What are you reading?

[Dingfod]

They science the shit out of that bitch then.

[Nullifidian]

I've been busy reading. I'm back on my stalled Poirot project, having completed the reading for season 9: Death on the Nile and The Hollow. The Hollow was a remarkable departure for Agatha Christie. There isn't the intricate plotting and elaborate misdirection of her other novels (Death on the Nile, for instance), but it was a tour de force of psychological writing. Perhaps this accounts for its relative obscurity and lack of popularity, but to my mind it evokes the writing of the roughly contemporary Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and I consider that high praise.

Next up is the first work of season 10, The Mystery of the Blue Train:



I've also not only finished The Wine-Dark Sea but also The Commodore, where Capt. Aubrey finally is promoted (temporarily) to flag rank and sent to frustrate the slave trade on the coast of West Africa, as well as the planned invasion of Ireland by French forces.

Currently, I'm on this audiobook, The Yellow Admiral:



This begins almost immediately where the last book left off, following the implications of what has happened in the previous two books. Because of a British plot in South America (I will say no more), Aubrey has been denounced as a British spy in Spain, and the fortune he had secreted there safe against his possible arrest for treason for his activities with the United Irishmen has been confiscated. Meanwhile, Aubrey's fortune is tied up in lawsuits over whether the slave ships he took were legal captures, and he may have to sell Ashgrove Cottage. I'm looking forward to it. After this, there are only two more complete novels and one partial work that was left unfinished because of Patrick O'Brian's death.

And I finished the first book in vol. 1 of that Complete Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet. Doyle's satire of the various positions taken by the London dailies on the murder case amused me. One of them, indeed, seemed very familiar:

The Daily Telegraph remarked that in the history of crime there had seldom been a tragedy which presented stranger features. The German name of the victim, the absence of all other motive, and the sinister inscription on the wall, all pointed to its perpetration by political refugees and revolutionists. The Socialists had many branches in America, and the deceased had, no doubt, infringed their unwritten laws, and been tracked down by them. After alluding airily to the Vehmgericht, aqua tofana, Carbonari, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the Darwinian theory, the principles of Malthus, and the Ratcliff Highway murders, the article concluded by admonishing the Government and advocating a closer watch over foreigners in England.

Evidently the Torygraph has changed little but its allusions since 1887.

[godfry n. glad]

Having completed and enjoyed Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, I followed up on his suggestions for addtional readings and requested (and have received) the following:






Having started the Greenhalgh text, the second subchapter in is a commentary on how the practitioners in the medical field resist 'evidence-based medicine'. Amusing, including her descriptions of how decision-making in medicine is done in the absence of evidence-based medical research...or...now, even with evidence-based medical research.

[Anastasia Beaverhausen]

I'm waiting on the final Maze Runner book from the library, so I picked up Viral by James Lillefors.

[JoeP]

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Nullifidian

Currently, I'm on this audiobook, The Yellow Admiral:

This begins almost immediately where the last book left off, following the implications of what has happened in the previous two books. Because of a British plot in South America (I will say no more), Aubrey Maturin has been denounced as a British spy in Spain, and the fortune he had secreted there safe against his possible arrest for treason for his activities with the United Irishmen has been confiscated.

Unfortunately, I couldn't go back and edit it, but my obsessive need for complete accuracy wouldn't let me leave it either.

[Nullifidian]

I just finished The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Yellow Admiral, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 (sometime soon I'll visit a Barnes & Noble to see if I can lay my hands on the other volume), so now I'm reading the following:

As text: the book Infinitesimal by Amir Alexander that I picked up a few weeks ago in the same haul with the Sherlock Holmes.

I'm also still working through that excellent Medieval Age anthology. I've dealt with the four large thematic sections, and three of the smaller sections (the complete Aucassin and Nicolette, extracts from "German Verse Narratives", and a section on Dante Alighieri with some poems and the Francesca and Paolo excerpt from The Inferno). Now I only have three more chapters to go, each on a specific author: Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita; Geoffrey Chaucer; and François Villon.

And as an audiobook, read by Ralph Cosham:



This edition is an omnibus edition of The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court, Privy Seal: His Last Venture, and The Fifth Queen Crowned in that order, which can individually all be found at Project Gutenberg, although sadly only the first volume is available from LibriVox, which is why I got this commercial recording from the library.

Also for historical fiction fans, Project Gutenberg has the first two books of Dmitri Merezhkovsky's "Christ and Antichrist" trilogy up at their site, both of which I've read and ardently recommend. Merezhkovsky meant "Antichrist" in its Nietzschean sense, so the books aren't a turn-of-the-century Left Behind. Rather, they focus on three moments, through the lens of three featured historical characters, where Christianity met and either conquered or was conquered by the forces of cultural change. The first book, The Death of the Gods, deals with the Emperor Julian's very nearly successful attempt to revive the Roman gods. The second book, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, uses the artist's life as a vantage point to look at Renaissance Italy, when Classical learning was reasserting itself in the culture, while at the same time the forces of reaction like Savonarola were trying to hold back the tide. The depiction of Savonarola's Florence reminds me of Kabul under the Taliban. The third book, Peter and Alexis: The Romance of Peter the Great, is only available through Archive.org and deals with the Westernizing figure of Peter and his conflicts with his son, the Tsarevitch Alexei.

[Nullifidian]

I went back to that Barnes and Noble I visited a few weeks back and bought three more books. They're all of them (mostly*) in the public domain, so theoretically I could have read them for free, but I like having physical copies of my favorite books around.

The first thing that I bought was the second volume of Holmes stories:



Then I bought the following because it contained both of Samuel Butler's translations of Homer in one book:



I bought the Samuel Butler translation of The Iliad when I was in 9th grade, because we were only studying The Odyssey in class, and I regard it as still one of the best prose translations. Butler's translation of The Odyssey pushes his not widely accepted idea that the author of the work was a Sicilian woman living about 3,000 years ago.



Then finally Moby-Dick in the Norton Critical Edition. This I bought for the scholarly essays and because of the name of one of the editors, Hershel Parker. If there's anyone who knows more about Melville and this novel in particular, I haven't heard of them.

*Because Conan Doyle died in 1930, his work is public domain in Life+50 and Life+70 countries, but it's not PD in the U.S., where the standard is 95 years after the date of publication for anything published on or after January 1, 1923 which has had its copyright renewed. Thus all of the Holmes corpus is public domain in the U.S. except for the last book, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in 1927. That's also why only three of the Richard Hannay spy novels by Conan Doyle's younger contemporary John Buchan are PD in the U.S. (The Thirty-nine Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr. Standfast), despite them all being PD everywhere else.

[specious_reasons]

I just finished reading The Shepard's Crown - the last book by Terry Pratchett. It's a fitting end to his career, as I think the Tiffany Aching series is among his best work.

I'm of mixed feeling. The book isn't his best work, but it's better than average. I had to admit, I teared up in the end, partly because it has a sentimental ending, but also because the ending is a comment on the author's life as well. I think he would have written more books if he had had the opportunity, but this was clearly his swan song.

[Watser?]

Just started reading this: Amazon.com: War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (9780745334301): Jeff Halper: Books

Our Palestine group is meeting with the author on Friday 4 December, I met him a couple of times in Jerusalem when I was there.

[Vivisectus]

I am reading "Life in a medieval village", which uses surviving records of the village of Elton and archaeological studies into abandoned villages to paint a picture of Elton around the 13th century.

I like the way they explain the intricate overlapping structures of village organisation and the manorial system in simple terms so complete novices like me can grasp it easily, and use court- and church records to show us these villeins and serfs and free tenants as they pay tax and avoid it, settle disputes in and out of court, marry, pray, bury their dead, build and re-build their houses, buy and sell land, etc etc etc.

While it is mostly a high-level overview, the authors love of their subject shows through, and to me it makes the book more enjoyable. They freely admit they are a little biased: they are indignant at the way medieval peasant get depicted as complete bumblefucks, sometimes even in quite serious historical novels, which they think is rather insulting to the people navigating the complex societies they are clearly fascinated by.

All in all an interesting read for anyone who is curious about how those villages you keep coming across in games, movies and novels actually worked.

[Nullifidian]

I finished The Yellow Admiral and the subsequent book, The Hundred Days, so that leaves me only with Blue at the Mizzen as the last full-length Aubrey-Maturin book. There's an unfinished draft of just three chapters that was collected after Patrick O'Brian's death and called 21: The Final Voyage of Jack Aubrey, but I'm on the fence about whether I want to read it. I'm not necessarily that much of a completist.

In the meantime I'm listening to this for a book group (click for link to the LibriVox page):


(The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf)

And reading this in codex form:


(Contemporary European Theatre Directors by Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato (eds.))

This book is extremely interesting (save for a biased and superficial chapter on Patrice Chéreau), although it's already a bit out of date. While the featured directors are still working, there's already a legion of younger contemporaries who are making major innovations in the European theatre scene, which is a point raised in the chapter on Frank Castorf and the Volksbühne. I can speak especially to the UK and German stages with a certain amount of confidence, because even if I can't afford to go there frequently they do broadcast and film their productions, or tour them internationally. Still, it's making me even more dissatisfied with the slavishly text-based American theater scene. We had a European-inspired avant-garde theatre here in San Diego that did classic works like William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, August Strindberg, Georg Büchner and the ancient Greeks, along with moderns like Sam Shepard, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but they went out of business over eight years ago because the building they were in needed $100k in earthquake retrofitting and the owners couldn't afford it. Although they started out as a troupe without a home, they couldn't survive the loss of their theatre and folded. I grew up with them and they constituted my earliest encounter with a "director's theater" aesthetic.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Nullifidian

We had a European-inspired avant-garde theatre here in San Diego that did classic works like William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, August Strindberg, Georg Büchner and the ancient Greeks, along with moderns like Sam Shepard, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but they went out of business over eight years ago because the building they were in needed $100k in earthquake retrofitting and the owners couldn't afford it. Although they started out as a troupe without a home, they couldn't survive the loss of their theatre and folded. I grew up with them and they constituted my earliest encounter with a "director's theater" aesthetic.

And if you want to find out what that theater was like during its early years, they have videos of some of their productions posted in full online.

The full performances consist of the following:
Drums in the Night by Bertolt Brecht
7 Blowjobs by Mac Wellman
Terminal Hip by Mac Wellman
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (a minimally cut performance of 4.5 hours)
Pre-Paradise Sorry Now by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Seduced by Sam Shepard
The Saint Plays by Erik Ehn
The Shadowy Waters by William Butler Yeats/New by Erik Ehn

Now, these were shot with a camcorder in the early 90s, so don't expect too much. Still, it will give you an idea of what it was like. I can't wait to visit or revisit some of these old productions.

And I should have included this list before, but if you're interested in the directors featured in the book above, they are profiled in the following order:
Ariane Mnouchkine
Patrice Chéreau
Lev Dodin
Silviu Purcărete
Frank Castorf (mention is also made of other Volksbühne directors like Andreas Kriegenburg, Jeremy Weller, and Johann Kresnik, who is primarily a choreographer)
Daniel Mesguich
Declan Donnellan
Piotr Borowski
Christoph Marthaler (who also worked at the Volksbühne and is included in the Castorf chapter)
Jan Lauwers
Simon McBurney
Romeo Castellucci
Kristian Frédric
Calixto Bieito
Rodrigo Garcia
Katie Mitchell
Thomas Ostermeier
Peter Sellars

You can see clips and trailers for these directors' productions, and occasionally full-length videos, or see production photos online.

[Nullifidian]

I went to Riverside to visit maddog and see a broadcast of Puccini's Turandot in one of Franco Zeffirelli's overstuffed productions. Little about it was good, to be brutally honest. The stage business was well-realized, but it was distracting and excessive. Nina Stemme as Turandot sang well, but even her large voice just sank into the depths. That set was an acoustic nightmare. Marco Berti was strained as Calaf, and at several points I feared for his voice and wondered if he would actually finish out the opera. There was absolutely no chemistry between any of the singers, least of all Nina Stemme and Marco Berti, partly because of the staging (where you could only move in prescribed paths without falling off the stairs and platforms) and partly because of Berti's underpowered singing. When you have two romantic leads who don't touch until the final moments of Act III, the singers have to thrill with the power of their voices, and Berti wasn't up to it. He has undoubted musicianship and a nice voice, but it's not appropriate for the heaviness of this role. The chorus was as poor as I've heard in a decade, and I suspect they didn't put as much effort into rehearsing this work as they might if it were something less well-known. Finally, the conducting was lackadaisical. Basically, it was just an effort at putting a well-beloved warhorse in an old-fashioned staging on stage without doing anything with it.

But on the way home, I stopped in at Barnes and Noble and picked up a few books from their bargain stacks. Two of the books (the Bond book and the Jeeves and Wooster continuation) are sort of "Why not?" buys purchased because it didn't cost me much. I read all the Ian Fleming Bond novels as a child, and a few of the continuations like the novelization of License to Kill (which was actually pretty good), but I haven't read any of William Boyd's Bond continuations. And I adore P. G. Wodehouse—and not just for the Jeeves stories, but also for Psmith, Blandings Castle, Ukridge, etc.—but I hadn't read Sebastian Faulks' homage to him. Faulks is also the novelist behind Charlotte Gray, which was adapted into a movie with Cate Blanchett. I liked both the novel and the movie very much, so I figured I'd take a chance on his imitation of Wodehouse. The other two are novels from writers whose works I'd previously enjoyed: Zadie Smith and E. L. Doctorow (whose Ragtime is one of my favorite works, and which was turned into a pretty decent musical, at least as far as the lyrics and score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens go, though Terence McNally's book is somewhat weak).




But for right now I'm listening to the following as an audiobook:


Since it's kind of hard to read, the Seven Classic Plays of the title are Euripides' Medea, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, Alexandre Dumas, fils' The Lady of the Camelias (source of Verdi's famous opera, La traviata), Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, George Bernard Shaw's romantic comedy Arms and the Man, and Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (which I've read reviewed, seen clips of, and seen on stage so much more often in German than in English that it was seriously a wrench not to write it as Anton Tschechow's Onkel Wanja ). Medea is part of the same reading group selection as The Voyage Out, for a year of reading featuring women protagonists (not necessarily women writers, but many of them are), so I skipped it and started with the Shakespeare. February will feature all Greek plays: Lysistrata by Aristophanes, The Trojan Women by Euripides, Medea by Euripides, and Antigone by Sophocles. We could have read The Suppliants by Aeschylus as well, but I guess a whole host of women (fifty Danaïds in the original story) acting as unified chorus would make analyzing them all for individual motivations and characterizations somewhat difficult. I've downloaded the other two tragedies from LibriVox, but I'll be reading Aristophanes' comedy in a book titled Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women translated by Jeffrey Henderson, because all public domain translations of Aristophanes are too bowdlerized. The other two plays in the volume featuring women are The Assemblywomen and Women at the Thesmophoria.

And reading this as a physical book. Since New Directions has made the somewhat unusual decision not to have any title or name on the front of the book, but only on the very thick spine, I'll have to tell you that the title of the book is The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector:

[Crumb]

In the middle of


Going to start this now because I got it at the Library!

[Watser?]

I am reading the Kalevala. It doesn't have as much snow in it as I thought. Reading it in Dutch but the translation isn't great. Also it was translated from German, so not even from the original.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Adam

... or else a reread of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach which recently came up in conversation with a friend.

Well, did ya?

bey received GEB for his birthday, the 20th anniversary edition with a new introduction by the author, and I picked it up yesterday.

I like it! It's a fun read. Nothing really earth-shattering so far (I'm about halfway through) but then I've studied formal logic, so...

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

but then I've studied formal logic, so...

So you might honk for this bumper sticker?



The rollover text reads: Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.

[Watser?]

Now reading the Saga of the people of Eyri, an Icelandic saga. It has a lot of murders in several countries but also a lot of lawsuits.

[JoeP]

What is it with the Icelandic sagas and lawsuits.

[Nullifidian]

I'm currently right in the middle of this book. It's in two parts, and I've only just begun part 2:



Also I'm resuming my long-delayed Poirot project with:



I've recently come across the name of A. E. W. Mason, who wrote several mystery novels featuring a French detective named Inspector Gabriel Hanaud, which is evidently one of the influences on Agatha Christie's Poirot. I've downloaded the LibriVox recording of the first Hanaud mystery, At the Villa Rose. Aside from his Hanaud novels, Mason is also famous for his adventure novel The Four Feathers, available from LibriVox as a group recording. I'll listen to the Mason novel after I'm finished with my current audiobook, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James.

[forthecloset]

Hello everyone!
I am new here and i want to join this community.
Currently i am reading cocktales volume 1 book which involving men doing various things to each other. These stories contain erotic and sexual content.
I like it!

[Crumb]

Welcome to the forthecloset!

[Nullifidian]

I have a sneaking suspicion that we'll never see forthecloset post anything else. The tone of that post just sets my spam alarm ringing, and the user name is associated with a sex shop. Although it could be the proprietor of the shop posting legitimately—even pornographers can have an online life I suppose—I'm kind of doubting it.

However, I do find the newb's use of rather endearing, even though that's one of the things that makes me think this is automated spam.

[Crumb]

I think you may be right.