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What are you reading at the moment?

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PRINTED WORD by Warren Chappell. Beautiful book.
 
Tonight I'm reading JerseyGirlDownUnder. Not sure if that's the original Jersey in the Channel, or the New one in the U.S. Maybe I'll find out.

Since I started writing and hanging out in the AH, I have discovered some really great authors here. Whenever someone catches my attention in the AH, I make it a point to read at least some of their work. Many of you have really elevated my opinion of what Literotica can be.

This thread makes a convenient place to keep a running list so I don't forget anyone. So far, I've read 8letters, biscuithammer, bramblethorn, ChloeTzang, ElectricBlue66, ellen_devlin, Exescort, HeyAll, JasonClearwater, Kantarii, MelissaBaby, NotWise, Oggbashan, SimonDoom, SolarRay, sr71plt, and SusanJillParker.
 
This weekend I have taken up The Alexandria Quartet, not having read any of it since my mom gave me Justine when I was a kid. I vaguely remember being enthralled. Excited to see how it spices up my writing here.
 
SolarRay said:
This weekend I have taken up The Alexandria Quartet, not having read any of it since my mom gave me Justine when I was a kid. I vaguely remember being enthralled. Excited to see how it spices up my writing here.
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I've started reading that four times, and bog down about two hundred pages in every time - it drives me insane. Same with the Revolt of Aphrodite. The writing is SO rich, it exhausts me. I'll try again, one day.
 
Instructions on a new printer and new phone (2 - one is a flip phone). The fine print hurts my eyes to squint so much - so I gave it a break.:rolleyes:
 
I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, which is a very detailed science fiction story about a generation ship travelling to Proxima Centauri. I think it might be his best book so far — even better than the Mars trilogy.

He is not great at writing sex scenes, however.
 




Anne Curry
Agincourt
New York, N.Y. 2014.




Curry's book appeared on the eve of the 600th anniversary of this legendary battle. It's a fascinating and thorough examination of what little is actually known about it.

Shakespeare's Henry V has had a surprisingly profound effect on what people believe (whether accurate or not) about the battle. In fact, scholars are not even certain of the precise location of the battlefield. It's all downhill from there. Nobody really knows much of anything other than the English won and English longbow archers likely were a significant factor in the outcome.

Beliefs based on myth otherwise predominate the "facts" held by the vast majority of those who have even heard of Agincourt.








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"...What were the principles that informed the highest art? He probed this question relentlessly over five years of tireless reading, thinking, expounding. It is hard to think of any other great creative artist who has challenged him-or herself in this way. In order to achieve the clarity he needed, he fiercely drove his largely self-educated brain. He was an omnivorous reader, especially in philosophy and philology, though he was completely untrained in either. He believed there was a Holy of Holies, an ultimate truth, to which all of his thinking and all of his creative energies were directed. But what was it? He was painfully aware that he had wasted his student years and was forever trying to make up lost ground, which made him almost promiscuously susceptible to new ideas.

Approaching the great thinkers of the modern age, he started with Hegel. He was awestruck by what he called the mysterious power of the philosopher's writing, a power he thought comparable to Beethoven's in his Ninth Symphony, but, on his own admission, he barely understood a word of it. Then his attention was drawn by a Catholic priest and political agitator named Menzdorff to the work of Ludwig Feurbach; Feurbach, Menzdorff told him, was 'the only real philosopher of modern times.' Wagner eagerly seized on the philosopher's first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, finding it a model of lucidity after Hegel. This he could understand, and it gave him a massive jolt. He fervently embraced its proposition that individual human consciousness is part of an infinite consciousness into which it will be absorbed at death, and that belief in immortality and a personal deity are merely expressions of egoism. What he saw as the tragic dimension of this argument appealed greatly to Wagner. Above all, he endorsed Feurbach's rejection of the tyranny of accepted ideas based on a blind belief in authority. Authority had been the bane of Wagner's life, humiliating him and acting as a check on the free expanse of his creative spirit— 'art made tongue-tied by authority', as Shakespeare has it. Oscar Wilde's observation that, 'the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all', exactly expresses Wagner's sentiments..."
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-Simon Callow
Being Wagner: The Story of The Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived
New York, N.Y. 2017.​

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I wasn't really introduced to Wagner until later in life as my family was partial to the Italians. A friend took me to Bayreuth and introduced me to the "Ring Cycle." I was hooked.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that, while I knew Wagner had led an unconventional life, I had no idea that it was as turbulent and peripatetic as related by Callow. In that regard, Wagner was quite similar to James Joyce. Both led physically transient existences. It would be a contest to figure out which of the two lived in more places.

I've always thought of Wagner as a genius. I just didn't realize how large a genius he was.

...and, yes, it is THAT Simon Callow.






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electricblue66 said:
I've started reading that four times, and bog down about two hundred pages in every time - it drives me insane. Same with the Revolt of Aphrodite. The writing is SO rich, it exhausts me. I'll try again, one day.
Click to expand...
I managed to get through Justine before I needed a break, and am currently up to Part Two of Balthazar. I stupidly bought a copy of The Avignon Quintet for ten bucks in a second hand book shop recently. It looks pristine, so I'm guessing someone else gave up on that one, too. But it sits with its virgin pages as A Challenge. I wonder when I'll get to it. Not anytime soon.
 
ATM, I'm just meandering my way through the Rubiyat by Omar Al-Khayyam. I find it genuinely relaxing to read.
 



"...Balfour later writing to Lloyd George that:
'The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination...if the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict. Our justification for our policy is that we regard Palestine as being absolutely exceptional; that we consider the Jews to have an historic claim to a home in their ancient land, provided that home can be given them without either dispossessing or opressing the present inhabitants...' "​
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-David Stevenson
1917: War, Peace, and Revolution
Oxford University Press
New York, N.Y. 2017.​

​






Stevenson's work betrays a staggering knowledge of worldwide events throughout the pivotal year of 1917.

The events of the Western and Eastern Fronts in Europe are widely-known but the other theaters of war (notably the miserable and horribly bloody Italian Front with its twelve [yes, 12] Battles of The Isonzo) are not.

Stevenson's incredible scope examines the reasons behind German strategic decisions (including the gamble of unlimited submarine warfare), the grant of officer commissions to Sikhs and Punjabs in British Indian army units, the Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the respective American, Greek, Brazilian, Siamese and Chinese decisions to enter the war on the side of the Allies, Lenin, the Russian Revolution, and various peace initiatives undertaken by Pope Benedict XV and the Vatican.






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John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee. I just finished "The Scarlet Ruse" and picked up "The Turquoise Lament". I also read "Darker Than Amber" and "The Deep Blue Goodbye" earlier this summer. Nine days left in summer, let's see if I can make it. In the hopper: "Brave New World", then "For Whom the Bell Tolls" then the new one by Stephen King.
 
Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

and

Candice Millard, The River of Doubt (Theodore Roosevelt exploring a tributary of the Amazon)
 



"...Joaquin was a compact, soon-to-be powerful storm with an indeterminate eye. Danielle couldn't have known, but even the NHC's [National Hurricane Center's] positions of Joaquin were seriously off. For the next thirty-six hours, official reports put the eye as much as forty miles too far to the north. Lack of reliable data had hindered NHC's reporting accuracy. The storm system had developed much faster than anyone expected, defying all the odds, intensifying at an astonishing rate. The NHC's Hurricane Hunters usually ran through a storm system collecting data every twelve hours; keeping track of this rapidly developing hurricane would have required much mor frequent flies. The NHC's forecasts were also handicapped by the fact there weren't any ships in the area sending voluntary weather reports. Without quality data, the meteorologists could only get a fuzzy picture of the storm from satellite imagery. There simply wasn't enough information to accurately predict Joaquin's intensity and path..."
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-Rachel Slade
Into The Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, And The Sinking Of El Faro
New York, N.Y. 2018.​

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The archive section of the NHC allows one a partial glimpse at what real-time information on Hurricane Joaquin was available. It's quite clear that the hurricane was quite unusual in a lot of respects and its motion erratic and unpredictable.

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2015/JOAQUIN.shtml?

This is a riveting account of the sinking of the El Faro, a U.S.-flagged container ship that unknowingly sailed into the eye of Hurricane Joaquin in 2015 and sank in 15,000 feet of water with the loss of all hands.

The book is largely based on the National Transportation Safety Board and U.S. Coast Guard reports issued in late 2017. Their findings were, in turn, substantially based on the vessel's recovered bridge voice recorder (I was not previously aware of the existence of such things). The search and near-miraculous recovery of the bridge voice recorder in 15,000 feet of water is, in itself, a fascinating tale.

On the whole, the incident is absolutely terrifying— the usual cascade of seemingly minor problems accumulating to produce catastrophe. Reading the crew's words while knowing that they're all going to be dead in twenty-four/twelve/six/three hours is chilling.

The book is both illuminating and horrifying. We sit here on land with our instant access to the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service radar and wonder how anybody could sail into the eye of a hurricane. Tracking and predicting the hurricane's course was no simple matter; Hurricane Joaquin did something that is extremely rare for an Atlantic hurricane— it reversed course and moved south.

There's interesting background on the design history of container vessels going all the way back to Malcolm McLean's revolutionary concept of containerization of cargo. El Faro's design dates to the 1970s. The author asserts that El Faro's design and condition were satisfactory though it was old and a compromise. The vessel was designed as a "RoRo" (roll-on, roll-off") and its 2nd deck was intended to be open and awash. The author made clear the important distinction between a "scuttle" and a "hatch cover." There's a very, very big and critically important difference between the commonly accepted usage of "scuttle" and a "hatch cover." Somebody screwed up big time by failing to properly secure the damn scuttles.








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Reading

I am reading Michael Connellys latest book, is ok to read when sitting on a bus or train, but no masterpiece. Tried to read Kafka, but guess that was way above my level. ;) I enjoy light reading, crime novels, mysteries, guess I will stay off the philosophy books for now lol.
 
‘Fascism - A Warning’, by Madeline Albright.

Recent gift. Some remarkable insights (so far) but some of it has me scratching my head. Too early to judge.
 



"...They stripped the bodies and scalped some of them, though most of the soldiers had hair too short for the effort. Then, as the men of the village threw themselves on their ponies and rode south toward the bluecoats standing on the high point near the river, the women, boys, and old men who had waited on their ponies out of range arrived to help kill the wounded and begin the important task of mutilation. Many warriors had died, but far more wasichus lay dead along this ridge. There were skulls to crush, eyes to tear out, muscles and tendons to sever, limbs to hack off, and heads to separate from bodies. These soldiers would not move through the next world in comfort..."​


-James Donovan
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn, the Last Great Battle of the American West
New York, New York 2008.​
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I am not alone in my long fascination with the Battle of The Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell's 1984 Son Of The Morning Star was my first encounter with a detailed account of the event and its protagonists. That was followed by Dee Brown's 1970 Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Robert M. Utley's 1993 The Lance And The Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, Steven E. Ambrose's 1975 Crazy Horse And Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors and Nathaniel Philbrick's 2010 The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, And The Battle Of The Little Big Horn.


A Terrible Glory is eminently readable, nicely illustrated ( I don't recall having seen photographs of the Crow scouts White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Curly and Goes Ahead or of the noted mountain man/scout Mitch Boyer or the Arikara interpreter Frederic Gerard heretofore ) and Donovan related several events leading up to the dénouement that were new to me.
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Attica Locke, The Cutting Season

Michael Pearce, The Snake Catcher's Daughter

Liza Mundy, Code Girls (this was a surprise find of a best-seller. Both of my parents worked in a later version of this program and we lived at Arlington Hall, which is featured in this book).
 
Off Season by Jack Ketchum. For people who know their horror, this is a cult classic known for its absolute brutality.

Read it way back in my teens, but saw a copy at a used bookstore around the corner from me and picked it up.

This is the only book that I've read that has a scene that deeply disturbed me to the point I will most likely skip it when I get there. One of those situations where it was obviously effective, but so over the top there's a good point to be made its just pure shock value and wasn't that necessary to that degree.
 
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