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

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

John wrote: "I am pleased to report that I purchased on Saturday a new MacBook. I do love my iPad, but wanted to have a more traditional desktop type arrangement. I am learning it now and it will be my winter p..."

John, I've been a huge fan of David Pogue's books in the Missing Manual series. With the Big Sur OS, Pogue has changed his title (and publisher?). I bought the new offering as spoon as it was published. It's titled Mac Unlocked: Everything You Need to Know to Get Cracking in macOS Big Sur. It's probably half the size of the earlier book in the macOS Missing Manual series, and I think that is really good. They just had too much stuff in them. I probably will actually read all of this one, something I've never done before. It ONLY has 438 pages!

John wrote: "I am pleased to report that I purchased on Saturday a new MacBook. I do love my iPad, but wanted to have a more traditional desktop type arrangement. I am learning it now and it will be my winter p..."

John, which model did you get? I really need a computer for use, in addition to our iPads. I end up using our iMac and really like it ... but my iPad Air is probably the best computer I ever bought.

Carol, it's actually there as North America Travel/Journey ... at some point, we may want to break that out as U.S. Travel, Canada Travel, Mexico Travel.

Definitely a different Christmas for us. My wife Cina has been dealing with cancer, which was diagnosed as Stage 3c or Stage 4, initially. There were three cycles of chemotherapy and then some major surgery on 23 December. We knew that the major tumor (which had been 12 cm.) had shrunk a lot based on two CT scans, but we were extremely pleased to hear that he found no obvious signs of cancer.

Robot assisted surgery is also great. I brought Cina home after one night in the hospital. No sutures ... just five holes sealed with super glue. Three more cycles of chemo coming up, but we have moved from being guardedly optimistic about six weeks ago to just being optimistic. That's a good way to get ready for the new year.

Carol wrote: "I don't seem able to post new threads or new topics. I have a beautiful book of photos of San Francisco by Attini and Guglielmini, published by Barnes and Noble, I wanted to post. Is it possible to..."

Carol,

Are you thinking of a new Folder .... one for photography? There is a folder for U.S. in the Travel folder.

Larry

Sher wrote: "Hello Maggie-- It sounds as though he had a better chance remembering because two or more senses were involved. What I wonder is what percentage of the population has the ability for synesthesia? C..."

Sher, I do recall reading perhaps two years ago that a lot more people have some mild degree of synesthesia than was previously thought. I doubt that I could find that article. It was in something like SCIENCE NEWS.

John wrote: "Carol wrote: "Re: memoir of Chasten Glezman. I was pleased to see that Pete Buttigieg is being given a post by Biden in his new government. He is relatively young, but will, I am sure, go far."

Ca..."

John, your explanation/insights are great about Buttigieg.

Carol wrote: "Xmas Day. I am posting the poem 'In the Bleak Midwinter' by Christina Rossetti. It was published in January, 1872. She was one of the most important women poets of the 19th century in England. Her ...It is England's favourite Xmas Carol (although I read that it is unknown in the US. You will have to tell me if that is so)."

Carol, it is sung several times every year starting in Advent in our Presbyterian Church. But I will say that I'm not sure that I heard it before we started attending this church about ten years ago!

I hear it a number of times in a long Spotify playlist that I created with about ten different Revels albums. See the following Wiki for an explanation of Revels music/productions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revels

A great category ... I'm waiting ... I'm waiting!

John wrote: "If anyone wants to read a great collection of essays written about books, try Jonathan Yardley’s Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited.

One of my favorite books. Yo..."

John, it's one of my favorites also, I was look at it just a few days ago. I often just pick it up and browse. I read the two essays on Roald Dahl's Someone Like You and Jim Brosnan's The Long Season. Both are books that I've read already, but Yardley's writing about them just pulls me in.

I hope that you read the very last two pages, where he lists the extra 37 books that he covered but which were not collected in this volume. He points to the following place where you can read those pieces online: http://neglectedbooks.com

John, thank you so much for this poem and Carol, I greatly appreciate all the information you provided!

Cynda, I do remember liking it a lot but then remembering at the end that he hadn't covered an important country ... and now I can't remember what country that was. :-)

John wrote: "Larry had asked about Pakistan: A Hard Country (in another thread but fits better here) - nearly finished with it, finding the read textbook/wonky but he can handle it given his bac..."

John, I acquired that book and will get around to reading it. Before I retired, my last boss was a Foreign Service Officer who came from Pakistan and was a true American success story. He eventually became the U.S. Ambassador to Moldova and is currently a VP at Washington State University. I asked him once if he had ever visited the Tribal Territories in Pakistan. He said "Once ... that was enough."

Cynda wrote: "I am reading
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by [author:Simo..."

Cynda, I read that book about a year ago. Let me know what you think of it when you finish it.

Good info, John. I look at the following three websites every day:

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio... (this is actually just today's poem)

https://poets.org

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

And on almost every day, I read the whole poem on each of the three sites. It's good for me ...

Although I read the New Yorker every week, I rarely read the poems. Why? It's hard to say, but I think it's because after I have spent a certain amount of time reading the many articles I want to read in the magazine, it's time to move on to something else. That's probably why I don't read the fiction in the New Yorker either.

Chanukah Lights Tonight
BY STEVEN SCHNEIDER

Our annual prairie Chanukah party—
latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes.
Friends arrive from nearby towns
and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight,”
spin like a dreidel to a klezmer hit.

The candles flicker in the window.
Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows.
If you squint,
the neighbors’ Christmas lights
look like the Omaha skyline.

The smell of oil is in the air.
We drift off to childhood
where we spent our gelt
on baseball cards and matinees,
cream sodas and potato knishes.

No delis in our neighborhood,
only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks.
Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out,
waiting for the Messiah to knock,
wanting to know if he can join the party.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

Another list from Best Books ... this one is the best history books of 2020. I do plan to get to Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs soon.

"Let’s move on to Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend, a new history of the Aztecs. The one thing I thought I knew about the Aztecs, but I’m clearly wrong, is that they didn’t have written sources. This is entirely based on written Aztec sources. Is that right?

That’s right. It just won the Cundill History Prize and deservedly so, I think. It’s a groundbreaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience. With the publicity from the Cundill Prize, there will be many more people reading it.

Rather like Milton, in a way, she has this grasp of the languages that are needed to access the documents from which she takes the Mexica—the Aztec—accounts of their past. So she speaks Nahuatl. And she’s not just looking at Mexico. This goes all the way up to Utah where some of these people come from."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/hist...

Sher wrote: "Jyoti wrote: "Hi everyone!

I am currently reading Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam and this is the first time I'm reading anything focuses on war/military a..."

Jyoti, I'm also interested in how you like the book by Bowden. I read his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War and thought it really brought out what urban warfare might be like in the modern age. And I bet that Bowden does the same for the Battle for Hue in the Vietnam War.

Jim Harrison's writing is so compartmentalized for me. I love his novellas and writing on food. I read one of his novels--I can't even remember which one it was now-- and don't think I'll read any more. I definitely will look for more of his poetry.

I read Legends of the Fall and Revenge before they were made into movies. I enjoyed the novellas and the movies both, although I suspect that the violence in the second one will be just too much for many.

What I posted on Facebook today .. Jim Harrison was such a "man's man." You see that especially in his novellas, like "Legends of the Fall" or "Revenge." But he was also famous as a gourmand (with some meals that might go on for five or six hours) ... and he was surprisingly sensitive in the poems that he wrote.

POETRY FOR THE DAY (17 December 2020)

Searchers
by Jim Harrison

At dawn Warren is on my bed,
a ragged lump of fur listening
to the birds as if deciding whether or not
to catch one. He has an old man’s
mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across
the yard and he walks after it
thinking he might close the widening distance
just as when I followed a lovely woman
on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn’t equal
her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes
moving into the distance, turning the final
corner, but when I turned the corner
she had disappeared and I looked up
into the trees thinking she might have climbed one.
When I was young a country girl would climb
a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face.
Warren and I are both searchers. He’s looking
for his dead sister Shirley, and I’m wondering
about my brother John who left the earth
on this voyage all living creatures take.
Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant
insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars.