Barry Cunningham

Another Carr puzzler.
Starts out very humorously. After the dead body appears, you'd think the humor would evaporate, but the memorable characters and suspects take up the slack.

Eye-witnesses are unreliable.
Marcus Chesney set up a test to demonstrate this where nothing was as it seemed.
But, alas, things were not as they seemed to Marcus Chesney either, and it cost him his life.
It takes Gideon Fell to unravel this web of delusion and illusion upon illusion.
Another classic John Dickson Carr puzzler.

Fascinating, curious, topically outdated (from the 1920s), infuriating, exasperating, insightful, and just plain stupid.

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.

I saw this biography in Mac's Backs and knew I had to have it. I knew him only as the basis for character you couldn't take your eyes off of in Kerouac's “On the Road” and wanted to know what his story was.
Neal Cassady was jerk, but a charismatic and influential jerk. In that respect, not unlike most politicians. But he grew up on the other side of the tracks, became a petty criminal, dope fiend, womanizer, and icon of the Beats and the Hippies. Jack Kerouac immortalized him as Dean Moriarty in “On the Road”; Allen Ginsberg fell in love with him, mentioning him by his initials in Howl; besides them he hung out with William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and he drove Merry Pranksters' psychedelic bus Furthur for Ken Kesey on their epic journey across America. An idyllic hero in the Ayn Rand mold.
Fascinating reading, but I'm glad I never met him.

Fairly lame, though not untypical for the era.
The sexist stereotypes and setting on a fictionalized Mercury that bears no plausible resemblance to what we know Mercury is like have not aged well.
I did not find the characters particularly engaging.
Maybe if I were 14 in 1949 (and it was still 1949!), I might have found it more engrossing.
As it is, meh.

Light lunch-time reading.
Definitely sports nostalgia (or pre-nostalgia, since it describes a sports world of the 1920s or 1930s), pedestrian, and small-time.
I grew up watching the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels, before the Dodgers moved to town, so, having liked some of Zane Grey's Westerns, I was willing to give this try. The minor leagues in this book are a lot more minor though, being set in smaller towns and sandlots, 20 to 30 years before I was watching the Angels. Not great plots or great sports writing, but a pleasant diversion.

I found this to be an excellent read.
It helped to put many of Cummings' poems in context. Most of his poems are very personal, so some context about where, when, and why they were written contributes a great deal to my appreciation of them.

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.

I must confess to some prejudice here: my father wrote this book and I published it. That said, I would not have bothered if I did not think it was worth the effort.
The book is a sequel to Gulliver's Travels, written and set in the mid-1930s. Like Swift's original, it is both a fantasy and a political satire, though not nearly as misanthropic as Swift's.
Though it is a satire of America during Franklin Roosevelt's first term, it is remarkably topical. Some scenes from the book seem inspired by the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 or recent Congressional hearings.
Not a commercial thriller or blockbuster, but still very funny and thought provoking. The “Look Inside” feature is enabled on Amazon, so potential readers can browse the book extensively to determine whether or not this may be of interest.

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.

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.

More modern fable than fairy story

Probably more than 50 years since I last read it. Clever and insightful, but much shorter than I had remembered. Still I think it probably would have lost its punch if it were longer because it would have been hard to maintain the conceit.

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.

Moving photography.
Would have liked a bit more text with more history of the institution to set it in its then current social context. That's partly because my maternal grandmother was institutionalized there years before Mary Ellen Mark was there.

Probably the best biography that can be written about Tatum given our agonizing lack of information about him.
Lester's biography appears as comprehensive as it could be, but inevitably leaves us wanting to know more about this enigmatic genius who awed almost all the musicians he met, and continues to awe us today with his recordings.

Possibly the worst science fiction book ever written.
When the good guys are losing a space battle to the aliens, they pop into bubble of spacetime and spend thousands of years developing powerful new weapons, then pop back into the battle a few seconds later with a vast armada to kick butt. I think that's cheating. Like a book on improving your chess suggesting you use a chain saw to dismember your opponent.
I'm sure you can find books you think are worse. Don't tell me. I'm not going to read them to compare. I don't want know. Have it your way.

I've been currently reading this for nearly 50 years.
Stevens's poetry is frequently enigmatic. Hence, I keep coming back to poems over and over again, reading new meanings into it.
I still have not read it all, and when I have, it will still probably be on my Currently Reading list.

Currently reading the Essays portion of this edition of her Complete Works. It's about 1,206 pages and I'm currently about 244 pages along.

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.