Continuing my Christie project. First, I'd like to say how much I love The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's not just one of my favorite mysteries, but one of my favorite books, period. Christie was accused of not playing fair with the solution, but in a way it's the fairest mystery she wrote, because there's nothing beyond the text to suggest who the killer is. In a murder mystery, the author can cheat the reader by not fully describing some vital piece of physical evidence, but here all the clues are literally on the page.
I've also already finished the following, also known as Lord Edgeware Dies:
Here, coincidentally, is another case where one of the key clues was not a piece of physical evidence, but a text. And, all in all, there weren't very many clues to find. There was really only one error committed by the murderer, and but for that the case might have gone unresolved if it were real life. This was one of the first times I genuinely felt that the great Hercule Poirot could have been stymied.
Now, continuing the project, I'm listening to this as an audiobook:
I finished all but the last two acts of the first part last night. The idiot king of Persia, Mycetes, reminds me of Dubya, except for the fact that Mycetes, unlike Dubya, actually has an intelligent sibling by the name of Cosroe. Cosroe is openly contemptuous of Mycetes, which leads to some of the funniest lines in the play, like the following:
Quote:
MYCETES. Well, here I swear by this my royal seat—
COSROE. You may do well to kiss it, then.
But, of course, the real interest of the play is the unstoppable juggernaut of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd who has become the most powerful man in the region, and the battles and backroom dealing that goes on around him, with each local potentate either defying or trying to use him, and almost all of them realizing too late that they've misjudged their man.
Finally, I just watched the ITV adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and was reminded yet again of one of my favorite Mitchell and Webb sketches:
And while I'm mentioning them and old mystery characters, I have to link to the unforgettable Sherlock Holmes adaptation in the "Dead British Actors" sketch:
Since I'm getting through these at such a brisk rate, I think I'll just post all the books that were adapted for the season 9 of Poirot. I'm already almost halfway through the first one, which I read once before. The novel anticipates Rashomon with a plot where Poirot sorts through the subtle differences of five people's account of the same 15-year-old murder case, and despite the necessary repetition of the facts it never becomes boring. It was also published as Murder in Retrospect.
The first and second books are audiobooks, and the third and fourth are texts. I'm reading the third now too, because I'm listening to the New York Philharmonic right now and want something to read as I listen (and they're premiering a piece by one of my favorite young composers, Lyra by Anthony Cheung, which has nothing to do with the books but does make me very happy ).
We were rewatching the Suchet documentary about Poirot on Sunday and I told my sister about your project. She has the complete Poirot set on her Amazon wish list and said she might copy you if she ever gets it.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Read through this on my day off. I think the cover sends a clear, but unintended message, but my coworker couldn't see it.
The message is: We don't own the rights to Bruce Lee's likeness.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Here's a bit of irony for you. Yesterday, I felt unusually inclined to reading some serious nonfiction, and I already finished Anthony Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy, so I finally picked up an anthology called Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. So, it's a book all about how to define and identify the beautiful... and it has the ugliest cover I've ever seen.
Seriously, take a look at this:
Granted, scholarly books from university presses aren't known for their aesthetic appeal, but it's almost as if they made a conscious attempt to scrape the very bottom of the barrel. At least the contents of the book are much better than its exterior. There are always two choices when dealing with an anthology or general history: in-depth but spotty coverage, or comprehensive but brief coverage. Anthony Kenny's book was the latter by necessity, since he had to deal with multiple aspects of philosophical thought over the last 2500 years, and this book is a good example of the former. There are few philosophers represented (and an abundance of German philosophers for reasons explained in the text—basically analytic philosophy, the dominant tradition in the Anglophone world, has traditionally given short shrift to art), but the few selections represent an in-depth treatment of each one's thought.
Last edited by Nullifidian; 06-04-2015 at 05:30 PM.
I recommend the Elliot book, White Coat Black Hat, which describes the unsavory aspects of many parts of the US medical establishment. The lead section is on what the author calls 'guinea-pigging', professional clinical trial subjects, and goes on to describe other dubious aspects of medicine like ghost medical writers, pharmaceutical representatives, thought leaders, public relation flacks, and 'bioethicists'. Prior to reading Elliot, I was familiar with these aspects except the 'guinea-piggers' and the paucity of real 'ethics' amongst what I thought to be a promising reformative move to bring more accountability to the medical profession, the introduction of ethicists to the field. Boy, was that discouraging. I am now a lot more cynical about claims for 'clinical trials', 'peer-reviewed journals' , or 'knowledge opinion leaders'. The author, by the way, is an academic medical bioethicist with the University of Minnesota.
I just finished this and I had to come back here and give it my highest recommendations. Brownlee is the writer whose piece on influenza vaccination in Atlantic introduced me to Dr. Tom Jefferson and the whole concept of the Cochrane Collaboration. She is an excellent investigative journalist.
Just finishing The Maltese Falcon which is more like the movie than I expected. Sure there are chunks of the book and an entire character missing, but some of the dialogue was used verbatim. Considering it's the third movie they made of it, it seems odd to me that it was closer to the book than the others. Perhaps current film-makers could take a lesson from that.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Good gawds, that's weird. I came here to say I am reading this book which has what it calls on the cover THE FOUR GREAT NOVELS by Dashiel Hammett. One of them being The Maltese Falcon, but that's number 3. The first one was Red Harvest and now I am reading The Dain Curse (number 4 is The Glass Key).
Anyway, what I learned so far:
- It was still okay to call someone a 'mulatto' casually and repeatedly. Or 'high yellow'.
- Aluminium was spelled aluminium.
- Cars were sometimes called 'machines'.
Still haven't learned the protagonist's name though. Or been able to put the book down much.
I read Red Harvest a while back. It is said to be the basis for Yojimbo but it's clearly a very loose one. And I don't believe that character ever gets a name. I've heard him called the Continental Op, from the name of another novel.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Among the selections:
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE
THE LAY OF THE NIBELUNGS
THE POEM OF THE CID
THE SONG OF ROLAND
BEOWULF
Among the authors:
Walter von der Vogelweide
Geoffrey Chaucer
François Villon
Dante Alighieri
Marie de France
This is one of the best anthologies of Medieval literature I've ever seen (I'd rank the Viking Portable Medieval Reader as among the greatest for nonfiction). It contains selections that date from the 7th to the 15th century, and features French, German, Italian, English, Russian, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Spanish, Basque, Icelandic, Portuguese, Galician, and Byzantine Greek works.
And as an audiobook, read by Simon Vance, I'm listening to:
Last edited by Nullifidian; 09-19-2015 at 01:00 AM.
One day when I didn't feel like reading short poems and extracts from the Medieval Age book, which I'm still plugging away at (now I'm up to the Minnesingers, including the delightful Walther von der Vogelweide, in the section "The Lyric: The Impact of the Troubadours and After . . ."), I put out my hand to select a novel and grabbed this:
It's very interesting. If anyone knows Irving Stone's biographical writings (either his actual biographies or his biographical novels), you'll know that the book is thoroughly researched, intensely detailed, and yet a page-turner. Right now I'm up to Darwin at Montevideo and Buenos Aires just preparing to sail for the Tierra del Fuego.
If I have one criticism of the book, it's that it has a lopsided structure, probably because Stone wanted to hit what he considered the highlights of Darwin's life. The book begins just after Darwin graduated from Cambridge, follows him to the receipt of the letters offering him an unpaid place on the HMS Beagle as Capt. FitzRoy's gentleman companion, and continues for fully half of the book dealing with the voyage. The time from his return to Britain up to the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, which is 23 years, takes up another quarter of the book (I glanced ahead). Then the last quarter deals with everything else up to his death, another 23 years of life. So half the book deals with five years, and the third and fourth quarters of the book deal with 23 years each. By comparison, Janet Browne's two volume biography (Darwin: Voyaging and Darwin: The Power of Place) splits the volumes right at Darwin making the decision in 1858 to write On the Origin of Species. Stone's structure seems to indicate that he believes that practically everything that happened to Darwin after Origin was trivial in comparison to his first 28 years of scientific life, even though this latter period encompasses five more editions of Origin, his Fertilisation of Orchids, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, The Descent of Man, and more. As much as I liked reading The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, I know Darwin was a far more substantive, prolific, and wide-ranging thinker than even those great works can fully indicate. I'd have liked for there to have been more time spent on Darwin the elder scientist and less on Darwin the young man.
Though I took a break from it to whiz through And Then There Were None this week. I've never really read much Christie, although I like the dramatizations. I think I'm going to fix that.
__________________
"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Before my vacation I had been rereading a lot of stuff, then finally went to the library and picked up:
The Land Across by Gene Wolfe- solid and engrossing, a travel writer manages to get to a mysterious eastern European country, and then the story takes a series of interesting turns, constantly evolving. The Human Division by John Scalzi- set in the Old Man's War universe, well written.
Then I went on vacation and suddenly devoured books again:
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard- light and humorous, the Faustian necromancer makes a wager with the devil that he can convince one hundred humans to sign their souls over to Satan within one year; if he succeeds Satan will return Johannes' soul to him; the twist is Johannes must arrange it through a demonic travelling carnival, led by him with the help of his betrayed and inhuman brother. The Peripheral by William Gibson- well crafted, nice build and interesting idea. Dark Intelligence by Neal Asher- in his Polity universe, as usual fascinating tech, xeno cults, and lots of action. The Last Colony by John Scalzi- also set in the Old Man's War universe, and also well written; not quite as strong but a great integration of galactic politics and characters. Lock In by John Scalzi- murder mystery set in the not so distant future, with a percentage of the world population permanently paralyzed by a viral epidemic but able to interface with the world through internet and remotely controlled robot bodies. Well done. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss- this fantasy novel was brilliantly written and I kept searching every bookstore I could find for the sequel. An infamous warrior, bard, and adept tells his story, and the writing is strong, great voice. The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore- he writes pretty light and humerous novels, and this mash-up of The Cask of Amontillado, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello is hilarious, and inspired me to go get his previous novel The Fool which features some of the same characters, mainly the fool, Pocket.
Traffic must be a boon for the economy because I was inspired to stop at a Barnes & Noble in order to wait it out. While there, I bought three books and a budget label CD of Dvořak's "New World" Symphony and Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony.
I was out and about to see the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Verdi's Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) with maddog , and I highly recommend that anyone even faintly interested in opera should go see the encore broadcast on Wednesday October 7 at 6:30 p.m. local time. If you can't see it then, then check around online for rebroadcasts of this production. A radio station in Alaska always rebroadcasts the Saturday Met matinees the next day, and you can find other times of upcoming broadcasts on the internet with Operacast.com (hideous site, but excellent information). This production was so worth it. One of the best-sung versions I've seen. What's even more impressive is that Dmitri Hvorostovsky, this production's Il Conte di Luna, is recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor.
The three books I picked up were:
The full title, which is a little hard to read here, is The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World.
This edition includes:
A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
I'd been wanting a decent complete Sherlock Holmes set for some time because I've been re-watching the Jeremy Brett adaptations and my previous Complete Sherlock Holmes was a single-volume facsimile edition of the stories printed in The Strand magazine. Very interesting to see Holmes with the Paget illustrations as his first readers may have seen him, but in reducing the pages to the size of a paperback they made the text almost indecipherable. If I say that the typeface was smaller than the two-volume OED, you might get the idea of what I'm talking about.
I would have snapped up both volumes at once but they only had the one.
I read The Martian over the weekend, on account of we watched the movie on Friday night and I liked it and I had heard that it was pretty true to the book so I wanted to check it out.
The movie was great, but extremely difficult for me to watch in IN-YOUR-FACE REAL THREE-DEE for various reasons, mostly relating to my squeamishness about blood and totally rational anxieties about loss of air and/or gravity.
The book was also great but with caveats. It was painfully obviously not written by a novelist/writer per se, but by a nerdy kid who had a cool story to tell. The story was excellent but the delivery was hella amateurish. I totally forgive that, even, because he used the whole "these are the nerd scientist's personal logs you are reading" device, and that was easy enough to buy.
The science, tho! OMG the science! So good. I can't say it's perfect, because I didn't check the numbers, but the one or two times he touched on my area of expertise he nailed it.
You guys remember this thing I posted in 2011 about the computery communications stuff inside the Pathfinder? So in the book, they use this same feature again to talk to the Pathfinder, and the tech guy is explaining it to the NASA guy (emphasis mine):
Quote:
"We've been looking through the old Pathfinder software. We got duplicate computers up and running for testing. Same computers they used to find a problem that almost killed the original mission. Real interesting story, actually; turns out there was a priority inversion in Sojourner's thread management and--"
"Focus, Jack," interrupted Venkat.
"Right. Well, the thing is, Pathfinder has an OS update process. So we can change the software to anything we want."
Fucking honestly, how many readers are going to read that and know or care how accurate it is? Given that, I went ahead and figured the rest of the science is that good, without bothering to do the research myself.
So I'm on the fence about recommending this book to my mom. I will tell her definitely don't watch the movie (she's at least as squeamish as I am), but I don't know how accessibile the book would be to her.
Edit:
I guess if I'm being totally accurate, I should replace the word "science" with "engineering" everywhere it appears in this post (minus this edit, that would just be confusing).
Re: What are you reading?
).
, and I highly recommend that anyone even faintly interested in opera should go see the encore broadcast on Wednesday October 7 at 6:30 p.m. local time. If you can't see it then, then check around online for rebroadcasts of this production. A radio station in Alaska always rebroadcasts the Saturday Met matinees the next day, and you can find other times of upcoming broadcasts on the internet with 
What's even more impressive is that Dmitri Hvorostovsky, this production's Il Conte di Luna, is recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor.
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