Tag: books

Laura Resnick. Satisfying sword and sorcery read, but more blah, blah, blah on the jacket and author’s note about how this book just couldn’t, possibly, be fit into one volume. Granted, the pacing is no Robert Jordan, but come on. “[T]he only other alternative was to eliminate so many pages that the remaining story wouldn’t have made any sense.” Puh-leeze, “the only other alternative” proves the editing wasn’t so hot, so I don’t want to hear it.

Robert Silverberg. Early (1969) slight novel, in contrast to his recent slight novels. So it’s not just a famous writer resting on his laurels.

Laura Resnick. Never believe authors’ notes that say the book couldn’t possibly be shorter, that it simply HAD to be published in two volumes, yadda yadda. It isn’t a bad book, and I look forward to reading the sequel, but it certainly could have been tightened up a lot. There’s a good mystery (although it seems to have been mostly exposed already without being solved by the characters), and an interesting struggle between two kinds of magic.

Bookslut has an innocuous little link about books not read that got me going. Here are some perennial and recent entries of mine.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited by Susannah Heschel, has been on my bookshelf for quite a few years now. I love The Sabbath and would like to become more familiar with Heschel’s thought.
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Dickens are, sadly, missing from my finished list. I did get 2/3 of the way through The Idiot before I decided I just couldn’t take the too-obvious symbolism any more.
A la recherche du temps perdu. My friend Jan loves it in French and has the stylish comic-book versions (in French and English). There’s a new translation in the works. I’ve picked up the first volume in bookstores I don’t know how many times. But I’ve never taken the jump.
The Life of Pi. I own it. I’ve started it. There it sits.
Into the Looking-Glass Wood by Alberto Manguel. Another book of essays sitting on my shelves for years. I loved A History of Reading, but that doesn’t seem to be enough.
Literary fiction. Haven’t read much. Don’t care to. Probably shouldn’t even mention it here.

Deborah J. Ross and Marion Zimmer Bradley. This [posthumous] installment in MZB’s Darkover stories is actually better than some of MZB’s own Darkover books, solidly within her style and within the Darkover canon, and a quick, entertaining read. The story eventually overlaps withHawkmistress, which I didn’t catch on to until it was made obvious.

Thomas Cahill. A couple of gems from this very readable (and very casual, even bawdy) work:

Early in the banquet [the symposium], libations were poured to Dionysus, god of wine, and a dithyramb, a song-and-dance to the inebriating god, was beaten out. You may, if you like, label this prayer, but it was from our perspective a lot closer to a conga line....
In this fragment from a fourth-century comedy by Eubulus, an already wobbly Dionysus boasts of how the typical symposium progressed:

Who but Dionysus pours the flowing wine
and mixes water in the streaming bowls tonight?
One bowl for ruddy health, then one for getting off;
the third brings sleep–and wise men leave before they’re tight.
For after that the bowls no more belong to us:
the fourth’s for hubris and the fifth for lots of noise,
the sixth for mindless fucking, followed by black eyes,
the eighth brings the police, the ninth’s for throwing up,
the tenth for trashing everything before we stop.

And in a very different vein, from Pericles’s Funeral Oration:

Therefore I do not mourn with the parents of the dead who are here with us. Rather, I will comfort them. For they know that they have been born into a world of manifold chance and that he is to be accounted happy to whom the best lot falls–the best sorrow, such as is yours today, or the best death, such as fell to these, for whom life and happiness were bound together. I know it is not easy to give you comfort. I know how often in the joy of others you will have reminders of what was once your own, and how men feel sorrow, not for the loss of what they have never tasted, but when something that has grown dear to them has been snatched away. But you must keep a brave heart in the hope of other children, those of you who are still of an age to bear them. For the newcomers will help you forget the gap in your own circle, and will help the City to fill up the ranks of its workers and its soldiers. For no man is fitted to give fair and honest advice in council if he has not, like his fellows, a family at stake in the hour of the City’s danger. To you who are past the age of vigor I would say: count the long years of happiness so much gain to set off against the brief space that yet remains, and let your burden be lightened by the glory of the dead. For the love of honor alone is not staled by age, and it is by honor, not, as some say, by gold, that the helpless end of life is cheered.

Talk about cold comfort! He goes on to a shorter paragraph addressed to siblings “for whom I see a mighty contest with the memory of the dead.”
Wow!

Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter. I actually finished this on the 27th October, but I’m just getting around to transcribing some things from my journal. Here are some of the ideas and exercises I particularly liked from the book.

Have a ritual of beginning.
1. Where’s your pencil?
3. Face your fears.
4. Give me one week without...mirrors, clocks, newspapers, speaking.
5. You can observe a lot by watching. A. Watch a man and woman together; write down everything they do until you get to 20. B. Repeat, writing down only things you find interesting. C. Compare/Contrast the two lists.
6. Pick a new name.
Chapter Five: Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box. (Organizational systems) “Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.”
11. Chaos and coins.
12. Reading archaeologically.
15. Take a field trip.
18. How to be lucky: “Be generous.”
19. Work with the best.
23. Take inventory of your skills.
24. Play twenty questions. “Before you approach a topic, write down twenty things you want to know about it.”
26. Take away a skill.
28. Build a bridge to the next day.
31. Give yourself a second chance.

By Cornelia Funke. More flimsy boundaries between the real world and fiction, this time in juvenile literature. This fantasy is set in modern, 21st-century Europe, although there are heavy doses of medieval details and quirks. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

By Jasper Fforde. Thursday Next back in action. In addition to the zaniness of the first book, this one includes some wild pairs of agents: Phodder and Canon; Chalk and Cheese; King and Nosmo. There’s the end of the world, wooly mammoth migrations, and a showdown with Goliath Corporation.