flyfish Posted January 11, 2010 Share Posted January 11, 2010 Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 - the second volume of Michael Palin's diaries. Covers his movie years: MP Live at the Hollywood Bowl, Time Bandits, The Missionary, MP's The Meaning of Life, Brazil, A Private Function, A Fish Called Wanda. I don't think there is another celebrity who would include photos of his/her newsagent and house painter in an autobiography, just because he likes them. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Wilfrid Posted January 11, 2010 Share Posted January 11, 2010 Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots, a very clearly written but flawed discussion of sources of Heidegger's 1933-1945 writings. Not much point discussing it here, as my objections would either be boring to non-Heidegger scholars or far too politically exciting for the board. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
The Scream Posted January 12, 2010 Share Posted January 12, 2010 Midnight's Children. Not sure if I'll finish it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
flyfish Posted January 28, 2010 Share Posted January 28, 2010 Some here might know the significance if I report that I am currently reading Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole... Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Chad Ward Posted January 28, 2010 Share Posted January 28, 2010 Some here might know the significance if I report that I am currently reading Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole... Have you suddenly come over all peckish? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
flyfish Posted January 30, 2010 Share Posted January 30, 2010 Some here might know the significance if I report that I am currently reading Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole... Have you suddenly come over all peckish? I keep wondering when the bouzouki player and dancers will come into it. There is a great YouTube clip of Cleese explaining the origin of the sketch... 1x2yvK4gbjM Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Peter Creasey Posted February 1, 2010 Share Posted February 1, 2010 Two fiction novels that I just finished... Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese The Wolf Hunters by James Oliver Curwood Both are recommended. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bloviatrix Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 Hilary Mantle's Wolf Hall. Most of what I've read about that era has always made Thomas Cromwell into an odious figure. This is an interesting revisionist telling. I'm enjoying it a lot. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
ghostrider Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 A Brief History of Stonehenge / Aubrey Burl / 2007 I've been fascinated by Stonehenge ever since I was a boy, when I was lucky enough to visit the site before it was roped off to the public. That led me to a wider interest in megalithic monuments and a small collection of books on the subject, including several earlier works by Burl. While I'm tiring of these Brief History titles, this book is much more than that trendy appellation implies. Early on, in a review of the Stonehenge literature, Burl notes that a significant book has appeared roughly every ten years in recent decades, starting with Richard Atkinson's Stonehenge in 1956. He clearly hopes that this book will be viewed as the next in that series, with some justification. This is an excellent compendium of the major findings at Stonehenge; it pulls together a wealth of detail that tells the story of the site's evolution as a ceremonial, ritual and funerary center over more than two thousand years, and places it in the context of the cultures that built other sites in the British Isles and Brittany during that vast span of time. It's full of intriguing tidbits, such as the possible derivation of the word "sarsen," which was "sazzan" in earlier centuries. Do these terms share a proto-Indo-European ancestor with "sasan" from the Chotanagpur area in northern India, which refers to large stone slabs used in prehistoric burial grounds there? Are they related to the Anglo-Saxon "sar-stan," which literally means "grievous stone" and described the large stones that had to be cleared from fields? Burl describes the Station Stones, four large megaliths (only two survive today) erected a century before the trilithon circle; the Station Stones marked out a giant rectangle centered on the earthwork henge that was the site's earliest construction. The site of the last missing stone was found in 1978; the astronomical alignments of the rectangle have been analyzed since I'd done my last reading on Stonehenge. The short sides of the rectangle pointed to the midsummer sunrise; its diagonals pointed to varoius solar and lunar events which marked the Quarter Days, those in-between points of the year which the Celts, many centuries later, made into the festival days of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samain. I can't explain my lifelong fascination with this stuff, but if you have a similar bent, this book is essential reading. It's oddly repetitive in places; I think that Burl would have benefitted from a collaboration with a good editor. That's a just small quibble; this book will take you on a grand trip through prehistoric time. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mongo_jones Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 earl lovelace, "the dragon can't dance". one of the great first paragraphs in all of novel-dom: "This is the hill tall above the city where Taffy, a man who say he is Christ, put himself up on a cross one burning midday and say to his followers: 'Crucify me! Let me die for my people. Stone me with stones as you stone Jesus, I will love you still.' And when they start to stone him in truth he get vex and start to cuss...: 'Get me down! Get me down!' he say. 'Let every sinnerman bear his own blasted burden; who is I to die for people who ain't have sense enough to know that they can't pelt a man with big stones when so much little pebbles lying on the ground.'" Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Wilfrid Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 A Brief History of Stonehenge / Aubrey Burl / 2007 I've been fascinated by Stonehenge ever since I was a boy, when I was lucky enough to visit the site before it was roped off to the public. You know they had a woodhenge there once? But it rotted. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
ghostrider Posted February 2, 2010 Share Posted February 2, 2010 A Brief History of Stonehenge / Aubrey Burl / 2007 I've been fascinated by Stonehenge ever since I was a boy, when I was lucky enough to visit the site before it was roped off to the public. You know they had a woodhenge there once? But it rotted. Yup. There was also one of those in Illinois near the Cahokia earthworks, not far across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, where I grew up. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
bloviatrix Posted February 3, 2010 Share Posted February 3, 2010 A Brief History of Stonehenge / Aubrey Burl / 2007 Cute cartoon in last week's issue of The New Yorker. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Peter Creasey Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 Just finished an ebook -- The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. Worthwhile book with a fairly complicated cast/plot. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Miguel Gierbolini Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots, a very clearly written but flawed discussion of sources of Heidegger's 1933-1945 writings. Not much point discussing it here, as my objections would either be boring to non-Heidegger scholars or far too politically exciting for the board. This is the kind of shit I want to know but I am always afraid to ask. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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