Category: What I’m Reading Now

What book(s) I’m reading now and what I think about the subject, the writing, the book design and the author. Most of these are books by the bedside: books I read in the final hour or so before sleep each night. There is usually a stack of 10-20 books on the go at any one time.

Books for the Kaiju Aficionado

Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Musings / Pop Culture / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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With possibly two new Godzilla films coming to theatres in 2023*, it may be time to refresh your memory and appreciation of the previous films in the franchise. And what better way to do it than with a brand-new book about them? And perhaps re-reading some of the content in your older book and movie collection (especially that Criterion Collection of the first 15 Godzilla films on Blu-Ray — see below — which you can start watching now to build your anticipation for the new films!). Godzilla: The Official Guide to the King of the Monsters was released this week, ……… click below for more ↓

Bread Machine Cookbooks

Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Daily life / Musings / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

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Among my shelves of books on baking bread by hand, is a smaller selection of books about using a bread machine to craft loaves and other items. I admit I’ve been somewhat lax in my creative uses of the bread machine, using it only to bake somewhat plain, whole loaves when I wasn’t up to or able to bake one entirely by hand. The results, I also admit, have been somewhat mixed, in large part because I tend to experiment with ingredients and settings rather than strictly follow recipes (cooking is for me a bit of a science lab…). But ……… click below for more ↓

Real Bread, Slow Dough, Bread Books

Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Musings / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Making bread is a small passion of mine, has been for many years as readers here will know*, although the results of my efforts do not always match my optimism. It’s always a bit of a guessing game what will result when I put the dough in the oven. That doesn’t stop me from trying, though, and I thoroughly enjoy the tactile process of making the bread, even if the end result is occasionally more brick-like than loaf-like. There’s something to be said about making bread as mindfulness therapy… Yes, making bread is also therapeutic: it involves focus, freedom from ……… click below for more ↓

Hobbesian vs Benthamite Politics

Collingwood / Council / Political philosophy / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was not an optimist about human behaviour. Writing more than a century after Niccolo Machiavelli, the English political philosopher argued in his masterwork, Leviathan (1651), that the quest for power was the main motivation for humans. And that our quest to acquire more would never cease until we were dead. He wrote: …in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than ……… click below for more ↓

The Book of Knowledge: 3

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Learning & Education / Media / Musings / Politics / Reading & Literacy / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Back in the Mesozoic of my life, I came across a quotation from Giacomo Casanova that, as far as I can remember these days, went “No man can know everything, but every man should attempt to.” For many decades, I didn’t know the source, or whether it was misquoted, misattributed, or simply a fake as we experience so often on most internet quote sites (aka clickbait sites). But it stuck with me. I recently found a more fulsome translation of his words from Chapter V of his memoirs: No one in this world can obtain a knowledge of everything, but ……… click below for more ↓

Ars Poetica

Books & Reviews / Classics / Culture / Literature / Poetry / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Horace’s Ars Poetica, or the Art of Poetry, was written as a 476-line poem in a letter to his friend, the Roman senator  Lucius Calpurnius Piso (Lucius) and his two sons, around 19 BCE. It was known for a time as the “Epistle to the Pisos” until 95CE when the critic  Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian) called it the Ars Poetica in his a twelve-volume textbook on rhetoric, the Institutio Oratoria. The name stuck. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) was popular during the Renaissance when Latin was still taught in schools. Some of his poems were among the works students had to ……… click below for more ↓

Milton Was Wrong

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Censorship / Media Issues / Political fads / Politics / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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In 1644, the English poet and pamphleteer John Milton wrote an impassioned defence of free speech (or, more factually, against censorship of print and in favour of restriction-free publication) called the Areopagitica. It was subtitled A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. In it, Milton argued that, given the choice between truth and lies, people were wise enough to see what was true. And that people’s character grew stronger when presented with a wide variety of viewpoints, even if those included lies and falsifications. It’s a bit of a dense ……… click below for more ↓

Smith, Rock, and the Trivialization of Western Culture

Books & Reviews / Culture / Media / Media Issues / Memes; Internet & Social / Musings / Social Order & Disorder / TV / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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If Neil Postman were alive today, sitting in a bar or café with Chris Hedges, I wonder which one would say “I told you so!” first after seeing social media this past week? The story that clogged the social media pipes this week was the slap one actor gave another on stage during the performance of the annual onanism festival called the Oscars. And as soon as it happened, even while it was occurring, a shitstorm of comments, opinions and reportage flooded social media. Every social media feed was clogged with pieces like tarry stercus and then flooded by the ……… click below for more ↓

Kerouac’s Haikus

Books & Reviews / Literature / Musings / Poetry / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Haiku is like a razor blade: small, light, but yet strong and incredibly sharp. Haiku says “Look over there!” and then smacks you from the other side. Haiku is the neutron star of poetry: stunning density combined with astounding brightness. Haiku swims in a sea of metaphor, darting like quick, bright fish among the forest of words. Haiku has a formal definition: “an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively. It is also described as “a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking ……… click below for more ↓

Wild Fruits

Books & Reviews / Botany & Paleobotany / Environment / Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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When he died of tuberculosis in his mother’s home, in 1862, 44-year-old Henry David Thoreau had already made his mark on the world with the publication of several books and numerous essays, including Civil Disobedience, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, A Yankee in Canada, and his classic, Walden, or Life in the Woods. I trust we’re all familiar with Thoreau’s major works, at least their titles, particularly Walden (first published in 1854). Thoreau — or at least some of his writing — is required reading in any educational institution worthy of its name; you ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on the First Tercet of Dante’s Inferno

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Classics / Poetry / Translations & translating / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Back in December, before Godaddy broke my blog through technical incompetence, I had written a piece about the first stanza in Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, The Divine Comedy. Since that post seems irretrievably lost, I decided to write another in the same vein. So please bear with me if this seems redundant. It all began innocently enough on Tuesday late last year when I was searching through my bookshelves in search of something I can no longer recall, and instead of what I was hunting (being easily distracted by books), I took down my copy of Mary ……… click below for more ↓

Ammon Shea is My New Hero

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Musings / What I'm Reading Now4 Comments

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Eyyyyyyy Wssup guys This was the entire first post that started a thread in a group I belonged to on Facebook. I think seeing it aged me a decade, and encouraged me to leave the group afterwards. Walking barefoot on broken glass would cause me less distress. All the poster needed to do to make me despair enough to seriously consider slitting my wrists would have been to write “yall” instead of “guys” (thus removing any actual words from the post) I tire of the many posts and comments that flout even the simplest of grammatical or spelling conventions as ……… click below for more ↓

Casanova Dies in Bohemia

Books & Reviews / History & Biography / Translations & translating / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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At the end of his long and storied life, Giacomo Casanova found himself a lonely man in a damp, cold castle in Bohemia, a small German kingdom distant from all the places where he had lived and loved. The servants mocked him, making fun of his stuffy, outdated and foreign fashions, his powdered wigs and stiff formality. He is from an older world, a more refined and gentile world than everyone around him, and as the 19th-century approaches, he struggles to avoid becoming a fossil. Casanova was ostensibly the librarian for Count Waldstein, but instead of cataloging the count’s large ……… click below for more ↓

Montaigne on Ketchup-Flavoured Cheetos

Musings / Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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In his famous work, Essays, Michel de Montaigne, channelling the Epicureans, wrote that, “All the opinions in the world point out that pleasure is our aim. (Book I: On the Power of Imagination).” And I have to admit that what we euphemistically call “junk food” is a widespread pleasure that many of us enjoy these days. Of course, Montaigne, ever the skeptic, also wrote, “Que sais je?” (What do I know? Book II, Ch. 12). I did it again: I used the name of my favourite writers to lure you into this musing piece. No apologies, of course, not even ……… click below for more ↓

Musings on The Tempest and Council

Collingwood / Council / Musings / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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It was a dark and stormy night… Shakespeare’s last solo-authored play, The Tempest, opens with a storm (the eponymous tempest) in which a group of elite passengers (a king, a duke, relatives, and courtly hangers-on) gets washed overboard (or jump) while the working sailors remain safe onboard their ship. In fact, the working class are sturdy, brave, and steadfast as they struggle to save the ship and passengers, while the panicked elites run around like headless chickens on the deck, wailing and bemoaning, afraid for their lives, and trying to convince the mariners they’re Special People Who Deserve Saving. Entitlement ……… click below for more ↓

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