So, What Are You Reading?

How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger and a bunch of religious/theology/Greek type stuff.

 

There seem to be a few, Ted. And a movement for more. Yeah, surprise to me, too! Celibacy not such a big thing with them, it seems. "New Monasticism," they call it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Monasticism#Protestant_forms_of_New_Monasticism

J.

 

Or with any religious group, it seems.

 

Read Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World.

 

Question for Historians:

When I file Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World on the shelf, should I file it with Western Civ/World History or should I file it with Renaissance & Reformation Historiography?

 

Just bought another Tony Hillerman book at the Thrift Store. The Fallen Man. Another Joe Leaphorn mystery. Joe has recently retired from the Navajo Tribal Police and is drawn back into a mystery he investigated some years before.

 

Under the Historiography heading, definitely, Ted. Much stuff by scholarly types out there to suggest so. Here's just one. Read the first few lines of the abstract/summary or whatever and you'll see. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/516586/summary

I would NEVER have known this without Google. How did I ever get through the first 50 years of my life without the Internet? (Bluffing, like all the others, I guess.)

 

Presently reading Pappy Boyington's Baa Baa Black Sheep.
Read approximately 200 pages of a 400 or so page book.

 

Read Pappy Boyington's Baa Baa Black Sheep, to page 384. Finis.

 

Read Robert Cowley's The Collected What If?, to page 827. Finis.

 

50 years ago, I bought some books by mail-order from the "International Collectors Library." Classic titles, all nicely bound, you got a few free and had to buy a few more at around $6 each. It was one of the Doubleday book clubs and was in business from the late 1940s till the 1980s. Over the years I bought some more in thrift stores. I'd say I've only read about half of them. I finally got the whole works out of boxes and shelved the other day. They look really nice. Wish I could find some more. When I finished, I sat down and read one, the Collected Stories of Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich.) Always loved those stories - characters like Tevye the Milkman, places I first read about in my teens - Kasrilevke, Yehupetz, Boiberik ... What a storyteller! A real mensch!

 

Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers' Project by Susan DeMasi

 

Read another of those International Collectors Library books I bought 50 years ago. The Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert. Since my teens, 19th Century French writers (particularly the poets) have always come at me like lightning, through the years.
Like this, from Flaubert: "In certain men, the more strongly they desire something, the more difficult it is for them to act. They are hamstrung by a lack of self-confidence, terrified that they might offend."

Ouch!

 

Read another book by Michael Ignatieff today. He's a former Harvard professor, a highly reputed journalist and former leader of the Liberal party in Canada. These days he's Rector and President of the Central European University - which, I believe, is moving from Hungary to Austria because Viktor Orban doesn't like it. We have a thread on that school here. https://www.degreeinfo.com/index.php?threads/central-european-university.39595/

Mr. Ignatieff is also one hell of a writer. A while ago, I thoroughly enjoyed - and was impressed by The Russian Album - a history of four generations of his own family. I believe he won the Governor General's award for that book in 1987.

I just finished - in one session - his novel Asya. Asya is the extraordinary Princesse Galitzine, born in 1900, still alive in 1990. It spans the Russian Civil War and both World Wars. Many locales - Paris, London, Moscow, Rural Russia, Southern France and some ugly ones too - e.g. Soviet labour camps and German concentration camps. This is a tour de force. I was exhausted! A great read. Mr. Ignatieff is obviously a man of many talents, despite his lack of success in retail politics. I certainly won't criticize him for that.

 

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

 

Have a nice doomsday: why millions of Americans are looking forward to the end of the world, by Nicholas Guyatt.

 

Barnes & Noble Top 20 holiday gift suggestions include only 1 book

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/barnes-nobles-top-20-holiday-gift-ideas-include-only-1-book-2018-12-05