Barry Cunningham
An all too concise survey of his work.
Would have liked more on his life.
Unfortunately, Robinson is remembered now, if at all, mainly for Richard Corey, which is heavily anthologized because of its shocking twist. This was just one of his many poems about fictional persons, reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
Can't say that this book helped me approach his poetry any better. It did confirm to me that it was difficult, but could be more or less understood on close reading, and that it might be a little depressing. But I think I'd figured that out already.
Quite the first novel from Zola!
I've been reading early novels from many authors complete collections of their works. Frequently the early works of famous authors are a struggle. I was pleased to find that this was engrossing from the start.
The story is perhaps a bit tawdry, but the narrator's voice is raw and compelling, his descriptions, evocative. At times I was reminded of Poe, Dostoevsky, Lovecraft, Huysmans, Tolstoy, and, of course, La Bohème.
Since the narrator is 20 years old, the over-the-top style of narration, while at times a bit irritating, did not seem out of character.
A Vignette
Just a short little interlude for Northwest Smith showing him finally enjoying a day on Earth. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Billing Northanger Abbey as a gothic parody overstates the case. It does not parody gothic romances in anything like the same sense that Don Quixote parodies chivalric romances. At best, the device of constantly shooting down the naive heroine's gothic fantasies lifts the book to the level of sufferably puerile.
(Actual edition read was that contained in the Complete Works of Jane Austen published by Delphi Classics.)
The book is divided into two parts.
The first part is a preface which is smart, irreverant, iconoclastic, insightful, erudite, and stupid. It is very amusing and a wonderful read.
The second part is a series of aphorisms, presumably meant, tongue-in-cheek, to represent Americans' beliefs, spoken and unspoken. It is too topical to hold up 92 years later. About half the references are nearly unintelligible to modern audiences. A large number of the intelligible references contradict the beliefs of modern Americans. All in all, reading the second part is like trying to read and eat 488 92-year-old, smart ass fortune cookies.
Excellent detailed critical analysis of the Gospel of Mark in its historical context.
Extensive historical analysis of the academic literature on Mark and related biblical literature.
Makes sense of Mark as an etiological myth for the Markan community that historicizes a mythic Jesus as a response to the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish War.
Meh. Fell off a shelf of the Universal Library.
Not a How to Pick Up Girls for Dummies. More than a bit dated. Occasional casual racism.
Reads more like George Ade than the Kama Sutra.
First, the description of this book that I see for the Kindle edition is wrong. It describes another entirely different novel by Ben Elton. The novel by James Hilton tells the story of the life of a fictional English diplomat, Charles Anderson, born in 1900. The only time travel involved is memory. The story is told in a present narrative, giving way to four flashbacks. Hilton's treatment of memory in this book is not quite as engaging as he treatment in [b:Goodbye Mr. Chips 2141948 Goodbye Mr. Chips James Hilton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348024958l/2141948.SY75.jpg 2147442], but there is a lot more action in a more complicated world.An engaging read. It had to be. The Kindle edition I read had hundreds of typographical errors. Most were capitalization errors. Lots of sentences without capitalization. Lots of words with a terminal “i” capitalized (e.g., “taxI”). Accented characters in foreign word replaced by blanks. Very aggravating.
Saw R. Austin Freeman referred to in [b:Goodbye, Mr. Chips 58657561 Goodbye, Mr. Chips James Hilton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1627587012l/58657561.SY75.jpg 2147442] as one of “Mr. Chips” favorite mystery authors.I can't say that I was very impressed. The “mystery” was pretty transparent from the start. Not much of a mystery at all. Seems a little wooden after all, with fairly stilted dialog. The effort at the end to pass itself off as a romance is really rather lame.
Fun read. Plenty of action. A little dated to be sure, especially in social attitudes and casual genocide. But at least the narrator doesn't upend Gladys on the back of a tarn at the end.
Actually from the edition contained in the Delphi Classics Complete Works of Daniel Defoe.
Read it in conjunction with Pirate Enlightenment, which references it frequently.
A little lame actually.
The first thing I note is that Einstein had discredited and abandoned the idea of the luminiferous ether several years before this book was written. Even though not all scientists had gotten that memo by 1913, that Doyle premises his story on its existence indicates that science is not going to be a strong point in the story, though it is consistent with Doyle's “spiritualist” world view at the time which does bleed through into the story.
The opening chapter, where everyone is behaving a little peculiarly, is a particularly heavy handed foreshadowing of the crisis to come.
The last chapter retcons the global catastrophe, reminiscent of more recent films that feature similar annoying mulligans (I'm thinking of the Avengers and Superman), one can see coming from the structure of the narration: our reporter protagonist must have an audience in the end.
I enjoy these old travel tales. The most difficult part is relating the old geographic names to current locations.
A serial melodrama to be sure. Still, the characters are engaging and the historical setting interesting. The plot is a bit of a pot-boiler, but it is interesting to see what Zola was getting into just before his first major work, Thérèse Raquin.
(I read this in the original PDF version issue by the January 6 Committee. In that version, the notes were not easy to navigate on my Kindle readers. Simple automated conversion to Kindle format made the formatting worse. I am also reading the Harper edition with the forward by Ari Melber that was delivered today (12/30/2022)).
An important document in contemporary American history. It thoroughly and meticulously documents the actions and events that led up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the events of the day itself, and subsequent events.
It is scathing.
I did not find it an easy book to read. I did not find the heavily annotated text so difficult, although, technically I suppose it was. What I found difficult seeing the depravity of the GOP, the Trump administration, and the right-wing extremists who planned and carried out the attack. The meticulous documentation of their ceaseless lies and abuses of power made for both a depressing and angry read.
One hopes that the Department of Justice indictments will be forthcoming in the new year. Besides Trump and his inner circle that plotted the insurrection, more than a few of the new House committee chairs deserve to be behind bars with their ground troops for seditious conspiracy for their roles supporting the January 6 coup attempt.
Just finished the first novel: Frank Reade, Jr. and His New Steam Man.
One of the more dreadful books that I have read recently.
I think I have paid my dues for Garbaugust.
If you want to read this because you liked the Hardy Boys and think a Civil War era boys' book might be a romp, skip it. Move along.
If you want to read it out of historical interest to find out what trash was being promoted to boys' just after the Civil War, gird your loins and proceed. Knock yourself out. Probably not as bad as much of the alt-right trash you see every day on the news.
I have come across references to Sappho many times in my recent reading. So I finally decided to read her works to fill this gap in my reading, knowing it would not take long because so little survives.
The Delphi Classics Edition contains a 2011 Greek / English dual text translation, by Peter Russell, of all her surviving work, about 650 lines total (out of an estimated 10,000 lines she may have produced over her lifetime). That took only about an hour to read.
A couple of odes survive, some shorter pieces which may or may not be complete, and over a hundred fragments of a few words to several lines. Russell's direct translation seems closest to Sappho's voice. And, a remarkable voice it is. Ancient commentators who had access to more of her work raved.
Some fragments remind me of haiku or Ezra Pound's famous little poem about the Paris Metro.
“The stars around the wide moon lose all their shining beauty, as she illuminates the whole earth with silver.”
There are two other “translations” in the volume:
A 1907 “translation” by Bliss Carman
A 1911 “translation” by John Myers O'hara
There is the following note about the Carman “translation”:
“Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. ... “
I class these “translations” more as poetic fan fiction mostly built on fragments of her original poems.
I rate Carman's work much superior to O'hara's. Carman seems closer to the original voice of Sappho shown in Russell's more direct translation. O'hara's verse is more stilted to my ear, redolent of Edwardian poetic pretense, obfuscation, and stereotypes.
This volume could really use a short scholarly article about Sappho explaining more of what we know about her, legends about her, her work, what we know about how her work was lost, her critical assessment in antiquity, and her importance in culture. Lacking that, I suggest you at least read the Wikipedia article on Sappho to fill in that lacuna.
Really about 3.5 stars.This is a reread for me, but the first read was when I was in high school in the mid-1960s, probably in the paperback edition cited.One of my high school English teachers (either Doreen Stock or Helvi Lansu, I think) first mentioned it in passing and I filed it away. It appealed to me for two reasons. First, like many kids I had gone through my period of enthusiasm for dog and pony novels when I was in elementary school after reading [b:Black Beauty 3685 Black Beauty Anna Sewell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1578265482l/3685.SY75.jpg 4639714] and [b:Lassie Come-Home 895886 Lassie Come-Home Eric Knight https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1316130656l/895886.SX50.jpg 1065795]. This was another dog book to tack onto that genre. Second, it was based on a real dog associated with the Brownings' romance as imagined by Virginia Woolf, all of which were points of intrigue to me. I remember that I read it, and thought it was OK, albeit not particularly memorable. I also read Woolf's [b:Orlando 18839 Orlando Virginia Woolf https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1443118010l/18839.SY75.jpg 6057225] during the same time period. It was memorable.Having recently read [b:A Room of One's Own 18521 A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327883012l/18521.SY75.jpg 1315615], which I enjoyed so much I immediately then listened to it on audio book. The mentions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in it suggested the reread of Flush. I reread it in [b:Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired ‘A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery 35657376 Virginia Woolf Complete Works (OBG Classics) Inspired ‘A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery Virginia Woolf https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499832747l/35657376.SY75.jpg 44132937].Flush is a curious novel. It is not your usual children's dog novel. It is not exactly told from the dog's point of view. Although Woolf's stream of consciousness narrative frequently narrates Flush's putative thoughts and feelings, it is definitely a third-person doing the narration. Flush at points appears to be extraordinarily class-conscious, which is perhaps a clue to what the novel is really supposed to be about. Flush's interior life in some way mirrors Elizabeth Barrett's own, as would be expected, and, perhaps, is a bit of an allegory for Virginia Woolf's interior life. Perhaps even a faint prescient echo of the allegorical technique in [b:Animal Farm 170448 Animal Farm George Orwell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1325861570l/170448.SY75.jpg 2207778]. This is all OK. Virginia Woolf is entitled.But Flush is also a historical dog about which we have some particulars from Elizabeth Barrett's poems and letters. Woolf goes to some lengths to connect the dots here, including several long footnotes explaining the references and that she has, thankfully, collapsed three separate dognappings into a single incident for readability.I am left with some more curiosity about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and would like to explore her letters more.Flush, as a re-imagined character, seems curiously incomplete from what I was hoping for, though it may have been exactly as Virginia Woolf intended. From a dog's point-of-view we had a lot of wild, passionate sense impressions, some perplexity and misunderstandings about what people are doing, and some class-conscious musings on human and dog hierarchies. Not really enough detail about what is going on in the Barrett family or the Brownings' romance to make complete sense of it, just some emotional impressions, as if from the viewpoint of a dog. It's unclear whether we are expected to know the surrounding context – the footnotes argue that the author does not expect this of the reader – or whether the muddled impressions are all we are supposed to get.While there is some poetry and beauty here, as well as more than a little social commentary, the character and story arcs leave me somewhat unsatisfied.
The first time I attempted to read this was when I was in high school over 50 years ago. Having seen many blurbs of books I was reading that called the writing Rabelaisian, I, of course, was intrigued and checked the book out from the library. I quickly skimmed some of the scatological humor near the beginning, then quickly got bogged down, bored, and returned the book to library having only read a small piece. However, I always meant to finish reading it sometime and even bought a copy in graduate school that sat on my bookshelves for over 30 years.
This year an enthusiastic Hungarian fan of Rabelais started a buddy read on Goodreads, so I signed up, figuring that if I committed to it and had somebody I might disappoint if I didn't keep up, I could get through it. The main problem reading it is that it's not all just scatology and humor. It is dense with allusions to history, Lucian, Erasmus, Roman historians, Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and Reformation inside baseball. When I was in high school, all this was completely over my head. I figured 50+ years later, being a lot more well read, it would be a lot easier. So I pulled down the Burton Raffel translation off my shelf, started in, and bounced right off. The problems were that (1) it was translated into an English that was so archaic that several words on every page broke most of the online dictionaries I could find and (2) there were not enough notes to untangle the many literary allusions in the text.
So, I finally broke down and spent the money to buy the Penguin Classics edition translated and annotated by M.A. Screech. That made all the difference. The notes allowed me to place all the allusions and track down the ones that were of interest. My reading buddy in Hungary also suggested the Mikhail Bakhtin's critical study Rabelais and His World. I still have barely gotten into Bakhtin's book, but I will probably finish it in the near future.
Overall, I was more impressed with the books than I had been in high school. They are quite complex. Much of Rabelais' humor would have been of more interest to 16th century audience. But a lot is quite universal. Parts of the books were a real slog, some because they just droned on and on beating the same dead horse, some because I felt the need to go read some story out of Lucian or the Bible for context. Other parts were delightful and poetic. Book V was the easiest to read, though it's not certain that it was even written by Rabelais, but Pantagruel's voyage seem to presage the latter parts of Gulliver's Travels.
A sensible approach
to evaluating the probability of assertions about history. Carrier's approach using Bayes's Theorem to cut through specious arguments is a valid scientific method, an important analytical tool, and can be helpful pedagogical technique.
While I would rate the main thesis and content of the book as 5 stars, overall readability is perhaps more like 3 stars. Hence my rating of 4 stars.
The first difficulty Carrier faces is that of trying to explain mathematical concepts of probability and statistics that are thoroughly garbled most people's minds to a nontechnical audience. I have 3 degrees in mathematics, so I mind this and don't view this as adversely affecting readability directly, but it does mean that he does face a difficult problem as an author.
There were three main problems with readability that I noted.
(1) Typos and other small errors: these were mostly minor and just a little annoying. For example, missing parentheses in formulae, numerical errors in cross-references in explanations, and the introduction of mathematical techniques in notes (specifically Laplace's Rule of Succession) that are not explained in the book itself.
(2) Philosophical prolixity: an unfortunate tendancy to lapse into philosophical jargon when it is not really needed. As a reader with considerable mathematical training, I find this simply to be annoying noise. I can only conjecture that the effect on a nontechnical reader is not likely to be good. I think it marks a lapse in the author's awareness of the needs of his target audience.
(3) Diffuse reasoning in analysis: this is a problem in presentation style. In Carrier's analysis of historicity criteria the presentation of the analytical reasoning tends to be too diffuse. In presenting his analysis he also presents and refutes all common counterarguments as he goes along. This sometimes makes it comically difficult to follow the overarching thread of analytical reasoning over the course of 80 pages say, when a dozen or more examples of counterarguments are brought up and refuted in the course of the explanation. It would be much easier to follow the reasoning if it were first succinctly outlined an argued in 10 to 20 pages. Then examine the examples after the argument is completed and in the reader's mind to exhibit their fallacies.
I rated this as 3-stars simply because I am not really in the target audience of 21st century middle-grade or young adults.
I read it with interest because the author is a high school classmate; he helped organize our very successful high school class 50th reunion in 2016. I was not at all close to him in high school and I knew our life experiences were very different, but I was interested learning in his experiences during our school years in Southern California and our formative young adult years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Peter relates a series of stories from his life growing up, analyzing the lessons he learned from them. He urges young readers to analyze what similar experiences they may have had and what coping strategies they may have available to them.
Although Peter and I went to the same high school at the same time, we inhabited very different worlds at the time. He had a car and liked to spend most of his time at the beach, 20 miles away, surfing. I grew up with my father, without a car in our household, let alone a car of my own. By nature, I was much more academically inclined. I was more likely to be reading about math and science or busing to the downtown library to browse the literature room, first for 20th century poetry, then for foreign literature (think haiku, Noh drama, Rabelais, Kafka, philology) that excited my fancy as I wandered around.
Nevertheless, the experiences Peter relates, particularly how he explores them, are fairly universal in nature. He stresses that universality in teasing out the lessons he has learned. In that sense we have shared a lot of the same experiences. And, since we experienced them in the same time periods, I can relate to them in a way that is probably closer to his experience than that of 21st century young adults.
Peter has spent a lot more time teaching young people over the past half century than I have. I'm sure his presentation is a lot better adapted to his intended audience than to his grizzled old classmate.
I am grateful that Peter has shared his experiences so thoughtfully and with such a kind and loving heart.
A very good layman's introduction to notions of modern mathematical physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the quest for a unified field theory. I enjoyed reading it very much.
My only quibble with the book was that it lacked the mathematical detail I would have liked. However, I am probably an atypical reader. I have a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT and M.S. and M.A. degrees in Math from my 10+ years in grad school studying math. Still, a Suggestions for Further Reading section would have been really helpful for those interested in learning more technical detail.
Very entertaining
A bit episodic and disjointed. But the last chapter on Cargo Cult Science zeros in on one of the main problems in our discussions of science and public policy; it alone would be enough to merit the 5 star rating.