Yup, me too Don't care if accountings of his life are 100% accurate, I take things with a bucket of salt anyway. But his horse training methods are proven and that's what's amazing.
I'm back to trying to get through the Bothers Karamazov. It's good, I know its good, I even like it a lot, but it's just so hard to read. I don't even know why. We'll see if I can make it more than 70 pages this time. (Think I got to 67 last time)
"Let my inspiration flow in token rhyme, suggesting rhythm." -Robert Hunter
To fill some time today, I picked up a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce at the SU market for £2. Read a little bit of it while we waited for the pressure to drop in the chamber.
Fiennes claims it's not really a novel, that it's 95% memoirs he found decomposing in a hut on the Antarctic peninsular in 1995, left there by a Canadian hunter of Nazi war-criminals who had stayed there the previous year.
The real author is presumed to be dead.
The personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are horrific.
That looks fascinating. I just finished an incredibly uplifting book that talks of a way I plan to attempt following called The Four Agreements: A Toltec Book of Wisdom by don Miguel Ruiz. The Toltecs never disappeared, we simply can't see them.
Last edited by danlo on Wed Jan 03, 2007 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
I'm ploughing through David Mitchell's new novel "Black Swan Green". It has been dubbed "the British Catcher in the Rye", and so far it is living up to that call. Mitchell rocks!
I picked up on ebay a couple of weeks ago the biography of Francis I, First Gentleman of France, written by Francis Hackett in 1935. Francis was the first "renaissance" King of France, who ruled at the time of King Henry VIII. It was he who had the Mona Lisa brought to France, along with Leonardo da Vinci, himself. Leonardo was said to have died in the arms of Francis, though that story's probably a stretch.
I finished reading yesterday Augustus by Anthony Everitt, a biography of Rome's first emperor. Augustus comes across as very determined. If you crossed him, even if you were family, you were in big trouble. Yet he devised a political solution to the constant civil wars of the years before Julius Caesar's death that survived for centuries.
I read the prologue for Persian Fire during my lunch hour today. Persian Fire a book on the Greek-Persian wars, was written by Tom Holland, who also wrote the excellent book Rubicon on the Roman Civil Wars. It looks like that will be my next purchase.
THE ROAD TO A HANGING, a cowboy western in which a former slave survives all kinds of vicissitudes. It's billed as YA, but there is too much cheating, lying and backstabbing for it to be wholesome children's fare.
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms." -- Roger Penrose
For the moment I´m rereading the Aubrey/Maturin-series (20 books) from Patrick O´Brian. Even if I´m no sailor, I love the books for the art with which they are written.
"The best historical novels ever written."—Richard Snow, The New York Times
Every human makes mistakes. The trick is to do them, when nobody is watching (P. Ustinov)
I've been reading The Sea Runners, by Ivan Doig. It's a novel, set in the early 1850's and based on a true story. It's about four men, indentured workers in today's Sitka, then part of Russian Alaska. Tired of their lot, they escape by canoe, with the aim of paddling to Oregon.
Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
Poemcrazy--Susan Goldsmith Woolridge Poetry Handbook--Mary Oliver
And my friend from work is making me read Sam's Letters to Jennifer by James Patterson. I take it to read in waiting rooms when I am with my clients.
STILL in the process of reading: Linguistics (teach yourself)--Jean Aitchison
When Am I Going to Be Happy? (How to Break the Emotional Bad Habits That Make You Miserable)--Penelope Russianoff, Ph.D
The Dim Sum of All Things--Kim Wong Keltner
Don't care if accountings of his life are 100% accurate, I take things with a bucket of salt anyway. But his horse training methods are proven and that's what's amazing.
