What are you currently reading?

[Mandryka]

So far bunch of double standard bs combined with gorgeous, almost effortless-seeming prose and plot. I probably should have mentioned the negatives after the positives since I actually really like this book.

I just can't get on with Balzac, though I haven't read that one. He's too old fashioned! The made novel, the omniscient narrator. Nice enough prose in French, I think. But even that is old fashioned (compared with Flaubert, Proust.)

At school we used to call Balzac "Balls ache."

[Florestan]

So far bunch of double standard bs combined with gorgeous, almost effortless-seeming prose and plot. I probably should have mentioned the negatives after the positives since I actually really like this book.

Judging the past by present standards is useless. It's a foreign country, doing things differently. 

And I'm sure that if Balzac came alive today, he'd find a lot of bs and double standards in our world as well.   

[Philo]

Elena Kostyucheno's I Love Russia:

[Florestan]

Elena Kostyucheno's I Love Russia:

Hah!

I love Russian music and literature. If "Russia" is extended to politics as well, then I hate it unremittingly, be it Tsarist, Soviet or Putinist. 

[AnotherSpin]

[Brian]

We should bring back the word "smasheroo" in reviews.

[Philo]

Taurino's The Anthology in Digital Culture

[Valentino]

3 down, 18 to go of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series.

Christmas present. I've read some of the books in Norwegian earlier and the film is a favorite, but reading these in English is excellent entertainment and the musical suggestions excellent ideas for listening.

[ritter]

Starting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Terre des Hommes ("Wind, Sand and Stars").