What are you currently reading?

[Florestan]

He also installed Putin, whose first official act as president was to cancel all ethics investigations of Yeltsin. Yeltsin facilitated the transfer of essentially the entire Soviet State economy to a small group of 'oligarchs' and was in power during the time when the FSB orchestrated the apartment bombings that were used as a justification for the second Chechen war. You might say he showed courage in preventing to putsch against Gorbachov, but once in power he was utterly corrupt, in my view.

+1.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

He also installed Putin, whose first official act as president was to cancel all ethics investigations of Yeltsin. Yeltsin facilitated the transfer of essentially the entire Soviet State economy to a small group of 'oligarchs' and was in power during the time when the FSB orchestrated the apartment bombings that were used as a justification for the second Chechen war. You might say he showed courage in preventing to putsch against Gorbachov, but once in power he was utterly corrupt, in my view.

I partially agree with you. Late Yeltsin became corrupt, if not utterly corrupt. He didn't make the post-Soviet Russia like Switzerland. However, since the condition of the USSR was very bad, I still think Yeltsin contributed to the improvement in human and political condition in Russia. We are dealing with the history of the real-world, rather than a fantasy- ideal place. In Russia in the 1990s with very limited alternatives and resources and bunch of oppositions, who else would have done better than Yeltsin? Sakharov, Popov, Yakovlev?
But again, I think he became substantially corrupt later.

[Artem]

Books that I finished last month. Several short ones among them. Ivan Klima was the best from the bunch. He's been one of my favourite recent literary discoveries. I like this blurb from goodreads about My Golden Trades. Very fitting book for these times.

One of the last artistic expressions of life under communism, this novel captures the atmosphere in Prague between 1983 and 1987, where a dance could be broken up by the secret police, a traffic offense could lead to surveillance, and where contraband books were the currency of the underworld.

[Mandryka]

Maybe my French isn't à la hauteur but, I think it's funny -- a bit like Pickwick but not as good. Are you supposed to laugh out loud?

[SimonNZ]

These two on the go:



And winding up volume one of Caro's LBJ the next Big Fat Book set to start will be another of Dominic Sandbrook's on modern Britain:

[joachim]

The biography of Süssmayr, by Thierry d'Alberto, released in february 2022.

This biography, the only one in French, teaches us a lot about the musical life of the time, about the last year of Mozart and Constance, about the Abbey of Kremsmünster where Süssmayr spent part of his youth, and about his sad end. , undermined by tuberculosis and ruined because of medical care, he dies when he was about to get married!



This portrait, which has often been attributed as being one of Mozart's, would be that of Süssmayr around 1802.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Robert McNamara.

[ritter]

This biography of Bruno Maderna, purchased in my recent trip to Italy:


I'm at the end of WW2, when Maderna is no longer the conducting child prodigy "Brunetto" and has taken as a young adult conducting courses with Antonio Guarneri and composition lessons  from (among others) Malipiero. He's producing his first important works (of course, not yet serial —even if he's conducted Webern's Variations op. 30 when on leave from military service in wartime Italy). Quite a character!

[Karl Henning]

Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

[SimonNZ]

Along with Sandbrook's book on the Heath years in Britain:

[Spotted Horses]

Tono-Bungay, by H.G. Wells.



I stumbled on this book because it is said that the final chapter was an inspiration for Vaughan-Williams A London Symphony, and a particular passage is often quoted as being the inspiration for the finale epilogue.

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes.

Bad choice. One of the most unsatisfying books I can remember reading.

It is written as a first person narrative, as though it were a memoir. The narrator is the son of a servant in a grand aristocratic estate (think Downton Abbey). A daughter of the family takes a liking to him, so to placate her he is allowed to hang on with his betters. This seems fine, until one of the aristocratic brats bullies him and he returns the favor by bloodying his nose. Of course he is banished from the housed, and eventually exiled to his uncle. The uncle is a chemist (pharmacist) with a small shop in a nearby village who has grand ideas. He looses his shop and the narrators small endowment in a money-making scheme and has to work as an assistant chemist in London. But then, the uncle invents a patent medicine, Tono-Bungay, which is useless, maybe mildly poisonous, but "goes viral." The uncle becomes a financier on a colossal scale and the narrator gets swept up. It seems like the uncle has entered a new aristocracy, building a monstrous grand building to supplant an elegant but uncomfortable country estate he has acquired. The aristocratic girl then reappears and reveals she has always been in love with our narrator. Of course it goes bust and the love interest announces she is not strong enough to be the wife of a poor man.

This gives H.G. Wells a framework to hang his philosophizing about England, the hollow nobility of the old order, the tawdry, rapacious greed of the new order, the hypocrisy of it all. But the characters are as flat as paper, and are just props for illustrating his social ideas.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Along with Sandbrook's book on the Heath years in Britain:

I assume you already know that Drive My Car won Academy foreign movie award.

[SimonNZ]

I assume you already know that Drive My Car won Academy foreign movie award.

Yes. As it happens I'm actually set to see it tomorrow. Luckily its run here was extended after it got the award , as this is the first chance I've had.

I read the story in the Men Without Women collection not long after it came out, but wont be able to remember it well enough now to tell what's been changed.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Yes. As it happens I'm actually set to see it tomorrow. Luckily its run here was extended after it got the award , as this is the first chance I've had.

I read the story in the Men Without Women collection not long after it came out, but wont be able to remember it well enough now to tell what's been changed.

Enjoy the movie and have a great weekend!

[Crudblud]

Re-reading Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to read it again without seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's casting choices from the film, and there is a little bit of that but actually so much of the book was never adapted for the film that that issue ends up being largely peripheral. I do actually like the film, but even in his lighter works what makes Pynchon Pynchon is the unfalteringly brilliant prose, and for me at least not even the greatest filmmaker could replace one of his paragraphs with one of their shots, no matter how striking.

[Mandryka]

Just started it, so far so good -- Falknerian.

[ritter]

Just started it, so far so good -- Falknerian.

I read Bernanos' Monsieur Ouine recently. A very well written book, with an almost cinematographic action and an uncanny ability to conjure vivid images to the reader. But it's one of the most pessimistic books I've ever read. Very unsettling....

[Mandryka]

I read Bernanos' Monsieur Ouine recently. A very well written book, with an almost cinematographic action and an uncanny ability to conjure vivid images to the reader. But it's one of the most pessimistic books I've ever read. Very unsettling....

It is very helpful for me to have the Livre de Poche edition because it's well annotated. Without it, I'd miss the references to Catholicism, and more. I've just learned, for example, about Frédéric Mistral and what a tarasque is!

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

The New White Nationalism In America, Carol M. Swain.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution, Lee Smolin.