Tag: books read 2014

Monk, Amblyopia & All

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Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

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Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)

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I’ve read a lot the last few months, and not posted much about the novels I’ve finished, but I’ll make an exception for this… and for one nonfiction book on governesses, which I’ll get to later this month. (And a few thoughtful posts on novels I wasn’t crazy about, which… well, they’ll go up eventually, I suppose, if they seem worth it when I revisit them.) Moll Flanders was an enjoyable enough book, once I got past the way novels were written in that time, which is to say, once I got past the lack of any kind of expository description of anything. Sure, Swift does …

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Georgian England, The Developing World, Crime Prevention, and Internet Trolls

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Life in Georgian London was an alien sort of existence: it’s hard to wrap your head around it, though there is one analogy I’ve discovered for it that neatly says a lot about the things we take for granted… and also suggests something of our future, too. I suspect the unexpected key is this figure: Yes, our old friend… the internet troll.  I’d argue that, among other things, the Internet is pretty invaluable in keeping humanity acquainted with what it’s like to live in a lawless, unpoliced world. Which is the kind of world that people in the 1730s lived …

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a very difficult book to talk about. It’s a challenging book to read, too, but talking about it seems harder than reading it, to me. That’s usually a sign that there’s something worth thinking over, though I am struggling to find a way into discussing it. Certainly, a mere “reader reaction” of the type that one sees all over the internet seems insufficient, for the same reason it strikes one as ridiculous for someone to walk out of a hall where a piece by Mahler or Webern or Stravinsky has just …

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Howard Who? by Howard Waldrop

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I just finished Howard Who? on Tuesday night, though I first read “The Ugly Chickens” a couple of years ago, and loved it. (My edition is the Peapod Classics one put out by Small Beer Press, pictured at the right.) So of the “slipstream” books I’ve read from Small Beer aren’t really my thing, but this collection was overall really, really good. It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is a Small Beer reprint: the collection was Waldrop’s first, and originally was put out by Doubleday in 1986. It seems so obvious to me that a smaller press could fruitfully …

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