What Are You Reading

Fading Fast said:

It's not literature, but it's a rip-roaring good read. If not her, who did he or others think wrote it?

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I suspect envy was at the root of her home run first time author academic criticism. I read Peyton Place on the sly when a kid; something the Sisters of St Joseph would never assign, of course, and like Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, said definitely improved my own literary perspective.

Finished "The court of Weimar - private" (1854) by Karl Eduard Vehse and starting "The Red and the Black" (1830) by Stendhal.

Starting tomorrow at 5PM, I'm on call til the following Friday. With the Husker idiots gearing up for their first school-sponsored drunken idiocy of the season, Lord only knows what that will bring. Last night I started preparing myself, I'm going to try to read all of Peter Bowen's Du Pre mysteries. It gives me something to look forward to, and enjoy, in the random moments of free time I get.

Trenchfriend said:

"The Red and the Black" (1830) by Stendhal.

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If you liked the Red and the Black, you might try Stendahl's "Charterhouse of Parma" which I read a while back. Mostly I remember being surprised by how readable it was and also I was titillated by the protagonist's romantic relationship with his... (okay, no spoilers).

I just finished reading Rupert Sheldrake's "The Science Delusion." His basic thesis is that modern science is stuck in a materialist rut that has become a dogma and that discoveries in the last few decades have shown that there are serious holes in the materialist world view. He particularly goes after the materialist argument that consciousness and free will are illusions and that what we call our minds are really just bioelectric snaps and pops between brain cells. He discusses evidence for ESP and other ideas that hint that there is more to our minds/consciousness than mere mechanistic synapses. Dogmatic materialist scientists are supposedly afraid to seriously investigate such things because they run counter to their entrenched biases. Not to mention that anyone who investigates such stuff is quickly discredited by the mainstream scientists. A major part of his argument is that quantum physics has now revealed that the "material" that the materialists believe in has, if you drill down, pretty much evaporated into probability fields and such. An interesting book if you are into that kind of thing.

What got me interested was that Mr Sheldrake did a Ted Talk that was banned... which made me want to watch it, which I did... which made me want to learn more about his ideas...

Yep, "The Red and the Black" is fantastic readable!

Harp said:

I suspect envy was at the root of her home run first time author academic criticism. I read Peyton Place on the sly when a kid; something the Sisters of St Joseph would never assign, of course, and like Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, said definitely improved my own literary perspective.

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I first read "Ethan Frome" in high school and it was one of the contributing factors in my decision to Not. Get. Married. Young. I am sincerely not criticizing what others do (there are many successful marriages of very young adults) - but for me, I wanted to avoid making a mistake and messy up my life before it got started. "Ethan Frome" effected me deeply and, on a better note than the fear of marriage it instilled in me, it set in motion my life-long love of Edith Wharton books.

Fading Fast said:

I first read "Ethan Frome" in high school and it was one of the contributing factors in my decision to Not. Get. Married. Young. I am sincerely not criticizing what others do (there are many successful marriages of very young adults) - but for me, I wanted to avoid making a mistake and messy up my life before it got started...

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Quite understandable. My own life was upended in youth but I always instinctively admitted to myself that I was more
the Robert Service type in The Men That Don't Fit In; realizing that the ball and chain were not for me.
Recently, last week a gal pal at the office made a bag lunch for me, pickle, potato chips, napkin with a turkey sandwich
inside. I facetiously told her I felt like I was married for a moment....(she's wedded twenty years) and we laughed.

Just finished "Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee

My neighbor is a book editor and recommends literature to me (versus a lot of the fluff and nonsense that I choose on my own). To be honest, I enjoy about half her recommendations and find the other half either too depressing (like everything else in our culture today, negativism is what wins critical awards) or unnecessarily abstruse.

"Pachinko" falls into the first category as it's really just a good inter-generational soap opera dressed-up a bit as literature. Set in Korea and Japan and covering most of the 20th and 21st Centuries (to date), the novel follows the life of one poor Korean family who, eventually, move from Korea - where the Japanese are aggressive occupiers pre-WWII - to Japan where, oddly, Koreans have more economic options despite encountering harsh racism and restrictions. It's interesting to see the progressive guns fire their full fury at the racist history of a country that isn't America - or said another way, Japan does not come out looking too good.

As with all enjoyable soap operas, there's plenty of romantic entanglements, betrayals, business failures and successes, intergenerational fighting and moments of glory, self-sacrifice and honor - basically, life writ large. In "Pachinko," it all plays out as Japan goes from dominant regional power to vanquished country trying to rebuild its culture and economy, but through it all, the Koreans (many stayed in Japan after WWII as Korea was still challenged by its own conflict) were discriminated against legally and culturally.

What works - what works in any good soap opera, um, I mean "literary novel -" is that you care about the well-developed characters and Pachinko shines here where most characters are true to life - a mix of moral and immoral - that feel real and engaging. As noted, everything that happens in life - all its ups and downs - happens here, but it also provides an interesting window into the history, relations and cultural difference of Korea and Japan.

When the book started out in full-on depressing mode, "Grapes of Wrath" depressing - poor, crippled fisherman works twenty-six hour days, nine days a week trying to make enough to feed his family rice, only rice (and not fish because he has to sell that to afford the rice) - I thought, "here we go again with 400 pages of a crown of thorns," but fortunately, the novel presents a more balance view of life and its possibilities. I'd recommend it as a good novel (soap opera) with the kick being better than average writing and an elucidating window into two countries.

Just Jim said:

Starting tomorrow at 5PM, I'm on call til the following Friday. With the Husker idiots gearing up for their first school-sponsored drunken idiocy of the season, Lord only knows what that will bring. Last night I started preparing myself, I'm going to try to read all of Peter Bowen's Du Pre mysteries. It gives me something to look forward to, and enjoy, in the random moments of free time I get.

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LOL! Too funny! A shame that the game got canceled Saturday night, though it didn't appear to dampen anyone's spirits from what I hear.

Three books on the go at the moment.

British historian Roger Moorhouse's excellent study on the Nazi-Soviet pact - The Devil's Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941.

Richard J. Evans' In Defense of History.

V. S. Alexander's The Taster about a woman who is one of Hitler's personal food taste testers (for poison!) at his Eagle's Nest home.

Without Precedent; Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times, Joel R. Paul

A slip on my part, Paul is a Hastings prof; progressive, and insufficiently critical of Marshall.

AmateisGal said:

Three books on the go at the moment.

British historian Roger Moorhouse's excellent study on the Nazi-Soviet pact - The Devil's Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941.

Richard J. Evans' In Defense of History.

V. S. Alexander's The Taster about a woman who is one of Hitler's personal food taste testers (for poison!) at his Eagle's Nest home.

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All sound good, but the last one has a quirky intrigue - how is it so far?

Fading Fast said:

All sound good, but the last one has a quirky intrigue - how is it so far?

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It's good. Not great. I like how it pushes someone into Hitler's inner circle, one who is not a fervent believer, and how she reacts to her environment.

Just finished "Cold War Swap" from 1966 by Ross Thomas - a solid entry in the Cold-War Era spy genre. It's no Tom Clancy or John le Carre', but how many are?

"The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers," by Maxwell King.

With acclaimed theatrical and TV documentaries, an upcoming film feature with Tom Hanks, and a rising online presence, we seem, fifteen years after his passing, to be living in the Year Of Fred -- which is fine with me. I've occasionally commented on the fact that Mister Rogers was the most important "father figure" of my own childhood, so when I heard that the first full-scale biography to deal with this remarkable man was coming out I grabbed it the first day it was on sale, and have been poring over it over the last three days.

It's not easy to write a biography of someone so genuinely wholesome -- there are no scandals, no skeletons in his closet. When the worst you can say about a person is that sometimes he could be stubborn, you aren't going to have much in the way of drama. But in spite of that there are quite a few interesting morsels spread about within the text concerning Rogers and the evolution of his mission -- an overprotected rich boy growing up in the 1930s with emotionally-distant parents. a jolly, beloved grandfather, and prodigal musical talent became, by the 1970s, one of the leading American experts on the psychological growth and development of children. King throws out little bits and pieces along the way that I wish were developed more -- Rogers' increasing friction with original co-star Josie Carey over the purpose of their work is noted -- Josie was a fun-loving entertainer who enjoyed the spontaneity of live TV, while Rogers was frustrated by anything that deviated from what he saw as his mission to help children grow emotionally -- but I'd like to have seen more about how the program developed behind the scenes, and how this paralleled his later friction with later co-star Betty Aberlin over Rogers' reluctance to take public political stands for causes they both supported out of fear of alienating homes that didn't agree with that view. But King doesn't mention the latter, even though it became a significant issue for Rogers during the run-up to the First Gulf War in 1991 -- a war he strongly opposed, but declined to oppose in public despite Aberlin pleading with him to do so.

Most of the Rogersana mentioned in the book isn't new -- but there are a few extremely interesting bits that shine a light on Rogers' personality. He was famous for his tightly-controlled temper -- but King does note a few occasions where that control slipped, notably the moment when he discovered that his then-teenage sons were growing pot in the basement. There's also a fascinating bit of insight concerning the constant rumors about Rogers' personal sexuality, where he comments to a friend that he considered himself as landing "in the middle of the scale" in terms of such things -- but King is careful to stress that there is no evidence, anywhere, that Rogers was ever anything but faithful to his wife.

There's little detailed discussion of Rogers' personal theology -- that's amply covered in Michael Long's study of a few years back -- but King does note how broad he could range in search of inspiration. Although a Presbyterian by birth and ordination, Rogers was fascinated by all faith traditions, and drew, in his personal beliefs, from Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist views as well as those of liberal mainline Protestantism. He was also a strong devotee of Freudian psychology, and Freud's works had a place on his bedroom bookcase right alongside the many religious texts. He himself underwent psychoanalysis for years, and it was characteristic of the man that he eventually enlisted his own psychiatrist to serve as a consultant for his television program.

King only met Rogers in person twice, but he was and is closely connected to the foundation that continues Rogers' work, so the book is essentially the "official" Rogers biography, but that's really not a drawback here. It's hard to do a "warts and all" book when the warts aren't all that consequential, and in that sense, I think King does a good job with what he set out to accomplish. We'll probably never understand everything that made Fred Rogers tick --but I suspect this is the closest we'll ever get.

Edith Wharton's splendid The Age of Innocence

Harp said:

Edith Wharton's splendid The Age of Innocence

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One of her best. Watched the early '90s movie version recently. It's pretty good, but IMO, you'd need to have read the book to truly follow the movie.

I've just picked up ebooks of My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse. Thoroughly enjoying them so far.

Fading Fast said:

One of her best.

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This morning after purchasing a round trip ticket at the Rock Island train station I discovered
the American Literary Series Edith Wharton volume among the donation shelf's pot boilers and romance
dog-eared paperbacks. After the Cubs busted flush against the Nats; Notre Dame's lousy win across the radio
dial against Ball State; and the Bears' abject second half surrender to the Packers, said find was a great start
to this week.

"The Finishing School" by Muriel Spark from 2003

Yes, the Muriel Spark who wrote "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie."

"The Finishing School" is about a sketchy, peregrinating European "finishing school" (an un-credentialed "college" for kids not looking for a traditional college but a throw-back post-highschoool year of study at a small - nine students - school) whose owners' marriage is rocky as he's trying, unsuccessfully, to write a novel and she's contemplating leaving him / having an affair. Into this mix comes a new class of students with one being a teenage prodigy apparently writing a already sought-after-by-publishers novel which obsesses the husband to the point of infatuation and near insanity. A few more things go on at the school (a few who's zooming who moments), but that's basically it.

Unfortunately, the plot is too thin and the characters not well-enough developed to carry a novel, but if you think of this as a long short story (something from "The Saturday Evening Post" in the '30s - even though it's set in the '00s, it has a retrograde feel) it's okay by that standard. At 180 very, very, very thinly spaced pages, it isn't much longer than a long short story. That said, there really is no reason to read this one other than if you are a Spark's fan or stumble upon it with nothing else on your reading plate at the moment.