July 19, 2018 at 10:49 pm (Books, destinations, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Australia, book lists, China, Italy, Japan, nonfiction, novel, reading lists, Spain, Stanford, travel books
Stanford professors, the editors of Stanford University Press and Bing Overseas Study Program staff were asked to recommend books for summer reading and they came up with some interesting titles:
Books To Shift Your Perspective
- An Act of Terror, by André Brink
- Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey
- The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
- Hadji Murad, by Leo Tolstoy
- Stoner, by John Williams
- The Removes, by Tatjana Soli
- Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta, by Michael Copperman
- Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy
Books on Globality and Migration
- Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat
- Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
Books for Travelers to:
Australia
- In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson and Ellen Titlebaum
China
- Age of Ambitions: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos
Germany
- Memories of a Nation, by Neil MacGregor
- The Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past is Shaping Its European Future, by Stephen Green
Italy
- The Italians, by John Hooper
Japan
- A Geek in Japan: Discovering the Land of Manga, Animé, Zen and the Tea Ceremony, by Hector Garcia
Cape Town, South Africa
- Keeper of the Kumm, by Sylvia Vollenhoven
Spain
- The New Spaniards, by John Hooper
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July 19, 2018 at 6:22 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, Lists, Places, Recommended)
Tags: art, desserts, exhibits, happiness, museums, praise, restaurants, San Francisco
Self has seen it three times.
The Magritte-themed food in the fifth floor café is so much fun:
In the adjoining sculpture garden, you can pose in front of this sign and you will look fabulous and so ‘San Francisco’:
Andrew and Jennie, 14 July 2018
There is a great, really great interactive portion at the end: Raise your arms, and YOU’RE the Magritte!
More later. Stay tuned!
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July 17, 2018 at 10:30 pm (Eavesdropping, Lists)
Tags: causes, discoveries, Huffpost, The New Yorker
The Daily Stormer is a relatively popular neo-Nazi blog, although it’s impossible to know exactly how popular. (From the style guide: “The site continues to grow month by month, indicating that there is no ceiling on this.” Also from the guide: “We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with exteme exaggeration.”)
— Andrew Marantz, in a piece from The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, 15 January 2018
Apparently, a HuffPost reporter, Ashley Feinberg, got sent a style guide, which is seventeen pages long. Excerpts:
- Links must not “stretch into the spacing between words.”
- Images must be exactly three hundred and twenty pixels wide, to avoid anything “aesthetically problematic.”
- Each post “should be filled with as much visual stimulation as possible,” in order to “appeal to the ADHD culture.”
- Passages from mainstream sources must be unaltered, so that “we can never be accused of ‘fake news’ — or delisted by Facebook as such.”
- There is NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH HYPERBOLE: “Even when a person can say to themselves ‘this is ridiculous,’ they are still affected by it on an emotional level. Refer to teenagers who get arrested for racist Twitter posts as ‘eternally noble warriors bravely fighting for divine war to protect the blood heritage of our sacred ancestors’ . . . You and anyone reading can say omg corny lol. But it just doesn’t matter to the primitive part of the brain.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 16, 2018 at 12:00 am (Books, destinations, Links, Lists, Places, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: art, England, historical fiction, Hyde Park, London, memorials, novel, reading lists, Scottish writers
The first time self read The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michael Faber, was over a decade ago. She hadn’t much experience of London. Now, however, she knows London, knows its general geography, and enjoys passages like the following:
- Since moving to the West End, Sugar has taken to crossing Hyde Park, over the Serpentine into Knightsbridge, and paying frequent visits to the two Georgian houses in Trevor Square, which may look like high-class brothels, but are in fact a public library.
— The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 35
- Follow Sugar now into the great open space, the grandiose vacancy of Regent Street — admire those overtowering honeycombs of palatial buildings stretching into the fog of artificial infinity, those thousands of identically shaped windows tier upon tier; the glassy expanse of roadway swept clear of snow; all of it is a statement of intent: a declaration that in the bright future to come, places like St. Giles and Soho, with their narrow labyrinths and tilting hovels and clammy, crumbling nooks infested with human flotsam, will be swept away, to be replaced by a new London that looks entirely like Regent Street, airy, regular and clean.
— The Crimson Petal and the White, p. 43
Her last trip to London was at the tail-end of October 2017. She dropped by Hyde Park and saw:
1) the Serpentine
2) a fabulous Pavilion
The 2017 Serpentine Pavilion designed by architect Francis Kéré
and 3) the Prince Albert Memorial:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 5, 2018 at 8:08 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, plans, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: biographies, Cee Neuner, historical fiction, inspiration, John Steinbeck, novel, reading lists, Scottish writers, summer, Tim O'Brien
Hooray! Self thought of something she could post for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Piles and Stacks
Of course it’s book-related. This first shot shows the books self checked out of her local library, a month or so ago:
Self’s “To Read” Pile: 8 June 2018
And here’s the stack of books currently checked out from her local library:
Self’s “To Read” Pile: 5 July 2018
Stay tuned, dear blog reader. Stay tuned.
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July 5, 2018 at 7:26 am (Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: bestsellers, book lists, fantasy, His Dark Materials, history, Japanese writers, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, Robert Harris, summer, thrillers, translation, travel books
By now it should be clear how much self loves constructing lists. And book lists best of all.
Self set herself a goodreads Reading Challenge of 32 books, which is pretty ambitious considering last year she didn’t make her challenge goal of 26 books.
Nevertheless.
Books Read This Year (in the order of their Goodreads Average Rating)
- The Odyssey (the translation by Emily Wilson)
- La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman
- The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
- The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
- The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
- The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
- Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck
- The Romanovs: 1613 – 1918, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
- Conclave, by Robert Harris
- Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
- The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
- Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire, by Leslie Peirce
- In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien
- Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
- Mikhail and Margarita, by Julie Lekstrom Himes
- The Mandibles, A Family: 2029 – 2047, by Lionel Shriver
- Moshi Moshi, by Banana Yoshimoto
- Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
- As Lie Is to Grin, by Simeon Marsalis
Today, self went poring over her recommended reading list and discarded a list called “Recommended Summer Reading” (downloaded from a literary website). Summer is practically half over and by the time she gets to the books on that list, it will be winter.
On her To-Read list 2018 are a biography of Daphne du Maurier and three du Maurier novels. She hopes she can get to them soon. She wishes Steinbeck weren’t so engaging because he is really slowing down her reading rate. Before she began Travels with Charley she read an average of a book a week.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers.
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July 4, 2018 at 4:53 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: biographies, book lists, essays, historical fiction, John Steinbeck, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, Scottish writers, summer, travel books
There was a stretch of months where all the authors self was reading or had read were male: That’s because a lot of the books she read the first half of the year were by Philip Pullman, who she read for the first time EVER this year. Shame! Shame! Shame!
Then she read Treasure Island, then Lord of the Flies.
She finally tackled Jean Rhys (another first, despite the fact that she’s been hearing about this author since the year she entered grad school) and ended up wanting to strangle her male character in Wide Sargasso Sea.
She discovered the luminous Norwegian writer Tove Jansson in The Summer Book.
She read an excellent first novel (by Julie Lekstrom Himes), Mikhail and Margarita.
After she’s done with Travels with Charley, she re-reads Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. She read this book over a decade ago but Faber’s name came up again when she found an old list (from the time she was a Hawthornden fellow, in June 2012) of book recommendations from her fellow Hawthornden writers.
Her next authors are all women:
- Elizabeth Strout
- Tatiana de Rosnay
- Daphne du Maurier
- Jenny Allen
- Magda Szabø
- Rosemary Sutcliff
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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July 1, 2018 at 5:43 pm (Lists, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: essays, nonfiction, politics, The New Yorker
Since self began her methodical reading of New Yorker back issues, she realizes that the economic and social forces churning through America (like Trump announcing his interest in the Presidency in 2006) should have been sending off alarm flares. But no, we were all too busy watching TV.
The Talk of the Town piece on actor Shia LaBoeuf and his humiliation by a Nazi group made the hair on the back of her neck stand!
From The Mail:
Pence and the Presidency
- Jane Mayer’s piece on Vice-President Mike Pence revealed his terrifying personal convictions and his connections to right-wing evangelical donors (“The President Pence Delusion,” 23 October). Pence seems to be content to act as President Trump’s puppet . . . The puppeteer has only to suggest that it’s fine for Pence to perform, and he rises to the occasion, no matter how embarrassing or how costly to this country.
Covering White Supremacy
- Andrew Marantz handles the presentation of the white supremacist Mike Enoch’s life story tactfully, but I worry that publishing articles like this will only encourage others to follow in Enoch’s destructive footsteps (“The Birth of a White Supremacist,” 16 October)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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June 30, 2018 at 3:15 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: book lists, historical fiction, John Steinbeck, memoir, nonfiction, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, summer, Tim O'Brien, translation, travel books
Self has been reading blazing fast, ever since she began Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, vol. 1 of The Book of Dust, in late March. The last week of March, and through April and May, she was on such a tear. After La Belle Sauvage, she read all of His Dark Materials, then moved on to childhood classics like Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Tove Jansson’s exquisite The Summer Book, two first novels (As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis and Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes, both excellent), and two books by Tim O’Brien (In the Lake of the Woods gutted her. In fact, she can’t stop thinking about it)
Since beginning Travels with Charley, however, she’s been moving at a glacial pace. It took her forever just to get through the Jay Parini introduction, and she’s just on p. 17.
She almost put the book aside last night, because it suddenly struck her that the kind of problems a man might encounter while traveling alone through America are very different from the kind of problems self experiences when she travels alone — self has traveled through not just America, but through Asia and Europe — and she is usually alone. It gets harder with every passing year. Security seems more suspicious (so many stamps on her passport!), people are less kind (or maybe self has just become more paranoid), and she’s definitely become more impatient. For one thing, she hates delays of any sort, and she hates flying because it’s so dehumanizing.
On p. 17, Steinbeck shares one of his underlying reasons for undertaking this trip, and she understands:
- A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the household becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.
Travel is one way to resist the gravitational pull of age. It’s like being young again because everything is new, and you can still be surprised, on a daily basis.
(Note: Self was taken aback that Steinbeck viewed himself as a kind of Ernest Hemingway manly man. She’s always thought of him as ‘gentle.’ He might even be insulted by that description.)
Onward!
Self can’t believe summer is officially here. Time moves so fast. Soon, she’ll have a harvest of figs and plums from her backyard:
Stay tuned.
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June 27, 2018 at 11:42 pm (Books, Explorers, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Places)
Tags: Canada, history, writing process
Self has always been fascinated by explorers, which is why she’s writing her novel about 18th century missionaries. She also has a very long story (32 pages currently, and nowhere near done) about an alien invasion in the Bering Sea. That story is all about Ice, but every day she reads various scientific reports about the disappearing glaciers so she feels mild concern that if she takes too long to finish this story, the context of the physical setting will cease to make any sense.
Today, she reads about the Penny and Barnes ice caps on Baffin Island, and about the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered much of North America. She learns that Baffin Island was known to the 11th century Norse of Greenland and Iceland, and that Baffin Island is postulated to be the Helluland of Viking sagas.
She also reads up on Sir John Franklin. The two ships that were lost during his fourth and final Arctic expedition were named the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus. The HMS Erebus was a 372-ton Heclaclass bomb vessel, built in Wales in 1826. The wreck has been located, in Queen Maud Gulf. The wreck of the HMS Terror lies under the water of Terror Bay. (Who names ships Erebus and Terror? Isn’t that like asking for trouble?)
She reads that Georgian Bay has 30,000 islands. Fresh in her mind is the fate of Kat, in the novel she just finished reading, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Who sets off alone in a small boat and becomes lost and lost and more lost.
She learns about the Jesuit mission of Saint-Marie, founded on Lake Huron in the 17th century.
She reads about Lewis and Clark and about rivers like the Columbia and the Hood, which she has seen, long ago, on a driving trip north that started out in San Francisco and hugged the coast of Oregon and Washington.
And she also reads about Celtic and Norse mythology, in a book she found in son’s room.
So many books, so little time!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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