What Are You Reading?

[downthecreek]

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry (for the second time - clearing out vast numbers of books does get you re-reading stuff)

Barry is a wonderful writer.

[skuthorp]

I find it almost impossible to read fiction these days. I might start but seldom finish, knowing it's just a story and unimportant means I lose interest quickly. So I don't buy any.

[David G]

I find it almost impossible to read fiction these days. I might start but seldom finish, knowing it's just a story and unimportant means I lose interest quickly. So I don't buy any.

That's too bad. I view fiction as far from unimportant. It's just a different way of viewing the world. A useful adjunct to non-fiction. An alternative way, and often a better one, to sidle up to truth. Fiction is a way of traveling to far places without leaving your home... of meeting types of people one will never meet in real life (nor, in some cases, would you want to)... of gaining perspective and understanding that one would never garner otherwise.

I just reread 'Wayfaring Stranger' by James Lee Burke. Which is a book that shines at illustrating what I just said. When I read it the first time, I was still so muddy-headed from the cancer treatment that I didn't fully appreciate it. This time I realized his laconic style disguises a density of diamonds. I do believe there is more wisdom packed into the first 100 pages than in any book I've picked up.

[FF]

Since a few years my pile of cookbooks is growing bigger then the boatbooks. And to save shelfspace I have more and more ebooks. The last is Tom Pamperins' Jagular goes anywhere' ( hope I spell the title well)

[mmd]

When, as a young man in the 1880s, Benjamin Lundy signed up for duty aboard a square-rigged commercial sailing vessel, he began a journey more exciting, and more terrifying, than he could have ever imagined: a treacherous, white-knuckle passage around that notorious "graveyard of ships," Cape Horn.

A century later, Derek Lundy, author of the bestselling Godforsaken Sea and an accomplished amateur seaman himself, set out to recount his forebear's journey. The Way of a Ship is a mesmerizing account of life on board a square-rigger, a remarkable reconstruction of a harrowing voyage through the most dangerous waters. Derek Lundy's masterful account evokes the excitement, romance, and brutality of a bygone era -- "a fantastic ride through one of the greatest moments in the history of adventure" (Seattle Times).

[Puttputt]

The Man who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Paduro. He’s also written an amazing noir series about a Havana police detective who aspires to be a writer, and failing that,a rare book collector. Definitely worth a look.

[paulf]

On Tyranny Tim Snyder, a quick one day read, a frightening look at where we are headed. It's 3 bucks...get it.

[Chip-skiff]

Circe, a retelling of Greek myth from the witch's point-of-view.



Like it so far. Circe is a popular subject, much abused.

This is my favourite painting by Waterhouse: Circe Invidiosa.

[skuthorp]

Archaeology, Zimbabwe and the African east coast to the north along the old trade routes.
Lots and lots of ancient gold mines.

[UCanoe_2]

The History of Underclothes, by C. Willett and Phyllis Cunnington. Exactly what it sounds like, from Middle Ages to ca. 1950.

American Fire, by Monica Hesse. Arson and romance gone very, very wrong on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

[Puttputt]

. Arson and romance gone very, very wrong on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
Sounds like a hunk, a hunk of burnin’ love.

[J P]

Rereading Norman Maclean's "Logging and Pimping, and 'Your Pal, Jim"'. It's one of the stories in "A River Runs Through It". I've been working on some crosscut saw related stuff recently (not pimping) and this story's humorous descriptions of the character 'Jim' and being on the end of a crosscut with him while logging early in the last century just crack me up. And it's just plain, pleasant writing. I'll probably go ahead and reread the other stories too; it's been a few decades since my first read of them.

[webishop14]

I just reread 'Wayfaring Stranger' by James Lee Burke. Which is a book that shines at illustrating what I just said. When I read it the first time, I was still so muddy-headed from the cancer treatment that I didn't fully appreciate it. This time I realized his laconic style disguises a density of diamonds. I do believe there is more wisdom packed into the first 100 pages than in any book I've picked up.

Burke is an incredible author. I first encountered him with "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead." He's at the top of my favorites list.

[NickW]

"If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It is the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London; bawdy comedy and the libertine court of Charles II; Christopher Wren in architecture, Henry Purcell in music and Isaac Newton in science ― the civil wars are over and a magnificent new era has begun.

But what would it really be like to live in Restoration Britain? Where would you stay and what would you eat? What would you wear and where would you do your shopping? The third volume in the series of Ian Mortimer’s bestselling Time Traveller’s Guides answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to seventeenth-century Britain would ask.

How much should you pay for one of those elaborate wigs? Should you trust a physician who advises you to drink fresh cow’s urine to cure your gout? Why are boys made to smoke in school? And why are you unlikely to get a fair trial in court?

People’s lives are changing rapidly – from a world of superstition and religious explanation to rationalism and scientific calculation. In many respects the period sees the tipping point between the old world and the new as fear and uncertainty, hardship and eating with your fingers give way to curiosity and professionalism, fine wines and knives and forks. Travelling to Restoration Britain encourages us to reflect on the customs and practices of daily life – and this unique guide not only teaches us about the seventeenth century but makes us look with fresh eyes at the modern world."

Nick

[Lew Barrett]

I just picked up Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. Fascinating.

[Flying Orca]

Burke is an incredible author. I first encountered him with "In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead." He's at the top of my favorites list.

Picked up his first Robicheaux book and damn can that man write!!! Thank you guys!

[Paul Pless]

[David G]

I'm intrigued by this one, but haven't read it yet. Please do report back.


From NYT --

Ms. Isenberg’s project in “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” is to retell United States history in a manner that not only includes the weak, the powerless and the stigmatized, but also places them front and center.

As such, she has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents. (Look, here are six more in my mailbox.) Viewed from below, a good angle for no one, America’s history is usefully disorienting and nearly always appalling. “White Trash” will have you squirming in your chair.

[CWSmith]

“White Trash” will have you squirming in your chair.

Frankly, they have for years.

[Canoeyawl]

Sort of obscure, this details the story of the German fleet of square rigged ships bottled up in the Gulf of California for the duration of Ww1
Non-fiction, almost a textbook I read it 30 years ago and am reading it again. Eventually the sailors abandonded ship one by one and walked to San Francisco!( Harold was a friend of my uncle, both settled in PNW they held unlimited masters tickets.)

[Chip-skiff]

The Wife's Tale by Aida Edemariam. Beautifully written personal history/biography set in Ethiopia.

[PeterSibley]

"An Utterly Impartial History of Britain " Informative and highly amusing!

[Mike H]

[Jim Mahan]

[Flying Orca]

That's a good one. His latest is apparently very good too.

[ron ll]

Someone (Rum Pirate?) recently started a thread about Dan Brown’s “Origin”. I can’t find the thread so I’ll post here. I said on that thread that I’m skeptical of grocery store novels like that, but I read it anyway. I have to admit, it was a pretty decent page turner and a fun plot, although very formulaic in the Dan Brown style, (Langdon (Tom Hanks) and a beautiful woman chase secret society bad guys through cathedrals.) But still I enjoyed this one more maybe due to the subject of the plot. Anyway, a refreshing intermission to some NF I’m laboring through.

[bobbys]

These are the books by my bed, i read every night.

The red badge of courage.

Holyfield...the boxer.

Moby dick.

The paradigm.

The forgotten soldier.

Isaiah. J vernon magee.

Stalingrad...antony beevor.

Frozen in time.

The mathews men.

A life wild and perilous..... mountain men..

Sinitra.

Life among the piutes.

American gun.chrid kyle.

Nine stories jd salinger.

Ava gardner bio.

True stories of great escapes.

A letter to my son..

Mark of the grizzly.

A history of wine

[NickW]

An interesting book, I'm about half way through it. An interesting author too.

http://rhodesproject.com/kathleen-burk-profile/

Nick

[skuthorp]

Same as before, African archaeology and parts of another earlier volume on the subject of observed and measured ruins by David Livingstone.
Both are now in my own library.

[gypsie]

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

If you're into anthropology, as studied through travel in an older time via ship and land.
Philiosophical reflection on a formative phase in his career.

Watching the passage of the sun through a day while at sea between France and Brazil:

At twenty to six in the evening the sky in the west seemed
encumbered with a complicated edifice, horizontal at its base, which
was so exactly like the sea that one would have thought it had been
sucked up out of it in some incomprehensible way, or that a thick and
invisible layer of crystal had been inserted between the two. Attached
to its summit suspended, as it were, to the very top of the sky as if
by some heaviness in reverse were flimsy scaffoldings, bloated
pyramids, vapours arrested in the act of boiling not clouds, one would
have said, but sculptured imitations of clouds; and yet clouds have
themselves that same quality, the polished and rounded look of wood
that has been carved and gilded. The whole mass masked the sun and
was dark, with occasional highlights, except towards the summit,
where it was beginning to break into little flames.

Higher still in the sky were mottled shapes that came apart in
insubstantial and fugacious wisps and curls: pure light, they seemed, in
texture.

Following the horizon round towards the north one could see the
main edifice grow thinner and vanish in a complication of clouds
behind which, in the far distance, a lofty strip of vapour could be
discerned; it was effervescent along its top, and on the side nearest the
still-invisible sun the light gave its outline a heavily modelled hem.
Farther to the north the element of modelling disappeared and nothing
remained but the strip itself, flat and lustreless, as it merged with the sea.
To the south this same strip re-emerged, this time with great
massive blocks of cloud above it that stood like cosmological dolmens
on the smoky crests of their understructure.

When one turned one s back on the sun and gazed eastwards there
could be seen two long thin superimposed groups of cloud that stood
out as if in their own light against a background of ramparts: battle
ments heavy-breasted and yet ethereal, pearly and soft with reflections
of pink and silver and mauve.

Meanwhile the sun was gradually coming into view behind the
celestial reefs that blocked the view to the west; as it progressed
downwards inch by inch its rays would disperse the mists or force their
way through, throwing into relief as they did so whatever had stood
in their way, and dissipating it in a mass of circular fragments, each
with a size and a luminous intensity all its own. Sometimes the light
would gather together, as one might clench one s fist, and through
the sleeve-end would appear, at most, two or three stiff and glitter
ing fingers. Or else an incandescent octopus would come forward
momentarily from the vaporous grottoes.

Every sunset has two distinct phases. At the beginning the sun plays
the role of architect. Later, when its rays no longer shine directly and
are merely reflections, it turns into a painter. As soon as it disappears
behind the horizon the light weakens and the complexity of the planes
becomes ever greater and greater. Broad daylight is the enemy of
perspective, but, between day and night, there is a moment of
transition at which the architecture of the skies is as fantastic as it is
ephemeral. When darkness comes, everything flattens down again, like
some marvellously coloured Japanese toy.

At exactly a quarter to six the first phase began. The sun was already
low, but had not yet touched the horizon. At the moment when it
appeared beneath the cloud-structure, it seemed to break open like the
yolk of an egg and its light spilled over the forms to which it was still
attached. This burst of bright light was soon followed by a withdrawal;
the sun s surroundings lost all brilliance and in the empty space that
marked off the topmost limit of the sea from the bottom of the cloud-
structure there could be seen a cordillera of vapours, which had but
lately been so dazzling as to be indecipherable and was now darkened
and sharp-pointed. At the same time it began to belly out, where
originally it had been quite flat. These small objects, black and solid,
moved to and fro, lazy-bodied migrants, across a large patch of
reddening sky which marked the beginning of the colour-phase and
was slowly mounting upwards from the horizon.

Gradually the evening s constructions-in-depth began to dismantle
themselves. The mass which had stood all day in the sky to the west
seemed to have been beaten flat like a metal leaf, and behind it was a
fire first golden, then vermilion, then cerise. This fire was beginning
to work on the elaborate clouds melting, disintegrating, and finally
volatilizing them in a whirlwind of tiny particles.

Network after network of fine vapours rose high in the sky; they
seemed to stretch in all directions horizontal, oblique, perpendicular,
even spiral. As the sun s rays went down (like a bow that must be tilted
this way or that, according to which string we seek to use) they caught
one after another of these and sent them flying in a gamut of colour
which one would have thought to be the exclusive and arbitrary
property of each one in turn. When it appeared, each network seemed
as exact, as precise, and as rigid in its fragility as fine-spun glass, but
gradually they all dissolved, as if their substance had been over-heated
by exposure in a sky which was everywhere in flames; their colour lost
its brightness and their outline its individuality, until finally each
vanished from the scene, giving place to a new network, and one
freshly spun. In the end it was difficult to distinguish one colour from
the next just as liquids of different colour and density will at first seem
to keep their individuality when they are poured into the same glass,
only to mingle later for all their apparent independence.

After that it became difficult to follow a spectacle which seemed to
be repeating itself in distant parts of the sky, at intervals sometimes of
several minutes, sometimes of a second or two. When the sun s disc cut
down into the western horizon we suddenly saw, very high up in the
east, clouds acid-mauve in tonality which had hitherto been invisible.
After a rapid efflorescence and enrichment these apparitions vanished
slowly, from right to left, at their moment of greatest subtlety, just as
if someone were wiping them away firmly and unhurriedly with a
piece of cloth. After a few seconds nothing remained but the cleaned
slate of the sky above the nebulous cloud-rampart. And this rampart
was turning to white and grey while the rest of the sky went rose-
pink.

Over towards the sun the old strip of cloud had receded into a
shapeless block of cement, and behind it a new long strip was flaming
in its turn; when its rednesses turned pale the mottled patches at the
zenith, whose turn had not yet come, began to take on weight. Below
there was a great burst of gold; above, where the summit had glittered,
it turned first to chestnut, then to violet. At the same time we seemed to
be scrutinizing its texture through a microscope; and it turned out to be
made up of a thousand little filaments, each supporting, like a skeleton,
its plump little forms.

The sun no longer shone directly. The colour-range of the sky
was pink and yellow; shrimp-pink, salmon-pink, flax-yellow, straw-
yellow; and this unemphatic richness was, in its turn, disappearing, as
the celestial landscape re-formed in a gamut of white and blue and
green. Yet a few corners of the horizon were still enjoying a brief
independence. To the left, the atmosphere was suddenly veiled a
whim, one would have thought, on tike part of a mysterious com
bination of greens. And these greens merged progressively into a group
of reds intense to begin with, then darker, then tinged with violet,
then smudged with coal, and evolving at the very end into the tracery
of a stick of charcoal on granulated paper. The sky behind was an
Alpine yellow-green and the strip of cloud, still firmly outlined,
remained opaque. In the westerly sky little horizontal stripes of gold
glimmered for an instant, but to the north it was almost dark; the full-
breasted rampart had dwindled to a series of whitish swellings beneath
a chalky sky.

[gypsie]

Continued;

Nothing is more mysterious than the ensemble of procedures,
always identical and never predictable, by which night succeeds day.
The first portent of these procedures is always a matter for doubt and
anxiety. No one can tell what forms will be adopted, on this one
particular occasion, by the night s insurrection. Impenetrable is the
alchemy by which each colour transforms itself into its complementary
colour, whereas, on the palette, as we all know, we should have to open
another tube of paint to achieve this same result. Where night is
concerned there is no limit to the minglings and comminglings which
may be achieved; for night comes to us as a deceiver. The sky turns
from pink to green; but it does so because I have failed to liotice that
certain clouds have turned bright red and, in doing so, make the sky
look green by contrast. The sky had, in effect, been pink; but a pink so
pale that it could no longer struggle against the very high-keyed red;
and yet I had not seen that red come into being, since a modulation
from gold to red is less startling to the eye than a modulation from pink
to green. It was by a trick, therefore, that night made its entrance into
the sky.

And so night began to deny the sky its golds and purples; warmth
of tone gave place to whites and greys. The set stage of night began to
reveal a sea landscape above the sea: an immense screen of clouds filing
by like an archipelago of long thin islands in front of an ocean-wide
sky; or like a flat sandy shore as it might look to a traveller in an
aeroplane flying low on its side with one wing almost in the sea. The
illusion was all the stronger for the fact that the last glimmers of day
fell obliquely on these cloud-forms and gave them, in high relief, the
air of solid rocks rocks too, at other times, are as if sculpted from light
and shadow and it was as if the sun, no longer able to exercise its
etching-needle on granite and porphyry, was lavishing its day-time
skills on these vaporous and insubstantial subjects.

The cloud background, therefore, was like the edge of an unnamed
coast. And as the sky cleared we could see beaches, lagoons, islets by
the hundred, and sandbanks overrun by the inactive ocean of the sky.
Fjords and inland lakes appeared where all had been flat and smooth.
And because the sky which surrounded these arrowy shapes was like
an ocean, and because the sea normally reflects the colours of the sky,
the scene was like the reconstruction of some distant landscape in which
the sun was setting all over again. We had only to look at the real sea,
far below, to escape from the mirage; that real sea had no longer either
the white-hot flatness of noonday or the curling prettiness of after-
dinner. No longer did the all-but-horizontal rays of daylight illuminate
the tops of the little waves that looked towards them, leaving the rest
in darkness. The water, too, was now seen in relief, and its precise and
heavy shadows were as if cast in steel. All transparency had gone.
And so, by a process at once unvarying and imperceptible, evening
gave place to night. All was changed. The sky on the horizon was
opaque, and above it the last clouds that had been brought into being
by the day s end were scattering across a ground that was livid yellow
at its base and turned blue towards its zenith. Soon they were but lean
and weakly shadows, like scenery-frames seen without stage-lights; the
performance over, we see them for what they are poor, fragile,
ephemeral and owing the illusion of reality which they had helped
to create not so much to their own nature as to some trickery of
lighting or perspective. Only a few moments earlier they had been
alive and in continual transformation; now they seem set fast in a form
as sad as it is unalterable, in the middle of a sky which will soon merge
them within its gathering darkness.

[David G]

Seems like a lotta words to say: the sky's pretty tonight. <G>

Just finished a spy thriller from Daniel Silva: House of Spies. Good story. Nice plotting. Not a ton of extraneous SupermanHeroism or implausible devices. I like thick books, because I can sink into that world for a while.

[Rum_Pirate]

Alistair McLean's Death Train

It was written by Alastair MacNiell based on a story by Alistair McLean

[Chip-skiff]

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.



Quietly excellent description of landscape and characters.

Since I've made a study of western American lit, it's odd that this is the first book by Cather that I've read.

[johnw]

Just re-read the Bromeliad, by Terry Pratchett.