Isaac Asimov’s Shakespeare commentaries are great. I always consult them after I see a play.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll look them up. For an ass-grabber, he was a fine literary critic.
(I attended many cocktail parties and book signings with him during the 1980s, and never saw him grab an ass. But he seemed like a potential ass grabber to me.)
I second Asimov’s commentaries, I read some of them back in my teens & 20s.
I used to belong to a Shakespeare reading group. We originally met in an adult ed class and the instructor had us read the plays aloud. First person up took the first part that came along and read that part from then on, etc. When the class ended, several of us would meet every other Sunday afternoon and read (and eat; we were into snacking too). We did this for about three years. It was a lot of fun. And educational!
It was interesting to see the ideas that came out of the language when heard or spoken aloud, that had never come up when reading silently to ourselves, or even to some extent when seeing a performance of the play. Saying the words aloud gives a whole new level of understanding I think. Maybe you can find someone to read a play with, Dinsdale. (Actually, given all this social distancing, I wish I knew some people to read “together” with now.)
Revisiting an old favorite today, David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent. A great collection of classic short horror stories.
I’ve finished the very long (44+ hours!) audiobook bio Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which is exhaustively detailed and usually interesting. I understand Vincent van Gogh much better as a person now, but like him less than I did before. It’s amazing his long-suffering brother Theo put up with him for as long as he did; Vincent was an amazing painter but was also - even when not obviously mentally ill - obsessive, short-tempered, pushy, demanding, a mooch, hypercritical of others, and drove away virtually everyone who ever cared about him. I won’t be able to listen to Don McLean’s “Vincent” in quite the same way ever again. Naifeh and Smith include an appendix in which they argue that van Gogh’s July 1890 death was not due to suicide, but an accident. I was not convinced, especially since van Gogh repeatedly said between his fatal wounding and his death about 30 hours later that it was a suicide, even though suicide was socially taboo and after being warned by local police that it was also a crime.
Now I’m enjoying the baseball novella Blockade Billy by Stephen King. It reads like an interview with an elderly, long-retired player from the (nonexistent) Newark, N.J. Titans about their fateful 1957 season.
I’m also reading a WW2-era Episcopal prayerbook, Prayers for Private Devotions in War-Time by the Rev. Willard L. Sperry of Harvard University’s Memorial Church, which has some comforting resonances during the current pandemic.
I finished Gideon the Ninth yesterday. Hoo boy. If you locked Robert Silverberg and Agatha Christie in a room and forced them to write a book together, and then got a brilliantly snarky teenager to rewrite the entire thing, the result would look something like this. It’s complicated and obscene and whiny-but-self-aware and violent and mysterious and so, so gross.
I think I love it.
It’s one of the Hugo finalists for the year, and so far it’s my tentative favorite of the four (of six) that I’ve read.
Library hold placed.
Oh, I wish my library would open up again!
I’ve also started Gideon the Ninth, while waiting for my local independent bookstore to deliver The City We Became.
Earlier this week I read Binti, a sci-fi novella with creepy aliens and spaceships. I don’t think I have strong feelings about it.
Nnedi Okorafor has written some crazy-good stuff, like The Book of Phoenix. Her Akata Witch series is pretty good. Other stuff by her is fine just fine, and Binti falls into that category for me as well.
It’s cool reading science fiction that’s based in African culture and tropes–but not all her writing is especially good.
I finished Snake Agent by Liz Williams, which is the first in her Inspector Chen series. It’s a Chinese urban Fantasy/cyberpunk mash up that half takes place on Earth and half in Hell. Goddess, demons and bureaucrasy to the max!
It was quite good, the characters were likeable, the action smooth and the world building fantastic.
Finished Operation Sea Lion: The Failed Nazi Invasion That Turned the Tide of War, by Leo McKinstry. Quite interesting, and very well written.
Now I’m reading The Aquiliad, by Somtow Sucharitkul. It’s an alternate history in which (among other changes) the Roman Empire didn’t fall.
Finished The Aquiliad, by Somtow Sucharitkul. It was okay.
Now I’m reading Numbers: How Counting Changed the World, by Tom Jackson.
Just finished The Deep, a novella that follows the lives of merfolk born from the wombs of pregnant captives thrown overboard from slave ships. It deals with some heavy issues in an allegorical fashion, and as such is pretty interesting. As literature, though, I wasn’t crazy about it: short as it was, it felt repetitive, humorless, and bound in modern cultural language that verged on New Age.
It’s one of the novella finalists for the 2020 Hugo. It wouldn’t get my vote.
Finished Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland. Loved, loved, loved this novel. Set in England from 1348-49, a group of people travel in company with each other for safety. Each has a secret to guard amid strange occurrences and the advent of the Black Death. I cannot praise this book enough. Fascinating right to the very last sentence. Highly recommended.
Have started Kona Winds, by Scott Kikkawa. Detective noir in 1953 Honolulu. The writer is a former Honolulu cop. His protagonist is the Territory of Hawaii’s first ethnic-Japanese homicide detective, Francis “Sheik” Yoshikawa. That’s “sheik” as in Valentino, not “shayk” as it’s pronounced correctly in Arabic, as it’s short for part of his last name, Yoshikawa. Sheik is a war hero, the recipient of a Purple Heart while serving with the storied 442nd Infantry Regiment in Italy, the real-life outfit that was composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, then he used the GI Bill to study medieval literature at Columbia University. Sheik is tasked with solving the brutal murder of his high-school sweetheart. Gone through most of it, and it is a great read. Much of that period of Hawaii I already knew, but I’m learning a lot that I didn’t know.
Finished both. Blockade Billy was a taste of bygone Fifties baseball, about a rookie phenom with a dark secret. A good read and it kept me guessing. The audiobook including a bonus novella, Morality, about a young couple who agree to do something terrible in exchange for a big wad o’ cash from a creepy old guy. Not as good as Blockade Billy, and the ending was kind of meh.
Prayers for Private Devotions in War-Time was worth a read and is now back on the shelf with my Bible and Book of Common Prayer.
I just started The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, a novel about a British murder suspect who won’t say anything to anybody, least of all the criminal psychologist assigned to her case. So far, so good.
Finished Numbers: How Counting Changed the World, by Tom Jackson. I enjoyed it.
Now I’m reading Out to Lunch, by Stacey Ballis.
I just finished The Blue Hammer by Ross Macdonald. I used to think Lew Archer was boring, but he’s really grown on me.
Finished Kona Winds, by Scott Kikkawa. Detective noir in 1953 Honolulu. The protagonist is the Territory of Hawaii’s first ethnic-Japanese homicide detective, Francis “Sheik” Yoshikawa. That’s “sheik” as in Valentino, not “shayk” as it’s pronounced correctly in Arabic, as it’s short for part of his last name, Yoshikawa. Sheik is a war hero, the recipient of a Purple Heart while serving with the storied 442nd Infantry Regiment in Italy, the real-life outfit that was composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, then he used the GI Bill to study medieval literature at Columbia University. Sheik is tasked with solving the brutal murder of his high-school sweetheart. Gone through most of it, and it is a great read. Much of that period of Hawaii I already knew, but I’m learning a lot that I didn’t know. The author is a former Honolulu cop and a current federal law-enforcement officer based here. It seems he has featured this detective before in short stories, but this is his first full-length novel. This is a fantastic first book, and I hope this turns into a series. I highly recommend it, but it’s published locally with Bamboo Ridge Press. I don’t know how available it is elsewhere. If you can find it on Amazon, this would make a great read if you’re stuck at home right now.
Next up is some LA noir. It’s back to Robert Crais and his third novel, Lullaby Town.
Looking for comfort food for my brain, so am rereading Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, which I first read in 1980.
I read a bunch of Lord Peter Wimsey as a teenager, but skipped the Harriet Vane books, as I couldn’t picture ol’ Sneaky Pete as a romantic hero. Over the past year I read the first three…thought Strong Poison had an exceptional murder technique, thought Have His Carcase was the best character wise, was largely disappointed by Gaudy Night (no MURDER? What the hell?). Then jumped back to a no-Harriet, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and realized the young me was right. No Harriet makes for better Peter. Hence Nine Tailors.