Category: Books & Reviews

Literature, culture, fiction, non-fiction, writers, authors and the craft of writing.

Who By Fire

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

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk I’ve been reading a biography of Leonard Cohen, recently: the 2012 I’m Your Man, by Sylvie Simmons. It’s an interesting journey through the life and thoughts of an exquisite artist who is, by nature, somewhat reclusive and stays out of the spotlight, but is deeply dedicated to his art. I don’t normally read “star” bios or autobiographies – frankly they often seem contrived and the lives portrayed, no matter how gussied up in prose, merely shallow. Most of them I categorize as “who cares?” books. Even those musicians I respect and admire have little to keep me turning pages. I struggled with ……… click below for more ↓

Just My Type

Books & Reviews / Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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Those long legs. Gently sloping shoulders. The swelling curves above and below. The sophisticated line of the throat. Everything to attract me, to draw my aging eye, to warm my heart. The sensual Bembo. She’s my kind of type. Bembo is one of the great Renaissance typefaces that has since been revived. It was designed by Francesco Griffo and first used in a book of poems and essays by scholar Pietro Bembo, published by printer Aldus Manutius, in 1495. Monotype recut it for modern use in 1929, digitized it in 1990 and more recently, in 2005, redesigned it for today’s printing as Bembo ……… click below for more ↓

Judas, a Biography

Arts / Behaviour & Psychology / Books & Reviews / Culture / Faith / Religion / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Long before Darth Vader, long before Lord Voldemort, long before Stephen Harper, Judas Iscariot reigned as the supreme icon of evil in Western mythology. Judas betrayed God. How much worse can you get?* For 2,000 years we’ve used the term Judas to refer to anyone who betrayed anything, any cause, any belief, any friendship. Yet, like all the icons of evil that came before, and who have followed, Judas holds a fascination for us that transcends his actions. Dante consigns him to the ninth circle of hell, one of three traitors forever chewed in the mouths of the three-headed Satan. Yet Brutus, ……… click below for more ↓

Myth and Meaning

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

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People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us find within ourselves. So says Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers, 1987, published in the book, The Power of Myth. The book is based on ……… click below for more ↓

1914: My Grandfathers’ Year

Books & Reviews / Family history / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / War & Military / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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As I read further into Max Hastings’ book, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, I wondered, as I have done in the past when reading similar books about that time, what my grandfathers must have felt when that war broke out. What it meant to them and their worldview, and to their imagined futures, both at the start of the war, and then at the end, after four years of struggle, of deprivation, of fighting. What was it like to finally come home? What did they think, then, of the world? Of their leaders? Of their own nationalism? Of the ……… click below for more ↓

In Search of Kant’s Categorical Imperative

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Ethics & morality / Logic and reason / PhilosophyOne Comment

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I have not read Immanuel Kant. Until recently, I did not feel at all apologetic about that statement. But when I watched the video above, I realized how much I was missing. A remarkable thinker, he proves to be, whose thoughts about society, religion, behaviour and politics appear at first glance quite akin to my own cogitations. And in many ways, his conclusions – at least as stated in the video – seem very Buddhist in nature. That “categorical imperative” seems most intriguing, and familiar in many ways, and I want more explanation. The video, above, was posted on my ……… click below for more ↓

Read, Re-read, Repeat

Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Scifi and fantasy / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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I’m currently re-reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantasy novel of Soviet life under Stalin, The Master and Margarita. Since this is actually a newer translation than the original one I read many years ago, I’m not sure it properly qualifies as “re-reading.” However, for me, re-reading a novel is uncommon. I seldom have the time to re-read, because my current reading list never dwindles (in fact it grows as I continue to add books to my library). Plus my interests and not static: I constantly seek to learn new things.* I always have a dozen books on the go, piled beside my bed ……… click below for more ↓

A Sense of Pinker’s Style

Books & Reviews / Grammar / Language & Grammar / Style & usage / What I'm Reading Now / Writing & FictionLeave a comment

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I share one of Steven Pinker’s passions: I like to read style books, grammar books, language books. To me, they’re like literary chemistry sets. When I was young, getting a chemistry set for Christmas or a birthday opened a whole world to me. I’d explore all sorts of interactions and experiments until I had run out of chemicals to do them with. Used litmus paper littered my bedroom. Reading a book on style or usage is similarly exciting to me. How words can be placed, can work together, how they meld or conflict, the alchemy and the choreography of language, all ……… click below for more ↓

Mao: The Unknown Dictator

Books & Reviews / History & Biography / War & Military / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Although I have read many biographies of the European dictators, and many histories of Europe and the Americas in the first half of the 20th century, I hadn’t read much about modern China until recently. Mao: The Unknown Story (by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday) was the first full-length biography I’ve read about Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong) and it is a remarkable work about a time and place in history that remains veiled to most of us even today. Mao’s rise to power and his leadership that won the Communist Party its iron-fisted rule in China has often been ……… click below for more ↓

CRAP Design

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

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CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity. An unfortunate acronym from the four basic principles of graphic design first expounded in Robin Williams’ delightful little book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book. It’s now in its fourth edition, adding 24 pages since the last edition, almost 50 since the 2nd and more than 100 since the first). Of all my books on graphic design, this has been my favourite for several years, ever since I bought the first edition in the late 1990s. It condenses so much information, so many ideas, so many nuances into clear, understandable principles. Plus, it’s well-illustrated, with many visual examples ……… click below for more ↓

In Praise of Audio Books

Books & Reviews / Family history / Literature / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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Although I had listened to them in the past, I really discovered the joys of audio books several years ago, when my 92-year-old father entered hospital for his final months. As I travelled to and from the city frequently that summer, audio books kept me entertained and my mind from dwelling on the more serious questions of his health and mortality. Travelling to Toronto to visit my mother in her nursing home, for several years after he passed away, often became a trip with audio books, too. Although I have always been an avid and voracious reader, CD recordings soon found a ……… click below for more ↓

The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction

Arts / Culture / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I have been reading the essays of the late critic, Walter Benjamin, most famous for his 1936 piece, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction (an earlier translation of this essay is available here). Wikipedia notes of this essay that it has been, …influential across the humanities, especially in the fields of cultural studies, media theory, architectural theory[1] and art history. Written at a time when Adolf Hitler was already Chancellor of Germany, it was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands ……… click below for more ↓

Ex Machina

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

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Ex Machina – “from the machine” – is a British film that is more about philosophy and morality than science. It opens a can or worms, philosophically, that underscores issues now being raised by advancing and increasingly intelligent technology. Its spare but crisp production reminds me of George Lucas’s first film, THX-1138. Spoiler alert, by the way… It is, in its essence, a modern exploration of the themes presented in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, using artificial intelligence as the  fulcrum, rather than the reanimating of dead tissue. The film poses questions that are current in all AI research, but ……… click below for more ↓

Fortuna: Why Plans Fail

Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies / Psychology & Sociology / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Niccolo Machiavelli used two words in his book, The Prince, to describe the factors that influenced events. In English these are virtue or character (virtu), fortune or chance (fortuna). Only virtue is internal – our nature – and although it manifests as voluntary action, it can only be somewhat, but not entirely controlled.* The other – chance or fortune – can make the best-laid plans of mice and men go aft agley, as Robert Browning wrote, regardless of our efforts to the contrary. In Chapter 25 of The Prince (What Fortune Can Effect In Human Affairs And How To Withstand Her), ……… click below for more ↓

Nope, That’s Not by Marcus Aurelius

Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Language & Grammar / Memes; Internet & Social2 Comments

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An image appeared on my Facebook feed one day purporting to be a quotation taken from the Roman emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. Having read his Meditations more than once in multiple translations, I was baffled because it didn’t look at all familiar or even sound like him. But was it a new translation? The quote is: Everything we hear is a opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. It’s a good line, even if a tautology (the statement is itself an opinion), but I can’t find it in any online version of the ……… click below for more ↓

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