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

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

How Xi Jinping rose to power ... to become the world's most powerful man. An article from The Week.

"Yet what do we know about the man himself? He is unpopular among the intelligentsia. Some of the elite whisper that he is not very bright, that he lacks polish and failed to get a top-grade education. But he is certainly an operator, having climbed the sharpest pyramid in politics. The Communist Party of China has about 95 million members; just 205 are full members of the central committee. Twenty-four men and one woman sit on its political bureau, better known as the politburo, and only seven of them – all men – are on the politburo standing committee. This is the body that rules China, and Xi is its boss. How did he get there?

Xi Jinping was born in 1953 into privilege as a member of the “red aristocracy”. He spent his early years in exclusive leadership compounds in Beijing. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary guerrilla commander. Qi Xin, his mother, joined the cause during the 1930s and became a Marxist educator."

https://ofs-f3e65fb1c706809f1171e6d3d...

Here's a link to the Best Books of 2021 according to NPR ... great organization with links to the previous years also:

https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view...

Carol, Look for that Friend request!

Larry

Carol wrote: "Saint Lucy is the patron saint for eyes. Various, very gruesome, tales about the loss of her eyes, presumably with much truth in them. Knowing this, combined with Donne's mourning on Saint Lucy's D..."

I didn't know that about St. Lucy, Carol. And like you said, all of this does makes this poem ever so sad.

Carol wrote: "Lovely to see a woman poet, Sappho, from so long ago. Women were so often the invisible face of creativity, as were also most men not blessed with the trappings of status or wealth throughout the c..."

So true, Carol.

Carol wrote: "Walt Whitman wrote long before the concept of Earth as Gaia came about- Gaia was originally the earth goddess in Greek mythology. However, his poem very completely expresses the later concept."

Hey, Carol ... could you PM me? Nothing big, but I just wanted to run something by you and your own settings won't allow me to PM you ... but I think that I can reply to you if you initiate the message exchange. Thanks.

John wrote: "I have always enjoyed Dirda’s books. I own a hard copy of Classics for Pleasure, but would like to cast about for an ebook version of it. In Classics, he did great essays on Eudora Welty and W.H. Auden. "

Dirda is my favorite book reviewer. "Book reviewer" is how he bills himself, although I do see him as a critic of the highest order.

A much older poem. This is taken not from a collection of poetry but from Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure.

"It may surprise modern readers to learn that the ancient Greeks recognized Sappho as the greatest of their lyric poets. She was even judged worthy of being considered a tenth muse, for no one could equal her in the matching of words to word-music. Here are a few lines, fifteen words in Kenneth Rexroth's translation [The line separation, a bit odd, is Rexroth's also.] :

The moon has set.
And the Pleiades. It is
Midnight. Time passes.
I sleep alone.

A double poem day ... this one copied from my friend's (Michael Yourshaw) Facebook feed today.

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day
BY JOHN DONNE
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

I never met a Whitman poem that I didn't like ...

On the Beach at Night Alone
By Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

SOURCE: https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio...

AN EXPERIMENT: Beginning in January 2022, I plan to read twelve of the best books of 2021 (as shown in the list below), one month at a time. So I’m happy to hear from you if you have comments on what I am reading … but I’m also happy to hear from you about you are reading and why you like it or maybe why you don’t like it … because not every book chosen as a best book on somebody else’s list is a best book for you.

MONTHLY READING FOR 2022:
Ann Patchett - These Precious Days
Craig Whitlock - The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War
Marc Morris - The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of England
Carl Zimmer - Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to be Alive
Elizabeth Kolbert - Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Brad Stone - Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
Walter Isaacson - The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N. Blain - Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
Alan Taylor - American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
Evan Osnos - Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury
Michelle Zauner - Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
Stanley Tucci - Taste: My Life Through Food

Carol, first a comment about videos. Not too many years ago, if you had told me about a video that was on BBC 2, I knew that there would be little chance of me seeing that. But just over the past few years, it has become so much easier to see things made in another country. I know that if it is good, something that first appears on a platform like BBC 2 will probably migrate to some other platform in the U.S. I know that it's probably on the BBC iPlayer, but we can't get that in the United States. But the BBC just started offering BBC Select (which collects the BBC's best programs and series) through Amazon, and I've added that.

I think that you are exactly correct about teaching the language. It's great to teach "don't" for "do not" ... because that is so commonly used ... but unless a class is aimed at preparing students for a visit to Scotland, teaching "dinna" is just a bit silly.

Carol, your comment about the importance of Hope ... made after reading the Kay Ryan poem is also important after you read and think about the Joyce Sutphen poem. I only hope that I will be able to hold the hands of someone who loves me.

Now That Anything Could Happen
by Joyce Sutphen

You now know that anything could happen;
things that never happened before, things that
only happened in movies and nightmares
are happening now, as if nothing could
stop them. You know now that you are not safe,
you know you live in fragile skin and bones,
that even steel and concrete can melt away,
and that the earth itself can come unhinged,
shaken from its orbit around the sun.
You know, now that anything can happen,
it’s hard to know what will, and what will you
do now that you know? What words will you say
now that you could say anything? What hands
will you hold? Whose heart will beat inside you?

SOURCE: https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio...

Prathet wrote: "I have a few books to recommend, I apologize for not linking them but I don't have a desktop right now. You should be able to easily find them on Amazon or Goodreads.

"Markets Over Mao: The Rise o..."

I don't want to defend U.S. policy toward China too much. It has often been wrong in big way and in small ways. I don't think it was the main reason for the U.S. involvement in the Great Pacific War or the Pacific Theater of WWII. Rather it was more generally the Japanese Imperial Expansion and the creation of the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere ... and then Japanese action and U.S. reactions that led to Pearl Harbor.

One of my regrets this year has to do with a few books on my TBR for 2021 that I still haven't gotten to... especially these:

FRANK DIKÖTTER - THE TRAGEDY OF LIBERATION
FRANK DIKÖTTER - MAO’S GREAT FAMINE
FRANK DIKÖTTER - THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
EZRA VOGEL - DENG XIAOPING
YANG JISHENG - TOMBSTONE - THE GREAT CHINESE FAMINE 1958-1962
YANG JISHENG - THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN - A HISTORY OF THE CINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Of these six books, I've read parts of the two dealing with Great Famine (the ones by Yang and Dikötter) and the so-called Great Leap Forward that was one of the major reasons for that famine. But, based on what I have read, I find little reason to believe that Mao was open to any true market reforms, much less an embrace of capitalism.

Book Marks on Lithub aggregates reviews for different categories of books so that you for a given book how many reviews were raves, how many were positive, how many were mixed, and how many were pans. The link takes you to the list for the best books of essays for 2021. As an example, it leads off with Ann Patchett's These Precious Days: Essays

" 21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

"… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”"

SOURCE: https://bookmarks.reviews/the-best-re...

The link is for the best books of essays for the year. A few other categories, e.g. poetry, already have lists. Book Marks will continue to add new "best of" lists over the next few weeks.

"Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction."

From the New Yorker, December 13, 2021

THE BEST BOOKS WE READ IN 2021
The fiction and nonfiction, old and new, that saw us through the year.

The link is from Apples News+: https://apple.news/A_lMovctWQpC9imwkn...

The link for the same story but from the New Yorker web site is here:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/202...

Steven wrote: "For Larry, The newest episode of "The Pacific Century" podcast is all about Wang Huning. I need to give it a listen...."

Steven,

Many thanks. I'll probably listen to that today.

Larry

Carol,

I am so sorry that the world doesn't have Angela Merkel as a formal leader any longer. I thought that she was the best leader of a major country over the last 20 years. I faulted her a bit on the Greek financial crisis a bit ... but I never had any ideas of my own about how to handle that better.

And I agree totally on distinguishing the Crimea from Ukraine.

I wish Americans would read about how the Crimea came to be reattached to Ukraine.

More importantly, I wish Americans and some others would understand that putting American or NATO troops into Ukraine would make Russia feel threatened in a way similar to Russia putting troops and weapon systems into Mexico.

John wrote: "The New Yorker has its own list of books that came out in 2021 that were enjoyed by the staff writers. It was a mix of fiction and non fiction. The only book on the list that intrigued me was Joy Williams’ Harrow. I have read some of her stories, and so this novel might be one I will read this winter...."

John, on these best lists, most of the books are ones that I am sure are quite good but are ones which hold little interest for me. That said, I really plan to use these lists to plan a lot of my reading for the coming year.