books
more books
1) my first ever ebook: mansfield park - austen...very good, even though the inevitable happy ending was inevitable from about chapter 2...but still enjoyable watching it unfold...a bit of a mary sue of a heroine, but still good description of a time and a social class....
2) unseen academicals, pratchett...a huge disappointment. We have been asking for a sports story from terry for decades - i remember discussing it with him in rotterdam in 90...he hates football and always maintained that there was no reason to write such a story since people who like sports cant read....the football parts of this book were actually good...but terry also wants to be mistaken for literature, and be considered as a serious writer. such striving and pretentiousness made for some truly bad books, like small gods, interesting times, thud, and almost ruined jingo...racisim was his bugbear in this book - and he also needs an editor - this is 550 pages, 300 would have been good. So, in all, it lacks the loving pastiche and mockery of carpe or last continent, and is filled with the moral preaching of s.g. and i.t....not to be read again...
3) musicophilia, oliver sacks....not a book on how music affects the brain, like 'this is your brain on music', rather a book on how pathological issues - stroke, alzheimers, autism etc, affect how you perceive music. interesting, like 'the man who mistook his wife for a hat' - the overriding feeling is like Dick's in Take Them to the Garden - anything that is so complicated as the human brain, that can go wrong in so many weird ways, must be a real wonder...
4) Tolkien and the invention of myth, ed Chance...a book of essays about how tolkien used myth in his writings. some clever analysis of the kalevala and tolkien and the edda and tolkien, some interesting ideas about folklore and tolkien in general. not the best critical reader, but if you want to deepen your knowledge of how JRRT thought, Chance's books are a good place to start....
5) The art of story telling, M. Gerhardt....a literary analysis of the 1001 nights..flawed. She based her analysis on a german translation, knows no arabic, but tries to make conclusions about the age and geographical origin of stories. also out dated in that she still insists that Gallard worked from a 'missing manuscript' when he wrote ali baba and afew of the other works now considered to be G's own creations. And the more I read the book, the more the fact that she was only working from a translation bothered me...also outdated in the sense that she had no modern paradigm (like post colonialism, or feminisim or some other crit lit theory) and was basically just listing which stories she liked with no analytical tools...
6) prehistory the making of the human mind, Colin Renfrew...I was hoping for a book like S. Mithen's the prehistory of the mind, a book on evolutionary psychology or cognitive archeology, but it was just a non-technical introduction to prehistory and modern scholarship.
1) my first ever ebook: mansfield park - austen...very good, even though the inevitable happy ending was inevitable from about chapter 2...but still enjoyable watching it unfold...a bit of a mary sue of a heroine, but still good description of a time and a social class....
2) unseen academicals, pratchett...a huge disappointment. We have been asking for a sports story from terry for decades - i remember discussing it with him in rotterdam in 90...he hates football and always maintained that there was no reason to write such a story since people who like sports cant read....the football parts of this book were actually good...but terry also wants to be mistaken for literature, and be considered as a serious writer. such striving and pretentiousness made for some truly bad books, like small gods, interesting times, thud, and almost ruined jingo...racisim was his bugbear in this book - and he also needs an editor - this is 550 pages, 300 would have been good. So, in all, it lacks the loving pastiche and mockery of carpe or last continent, and is filled with the moral preaching of s.g. and i.t....not to be read again...
3) musicophilia, oliver sacks....not a book on how music affects the brain, like 'this is your brain on music', rather a book on how pathological issues - stroke, alzheimers, autism etc, affect how you perceive music. interesting, like 'the man who mistook his wife for a hat' - the overriding feeling is like Dick's in Take Them to the Garden - anything that is so complicated as the human brain, that can go wrong in so many weird ways, must be a real wonder...
4) Tolkien and the invention of myth, ed Chance...a book of essays about how tolkien used myth in his writings. some clever analysis of the kalevala and tolkien and the edda and tolkien, some interesting ideas about folklore and tolkien in general. not the best critical reader, but if you want to deepen your knowledge of how JRRT thought, Chance's books are a good place to start....
5) The art of story telling, M. Gerhardt....a literary analysis of the 1001 nights..flawed. She based her analysis on a german translation, knows no arabic, but tries to make conclusions about the age and geographical origin of stories. also out dated in that she still insists that Gallard worked from a 'missing manuscript' when he wrote ali baba and afew of the other works now considered to be G's own creations. And the more I read the book, the more the fact that she was only working from a translation bothered me...also outdated in the sense that she had no modern paradigm (like post colonialism, or feminisim or some other crit lit theory) and was basically just listing which stories she liked with no analytical tools...
6) prehistory the making of the human mind, Colin Renfrew...I was hoping for a book like S. Mithen's the prehistory of the mind, a book on evolutionary psychology or cognitive archeology, but it was just a non-technical introduction to prehistory and modern scholarship.