Category: Books & Reviews

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

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 ↓

Socrates and Saunderson

Classics / Collingwood / Council / Disrespect and bad behaviour / Entitlement / Ethics and behaviour / Philosophy / Saunderson's MPP campaignOne Comment

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In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates debates with three sophists — Gorgias the rhetorician and his pupils Polus, and Callicles — about justice, power, morality, and virtue. Socrates also questions the value of oratory and rhetoric — the crafts of the sophists — in contemporary politics and whether they do good for the people. Spoiler alert: he’s not convinced they are for the good. You can read the somewhat stuffy Benjamin Jowett translation here and here, or read David Horan’s more modern translation here. I realize that readers may not be in the habit of reading Plato, or might not see ……… 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 ↓

Are Secular Nations Happier?

Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Musings / Talibangelists and pseudo-Christians3 Comments

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Are less-religious or more secular nations happier than religious ones? Studies suggest yes. Personally, I would certainly be happier in a more secular nation if it meant fewer angry, nasty, fanatic believers like the Westboro Baptist congregation (see picture, right), or the faux-faith anti-mask/anti-vaccine, pro-disease protestors,* or any of the frothing anti-choice, anti-abortion protestors who appear around medical clinics. I suspect many among us would also live much more happily without their disruptive, often vicious, pseudo-religious behaviour. But as a democratic, liberal society we are remarkably tolerant of their bullshit and antics because they claim it’s religion-based and we seem ……… 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 ↓

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 ↓

The Beatles: Songs and Lives

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the era I grew up in. I’ve read several other bios in the past, both of the band and of the individual members, although there are many more in print that I haven’t read. But this is the only one I’ve re-read. And it was well worth it, to recall in such detail those years. Almost all of the other books about The Beatles I owned have, over the years, been ……… 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 ↓

Books of Quotations from Shakespeare

Books & Reviews / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Shakespeare3 Comments

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A good book of selected quotations from Shakespeare is a nice complement to the collected works. Properly arranged, it lets you find relevant aphorisms, and speeches on a wide variety of topics; bon mots you can drop into conversations, emails, and blog posts. As is my wont, I have collected several of these books, and herein are my opinions of them. Note that there may be later editions than those noted here. First, I classify them as four different types of quotation books: Dictionary style (arranged alphabetically by topic such as politics, love, loyalty, fear, etc.; Topic or specialty style ……… 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 ↓

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