Barry Cunningham

I first read this book in the summer of 1965. Saw it beside Howl in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue, probably Shakespeare & Co. It was delightfully iconoclastic, with overtones of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Well over my head at the time with its dense literary allusions and references to locations I hadn't experienced yet. 55 years later, more widely read and more widely traveled, it makes more sense now. Of course not all of it make sense to anyone now; there are numerous obscure autobiographical and personal allusions we may never understand.
Corso was nothing if not a master of mixed metaphors ... or a mister of maxed metaphors. Some poems make Subterranean Homesick Blues look like MacArthur Park.
It starts in San Francisco (“O anti-verdurous phallic ... “) and ends in Paris (“ ... Dollhouse of Mama War.”) with, in Ginsberg's words, “a box of crazy toys” in between.

Ultimately, a children's book.
Designed to be inspiring, it is well written and engaging, with a certain charm. It certainly is very short. I read it in 2-3 hours.
However, I haven't been a young adult since well before this book was written. I found the magical thinking and God mambo-jumbo to be a bit wearing. The final well-signaled plot twist would probably have seemed more profound if I were younger and it were more novel to me.
Then there is the point that finding a chest full of gold on somebody else's property in Spain at almost any point in time over the past 200 years is going to involve more than a little litigation, taxation, or bribery. Not completely happily-ever-after.
The setting in time is more than a little confusing. Obviously trying to achieve a certain sort of timeless vibe, there is a conspicuous absence of technology. No trains, planes, or automobiles. No telephone or telegraph. Only revolvers and rifles. I think it is supposed to seem 19th century. That makes the Englishman's interest in alchemy just barely plausible. But then the absence of colonial powers in North Africa, save for one Englishman, seems bizarre. The combatants in the wars in the region are conspicuously unidentified. There is a reference to an unidentified book whose beginning seems somewhat like Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, but, seeing as this would place the timeline firmly and implausibly in the Franco era, it just further confuses the setting in time for me.

A hilarious read. An angel falls to earth, but the story is more prosaic and more riotous than anything Milton could have imagined. It turns out that Victorian England is a special kind of hell for real fallen angels.

Kind of disappointing. The gimmick is obvious from the computer error messages and the first green dot. Kind of hard to get invested in the characters when they're all just placeholders.

Nightwood

Well written I suppose. But for all its descriptive bluster, scandalous-at-the-time homoerotic themes, and lovelorn agonized characters, to me it comes off basically as pretentious romantic twaddle. Sometimes amusing, but, while less formulaic, it's no more serious than the chivalric romances that drove Don Quixote mad.

I read this book after seeing the moving during my freshman or sophomore year in college.
I found the characters even more two dimensional in the book than in the movie.
I learned that I really dislike Ayn Rand. I found none of her characters engaging or well characterized. They are simply symbols she is pushing around on the page to promote her political ideals.

A vast sprawling Pyncheonesque read

Engrossing many-threaded story with few neat endings. Many great characters kept drawing me in. The longest section, Part 4, a fast cutting litany of femicides leaves me with the idea that extending the idea of Murder on the Orient Express the killers may be an entire society.

An excellent read, masterfully written.
Beschloss fleshed in a lot of detail about the motivations for the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, and the Korean War that weren't in my history classes in school or in my previous reading. They make more sense to me now, twisted and perverted as that sense is.
It also demonstrates how in every war, the power of the President to wage war has increased, quite contrary to the founders intention in the Constitution. Partly this is because the founders were so naive about how the nature of international conflict was to evolve centuries later, a failure which is certainly understandable. But it is also our fault. Allowing ourselves to fall prey to the myth of the inerrant, all-wise founders allows those who wield 21st century weapons to evade the ineffective controls designed by 18th century imaginations.

Again, more of a romance set against a mystery with archaeologists, mummies, a vanishing man, and a complicated inheritance. Both the romance and the mystery are a little bit better than Freeman's first. Lots of wandering around turn-of-the-century London.

Actually from the Delphi Classics Complete Arthur Conan Doyle. About the 5th time I've been through the Holmes opus. Last time was over 20 years ago.
Always fun.

Delightfully witty ...

... putdown of pompous and hateful creeds of all sorts. Hitchens combines thoughtful arguments and erudition (à la Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins) with the wit of a George Carlin.

A very difficult read. I read it as an eBook on my iPhone, which made it doubly difficult because all the footnotes are interlineated in the text.
Historically, the book is very important. Darwin had left off dealing in detail with man's place in evolution in The Origin of Species because he knew it would be a lightning rod, and, as such, a distraction from his exposition of principles of natural selection.
I found the book's organization somewhat confusing. Only the first part of the book is really devoted to analyzing man's place in the natural world and how he has evolved. The second part of the book is devoted to sexual selection, surveying sexual characters throughout the animal kingdom. The third part attempts to tie together the first two parts, examining sexual characters in man.
Throughout this book, I was struck by how little data Darwin actually had on which to base his inquiries. One hundred forty years later we have exponentially more data on species, their genomes, relations, and behaviors. Hence, much of Darwin's discussion is speculative, as he readily acknowledges. DNA was unknown to Darwin, so he speculated about “gemmules” being transmitted to offspring. Much of his speculation about the relations among species is outdated by the precise information we have from DNA sequencing.
Unfortunately, Pasteur's insights into the crucial importance of microbial life, which were being formulated at that time, seem to have come a little late to have much influence on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In reading this book, I can easily find flaws in his speculation on particular subjects: we now know about the importance of symbiosis as a mechanism driving evolution thanks to the work of Lynne Margulis; we know about the influence of geography, native species, natural resources, and infectious diseases in accounting for cultural and technological differences that Victorians might have attribute to race (e.g., see Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; and the language about lower and higher species, savage and civilized races, now seems hopelessly Victorian.
Darwin was a trailblazer. This book reminds us how little Darwin could see from where he stood in the mid-19th century. We must also remember where he started and how far he came. His broad vision of the web of life and man's place in it was insightful and revolutionary.

I know I read this Lattimore translation my freshman year at MIT.
It really is beautiful, if a bit gory at times. The huge number of names, oblique name references, and mythological and geographical references do make reading difficult, but I was in no hurry this time and was using the notes in Willock's excellent Companion, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I don't remember and can't help wondering now if I got as much out of it as a freshman as I do now. I have a lot more background knowledge of Greek mythology, history, and geography now than I did then. But, even as a freshman, it was not my first exposure to Homer: I remember buying and reading the Classics Illustrated version of The Iliad in elementary school, as well as reading the Rouse translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey when I was in high school. I must have liked it my freshman year though because I remember reading a lot of the followup Greek dramas outside of class because I liked them so much.
Anyway, I decided to pick up The Iliad again because I recently read Madeleine Miller's The Song of Achilles, which I loved for her lyricism, and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which I really liked for her storytelling. I wanted to see how much they were retconing Homer. The answer is, quite a bit, but they can stand on their own. Nowhere near as bad as the movie Troy.
Anyway, I can recommend the Lattimore translation as one of the most readable and lyrical. It's most enjoyable if you take your time and lookup or figure out all of the references.
I'm sure there are other fine translations out there and opinions and preferences may vary. John Keats wrote an excellent favorable review of Chapman's translation some time ago.

An interesting covert street photography exhibit of pictures taken on the New York subway in 1938, 1940, and 1941.
Nowadays, with our smartphones and small high-ISO P&S cameras, taking such photos is not much of a technical challenge. It's easy to overlook just how hard this was to do with a 35mm Contax beneath one's winter coat with a bulb release routed down the sleeve. But the pictures are a remarkable time capsule of some of life's unguarded, boring moments. Ordinary then. Gone now. Brutally forgotten otherwise.

Excellent supplement to the Lattimore translation.
Gave just 4 stars just because of the nature of the book: it is basically a set of notes that could appear as endnotes or footnotes in the book, which makes reading a bit fiddly at best.
There was some higher-level summary notes for the beginning of each Book of The Iliad, which was helpful and more engaging. Would have enjoyed a bit more of these.
For me, it was easiest to use this book if I read all the notes for each Book or section of a Book before reading in The Iliad proper to minimize the juggling of two books. Of course, I went back and looked again if questions occured to me during my reading The Iliad, but generally I found that going back and forth on a line by line basis was not necessary or more helpful.

A book I've been meaning to read since junior high school. Perhaps it might have been better in junior high school.
It starts out kind of slow, and I had some annoyances in Orczy's style. The main plot in fact is somewhat preposterous: British aristocrats saving French aristocrats.
The first major reveal happens about halfway through the book. But, it is hard to imagine that it could come as a surprise to anyone over the age of twelve. The title and the first chapter are about a male superhero. Then we spend umpteen chapters following a woman around. Why is that? What is the connection?
Finally the pace picks up and we have some real action. This bit is better paced, which is probably why it seems better written. Eventually it even culminates in the 18th century shanks' mare equivalent of a car chase, reminiscent of Kidnapped or John Buchan chases through the gorse. However the disguises wouldn't fool anyone who has read a few Doc Savages or is over the age of twelve.
So am I glad that I read it after all these years? Yes.
Do I wish that I had read it earlier? Yes, but not because I feel like I was missing some part of my education by not reading it. It's more like I think I might have enjoyed it more if I were more naive.

An involving tale of intrigue, well written and well paced, with an engaging main character, Richard Hannay. Perhaps little dated, being set just before the outbreak of World War I. The plot is driven by just one or two too many coincidences to be completely convincing.
Still, a worthwhile read. I plan to add some of Buchan's other novels featuring Richard Hannay to my list of books to read, perhaps as a guilty pleasure.

Compelling argument for remembering the lessons of Keynsian economic about how to end a depression. Unfortunately, our myopic politicians in Washington seem bent on out-Hoovering Hoover. The end result of following the Republican economic dogma of slashing and burning the government spending will be to sink the U.S., and probably the world, economy for at least a generation.

I grew up in Hollywood, so the local color of Hollywood in early 1930s was interesting and nostalgic. However, it runs into problems using actual historical people as characters when their actions as character diverge too far from what we know about the actual historical figures.
For instance, I found it hard to get engaged with the mystery of where Alla Nazimova "disappeared" to at a period in her life when she was starring on the Broadway stage in New York. It didn't help that she was "found" living with Dorothy Arzner when we know she was living with Glesca Marshall at that time.
To me it read like a contemporary young adult sitcom set in 1930s Hollywood. Some episodes were rather transparent treatments of contemporary social issues transplanted into that milieu.
Fairly fast-paced and readable, it is fairly light-weight. The blurb at the end of the book teasing the first chapter of the next book in the series seemed like a fairly wooden exposition for season 2 to me. Can't say it made me want to rush right out and buy it or borrow it from the library.

Actually, the Project Gutenberg edition on Stanza on my iPhone.

I read Muir's The Yosemite last year and found that book and him utterly amazing. Decided to read some more of his works, and this seemed like the logical place to start.

His origins may not have been that unusual for his time, but where he went from there in his late youth and early manhood seem entirely unexpected.

His early life and his narrative fall into three parts: his early youth in Scotland, his emigration to America and adolescence spent in help his family carve two farms out of the wilderness in Wisconsin, and his remarkable pursuit of an education and cultivation of his inventive genius.

In his early schooling in Scotland, corporal punishment was the chief pedagogical technique. Sort of an early form of standardized testing: no child left unscathed. This, and the savagery of the other boys in school, might have soured one on education forever. Remarkably, in Muir's case, they did not. Even in the narrative of his early youth, he describes his explorations of nature: observing birds and finding their eggs.

Suddenly, in 1849, when Muir was about eleven, his father decided the family would emigrate to America. First, his father and the three eldest children, made the crossing and found some land in Wisconsin. They built a shanty and set about the hard work of making a farm out of the wilderness. By fall, they had cleared the land and built a frame house so that the rest of the family was able to join them. But despite the hard labor that this entailed, his description of this time is one of overwhelming joy as he and his brother Daniel enjoy the freedom of the wilderness and discover the animals of the woods and the farm. This part of his narrative contains vivid descriptions of his discovery of nature around him.

After eight years, having already built a comfortable farm, his father bought another half-section of land four or five miles distant, and again commenced the back-breaking work of clearing it and building it up. Remarkably, for all the strenuous work he was doing and his father's strict religious discouragement, Muir set about trying to educate himself in what little time he had available outside of work. He got his father to buy him a book on arithmetic, and despite not having attended school since the age of 11, he was able to work through it in short order. He then set about trying to read all that he could, borrowing or acquiring books as he could. All this was sternly opposed by his father, who believed that the Bible was the only book he needed. Muir would try to steal five to ten minutes to read by candlelight around 8pm before his father would admonish him to put out the light and go to bed to be ready for work tomorrow.

One night, his father made the tactical mistake of telling him that he shouldn't have to be scolded every night into putting out the light, but that he could get up as early as he liked. Immediately, Muir began going to bed with the rest of the family, but getting up at 1 AM to work on his inventions. He built scientific instruments and whittled clocks of his own design.

Later, when he showed them to a knowledgeable neighbor, he was told he should go exhibit them at the State Fair, and that he could easily secure a job in a machine shop. Eventually, this is just what he did. When he left home for the State Fair, his father assured him that he was on his own and if he should run into a rough spell, he shouldn't look to his father for help.

At the State Fair, he was offered a job in a machine shop. After a few months though, it did really work out. There wasn't enough work or instruction available to satisfy him. So he moved to Madison. After a little while he figured out that he could get into the University of Wisconsin, teaching himself enough to keep up with the rest of the students, and earn enough doing odd jobs to put himself through college.

So that's just what he did, learning a great variety of things befitting his wonderous curiousity: botany, geology, chemistry, sciences, and engineering.

End of youth. He wrote more books about later.