Amph What book are you reading right now?

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

 

The Complete Fables by Aesop

 

Fiction: SW Last Shot
Nonfiction: Realm Divided by Dan Jones (a look at the year the Magna Carta was signed in Britain - 1215 - both from a political point of view and looks at how everyday people lived. Not bad so far if that time period interests you).

 

One Beautiful Dream by Jennifer Fulwiler

 

Tara Duncan: Les Sortceliers by Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian

 

The Boys in the Boat - about the American rowing team that won the medal in Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics. Started a bit slow, but picking up now.

 

Twenty Days in Turin.

 

About Looking (1980) – John Berger

Imagine one of the sculptures. Thin, irreducible, still and yet not rigid, impossible to dismiss, possible only to inspect, to stare at. If you stare, the figure stares back. . . What is different now is how you become conscious of the track of your stare and hers: the narrow corridor of looking between you – perhaps this is like the track of a prayer if such a thing could be visualized.

I quite liked the previous book of art criticism I read by Berger and that’s enough of a rarity that I ended up seeking out this one, which is kind of considered his best, I think. It’s longer than Ways of Seeing and broader in a way. There are several essays in this one and there isn’t really a particular theme tying them all together. They range from modern art to, in a particularly startling and insightful essay, the ethical considerations of viewing animals in the context of the zoo. The zoo essay, called Why Look at Animals?, is the one that kicks the book off and it really sets a tone in terms of the reader just kind of sitting back and thinking, “Okay, I have no idea where this book is going to go.” Ultimately, I found this book to be absolutely brilliant. Berger has a gift for being both very accessible to a layman and quite beautiful in his prose. I think he’s genuinely the best art critic I’ve ever read and one of the few that I would recommend to a beginner who wants to gain a basic understanding of art and to a more advanced connoisseur in search of new, beautifully crafted insights. There were some genuine epiphanies had while reading this book; some of his writing on Modigliani really snapped his art into a focus I’d never seen before, revealing something meaningful behind what I’d always believed to simply be stylistic tics. And if you’re still not convinced to pick up this book, allow me to put the cherry on top of my thoughts and also illustrate just how wide ranging and outside the box Berger’s thinking really is: there’s an essay here comparing & contrasting the work of nightmarish painter Francis Bacon with the charming pop sensibilities of Walt Disney. Step inside the wonderful world of Berger. 4 stars.

tl;dr – wide-ranging collection of essays about art is accessible, sharp, beautifully written and filled with genuine insights; the best book of art criticism I’ve yet encountered. 4 stars.

 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

I've been rereading the series for the first time in about ten years. The last time I read it the whole way through like this, I was still a teenager. Now, I'm almost 30. There's a lot of stuff that didn't resonate with me as much when I was a teenager, particularly the stuff about Dementors, Azkaban, possession, and Occlumency stuff, that I read with a fresh set of eyes and a whole different background of personal experiences, which made reading about those things particularly acute for me, especially from the standpoint of having gone through and continuing to go through my struggles with mental illness and personal demons.

 

*HUGS*
Rereading certain books as an adult certainly puts a new perspective on the material.

I think I'm going to read the Galadria trilogy.

 

Confessions (1838) – Augustine, E.B. Pusey

I previously read a translation of Augustine’s ground-breaking auto-biography/theological treatise from 1961 by R.S. Pine-Coffin. I said at the time that I thought I’d pick up another one at some point and I’ve finally gotten around to it. This translation is over a hundred years older than Pine-Coffin’s and it shows in ways both good and bad. The language here is a lot more poetic and is pretty clearly written to mimic the style of the King James Bible. Pine-Coffin’s version was shooting for a more modern vernacular with equally mixed results. Pine-Coffin’s version was sometimes a lot more visceral than Pusey’s version, as in the section about Augustine’s conversion, but it was also frequently pretty stilted. Pusey’s version is, on the whole, a lot more beautiful and, ironically, an easier read, but it does lose some of its emotional intensity. I think these are perfect examples of why you should read multiple translations of a work; they’re very different and complementary in some interesting ways. Pusey brings a more graceful and beautiful prose, but Pine-Coffin ratchets up the intensity. As to the work itself, I’ve talked about it before and my reaction here is much the same: it’s compelling as both a story and a character study, but it could use some tightening. I’m giving this one exactly the rating I gave Pine-Coffin’s translation, but for different reasons. Oh, by the way, is there some rule about only people with silly names being allowed to translate Augustine? First, we had a Pine-Coffin and now we have something that might show up in a diss track: E.B. Pusey. Weird. I look forward to I.M. Gay’s translation. 3 stars.

tl;dr – older translation of Augustine’s compelling text is more poetic than some, but it also loses some of the immediacy of new translations. 3 stars.

 

Ronan Farrow's "War on Peace" about the Trump administration running a bulldozer through the State Department, the diplomatic corps and all its institutional culture and expertise.

 

On the Banks of the Bayou by Roger Lea MacBride

 

Just finished; Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey. This series continues to deftly blend action, galactic politics and basic human drama. - 8/10

About to begin; Phew. Not sure. Got half a dozen choices here. Gonna hold off going on to Persepolis Rising (Book #7 in the Expanse series). I've got Project Nemesis (A kaiju novel by Jeremy Robinson, who wrote the Chess Team series I've dabbled in recently). Even got a (gasp) Star Wars novel. Paradise Snare by A.C. Crispin, an old school Han Solo focused novel I picked up after seeing the most recent Solo trailer.

 

Star Wars: Last Shot

 

Star War: Battlefront: Inferno Squad

 

Fascism A Warning: Madeline Albright

 

The Complete Fables by Aesop. I am attempting to read the canon of western literature.

 

I just finished reading that. I thought it was a pretty good supplement to the game's campaign.

 

I don't play the games, but I loved the first Battlefront book. It read like a good video game.
The Unleashed books read more like a single-player RPG but BF was much more immersive.

I'm 60 pages in and I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. It doesn't even read like Golden's other SW novels, which is awesome.

 

Biography of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin .

This is excellent , really thorough . I knew a lot of the story , but my god he's a stubborn petulant bugger . I've noticed a pattern which is very much that he's a victim of his own imagination : someone will say something to him , then later he'll hear about something else and then put these 2 items together and form some sort of conspiracy .
He's fallen out with pretty much all his co-creators . And all the comic companies , and yet no-one's ever really done him wrong .
He remains one of the best writers tho .

the only thing lacking from this biog is much info about his childhood / teenage years .

 

I'm not so sure about that. Moore wanted the rights to Watchmen to eventually revert to him, which DC only agreed to on condition that they would revert to Moore when the book was out of print.

In a weird coincidence it turns out Watchmen is one of a vanishingly small number of comic books that has never been out of print! What are the odds?!

 

Alan Moore's musings are hilarious. He's so cynical and cranky. He said one time that Hollywood is running out of ideas and soon they'll have a film where Johnny Depp plays Cap'n Crunch.

 

Yeah but it's not like anyone ripped him off , he still gets royalties from the sales .

But it's sad he fell out with DC 'cos I'd have loved to have seen him do a run on Superman , I really think it could've been great .
.

 

He's gets a royalty commensurate with going rates in comics in the 1980s which is a pittance compared to how much it's made DC over the years; they ripped him off hard, as is the industry's wont.