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What are you reading Chapter 4
- Thread starter slobake
- Start date
Christopher Dresser's Traditional Arts And Crafts Of Japan (1994); it was originally titled as Japan: Its Architecture, Art, And Art Manufacturers (1882).
I'm currently re-reading the Web Mage series (5 books) by Kelly McCullough.
I last read them over 10 years ago.
I'm currently in the middle of the 4th book. I forgot just how good this series is.
Webmage Series by Kelly McCullough
I last read them over 10 years ago.
I'm currently in the middle of the 4th book. I forgot just how good this series is.
Webmage Series by Kelly McCullough
Guitar King - Michael Bloomfield's life in the blues by David Dann. When it showed up, I said, "what the hell is this?" and opened it up. It was the book. 650 pages or more. I think it'll take about a year.
I failed my GoodReads book challenge for 2022. I'd aimed for 100 books, and only managed 93.
This year, I've set my sights lower...99 books!
So far I'm doing good.
Just finished two books by Chris Offutt, The Killing Hills and Shifty's Boys. These involve a Jack Reacher type of guy, but one more in touch with his Kentucky nature-loving roots. Really nice writing, reminiscent of Elmore Leonard.
I've another Chris Offutt book lined up, Country Dark, but I'm currently on the last pages of a biography of Stones drummer Charlie Watts, which has been excellent.
This year, I've set my sights lower...99 books!
So far I'm doing good.
Just finished two books by Chris Offutt, The Killing Hills and Shifty's Boys. These involve a Jack Reacher type of guy, but one more in touch with his Kentucky nature-loving roots. Really nice writing, reminiscent of Elmore Leonard.
I've another Chris Offutt book lined up, Country Dark, but I'm currently on the last pages of a biography of Stones drummer Charlie Watts, which has been excellent.
Maybe it's my short attention span these days, but my pattern is to have a bunch of books I'm reading at once and usually just to read a chapter of each at a time, rotating among them. Right now the university is on break so some of my reading is for myself and some of it is prep for things I'm teaching starting in a couple weeks.
For teaching prep right now, I'm reading India's Islamic Traditions, an academic anthology about... well, what the title says. That's for an Islamic Empires seminar.
And Debra Hassig's Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology. This is prep for a class called "Facing Beasts" about historical human interactions with animals.
I've also been on a very looooonnng slog through a translation of Johan de Weyer's De Praestigiis Daemonium, published as Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance. De Weyer was a huge critic of early modern witchcraft trials and very controversial. He argued that witches were not in league with the Devil but deluded by him, and that the real evil Satan was working was to turn people against each other in these accusations. It's an immense book but I teach a course on the history of magic, plus I've started working on a book of my own on the treatment of mental illness historically, and de Weyer interprets the "delusions" part in terms of melancholy hallucinations, so I thought I should take the time.
(If anyone's looking at the prices on these books, no, I haven't bought copies - very much indebted to the library!).
And then, fun reading! In a way, fiction readings right now are related yet from very different angles. One is that, while Christmas shopping, I finally came across an affordable anthology of the complete fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. As you might guess from some of the academic stuff, Lovecraft kind of keeps coming up around the horizons of my teaching and other interests, but I never really read his stuff. So I figured I'd take the plunge. I started working through it in order, and got burned out - in his early years, at least, Lovecraft's writing is pretty bad. Yesterday I figured I'd stop punishing myself and just skip to the classics and read the Call of Cthulhu - and actually, to my surprise, rather liked it.
Right before turning to "the Call of Cthulhu," though, I figured I would turn to something that was a safer bet to enjoy. A while back, like over the summer, I had re-read the first two volumes of CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and really liked rediscovering them. So I also decided to finish that and turn to the third one, Invalid Link Removed, where the action turns to Earth. I had read it once, a long time ago, and recognized it was modeled on the "supernatural thrillers" of Charles Williams. It's quite interesting to be looking at it again at the same time as Lovecraft, and seeing how strongly both Lewis-via-Williams and Lovecraft were influenced by the occultist movements of the early 20th century - the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley and that crowd - along with a little bit of the early space-travel speculation of HG Wells or Jules Verne. And yet they wind up with such different takes on it, even as their novels have this sort of shared milieu of English/New Englandish small towns, rambling country houses, eccentric professors and so on, but with this rumbling undercurrent of dark spiritual forces on the verge of exploding into consciousness.
For teaching prep right now, I'm reading India's Islamic Traditions, an academic anthology about... well, what the title says. That's for an Islamic Empires seminar.
And Debra Hassig's Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology. This is prep for a class called "Facing Beasts" about historical human interactions with animals.
I've also been on a very looooonnng slog through a translation of Johan de Weyer's De Praestigiis Daemonium, published as Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance. De Weyer was a huge critic of early modern witchcraft trials and very controversial. He argued that witches were not in league with the Devil but deluded by him, and that the real evil Satan was working was to turn people against each other in these accusations. It's an immense book but I teach a course on the history of magic, plus I've started working on a book of my own on the treatment of mental illness historically, and de Weyer interprets the "delusions" part in terms of melancholy hallucinations, so I thought I should take the time.
(If anyone's looking at the prices on these books, no, I haven't bought copies - very much indebted to the library!).
And then, fun reading! In a way, fiction readings right now are related yet from very different angles. One is that, while Christmas shopping, I finally came across an affordable anthology of the complete fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. As you might guess from some of the academic stuff, Lovecraft kind of keeps coming up around the horizons of my teaching and other interests, but I never really read his stuff. So I figured I'd take the plunge. I started working through it in order, and got burned out - in his early years, at least, Lovecraft's writing is pretty bad. Yesterday I figured I'd stop punishing myself and just skip to the classics and read the Call of Cthulhu - and actually, to my surprise, rather liked it.
Right before turning to "the Call of Cthulhu," though, I figured I would turn to something that was a safer bet to enjoy. A while back, like over the summer, I had re-read the first two volumes of CS Lewis' Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and really liked rediscovering them. So I also decided to finish that and turn to the third one, Invalid Link Removed, where the action turns to Earth. I had read it once, a long time ago, and recognized it was modeled on the "supernatural thrillers" of Charles Williams. It's quite interesting to be looking at it again at the same time as Lovecraft, and seeing how strongly both Lewis-via-Williams and Lovecraft were influenced by the occultist movements of the early 20th century - the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley and that crowd - along with a little bit of the early space-travel speculation of HG Wells or Jules Verne. And yet they wind up with such different takes on it, even as their novels have this sort of shared milieu of English/New Englandish small towns, rambling country houses, eccentric professors and so on, but with this rumbling undercurrent of dark spiritual forces on the verge of exploding into consciousness.
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Just about finishing Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, the first part of his Luna trilogy.
It’s pretty good, lots of familiar themes from earlier SF writers but blended together in quite a fresh way and really well written. I’ve already ordered the other two books in the series.
It’s pretty good, lots of familiar themes from earlier SF writers but blended together in quite a fresh way and really well written. I’ve already ordered the other two books in the series.
Just finished "Eruption: Conversations With Eddie Van Halen". It's a good read, albeit a bit repetitive. In addition to Eddie interviews, there are others with Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar, Gary Cherone, Wolfgang, and others. And if you're a tinkerer at all, the stuff about his guitar creations, including his signature guitars, is really interesting.
John Scalzi - The Kaiju Preservation Society
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This book — you could successfully found a small bungalow on it — really needs a stand for the reading. It came out in '73 so it's a little anachronistic, today. I've had it on the shelves for a good while now but it's about time I got a good book-stand and gave it a shake. It's more than a little unwieldy.
It's an Aussie edition, a little battered, more-or-less intact, more like a time capsule now, but still an inspiring work, words aplenty, well defined, rich with meaning and insight. And some really hip '70s glossy graphics, along with some eye-opening insights, no doubt, into the world the way we saw it, fifty odd years ago.
Encyclopedic. Something not unlike what you'd see on old Tom's shelves, in the study. That's why I scored it, in the first place
There's some history in this dictionary, both personal and inclusive.
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A classic!Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
That seems like it would be up my alley. Not really sure what that says about me...
Just finished the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I was a bit late to that party but it's quite good - beautiful and very sad at the same time, which seems to be consistent with his other books.
Currently reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.
Currently reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder.
