What are you currently reading?

[Mandryka]

since all vowels sound the same in French anyway

N'importe quoi!

[André]

N'importe quoi!

+1 

[Ratliff]

Revisiting some Austen: Mansfield Park

A savage, dense book full of sarcasm, cutting hypocrisies, and dagger-like wit. The point is constantly hammered home that "love" is more or less a feeling which is manufactured after careful consideration of the economics and the class implications. One of the main characters is a slave owner and that reflects in his relationships with other (non-slave) characters. Edmund constantly does things which everyone praises as nice and thoughtful, but he never asks anyone if he should do them, and the intended beneficiaries are always resentful. If anyone out there thinks Jane Austen is nice and fluffy and as light as pastry, full of happy couples falling in love, they should be reading more carefully. Absolutely savage novel, like Tarantino with roses instead of guns.

Time to re-read some Austin.

[Ratliff]

Orient Express, by Graham Green. The story of a group of passengers who happen to be riding the same train, and who interact in various ways. A perfectly conceived and told story, featuring a wealthy Jewish merchant, a leftist revolutionary fugitive, a chorus girl, a priest, a petty thief fleeing a murder, a lesbian reporter and her female secretary/companion. It takes place between the great wars. Some characterizations seem inappropriate and stereotypical, but it is a window into a different age. An excellent book.

[AlberichUndHagen]

[SimonNZ]

This well done biography was particularly good in its coverage and treatment of Yoko Ono, detailing her early life in one of Japan's richest families raised like a medieval princess through to an admiring view of her experimental work with Fluxus, the barely concealed conclusion is that  far from the standard narrative of she being the worst thing to happen to him he may have been the worst thing to happen to her. Particularly so in her marelt supportive and backseat role in dealing with all his emotional inadequacies and his ever-changing championing of various nutty pseudopsychology.

Also a very vivid depiction of time and place in the coverage of the Beatles' Hamburg red light district days.


Also finished:



Hitchens' jet black portrait of Clinton. Actually hard to imagine a Republican creating something this unrelentingly hostile. Many of his arguments are interesting (though most claims unsourced) but ultimately undermined by his loathing permanently set at eleven. And on every page one is forced to wonder just what he would have made of Trump.


started:

[JBS]

This well done biography was particularly good in its coverage and treatment of Yoko Ono, detailing her early life in one of Japan's richest families raised like a medieval princess through to an admiring view of her experimental work with Fluxus, the barely concealed conclusion is that  far from the standard narrative of she being the worst thing to happen to him he may have been the worst thing to happen to her. Particularly so in her marelt supportive and backseat role in dealing with all his emotional inadequacies and his ever-changing championing of various nutty pseudopsychology.

Also a very vivid depiction of time and place in the coverage of the Beatles' Hamburg red light district days.


Also finished:



Hitchens' jet black portrait of Clinton. Actually hard to imagine a Republican creating something this unrelentingly hostile. Many of his arguments are interesting (though most claims unsourced) but ultimately undermined by his loathing permanently set at eleven. And on every page one is forced to wonder just what he would have made of Trump.

His book on Kissinger has the same level of loathing and hostility to its subject, as the title might suggest


He also wrote a book about Mother Teresa that seems to just as hostile to her, if the fact that it was republished  in the same format as the others is a good indicator.

[SimonNZ]

He also wrote a book about Mother Teresa that seems to just as hostile to her, if the fact that it was republished  in the same format as the others is a good indicator.

I've read what I think may have been the original magazine article version of the Mother Teresa thing in one of the anthologies of his journalism. He's not really hostile towards her - well, he sort of is, but in a roundabout way. He's more interested in the myth the world has made out of her due to some kind of need for a "Mother Teresa" figure, and how very different it is to the actual work she does and to her methods.

For some reason Hitchens' doesn't add the Clintons killing of Vince Foster (et al) to his list of charges - which can only be an oversight as he's happy to advance every other accusation sensible or silly, including being 100% all in on the "Wag The Dog" theory of the post-Monica wars.

[SimonNZ]

[LKB]

Still going with Jack Reacher, but also started this today and pleased to find it very well written. The section near the beginning on the Curies was a model of potted biography and popular history:

Obliquely related:

https://books.google.com/books?id=T6PjIRx26FIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22L.+Douglas+Keeney%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwid-cHZ2IPnAhW3GDQIHQmDCtoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

I recommend 15 Minutes. For those too young to have memories of the most dangerous years of the Cold War, the book will be an eye - opener. The account of the Texas Towers alone makes the book worthwhile.

Duck and cover,

LKB

[JBS]

RIP Christopher Tolkien
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/01/17/christopher-tolkien-guardian-father-jrr-tolkiens-creations-edited/

[AlberichUndHagen]

RIP. Without Christopher we wouldn't have had Silmarillion (my favorite Tolkien book) or other posthumous works published except maybe much later.

Also continuing through latter segments of Proust's Swann's Way (the Finnish translation actually divides Swann's Way in 2 volumes, the first one is about the Combray section, I'm currently in vol 2 of Finnish translation which includes Swann in love and Names of places: the name). IIRC, the next two parts of original In Search of Lost Time (In the Budding Grove and Guermantes Way) are also divided in Finnish translation into 2 volumes each. So in translation this monumental work is 10 volumes in total.

[SimonNZ]

Halfway through Age Of Radiance but also knocked of this:



A very good deep dive into one pivotal year, corralling a lot of info you'd elsewhere find scattered across a number of volumes, along with the authors reexamination of contemporary reviews and interviews, and his own interviews with many of the Beatles inner circle.

from the back cover:

"The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966—the year of their last concert and Revolver, their first album of songs not intended for live performance. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from the tour circuit, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year Americans burned their records after John's explosive claim that the group was "more popular than Jesus," the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for "snubbing" the country's first lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

[steve ridgway]

Halfway through Age Of Radiance but also knocked of this:



A very good deep dive into one pivotal year, corralling a lot of info you'd elsewhere find scattered across a number of volumes, along with the authors reexamination of contemporary reviews and interviews, and his own interviews with many of the Beatles inner circle.

from the back cover:

"The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966—the year of their last concert and Revolver, their first album of songs not intended for live performance. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from the tour circuit, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year Americans burned their records after John's explosive claim that the group was "more popular than Jesus," the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for "snubbing" the country's first lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Pop and rock music got so much more experimental and interesting that year after the Beatles picked up the studio sound manipulation techniques of 1950s/60s "classical" music.

[SimonNZ]

This was superb, particularly in the three sections near the end covering Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Up to this point I'd say the book was highly recommended.

Then the conclusion section was so astonishingly bad and bizarrely undermined and contradicted everything that came before it that I was left baffled. It was as though an industry apologist had granted access to all the materials in the book as long as they could have the final word, including the astonishing statement that a meltdown every decade or so is just the price we pay for this glorious energy source along with rolling out all the disingenuous industry spin about "fearmongering" and provable fatality figures. Its been a week since I finished it and I still feel angry and cheated.

Read up to right before the conclusion...then stop.

halfway through both of these:



aslo dipping into these:



Oates loses a point for including herself, Burgess gets a point for not including himself

[Mandryka]

That's a nice one, with the texts she wrote for Libération. She recorded some excerpts (in her unmistakeable, seductive voice) as La jeune fille et l'enfant. I've had it on cassette since it was first released, and I think that is the only format ever released (no transfer to CD AFAIK, and not on YouTube either).

Just finished L'amant. About to start L'Amante Anglaise.

Is there a recommendable book on Duras -- biography, critical etc? L'amant has made me curious about her family -- mother, big brother.

[steve ridgway]

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. The discussion of abstruse Boulez books led me to https://archive.org/details/cambridgehistoryof20thcenturymusic/ where I've started reading it on my iPad for free but as there was a cheap paperback "Like New" updated edition on Amazon I've ordered that too.

[AlberichUndHagen]

Still continuing through Les Misérables (funny that I'm reading at the same time two of the longest French novels).

One stereotype which seems to bother me a bit is that Hugo is apparently of the opinion that all the landladies are nosy and gossiping spies who like nothing better than find out the secrets of every person they come across.

[Florestan]

Still continuing through Les Misérables (funny that I'm reading at the same time two of the longest French novels).

One stereotype which seems to bother me a bit is that Hugo is apparently of the opinion that all the landladies are nosy and gossiping spies who like nothing better than find out the secrets of every person they come across.

Maybe in France back then they really were. 

[ritter]

Just finished L'amant. About to start L'Amante Anglaise.

Is there a recommendable book on Duras -- biography, critical etc? L'amant has made me curious about her family -- mother, big brother.

The standard biography of Duras seems to be that by Laure Adler, originally published in 1998 with to popular success:

[asin]2070414728[/asin]

Then there's this book by Alain Vircondelet, which is actually in my library, that has a chapter called "Durasie", which (as per an amazon reviewer) deals with her imaginary reconstruction of her Far Eastern childhood (and which I might take a look at soon).



Note that both Adler and Vircondelet have each published other books on Duras, dealing with more specific issues of her life and/or work. Their biographies have been translated into English.