My personal reading blog
Well!
Not only has my general-reading palate been cleansed by a couple of pretty good teen novels (although further reflecting has made me think less of Saint Iggy, mainly because it has an almost bewilderingly unsatisfying ending) and one great science fiction novel, but now my very specific HISTORY palate has also been cleansed! Soldiers & Ghosts by J. E. Lendon was great!
Read MoreKarleen Koen’s big book Dark Angels turned out to be a quite enjoyable piece of Restoration historical fiction. This was a relief, since the Restoration, worse than any period (except of course the Regency), tends to bring out the Amelia Nettleship in so many writers (for those of you who don’t know the name, it refers to a lady novelist and “bottler of historical bilge-water” in John Mortimer’s immortal story “Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation”). Certainly Koen herself gave me cause to worry, since right there in her Author’s Note she refers to Charles II as “the merry monarch.” That’s usually a sign of trouble.
Read MoreSome fun and interesting things in this week’s London Review of Books and the TLS.
Mark Kishlansky writes a very good, succinct piece on the Restoration, reviewing a new massive two-volume history by Tim Harris. Kishlansky’s review is negative, which is surely not something an author wants to read after spending 1100 pages on his subject (we’ll see what other critical organs have to say about the books), and one thing he writes distracted me from the rest of his review:
Read MoreI must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
In case any of you were wondering what my weird fascination with this Masefield character is, I can tell you: it’s Star Trek!
Masefield is one of the only poets mentioned by name in the Star Trek universe, specifically in the much-maligned Star Trek V when Kirk quotes from a line of the poem herein posted. Kirk quotes the line, McCoy misidentifies it as Melville, and Spock corrects him with Masefield.
Read MoreWilliam Carter, in the first volume of his epic ongoing Proust edition for Yale University Press, characterizes Proust’s seven-volume series À la recherche du temps perdu as “considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.”
Read MoreOne of the small corners of YouTube not dominated by cat videos belongs to the downright oddest and most dismaying cultural oddities of the 21st century: the YouTube boy-celebrity. They aren’t real celebrities; you’ve never heard of them, the entirety of their careers to date has begun, escalated, and flourished without touching your life in any way. But in their insular world, their experience mimics actual celebrity to an uncanny degree: these YouTube boy-celebrities have publicists, social media managers, endorsement deals, and copyrighted brands.
Read MoreOnly two comics this week, although my nemesis Pepito just recently returned from an exclusive tour of Europe and the subcontinent, so I’ll doubtless be rooting through a pile of poop sometime soon.
In the meantime, I bought Justice League of America #1 and the latest issue of Wolverine. Both were meticulously well-done (fantastic artwork in both cases), and both irritated the piss out of me.
Read MoreOur book today is the latest from a long-time favorite here on Stevereads: it’s One Wild Bird at a Time by the great bird specialist and nature-writer Bernd Heinrich, a slim volume (filled, as always, with the author’s own illustrations) in which he meditates on one kind of bird per chapter in a warm and fast-paced mixture of observational writing and personal recollections. He writes about starlings, chickadees, blue jays, hawks, and grouse, he ruminates on crows and ravens (as befits the author of such great books as Ravens in Winter and The Mind of the Raven), and he entwines his love of owls with his love of both investigating animal behavior and writing about it:
Read MoreThe authors work a kind of magic in the book that’s evident even in translation; the combination of reporting and novel-writing going on here shouldn’t work as well as it does. The Father (the book is Part 1 – Quercus will bring out The Sons next year) is incredibly gripping reading, every bit as good – in fact, often quite a bit better – than the faddish Swedish crime fiction that’s been dominating the fiction bestseller lists for over a decade. We get prickly insights into Ivan, the violent paterfamilias of this crime family, into his sons Leo, Vincent, and Felix, and, intriguingly, into the mind frame of the mother, Britt-Marie. And the tension hardly ever lets up – the writing team does a very effective job of constantly working the narrative’s tempo:
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.
