Ersatz TLS discussion
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Weekly TLS
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What Are We Reading? 14 Dec 2020
Machenbach wrote: "Andy wrote: "Abe Books Most Expensive Books Sold in 2020, read this and decided on a rummage through my shelves..Unfortunately nothing quite so grand.."
Have you checked under the bed?
Thanks for ..."
I’ve actually got one I’m trying to sell MB. I’ll take it to Hey with me next time I go. For some reason when searching for it years ago, I ended up with two copies.., The Legend of John Hornby .
I think it’s worth about £50 (only...)
Maybe if I keep hold of it a few years...
Machenbach (115) wrote: "Justine wrote: "Sent by Ambrose Bierce to Mark Twain?"Reminded me of Ernst:
"
I thought about this one, but then got a Tesco pack with a snowman in front of the cottage instead.
Alwynne (123) wrote: "Justine (86) wrote: "Alwynne (79) wrote: "Review 
Mistletoe and MurderMistletoe and Murder is another in the series featuring Hazel Wong a..."
Yes, you're probably right that I was rushing in to protect her reputation because, as we all know, 'noir' is for guys with brains and backbone, 'cosy' for fluffheads. I don't know about 'Leavisite', but there is definitely a lot of snobbery about books.
On the other hand, I can easily imagine Wittgenstein passing his spare afternoons in the front cinema seat watching cowboy movies.
Mod
Thinking about this was prompted by my getting down Collected Poems by Edward Thomas when looking for a Friday poem. In the front is pasted a label telling me that I received this in my last year at school as 'Alderman Brook's Prefects' Reading Prize'. Below the date is our school motto: "Ad Rem Mox Nox", which roughly translates as "Time is short, get to work" or more specifically "Get it done before nightfall". In the 1960s, the official translation of the motto was "Work, for the night cometh". I'm not sure what I actually did to deserve this prize, but I suppose it must be related to the readings from the bible which girls in the Upper Sixth had to do at the morning assembly.
I then looked out my other prizes, trying to remember what they had been for: in the first form, an Attainment Prize, R.L. Stevenson's The Black Arrow (a choice which puzzles me now); three Austen novels including Sense and Sensibility, the 'Form IV English Prize'; Dylan Thomas,Quite Early One Morning, the 'Speech Training Prize'.
Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gpfr. My school prize story is of getting Kipling's Kim as the second form prize (so aged 13) and although I love reading and I love Kipling and although even non-Kipling lovers say it's a great book I have NEVER READ IT!
I think I now feel that if I did read it I would die. Or never read anything again. Or something pessimistic and supernatural like that. Maybe I should get a cheap paperback version and read that rather than the hardback with the inscription in?
Gpfr wrote(127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? "And we did Speech Training too! Trying to take the Derby out of the girls, with little success.
I wrote the following before I read about school prizes. They don’t seem to give them any more at least one doesn’t hear about them. Mine were always for ‘general good work’ predictably, Shakespeare, Kipling and a Dictionary. Recently I came across an article that ruminated on snobbery in poetry and, foolish me, was surprised. Surprised because it had not occurred to me that it should be thought snobby but then, thinking about this maybe it’s because we don’t always understand what the poem is trying to say and we don’t want our ignorance exposed.
Now, I find much in poems, not most, I cannot analyse them, don’t want to for in some way that spoils them for me, maybe I will like just a line or two, like to write them for to me it’s like writing a song. Someone else will read the poem differently , will like different lines.
Some of you may remember that I find mathematics as beautiful and rewarding as poetry. Maybe, and this is simply a guess on my part, both poetry and mathematics make some afraid and to cover up that emotion , both may be labelled snobby.
It’s all a shame because we need various bits of mathematics to live our lives and I would hazard a bet that everyone can recite a little poetry. Young children usually adore rhymes and poems. Why else would we recite nursery rhymes to little ones? It seems that when we enter adolescence the ‘I hate maths and poetry’ worlds take over and sadly this stays with some for the rest of their lives. If I am honest, and here I am talking about maths, I think that this stems from a moment of bad teaching when it all becomes too much effort, too many failures. Really, we are all, every one of us, brilliant mathematicians just dealing with the multitude of mathematical topics we tackle everyday without thinking.
There is so much that I do not know about mathematics, about poetry. I embrace both because they give much satisfaction and pleasure.
I truly had not thought about snobbishness in poetry, knew people fear maths. If a poem doesn’t talk to me I move on. If others want to analyse them that’s fine by me but I would hate anyone to think of my love of these two disciplines as snobbish.
If there was a talent that I could have it would be to be able to play a musical instrument but that is for others.
Mod
And we did Speech Training too! Trying to take the Derby out of the girls, with little success."
And in spite of having won the Prefects' Reading Prize, I was never a prefect - did I get it under false pretences? 🤔
I never received a book as a school prize but I DID win one as a prize from the Puffin Club, of which I was a member in my mid teens. This would be ~ 1971-2. The book was The Endless Steppe by Esther Rudomin Hautzig and it was a prize for a competition to create a scrapbook of our summer holidays. That year, a bunch of us went on a biology field trip to Portland Bill and stayed in the lighthouse!! My scrapbook ended up on display in an exhibition in London! I say this not to boast but because looking back, nobody in my family was interested, nobody came to the exhibition with me-I got trainfare from my Mum and went on my own to see it-and nobody commented afterwards or expressed any curiosity. But it was a very big deal. I took their indifference so much for granted that in one of my many moves I had a clearout and gave the book away. It amazes me now that I did this. I wish very much that I had kept it. The lesson is, if your kids accomplish something special, give them a pat on the back and some acknowledgement. Show a modicum of curiosity. If you do not take them seriously they will not take themselves seriously.
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gpfr. My school prize story is of getting Kipling's Kim as the second..."
A few years ago, I decided to re-read Kim out of curiosity and because when I turned 50 I decided it was time to stop feeling apologetic about being Indian and read up on Indian history, literature etc. A great deal of new work was being published starting early this century. I like Kipling's children's books too and grew up on the Just So Stories and Puck of Pook's Hill. I just looked at my copy of Kim-I bought it in 1983! But I never finished it, even after 2 attempts, and I rarely if ever buy and fail to finish.
I hated Kim-there's nothing there for a woman, which is what I always feel about espionage stories. Why is The Great Game any different? There are no women of any substance because anyone of any standing in society would have been in purdah-just common prostitutes and such. It takes place in a man's world and there's nothing else in it. Even the detail about India failed to interest and if anything was a reminder that this is yet another old white guy's view, and seriously limited in scope. it is treated by critics in the West as if it was a "picture of India" but is limited to bazaar trash and coolies on both sides-the rulers and the ruled. It is anything but a picture of "India". It actually opens with Kim sitting astride a cannon named Zam-Zammah, a doubly phallic and extremely offensive symbol of the conquest of India. What a slap in the face! That is why I couldn't finish it. Finally, as a South Indian one gets very tired of the Brits' obsession with the NW Frontier and "The Martial Races", as Lord Curzon called them, as if there was nothing else in India but Pathans and parathas, and the only virtue was mindless, stupid, aggression. So Y chromosome and tedious beyond belief.
Alwynne wrote (126): "Leavisesl"Of course, the novel came under attack right from the start. A form of reading that entertained without notable improving elements! That appealed so strongly to the imagination! That was read by servant girls! The subject matters - sex, love, adventure, crime, humour, horror - were woven into stories whose characters - including females - often invited readers to identify with them. The theatre was bad enough, but these were books a wife or daughter or maid could bring into the home and read and reread privately. Of course men also read and enjoyed novels, but it was the wide female audience that caused a stir.
Then, when early modern and modern literature entered the university as a subject of academic study, I assume the pressure was on to identify a canon of fiction worthy of the ivory towers. That canon was just beginning to be seriously questioned, as I recall, in the mid-sixties. You evidently have had opportunities to explore much more widely as a result.
FrancesBurgundy (129) wrote: And we did Speech Training too! Trying to take the Derby out of the girls, with little success."We in my convent school in NY didn't receive books as prizes, though we did get speech training. Our poor speech teacher was treated appallingly by her classes, so much so that one of the nuns had to sit in during the lessons. And yeah, like no one's urban accent changed in the slightest.
WARNING TO THE WEST, a collection of speechs that Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave in the USA and UK between 1975-76, is an interesting artefact from the 1970s cold war timesSolzhenitsyn is a strident critic of the ghastly evil that was communism but i do find some of it borders hyperbole, in that he sells the USSR as far more powerful and dynamic than it actually was by 1975. His predictions that within a few decades the west would be in peril and that Portugal would be joining the Warsaw Pact are way off. In fact the USSR had been in decay since the mid 1960s and the wheels were coming off every facet of the state
I most strongly object to Solzhenitsyns comments that western workers lived in a better way than Soviet ones(in 1975) I loathe communism but in one area of their state, from the 1950s to 1980s, where they easily matched the capitalist world, was the strong welfare state and pension system. Personal freedom wasnt allowed as such but the worker was far more secure than in the precariat of the west, increasingly as Raegen and Thatcher started to pulverise the post-war western social contract
Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gpfr. My school prize story is of getting Kip..."
I'm a huge fan of Kipling in last decade, before that i held off as he seemed to be almost too much of a charachiture but his dreadful early childhood and the attention to India drew me back in when i read "Plain Tales from the Hills". It wasnt all chummy "pukka sahib" jingoism, in fact some of it was unsettling and disquietening, conveying the sense of the british and the "Raj" as uneasy bedfellows. I aim to read Kim next as i am interested Northern India and the frontier
I do share your point about how South India comes out badly from the racist "Martial" stereotyping of the Indians. Have you read anything by Raja Rao? He was writing about the Mangalore -Karnataka area and like a minority in that region shared bright blue eyes with dark skin, a striking look indeed....Narayan was another South Indian writer, from the Madras area
Alwynne wrote: "Review 
Kallocain"Wow. Fascinating, I've never even heard of this book before. I'll have to track it down
Paul wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "Review Kallocain"Wow. Fascinating, I've never even heard of this book before. I'll have to track it down"
there is another novel by Karin Boye in print called "Crisis"
i didnt like kallocain at all when i read it about 10 years ago in a vile POD format book but i may re-read it now
Why are Penguin messing about with Ditlevsen books?I wanted to order "Youth",to follow on from the first in the triology but its now been re-packaged and not available till January!!!
Alwynne wrote: "Paul wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "Review Kallocain"Wow. Fascinating, I've never even heard of this book before. I'll have to track it down"
It is as bil..."
another Norvik Press female author is Hagar Olssons "Chitambo", which i mean to read soon...finnish female author, like Tove Jansson, a Finland-Swede
Alwynne wrote (#143): "it's very different in flavour though, as you probably already know, written in her earlier, experimental, modernist phase."Thanks for the review Alwynne - I don't think I'll read it (as you say, you were interested in, rather than purely enjoying, reading it) but I had never heard of this writer before.
Glad to see the pertinent choice for the cover of another fellow Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, whom I had - again! - never heard of before this recent Guardian article: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020...
Alwynne wrote: "AB76 (144) wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "Paul wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "Review Kallocain"Wow. Fascinating, I've never even heard of this book before. I'll h..."
Likewise....i'm trying to cut down purchasing until 2021!
i hadnt heard of Sandel...i do know Martinson
Alwynne wrote: "AB76 (144) wrote: "Why are Penguin messing about with Ditlevsen books?I wanted to order "Youth",to follow on from the first in the triology but its now been re-packaged and not available till Jan..."
i agree the instalments were over priced but well packaged, i am doing same as you now, pre-ordered the triology, even though i have read the first volume
Alwynne wrote: "AB76 (144) wrote: "Alwynne wrote: "AB76 (144) wrote: "Why are Penguin messing about with Ditlevsen books?I wanted to order "Youth",to follow on from the first in the triology but its now been re-..."
thats a good point.....hope the whole thing doesnt get delayed even longer..i should have bought all three this year!
AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gpfr. My school prize story is..."
No I haven't but I have-from my Dad's collection-a number of other S. Indian writers and a very large and diverse collection of books on India published from the 60s onward to today-many bought in India by my Dad. I should check.
As for Kipling, I didnt read the Jungle Book until after I saw the Disney movie and as I don't like beast fable, I thought it boring. I read Rewards and Fairies, but it was hard to get his other books. I like his poetry too, he had a great gift, but he was clearly hopelessly conflicted about his Indian Inner Child. I recall seeing Stalky & Co and Captains Courageous in the library but only boredom when I peeped inside-they were written for boys and there was nothing to attract a girl, even one interested in science and "masculine" pursuits as I was. This is Kipling's great failing.
As for writing on India in the US, it seems to be limited to endless dull biographies of Mrs Gandhi and assorted Nehrus, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who wasn't even Indian and never learned to wear a sari properly. It's laughable.
A couple of weeks ago I was writing about cephalopods and what I learned from reading Monarchs of the Sea. How these fantastic creatures were floating around the bottom of the oceans four hundred million years ago when the land on Earth was still joined together as one super continent, Pangaea surrounded by one sea,Panthalassa.https://postimg.cc/jLdJL5K4
Around 300 million years ago chunks of land started to drift around and find the places we know today but little did I think about what the land looked like then. A vague land much like today? How wrong can I be?
It did not dawn on me to think about how earth came to be on the land of rock. What started life on earth rather than in the sea?
Reading Entangled Life I have found out that all started with a partnership between algae and fungi that crept across the land, ( think of something like seaweed which is a lichen which is algae and fungi in a a relationship ), gradually made roots in the rock, made the earth, sent up shoots to form plants and gave us a place for life on land. Wow.
And so we have entangled life as the joint relationship between plants and fungi still today. The plant sources carbon dioxide and lipids for food and the fungi entangled in the roots searches out for water and minerals; both get fed.
Isn’t that just marvellous to know.
Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gpfr. My school p..."
Three others to try, less southern are the following:
Mulk Raj Anand "Untouchable"
Khushwant Singh "Train To Pakistan" (Punjab)
Ahmed Ali "Twilight in Delhi" (Delhi)
plus the Pakistan/border region set short stories of Hasan Sadat Manto
Tagore is obviously a genius and am sure you have read some of his works already, Bengal has a special place in indian film and novels, in fact Romanian author Mircea Eliade provides a superb outsiders view of the Raj in his 1930s novel "Bengal Nights"
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Why are Penguin messing about with Ditlevsen books?"'Cos they're scumbags and have been since at least the Bertelsmann takeover."
that made me giggle Mach..well said sir!
AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot since our day Gp..."
Thanks, but I am SO not interested in the Pakistan border region. Again, it's as if there was nothing else to write about-it has been beaten to death. No, I don't think Tagore was a genius-I think he is vastly overrated. What I have read, I was not impressed by, though possibly the real point of Tagore is that he was "out there" for his day and revitalized Bengali lit-poor translation is an issue too. Bengali intellectuals are totally overrated-usually by themselves. As for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is a joke-who reads half these authors? Certainly not me, and I prefer history anyway. I tried One Hundred Years of Solitude and thought it was complete rubbish TBH.
Machenbach (155) – John Barton/A History of the Bible – That is a great review, thank you very much. Even for a non-believer the process by which writings from all ages and teachings from one life became translated into Church doctrine is very interesting, and it sounds as though this book gives us an authoritative and non-extreme account of the current state of knowledge around that central issue. I will see if our library can get it for me.
Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot sin..."
lol...interesting opinions...maybe see if your fathers books have some Rao or Narayan amongst them then, stick to the south!
Your mention of Kipling earlier has pushed "traffics and discoveries" up my list and i will read that next!
Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot sin..."
Tagore for me is a fascinating figure and i have always liked him, Nobel prize is a major achievment for a body of work and i always enjoy the annual awards and the discussions they create, the Punjab area is fascinating for me with its religious diversity on both sides up till 1947( on the Indian side subsequently)
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote(127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? "And we did Speech Training too! Trying to take the Derby out of the girls, with little success."
You didn't go to NGHS did you?
Over the past 4 years, I’ve probably been a bit unfair to The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. I know from re-visiting it from time to time that it’s a solid guide to understanding voice in fiction. My problem was that I went to the book looking for a way of understanding and explicating irony in fiction, and found Booth’s treatment of it there to be mostly unsatisfactory.
I did not know at the time that Booth later wrote an entire book devoted to irony, A Rhetoric of Irony, which I’ve now read and I am (ironically?) still pretty unsatisfied, though I can hardly maintain that the author’s treatment of the subject was inadequate or superficial. I guess I’m looking for something that can’t exist: a key to analytically explicating irony from a purely textual analysis. But as Booth shows, understanding irony relies largely on extra-textual factors: the attitudes and worldview of author and reader, the historical situation of a text, and the context in which a text is written and read.
I might summarize Booth’s take on irony as, “well, it all depends…” and “I know it when I read it (and you know it when you read it, though you may know it in a far greater or lesser number of instances than I do)”. The appreciation of irony requires a kind of dance of mutual recognition between author and reader: a mutual recognition of coded meaning that, because it potentially excludes some, if not many, readers, is perhaps the closest two minds can come to each other through the written word.
For most of his text, Booth deals with “stable irony”: ironically worded passages which the reader mentally reconstructs into the “true” meaning of the passage. He looks at a variety of ways in which this is handled by writers and understood by readers, in both extended excerpts and several complete works: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, “All That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor, and a number of poems. This sort of play-by-play analysis of reading irony makes explicit a process that is subconscious for most experienced readers and is helpful in illustrating Booth's more general points.
Equally vital to the reading of the ironic passages in his examples of stable irony is the highlighting of the parts of the work which, for a proper understanding, need to be read un-ironically. (As indicated in many qualifications Booth gives in his analyses, such as recognizing the potential controversy raised by the idea of “proper” or “correct” reading, the author always feels himself on shaky ground in making categorical statements and goes to some lengths to define the limits and assumptions of his inquiry into irony.) As important in understanding irony as the ability to detect it in the first place, is the knowledge of which parts of a work are not to be read as irony, “learning where to stop” as one of Booth’s chapter titles has it.
In this chapter Booth gives five handicaps to understanding or detecting irony:
• Ignorance – the irony is presented in a context unfamiliar to a reader, which could be cultural, generational, or any number of milieus that the reader does not share with the author or the intended audience, and with which he is unfamiliar.
• Inability to Pay Attention – Booth’s examples are of readers encountering irony in a format, such as a newspaper article, that normally does not require the kind of attentive reading that would be given to a work of literature.
• Prejudice – the reader does not share or is opposed to an author’s point of view, either the ironic message itself, or its intended “reconstructed” meaning.
• Lack of Practice – either inexperience in reading irony in general or unfamiliarity with generic conventions whose violation may point to irony (this seems to fall equally well under “Ignorance”).
• Emotional Inadequacy – Readers who are “either too ready to emote or too resistant to emotional appeals”.
In the last sections of the book, Booth deals with texts that go beyond “stable irony” into “unstable irony”, where it is impossible to reconstruct an ironic passage into a “correct” statement of an author’s position (the only specific examples here are some passages from The Man Without Qualities, and a Howard Nemerov poem, “Boom!”). Beyond “unstable irony” lies “infinite instability”, ironic works in which there is no “knowing where to stop” because every attempt at reconstruction or negation leads to further irony; Samuel Beckett is the prime example given here.
Machenbach wrote: "Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:"All 17 by Americans."
Not totally surprised at that.
giveusaclue wrote(165): "FrancesBurgundy wrote: ."You didn't go to NGHS did you?.."
If you're asking me, giveus, no I didn't. State grammar in Derby. Forgive me if I don't elaborate - I'm notoriously secretive - but there were only two so my cover might be blown if anyone's desperate to work it out. And from the number of crime novels you lot seem to read it might soon be. I won't give my school motto like Gpfr did or you'd get it in one!
Machenbach wrote: "Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:"All 17 by Americans."
Well, the Larson is about [checks Goodreads summary, sighs] Winston fucking Churchill.
Machenbach wrote (#166): " so you shouldn't have a problem getting a copy from your library, unless it happens to be run by the Taliban or the Tories, of course."I also wonder how that well-researched and scholarly book on the Bible would fare in the Bible belt!
I second vermontlogger/Russell, this was a very good review, and I have it in mind to buy it at the next opportunity for my f-i-l, a practising Irish Catholic with a critical nous when it comes to religion, and a mildly rebellious position regarding the Church.
FrancesBurgundy wrote: "giveusaclue wrote(165): "FrancesBurgundy wrote: ."You didn't go to NGHS did you?.."
If you're asking me, giveus, no I didn't. State grammar in Derby. Forgive me if I don't elaborate - I'm notorio..."
No problem Frances, I do understand. It was that comment about speech training that took my mind back. I hope yours had more effect than mine!!
Machenbach (155) wrote: "John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths. A book like this – which attempts to survey the history of the composition of the Bible’s constituent books, its forma..."
Thanks, MB. I'm interested always in the evolution of texts, ancient ones especially, and certainly biblical texts - OT, NT, apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, the lot. And it's in the library! I look forward to referring back to your review as I read it, and perhaps responding to it.
Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Sandya wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote (127): "Do children still get books as prizes at school? Giving of prizes has probably changed a lot sin..."
a great non-fiction source to consult are the huge Gazetteers of Imperial India, dictionaries and reference guides to each region compiled by the Indian civil service in the 19th century. i found the Madras Gazeteer fascinating!
giveusaclue wrote: "Machenbach wrote: "Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:"All 17 by Americans."
Not totally surprised at that."
me neither but its a shame, he always seemed like a more outward looking person
Gpfr wrote [Message 127]: "Do children still get books as prizes at school? My children and grandchildren here in France have never done so. Thinking about this was prompted by my getting down Collected Poems by Edward Tho..."
My school's motto was 'Deo Juvante' which, appropriately, translates as 'God help us'.
I only ever won one prize that I can remember, which was a copy of Arthur Bryant's 'The Age of Endurance'.
Machenbach wrote: "Gladarvor wrote: "I also wonder how that well-researched and scholarly book on the Bible would fare in the Bible belt!"Ha! Do any scholarly books fare well there?"
You got me curious about bestselling religious books in the US – apparently the NY Times stopped keeping a separate “Religion, Spirituality and Faith” list the month Trump was inaugurated. Here are the entries on that terminal list:
Alwynne wrote: "Andy (99) wrote: "Witch-Cult Abbey by Mark Samuels
1942, and the war is raging in the skies over Britain when an archivist of antiquarian books ..."
Library copy Alwynne.
I also struggled to find it, but there existed one copy in Cumbria..took me a few weeks of waiting and a £1 fee...well worth it.
Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:
[bookcover:The Splendid and the Vile: ..."Is there anything from outside of the US?
Isn’t that a bit embarrassing, to announce you’ve read nothing else?
Andy wrote: "Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:[bookcover:The Splendid a..."depends if this is merely a tie in, where Obama endorses a number of books, he wanted to read...or books that publishers had sent to him
I would be embarrassed to have spent a whole year reading nothing but books about England..
Gladarvor wrote (#174): "Machenbach wrote (#166): "I intend to buy ..."I would second support for the purchase. From within in the same academic sphere, it is a very good introduction, and I would echo the praise of Machenbach's fine review. There are certain choices of Barton which leave room for debate, but overall it is a solid scholarly work. It should be forced reading for Bible belt types, but only wishful thinking that it would make any difference ...
MB (166), glad (174) – When I thought about it I actually decided to buy it, as mrs vermontlogger is very interested in the general subject as well, so it’s like an extra present, from the two of us to the two of us. But the library is getting me Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
AB76 wrote: "Andy wrote: "Bill wrote: "Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020:[bookcover:T..."Understood. Better if this was made clear. I have a gripe at times with a sites like LitHub which tends to portray pretty much only American books.
We’re currently getting translations from countries we’ve hardly had the chance to read before.
I’d be interested to know from how many countries you’ve read this year AB. Very many, I’m sure.
I’ll tally mine up on NYE.
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Ersatz TLS
Books mentioned in this topic
Von wegen Heilige Nacht! (other topics)The Blue Flower (other topics)
No Bed for Bacon (other topics)
Confessions (other topics)
Shipwrecks (other topics)
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The best books of 2020 to support indie publishers this Christmas
Some of the most outstanding books by small presses, from an extraordinary year
In other words: "These are books..."
Another sad thing about the article Georg is that it isn’t open to comments.
That’s usually the way to pick up some good recommendations.
And, to be fair, a way for small Indie publishers to push their stuff.