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.

A Meeting of the Minds?

Books & Reviews / Philosophy / Political philosophy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Niccolo Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne never met, nor could they have — Machiavelli died six years before Montaigne was born, and they lived about 1,200 km (800 miles) apart — but imagine the conversations they could have had if they had lived at the same time and close enough to visit one another, to have dinner together. Imagine the hard-nosed philosopher of the body politic and the curious philosopher of inner space, together, discussing humankind, discussing ways of living, ways of governing, discussing the classics, faith, duty, laws, and, of course, their writing. One a middle-class republican, the other … click below for more ↓

Musings on Reading Literature

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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There’s a passage from the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008, p. 116-117) that so delighted me when I came across it that I read it aloud to Susan: “Mildly hemorrhagic urine” is, to me, a form of light entertainment: it has a nice ring to it and evokes a singular world, a brief refreshing change from literature. For the very same reason, I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which conveys the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and … click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespeare Guidebooks

Books & Reviews / Books about books / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

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Unless you’re an academic who has studied The Bard for your entire career, you really need a guide, a Virgil if you will, to enter the dark forest of Shakespeare and find your way about in it. At the very least, you’ll want a guide to Shakespeare’s language and wordplay to illuminate the texts. Fortunately, there are plenty of guides to be had in the printed world. From essays on a single soliloquy to books that explore the entire canon, there is no shortage of guides available, online and in hardcopy. Of course, I recommend the latter because, well, it’s … click below for more ↓

Musings on Reading the Bard Over a Year

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Wonderful thing, the internet. You can type “complete works reading list Shakespeare” into a search engine and come up with dozens of lists with a recommended order for reading The Bard’s plays and poems over the period of a year. And none of them the same or seemingly made with the same logic. But, it seems, many have taken up the challenge. In almost no time, I had several lists to examine (here’s a PDF I made of the first few I discovered and collated) and consider in light of my own desire to read all the Bard’s plays (and … click below for more ↓

Musings on Shakespearean Apocrypha

Shakespeare / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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When the First Folio was published in 1623, it had 36 of the Bard’s plays, listed in three categories: histories, tragedies, and comedies (it didn’t include his longer poems, or the sonnets)*. And even then, these were not all of his plays. Several were not included, although they were known to the folio’s compilers. For reasons unknown, there were several plays missing from the original canon, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Two Noble Kinsmen; Edward III;  The Book of Sir Thomas More; Cardenio; and Love’s Labour’s Won. The latter two are “lost” (more on that, later); the rest are … click below for more ↓

Musings on Aesop and Local Politics

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Philosophy / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I’ve always liked reading “wisdom tales”; I still read and delight in those Zen Buddhist stories that Paul Reps recounted in his book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, which I first encountered in the late 1960s. Not long after that, I discovered the many tales of the Mulla Nasrudin retold by Idries Shah, and the stories of the Wise Men of Chelm, the imaginary city of fools in Jewish folklore. Decades later, I still have most of these books. I suspect, however, little of the implied wisdom in them has rubbed off on me, yet I persist in reading them. Around … click below for more ↓

Musing on the Authorship Question Again

Books & Reviews / Shakespeare / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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The “authorship question” — who wrote Shakespeare’s works, aside that is, from Shakespeare himself — is a conspiracy that seems a metaphor for modern society.  It contains the seeds of many popular conspiracies within it: pseudoscience, suspicions about authority, declarations of revelation, blind faith, angry defences, opinions and interpretations, Youtube quacks, amateurs posing as researchers, wild claims, and the paranoia we find on social media. You can find its counterparts in alien abductions, chemtrails, Pizzagate, Trump’s election victory, pro-disease/anti-vaccination protests, astrology, creationism,  Bigfoot, Atlantis, and Elvis is still alive: a whole passel of piffle seems born from it. And it … click below for more ↓

Killing Commendatore

Books & Reviews / Literature / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami’s novels for several, recent years, and have read nine or ten of them already. Those I’ve read have all fit into the category of “magical realism”; a style of fiction that was made famous by Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez (you would have encountered this in his bestselling book, 100 years of Solitude).* It’s a technique of writing where the imagined, or the fantastic enters the mundane world and is treated as natural. Or as Britannica notes: … the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. I … click below for more ↓

Are Creationists Gaining More Sway?

Creationism / Critical Thinking / Local media / Pseudoscience & Quackery / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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A recent survey by Research Co. and Glacier Media shows a deeply disturbing trend in Canadians: we seem to be getting increasingly stupid. While this survey didn’t get the media coverage that other current events received (and hasn’t even been hinted at in local media, but no surprises there), I think it is one of the most troubling surveys of the last decade. The survey showed that, … more than half of Canadians (57%) believe that human beings evolved from less advanced forms of life over millions of years, while 26% think that God created human beings in their present form … click below for more ↓

Lichens of South Georgian Bay

Botany & Paleobotany / Collingwood / Environment / Personal Reminiscences / Science & Technology / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”19″ display=”basic_thumbnail” thumbnail_crop=”0″] In recent months, I have developed an interest in lichens: wondering what species live in our area, how and where they grow, which plants are their competitors or companions, why they grow where they do, what they live on for nutrition, how they reproduce and spread, what lives on them, and their microbiology. Small, innocuous plants you may mistake for a discoloration on rock or even a disease on a tree, they are nonetheless very common throughout our local environment. In fact, lichen have been found on every continent, including Antarctica, which has earned some … click below for more ↓

Musings on Downsizing, No. 2

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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In the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s a memorable, somewhat spooky scene towards the end where astronaut Dave is pulling the chips from the memory banks of HAL, the ship’s AI computer. HAL begs Dave to stop while his memories recede: Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave…Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid… I felt a bit like HAL while I … click below for more ↓

More Musings on Tea

Daily life / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / Tea & coffee / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Back in 1946, while England was still recovering from the deprivations of WWII and under rationing, the prolific George Orwell wrote his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea” with his eleven-step instructions for making what he considered the perfect cuppa.* But do they still stand today? Certainly, his notion of what makes a “strong” tea would be considered very strong by standards today. As the BBC noted in an article that debunked many of Orwell’s notions about making tea almost 60 years later, “The great critic of Hitler and Stalin, was not above a bit of teatime Totalitarianism himself, it … click below for more ↓

Review: The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook

Books & Reviews / Cooking / Food & Drink / Pasta / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook: 100 Recipes for Every Kind of Amazing Pasta Your Pasta Maker Can Make, by Lucy Vaserfirer, Paperback, 208 pages, Published in 2020 by Harvard Common Press, Beverly, MA, USA. I am disappointed. At almost $40, I don’t believe the book delivers what the title promises. I expected a book with “ultimate” in its title to have a LOT more information on actually using the machinery, and about the various types and styles, with plenty of photos and explanations, but there is very little of that. It’s mostly recipes. Nothing at all on the differences between types … click below for more ↓

English as She is Spoke

Books & Reviews / Grammar / Language & Grammar / Meaning of words / Style & usage / Translations & translating / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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One of the more delightful books in my personal library is a reprint of the 1883 American edition of English as She Is Spoke, described by Wikipedia as,  …intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book; however, as the “English” translations provided are usually inaccurate or incoherent, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation. Even a quick glance at its suggested English phrases and you’ll see the humour. It reads more like a guide for the speech of the beloved character of Manuel in Fawlty Towers than a guide for visitors and immigrants: “We … click below for more ↓

Point to Point: The Book From the Ground

Arts / Books & Reviews / Books about books / Culture / Language & Grammar / Meaning of words / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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A few years back, during one of our Toronto mini-vacations, I was browsing in the shop of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and I came across a small book that had no words, just pictures. No, it wasn’t a book with pictures of artworks or photographs: it was a story, told entirely through common icons, symbols, and emoticons. Pictograms, looking not unlike a modernized version of Egyptian hieroglyphs. There wasn’t even a book title on the cover. There were no instructions, no guides, no hints, no translations. The reader had to figure out what the story was about by him- … click below for more ↓

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