What are you currently reading?

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



Started:

[Draško]

The World of Jeeves

Complete Jeeves & Wooster short stories, thirty-something of them. I've been enjoying them for most of last year. Bit by bit, they never should be read back to back. 

[Jo498]

Of the short stories I usually read them in bunches as they were grouped in the older collections. Overall, I think they are usually better than the longer novels. Especially the later novels are not that good anymore although usually Jeeves and Wooster is still better than the late "Blandings" novels. (The earlier Blandings are among the best but I tend to find Galahad insufferable.)

A few days ago I finished a rather interesting SF novel by Lem: Niezwyciężony (The Invincible). Written in 1964 this already has a fully fledged conception of something like "nanobots" and I wonder if Lem was the first one with the idea. Maybe not (wiki says "one of the first" without source/citation) but it is very well explained and developed.

[bwv 1080]

rereading from about 25 years ago, mostly the audiobook, which is well done but you need the book sometimes to see the section changes.  There does not seem to be much thought into the audiobook chapters other than each of the 43 'chapters' is about 50 minutes long.  The book itself has four large chapters with numerous unnumbered sections within

[Brian]

(The earlier Blandings are among the best but I tend to find Galahad insufferable.)

Galahad is my favorite, but I have noticed that he is best when he doesn't appear often, and you wish for more of him, rather than when he is a central character.

[Mirror Image]

Re-reading:

[Karl Henning]

rereading from about 25 years ago, mostly the audiobook, which is well done but you need the book sometimes to see the section changes.  There does not seem to be much thought into the audiobook chapters other than each of the 43 'chapters' is about 50 minutes long.  The book itself has four large chapters with numerous unnumbered sections within

As with tagging mp3s (?) there is a tension between cookie-cutter organization, and variations in the organization of an artwork 

[Karl Henning]

Galahad is my favorite, but I have noticed that he is best when he doesn't appear often, and you wish for more of him, rather than when he is a central character.

Very interesting!  (FWIW, I have not yet plunged in at Blandings.)

We never feel that about Jeeves, or Psmith, meseems.

[Karl Henning]

Re-reading:

That looks mighty interesting.

[bwv 1080]

As with tagging mp3s (?) there is a tension between cookie-cutter organization, and variations in the organization of an artwork 

Yes, but at least mp3/cd tracks can be meaningfully lapeled.  Don't know why audible can't label chapters

[Daverz]

An entertaining read so far:

[asin] B004J4WNJE[/asin]

[Karl Henning]

David Ossman (yes, of course, that David Ossman), The Ronald Reagan Murder Case.

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



The Wolff book was much better than I expected it to be, and is kind of misrepresented by the "shocking revelations!" advertising its had.

[ritter]

Accompanying my recent revisiting of late 19th to early 20th century Italian opera (scapigliatura to verismo and decadentismo) with this book by eminent left-wing critic Rubens Tedeschi (who died in 2015 at the age of 101):

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I got to Tedeschi through conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni, as both men had a bit of a feud concerning many of the composers of the period (particularly Mascagni—a guilty pleasure of mine, I must admit  ). Gavazzeni was a great promoter of this repertoire (in the opera house, on record and in print), and Tedeschi called him "a champion of lost causes", contradicting many of the arguments given by the conductor. Most interesting to compare these two views of a troubled but IMHO fascinating era in operatic history.

The subtitle of the book is slightly misleading. The first edition started with Boito and the scapigliatura, and essays on the "big four" (Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi) seem to have been appended at the end in this later reprint.

Tedeschi also wrote a book on d'Annunzio and music. Apparently rather difficult to get hold of, but I've just ordered the one copy that was being offered on AbeBooks 

[SimonNZ]

Also picking away at this on audiobook at about one disc per day,and finding it very good:

[Ken B]

Also picking away at this on audiobook at about one disc per day,and finding it very good:

A dreadful book. It is deeply unreliable. Armstrong is either unaware of,or ignores the large corpus of modern historians and their work on the sources. Cf ibn Warraq, The Quest for the Historical Mohammed.
Even Robert Spencer's extremely hostile and tendentious book is better than Armstrong's.

[SimonNZ]

Interesting. Im not at all familiar with the scholarship. What sort of things does she get wrong?

[Ken B]

Interesting. Im not at all familiar with the scholarship. What sort of things does she get wrong?

She relies pretty much entirely and uncritically on traditional Muslim sources, which are of course all late. Just as one example, Patricia Crone has shown there was no trade route through the Medina/Mecca region at that time. That's a huge hit for any claim of historicity. She makes, as I recall from my reading of her, no mention of the problems with isnads and ahadith, nor the early variants of the Koran, the theories it has origins nearer Syria, bupkis, and so on. Just religious apologetics.

Aside from warraq as I recommended, Andrew Rippin has a good book on Islam that discusses this. The Oxford short intro to the Koran is excellent.

[zamyrabyrd]

She relies pretty much entirely and uncritically on traditional Muslim sources, which are of course all late. Just as one example, Patricia Crone has shown there was no trade route through the Medina/Mecca region at that time. That's a huge hit for any claim of historicity. She makes, as I recall from my reading of her, no mention of the problems with isnads and ahadith, nor the early variants of the Koran, the theories it has origins nearer Syria, bupkis, and so on. Just religious apologetics.

Oh gosh, I read Armstrong's Islam, a Short History (2000), very superficial. People like her become apologetic for something they have not even the basic understanding. I do have a thing about "former" nuns, though, priests, too, like Martin Luther. 

[SimonNZ]

She relies pretty much entirely and uncritically on traditional Muslim sources, which are of course all late. Just as one example, Patricia Crone has shown there was no trade route through the Medina/Mecca region at that time. That's a huge hit for any claim of historicity. She makes, as I recall from my reading of her, no mention of the problems with isnads and ahadith, nor the early variants of the Koran, the theories it has origins nearer Syria, bupkis, and so on. Just religious apologetics.

Aside from warraq as I recommended, Andrew Rippin has a good book on Islam that discusses this. The Oxford short intro to the Koran is excellent.

I'll see if i can track those down. Thanks.