Posted on 11/22/2015 8:40:27 AM PST by vis a vis
It has been way too long since we had one of these....
A correction: Voss’s memoirs are of his combat in Finland, not Norway. Mea culpa.
The Fellowship, The Literary Lives of the Inklings Philip and Carol Zaleski
assorted others on the nook, in the den etcetera
Published in the Library of Universal Literature: Biography 1900
(originally published in five volumes in 1856 — 59)
from the Ohio State University library
Gosh. If I just get through a couple of cycles of FR and
read my Bible daily, I’m doing good. - My eyes just won’t
hold out for much these days.
As an interesting anecdote, Custer's wife, Libbie, was given the table on which generals Grant and Lee signed the surrender at Appomatox. Custer had been instrumental in cornering Lee after he had abandoned Petersburg. Libbie was given the table by none other than Gen. Phil Sheridan, who praised Custer as being one of the leaders in bringing Lee's army to heel.
“The Borgias” by J. Lucas Dubreton
and
“The Barber of Natchez” by Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan.
Both histories written before the PC craze took hold.
This will probably be a little off beat for FR. I’m re-reading Thirty three Teeth which is one of the series of Dr. Siri Paiboun books by Colin Cotterill.
I like them very much, even though pretty much everyone is a Communist! They take place in Laos, I guess in the late 70s after the Vietnam war ended (not really sure about the time frame, they are not really topical in that way, but it’s between the end of the war and the fall of the Soviet union, that’s for sure.)
Dr. Siri is the national coroner and he has a couple of charming assistants, a chubby and sweet young nurse and a mentally retarded orderly. He’s also good friends with a pretty big shot in the government, they are like Rockford and that Lt. he was friends with.
They don’t make communism look good at all, but I wouldn’t say they were anti-communist either. There is also a large supernatural element to the stories.
I’m amazed I like them as much as I do, but I really do.
“Next up Connelly’s new one with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller.”
Love those.
The Witches of Cahokia
Don’t recommend it.
If you have to commute by car, try audio books. They are great and I need to get some more myself. You can get them at the library and I think some libraries even have it so you can borrow them via download.
Looking forward to it.
Re-reading The Time Ships. Stephen Baxter was commissioned to do the squeal to the Time Machine.
Hawaii detective novels by Toby Neal. (Go Lea!)
Late in life he settled on a site for a library to house his collection, and over eight years he stealthily acquired that land in Washington DC. Just then, it was announced that Congress would condemn that area as a site for an expansion of the Library of Congress. Folger responded by notifying the Librarian of Congress of his intention, but announcing that if he couldn’t build on the site he had acquired, he would build somewhere else - but not in Washington. The Librarian threw his weight behind Folger’s plan, and the Folger Shakespeare Library is in sight of the Library of Congress, and in the shadow of the Supreme Court building. Sounds like an interesting place to visit in DC.
Interesting to learn that, for want of copyright law, Shakespeare and his contemporaries avoided publishing their plays, since it would only enable others to plagiarize. Thus, it was long after Shakespeare’s death that his fellow actors compiled some of his plays into the “first folio”; many others were already lost. Paper (made from rags, not wood pulp) was expensive, and got reused. When published, the First Folio was expensive and had a limited audience; the press run was only 750 copies. Shakespeare was not precisely “a prophet without honor in his own time,” but he was not acclaimed during his lifetime as the genius he is now considered. His plays were not considered classics at the time, nor for generations afterward; his reputation as a towering literary figure really only took hold in the Nineteenth Century. Thus, most of the original 750 first folios do not survive - and the Folger collection contains about a third of those known still to exist.
Speaking of Commentary magazine, there is Benjamin Balint's Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right. It's a pretty thorough history and because you can find many of the articles mentioned on the magazine's website, the book opens out into a larger experience, if you want to do more reading.
I get the feeling Balint's on the side of the magazine, even in its current Podhoretz II phase, but he's scrupulously fair, giving all of its critics and opponents say. There are so many critics, though, and because so many of them started out writing for the magazine they're an important part of the story that can't be left out, so the result is sourer and more negative than the author or the magazine would probably have liked. Anyway, the book points you in all kinds of different directions if you're interested.
bfl
I do like audio books. And I do a lot of local driving. But there are so many stops and pickups that I am kind of addicted to my talk radio. Sigh.
light reading, I always go to: Growing Up by Russell Baker
In my line-up is always
Pride and Prejudice
Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Angela's Ashes
anything about the Appalachian Trail
Interesting topics: Civil War, the mutiny on The Bounty, and...again..the Appalachian Trail
“The Holy Spirit In Action,” by Frank J. Sheed, Servant Publishing (For the third time...)
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