy]

Buckley's classic undergrad memoir, God and Man at Yale is a pleasant read.

Thanks, I will check it out.

 

[AmateisGal]

Apparently I wasn't in the mood for the Agatha Christie Christmas story as I abandoned it and instead went to the library for some other books. I found one that looks to be SUPER fun called The Invisible Library. I don't normally read fantasy lit, but as a bibliophile, I couldn't help but pick this one up: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Li...3130253&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Invisible+Library

I also picked up A Very Vintage Christmas by Bob Richter. It's perfect for Lounge members as it details how Christmas decorating evolved, tips on finding vintage decorations, and lots and lots of photos from the author's personal collection. It's quite fun.

http://www.averyvintagechristmas.com/

Ironically, as I finished thumbing through the Christmas book, a friend texted me a video he took of a bunch of vintage Christmas decorations and asked me if I wanted them - for free. I of course said yes!

 

[OldStrummer]

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived

 

[Tiki Tom]

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Apparently Stefan Zweig was a very successful writer before WWII and very widely read. After his death in 1942 he fell into obscurity.
The World of Yesterday is a fascinating look at Europe during the period of roughly 1900 to 1940 through the eyes of a bourgeois, assimilated, very successful Viennese Jew. He seems to know everyone in the intellectual circles of western Europe and is quite the progressive pan-European visionary, anticipating the whole European Union project by decades. Indeed, this book gives the lie to the false notion that European unity sprang from the wreckage of WWII with no antecedents. Anyway, a very good read (with a lot of interesting details). I'd call it mandatory reading for anyone interested in the culture and history of Europe in the first forty years of the twentieth century. A very enjoyable read, not a "slog" at all.

 

[Fading Fast]

Wouk's "little novels" are the ones I enjoy the most -- "Aurora Dawn" and "City Boy" are wonderful slices of their own particular worlds, without any pretense at being Littahrahchoor. He can be a bit ponderous when he wants you to take him seriously, but when he's writing with a light touch, he's wonderful. And I enjoy writing about him in the present tense because the old boy is still alive and well at 102.
....

He's certainly lived longer than Hudson Hawk. Probably published about ten or so years ago now, the last "little" novel I read from him was "A Hole in Texas" which is a love story wrapped around - get this - the search for the Higgs Bosun. It's a gem of a "little" book. Not up to his best, but for his age, still an impressive effort and definitely a fun read for Wouk fans.

As to "littachrahchoor" (wonderful, you are a singular person), I could hear the IED exploding as I wrote that word as I know many use it as a political-social club to beat others down with the wielder's self-declared intellectual superiority. But even if we did away with the word, its non-political-social meaning - an attempt to define timeless, universal and skillful writing - would still exist.

For me, while "littachrahchoor" (the writing definition, I don't care about the social-political one) has a subjective element to it - 2+2=4, after that most things have an element of opinion to them - there is a continuum of writing that puts some of it on the side of being universal / timeless / able to express themes and the human condition in a way that resonates for centuries / that isn't tied to its moment - that's the side of the continuum where "littachrahchoor" sits. Wouk's writing, at its best, touches that part of the continuum, but not the way a Wharton or Tolstoy or Hugo does.

My day-to-day life doesn't relate much to early 1800s France, but not too much time goes by that something in my life doesn't remind me of Quasimodo running in the church, in and out of view from the public, with Esmeralda hoisted above his head, screaming "sanctuary!" I'll leave it to the eggheads to argue about what is "littachrahchoor," but whatever it is, it (the timeless quality writing kind) is in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

 

[Tiki Tom]

When you are young, “Literature” is important. That’s when you are still trying to figure out what is important and what’s not. Hopefully some of the great books can show you ---as opposed to tell you--- what these things are. But, as a young person, you may not find these things unless someone you respect guides you to worthy titles. In my case, it was a really excellent AP English teacher in high school. I learned a lot by going through a “Literature” period; although I admit that there was some posing involved too (on my part. Think dead poets society.) Now that I’m much older, I can sort of instinctively know when I’m looking at crap, thanks to some of that early and intensely felt exposure to the good stuff. So I tend to be forgiving about young people in the throes of a "Littahrahchoor" infatuation.

 

[Fading Fast]

"My Name is Lucy Barton" by Elizabeth Strout

Broadly, there are two kinds of bad books - those you stop reading / can't read and those you read and hate. This is the later kind.

It's reasonably well written and you know the author has talent, but the book's inferred philosophy is so self absorb, so "my life and every single detail is so important to me" that it almost made me puke.

Everybody's life is meaningful to them. And having a horrible childhood doesn't absolve someone from the responsibility of growing up and becoming an adult. At some point, adults realize that no matter how interesting and important their life is to them, to most of the rest of the world, they are just another person.

This is a book about a woman who doesn't realize that. But she is also an oh-so-good person - she turns the other cheek again and again, gives money away freely (because in that Never Never Land of some politics today, disliking money - being "above" money - is proof of moral superiority) and on and on in the world of being wonderful.

I could go on, but that's it - rant over.

 

[Harp]

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Apparently Stefan Zweig was a very successful writer before WWII and very widely read. After his death in 1942 he fell into obscurity.
The World of Yesterday is a fascinating look at Europe during the period of roughly 1900 to 1940 through the eyes of a bourgeois, assimilated, very successful Viennese Jew. He seems to know everyone in the intellectual circles of western Europe and is quite the progressive pan-European visionary, anticipating the whole European Union project by decades. Indeed, this book gives the lie to the false notion that European unity sprang from the wreckage of WWII with no antecedents...

I will certainly find this, seems quite prophetic. I lived in Germany and Greece for a few years and from a distance can recall disparate economic impression
that questioned whether such union could ever succeed.
_______________________________

So I tend to be forgiving about young people in the throes of a "Littahrahchoor" infatuation.

I find that youth more commonly eschew Lit altogether, so I often gift selected works where I find the exception and there is interest in reading.
Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch and the late Simon Leys' excellent essay collection The Hall of Uselessness are titles I readily hand out to kids.

 

[dubpynchon]

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. Apparently Stefan Zweig was a very successful writer before WWII and very widely read. After his death in 1942 he fell into obscurity.
The World of Yesterday is a fascinating look at Europe during the period of roughly 1900 to 1940 through the eyes of a bourgeois, assimilated, very successful Viennese Jew. He seems to know everyone in the intellectual circles of western Europe and is quite the progressive pan-European visionary, anticipating the whole European Union project by decades. Indeed, this book gives the lie to the false notion that European unity sprang from the wreckage of WWII with no antecedents. Anyway, a very good read (with a lot of interesting details). I'd call it mandatory reading for anyone interested in the culture and history of Europe in the first forty years of the twentieth century. A very enjoyable read, not a "slog" at all.

Everything by Stefan Zweig is worth reading. At one time he was the most widely read author in Europe, it’s only recently that his books have been in print in English, crazy.

At the moment I’m reading Henry James’ ‘Portrait of a Lady’. It’s my first Henry James and I’m quite enjoying it but the going tends to be slow. I like to read something by Conrad at Christmas for some reason so this year I’ll probably just reread ‘Youth’ as I doubt I’ll have ‘Portrait of a Lady’ finished in the next week or two. If I do I’ll reread ‘Typhoon’ or ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’, probably his masterpiece.

 

[Harp]

Everything by Stefan Zweig is worth reading. At one time he was the most widely read author in Europe, it’s only recently that his books have been in print in English, crazy.

At the moment I’m reading Henry James’ ‘Portrait of a Lady’. It’s my first Henry James and I’m quite enjoying it but the going tends to be slow.

Have you read Colm Toibin's study of Henry James' inner life, The Master?

 

[dubpynchon]

Have you read Colm Toibin's study of Henry James' inner life, The Master?

I have, it was excellent, have you read it? Thankfully he didn’t try to emulate James’s style. It has the best description of alcoholism I’ve ever read in the drunken manservant. Another Irish writer, John Banville, has written a sequel to ‘The Portrait of a Lady’. Like a lot of 19th century heroines Isabel Archer kind of deflates at the end of the novel apparently (I’m hoping to finish Portrait over Christmas).

 

[Harp]

(I’m hoping to finish Portrait over Christmas).

If you haven't read Pierre Ryckmans-Simon Leys' The Hall of Uselessness, treat yourself over the holidays.
Leys was a philosopher I wish I had met earlier in life, though I appreciate him all the more so in maturity.

 

[dubpynchon]

If you haven't read Pierre Ryckmans-Simon Leys' The Hall of Uselessness, treat yourself over the holidays.
Leys was a philosopher I wish I had met earlier in life, though I appreciate him all the more so in maturity.

Thanks, I’ll give it a look.

Great signature by the way, Blake, now there was an interesting character. I’ve tried reading some of his later works, his Prophetic Books as he called them, woah. I’ve read Northrop Frye’s famous study of Blake ‘Fearful Symmetry’ and Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘The Land of Ulro’, neither helped!

 

[Nobert]

The August, 1951 issue of The American Mercury. Featruing an overview of the M-G-M studio's approach to film-making, a travel piece on Milan as the most bourgeois continental city in Italy, a rather scathing indictment of President Truman, and a critique of the new spiritualist fad known as Dianetics.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Mercury was such a strange magazine then -- there were certain tendencies in its pages in the years just after the war that led one to suspect a connection to the CIA. In a few years' time it would be taken over by the Jayhawk Nazi himself, Rev. Gerald Winrod, and would spin from there ever deeper into bizarre hallucinations. H. L. Mencken would have either been appalled or would have chuckled with satisfaction or possibly both at the same time.

As for me, I'm enjoying "Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip," a recent compilation of photos taken during the Soviet humorists' cross-country tour of the USA in 1935-36, as chronicled in "Little Golden America," reviewed earlier in the thread. This volume, prepared with the cooperation of Ilya Ilf's daughter, shows a good cross section of the thousand or so snaphots Ilf took during the trip -- and they're snapshots, not Dorothea Lange documentary photos. Ilf didn't have much sense of artistic composition, which sort of makes the photos even more interesting -- they're random images of random people, scenes, and situations with no sense of posing or propaganda or art. Ilf had a particular fondness for signs, the gaudier the better, and many such photos appear in the book. Some of the pictures are quite evocative -- a shot of a lonely crossroads with a Pure Oil gas station on one corner and a row of garish billboards across the way really does capture the essence of a certain time and place in America.

Along with the photos are selections of the text that accompanied the pictures when they were published in Ogonek magazine in the USSR, which comments track closely with those given in "Little Golden America." Some are a bit harsher, notably the discussion of advertising and Americans' devotion to it. Somebody should have shown the boys a copy of "Ballyhoo" so they could have understood that not *all* Americans took ads seriously.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Finished the last Ian Fleming James Bond "story," "007 in New York." It's less a short story than a small travelogue of Bond's reactions to late 1963 New York, but it's fascinating nevertheless. Odd that I'd never read it before it was included in the 2008 short story collection Quantum of Solace (for one of the stories, but also as a tie-in to the Bond movie of that year).

 

[Fading Fast]

Finished the last Ian Fleming James Bond "story," "007 in New York." It's less a short story than a small travelogue of Bond's reactions to late 1963 New York, but it's fascinating nevertheless. Odd that I'd never read it before it was included in the 2008 short story collection Quantum of Solace (for one of the stories, but also as a tie-in to the Bond movie of that year).

Ooh, I have to get a copy of that story. Amazon to the rescue:

 

[Benzadmiral]

Ooh, I have to get a copy of that story. Amazon to the rescue:
View attachment 98909

That's the same edition that I've borrowed from the library, the 2008 ones with the fantastic paintings, except this is a collection of all the Fleming short stories: the ones from For Your Eyes Only, plus "Octopussy," "The Property of a Lady," and the dynamite short story "The Living Daylights," which became the opening part of the first Timothy Dalton film.

 

[Fading Fast]

That's the same edition that I've borrowed from the library, the 2008 ones with the fantastic paintings, except this is a collection of all the Fleming short stories: the ones from For Your Eyes Only, plus "Octopussy," "The Property of a Lady," and the dynamite short story "The Living Daylights," which became the opening part of the first Timothy Dalton film.

Also, as I believe you recommended it to me, I just started James M. Cain's "Career in C Major."

 

[AmateisGal]

I really enjoyed reading Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

Okay, confession. There are times when no matter what I do, I cannot get into a book, even if the premise intrigues me. This is baffling to me. Does anyone else go through these dry spells?