Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

Cynda wrote: "Larry just a reminder that many pray for you and your wife's health. . . . .I have had a lovely reading run that seems to continue. I have 48-hour readathon starting tomorrow evening with a quiet, ..."


Cynda, your prayers are welcome indeed. We're doing pretty well right now healthwise.

Those cycles of reading more and reading less clearly affect me also. I have a very different week coming up beginning on Saturday ... sorry to be so oblique about it ... and I don't know how that will affect my reading at all.

John wrote: "I wish I had taken a picture of the room they gave me. It had a wooden table, a wooden chair, and a manual typewriter. From the ceiling hung a lightbulb. .."

Pretty Spartan.

Cynda wrote: "Scribd gets better and better. During the early days of covid, Scribd had a website banner saying that they were the best nonfiction e-service. They were good. Now they have expanded to fiction wri..."

One fascinating thing about Scribd is that originally they really were a site devoted to pirating books. The owners managed to navigate a way through the legal shoals to move into legal waters, striking a deal with some publishers. That was not an easy thing to do and they deserve seveal kinds of credit n accomplishing that.

John, in James Patterson by James Patterson, he relates how he interned in the mental health facility where James Taylor spent some time. Patterson would sometimes sit with Taylor and just talk and listen to him play. The book is just okay .. but it does have a few great stories in it.

You pick out good books, Ron.

Patrick wrote: "I am reading it [the Hadas book] with great pleasure. Although I had Latin in middle and high school, and thank goodness for that, I still appreciate as much help as I can get with classical context...."

I took four years of Latin in high school and did pretty well. Perhaps twenty years ago, I looked at the entrance exam for Harvard which included translation from English into Latin. I'm not sure if I could have gotten one sentence of those right.

Patrick, I found a used copy of a NYRB EDITION of the Shakespeare book … that was really new for a very reasonable price.

Patrick, in some fields, e.g. oncology perhaps, ongoing research may make some texts out-of-date, but there are some other fields where works published much earlier than the decades you mention are probably still of great relevance.

One example that immediately comes to mind follows. (I posted this in 2022).

Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare… My favorite book on Shakespeare’s plays, and I only found it in the last year. My edition is from 1948,but it was first published in 1939. Odd language in some of the essays, and I love it for that. You could argue that it’s the academese of the late 1940s, and that’s probably part of it. But I think it’s mainly Mark Van Doren carefully choosing exactly what he wants to say in his own particular way. The book covers all of his plays and has one essay on his poetry.

Patrick wrote: "
Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading. .."

Patrick, I had never heard of this particular work by Hadas. I was pleased to find it on Perlego.

In another thread, and actually I ithink it was on Facebook, I made a comment that these days, you're better off reading Mary Beard, especially her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, if you want to know what really happened in Rome, but you still might want to read Gibbon, simply for his majestic sentences. I quoted one, and the immediate response was that he needed an editor. Actually, he didn't. He needed that close attention that you suggest was also required for reading Plutarch in translation. I think it helps our minds if every now and then we force them to be stretched a bit.

John,

I though that Remnick was a bit unfair to Keith Richards about his autobiography. Yeah, all the drugs and sex are there .. to the extent that Richards can remember it. But the music is such a large part of it. Richards really describes how the Stones early on combined rock (as it existed then) with pop (as it existed then) with blues and rhythm and blues to create their sound. And then he has that conversation with Hoagy Carmichael. And then in a number of places he talks about the business of music ... how the Stone sand the Beatles actually collaborated a little on the release of albums. It is no surprise that the book is widely acclaimed as one of the best autobiographies by a musician.

Remnick does accurately capture how petty Richards could be at time, and his misreading of the greatness of Springsteen is truly surprising.

But I still enjoyed the chapter as a quick summary of Richards.

So .. the voting is open and will remain open until 7/19

The four books to vote on are these:
Jonathan Eig - Ali: A Life
Tina Turner - My Love Story
John Julius Norwich - Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe
Greg Grandin The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

Four good books to choose from. Eligible voters are Lance, Diane S., Cynda, and Ron. Please cast your votes by a comment in this thread. In the event of a tie, I will use a random number generator to choose the book.

Cynda wrote: "Larry. ¿Might it help to check out the texts used at Non Fiction Book Club from when this more informal style of voting was used there?"

Cynda, thanks ... clearly my objective to achieve more participation probably had a minimal and maybe counterproductive effect by being overly restrictive in establishing who could vote. Next month, I think I'll open the voting to any who nominate or second a book for consideration ... OR any members who simply state that in voting for a book that they will try to read that book.

The voting will commence shortly ... still collecting my thoughts for a text to post.

Cynda wrote: "Here are a few books about New Orleans that I have read and can recommend:

Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza


The ..."</i>

The Tom Piazza book is wonderful. I've actually read it twice.

Tom Piazza has another book that is great ... [book:The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz. It's especially good about the early years ... when jazz was being created in New Orleans and very good about the years through bebop and West Coast jazz. After that, not so much. But that's okay, because where it's good, it's great.

John wrote: "I adopted a one year old tabby named Mayer. I brought him home yesterday. He is nervous and shy, so giving him his space. He has his own room here. It will probably be a week or so until I can intr..."

You're a good man, John.

Patrick wrote: "I like Ted Gioia’s work. The disappearance of criticism as a journalistic profession has been unfortunate."

He has really renewed his financial success through his Substack subscription ... and is even publishing his latest book a chapter at a time on that Substack.

More generally, it is almost criminal that our best critics are so poorly remunerated. Literary critics especially deserve better. Some musc critics seem to have figured out out to monetize their efforts ... and that is true for some musicians also. (We subscribe to one (Livingston Taylor) through Patreon and to another (Carrie Newcomer) through Substack. ... For better or worse, it's a digital world ... and you either learn how to use that to your advantage, or you sink.)

John, I'll try to read both over the next few days.

Patrick, that's a great idea. Any books that you think should be listed under that topic?