Member: A_musing
CollectionsYour library (2,106), Currently reading (4), All collections (2,106)
Reviews51 reviews
Tags20th Century (1,117), American (913), Novels (658), History (385), 19th Century (368), Poetry (305), First Edition (259), English (216), 17th & 18th Centuries (164), Nobel (164) — see all tags
Cloudstag cloud, author cloud
About meA touch of gray and a garden that needs weeding. And an LT library that needs updating - I'm a few dozen books behind!
My rating system, used in several threads:
1 - The author ought to be ashamed of him(her)self(C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle)
2 - A bad book that can and should be ignored (Atwood's The Edible Woman)
3 - Written well enough, but why? (Dan Brown's DaVinci Code)
4 - Neither memorable nor a waste of time (Murakami's After Dark)
5 - Well written, fun, not very filling and easily forgotten (Gabriel Garcia Marquez's My Melancholy Whore)
6 - A solid, good book, worth reading (most of Hemingway or Atwood falls here)
7 - A book that reaches deep inside you and twists something (average Faulkner)
8 - Memorable and moving with a lasting impact on my life (Mahfouz, Katherine Anne Porter, Joyce). Everyone around me knows I like these books.
9 - Wow! Books I feel compelled to force on other people. (Thomas Mann's Transposed Heads)
10 - Moby Dick
About my libraryMany of our books are old, interesting editions. We hope the children catch the contagion.
A few underappreciated little gems are identified as, well, "underappreciated little gems". If you must peak at one thing in my library, there it is.
I once opened a newly purchased, dusty, 100-year old history book to find a well-preserved four leaf clover pressed inside. I've had better luck on opening other books.
Below is map showing countries from which I have read at least some literature. You can see other people's maps on a thread in the "Reading Globally - Fiction" group. I need to find some good books to read from Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the southern Slavic countries.
Suggestions are always welcome.
create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide
GroupsArab, North African and Middle Eastern Literature, Audiobooks, Bully's Tavern, Club Read 2009, Early Reviewers, History Readers: Clio's (Pleasure?) Palace, Infinite Jesters, Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue, Le Salon du peuple pour le peuple, Mahābhārata Anyone? —show all groups, Rare, Old or Offbeat, Reading Globally, The Clocks Have All Stopped, The Federalist Papers, William Faulkner and his Literary Kin
Favorite authorsBeowulf poet, Anonymous, Geoffrey Barraclough, Heinrich Böll, Marc Bloch, Lewis Carroll, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Umberto Eco, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Jean de La Fontaine, Luo Guanzhong, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henri Freeqy IV (founder); everyone in their heart of hearts, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Ismail Kadare, Kalidasa, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Charles Lamb, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, James Laughlin, Halldor Laxness, Clarice Lispector, Naguib Mahfouz, Thomas Mann, Yo-Yo Ma, Herman Melville, Maria Rosa Menocal, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Nizan, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Sima Qian, Dylan Thomas, Barbara W. Tuchman, Vyasa, Tennessee Williams, Wu Cheng'en, Wai-lim Yip (Shared favorites)
VenuesFavorites
Favorite bookstoresBarefoot Books, Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Prudential Center, Book Ends, Boston Book Annex, Brattle Book Shop, Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Harvard Book Store, Montague Book Mill
Favorite librariesAmherst College Frost Library, Boston Public Library, Phillips Library - Peabody Essex Museum, Winchester Public Library
Other favoritesMuseum of Fine Arts (museum and shop), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (museum and shop)
Homepagehttp://thetreadleoftheloom.blogspot.com/
Also onLast.fm, Lists of Bests
Membership
LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway
Real nameCall me Sam
LocationBoston
Account typepublic, lifetime
URLs
http://www.librarything.com/profile/A_musing (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/A_musing (library)
Member sinceFeb 27, 2006
Currently readingNine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge Medieval Classics) by Peter Dronke
Porius by John Cowper Powys
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Edwin Arnold'sThe Song of Krishna: The Illustrated Bhagavad Gita [Hardcover](2010) by Edwin Arnold (Translator) Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Illustrator)
The Recognition of 'Sakuntala: A Play in Seven Acts (Oxford World's Classics) by Kalidasa
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May I please offer something?
$4 ebooks.
http://thehomepageoffallon.webs.com/
Knowledge is power!
Come see ebooks that teach useful things other people wish they knew how to do.
Like how to purposely forget something. Or how to detect a lie. How to make friends.
And so on!
You can download them to your own computer.
There are more ebooks to come, so please subscribe!
-Fallon
posted by Fallon999 at 12:06 pm (EST) on May 24, 2013
posted by MeditationesMartini at 8:43 pm (EST) on Feb 27, 2013
Just got to the end of Chapter 2 and laughed at a double pun I hadn't got before: "But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling". (I previously got the 'blubber' thing, but not 'wailing' until I heard it read aloud.)
posted by ChocolateMuse at 12:59 am (EST) on Sep 17, 2012
Have you read Mardi?
WTF??????
posted by tomcatMurr at 11:23 am (EST) on Apr 6, 2012
posted by Poquette at 10:46 pm (EST) on Mar 10, 2012
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 9:57 pm (EST) on Feb 23, 2012
posted by darsu at 3:03 pm (EST) on Feb 7, 2012
posted by MeditationesMartini at 9:34 pm (EST) on Feb 6, 2012
posted by tomcatMurr at 8:48 pm (EST) on Feb 5, 2012
posted by tomcatMurr at 6:06 am (EST) on Feb 5, 2012
posted by bookworm12 at 5:06 pm (EST) on Feb 4, 2012
posted by Poquette at 4:53 pm (EST) on Feb 4, 2012
...or the sex of Satan.
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 12:57 pm (EST) on Feb 2, 2012
Let that measely 'ol inconsequential rest of humanity eat crack, A_musing.
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 12:49 pm (EST) on Feb 2, 2012
I've also ordered the Philbrick book from my library.
Thanks for leading the read, the threads and blog are of course incredibly erudite.
posted by ChocolateMuse at 11:53 pm (EST) on Jan 15, 2012
posted by Macumbeira at 10:37 pm (EST) on Jan 10, 2012
I also just noticed tonight that you've an author among your "favorites" who has never published a book to my knowledge ... though he's tried! How delightfully subversive, Sam!
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 1:02 am (EST) on Dec 28, 2011
posted by beelzebubba at 11:08 pm (EST) on Dec 8, 2011
I'm taking a bit of an LT break right now, but plan on being back in time for MD. It will be a reread for me and I can't wait.
My best,
Teresa
posted by theaelizabet at 10:08 am (EST) on Dec 3, 2011
Regards,
Maki
posted by Makifat at 10:46 am (EST) on Nov 17, 2011
posted by anna_in_pdx at 3:43 pm (EST) on Oct 12, 2011
I was sorry to read about your medical situation. I do hope you are better now. My summer, too, has been somewhat fraught due to some family matters. I do want to pursue summer stock, though. Are you still willing to lead Shakuntala? I've written an intro/overview for Medieval theater. If you're ready, let me know and I'll post it on a new thread ASAP.
Take care,
Teresa
posted by theaelizabet at 12:16 am (EST) on Jul 30, 2011
posted by Porius at 10:03 am (EST) on Jul 6, 2011
posted by MeditationesMartini at 12:00 pm (EST) on Jun 9, 2011
posted by theaelizabet at 10:40 pm (EST) on May 10, 2011
Best wishes,
Murr
posted by tomcatMurr at 10:59 pm (EST) on Mar 30, 2011
posted by Porius at 11:04 am (EST) on Mar 30, 2011
posted by Porius at 10:31 pm (EST) on Mar 29, 2011
posted by paradoxosalpha at 8:19 pm (EST) on Mar 11, 2011
posted by tomcatMurr at 5:16 am (EST) on Mar 10, 2011
posted by paradoxosalpha at 4:12 pm (EST) on Mar 9, 2011
posted by msjohns615 at 3:20 pm (EST) on Mar 9, 2011
posted by DanMat at 7:53 pm (EST) on Mar 3, 2011
posted by DanMat at 12:46 pm (EST) on Mar 3, 2011
"a": "I love ʻaʻ ".
Iʻve noticed, though I know only a little of the language, that
the indefinite article in [Yiddish] is also "a". As in the proverb
"A shlekhter Shalom is besser wie a guter Krieg." / "A BAD peace is better than a GOOD war."
Iʻm assuming itʻs an accidental not a derivative affinity.
posted by rolandperkins at 8:11 pm (EST) on Feb 12, 2011
posted by Macumbeira at 6:14 pm (EST) on Jan 27, 2011
Glad you're back!
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 7:38 pm (EST) on Jun 14, 2010
yours,
Mocha Muse :)
posted by ChocolateMuse at 12:17 am (EST) on Jun 14, 2010
posted by jenniebooks at 4:12 pm (EST) on May 21, 2010
Mac
posted by Macumbeira at 5:44 pm (EST) on Feb 21, 2010
Way to go. I can't imagine even writing a review on this one, let alone a hot one.
I still have about 150 pages to go. We are yet in the sewers of Paris. It has been a good read. I knew the story and read the (it had to be the abridged version) book previously but there is soooooooooooo much more to the story this time around.
Great review and again, congratulations.
hugs,
belva
posted by rainpebble at 2:49 pm (EST) on Feb 17, 2010
Rena
posted by ChocolateMuse at 11:47 pm (EST) on Feb 2, 2010
along with all the lights.
Log fires in the fire place,
on those cold winter nights.
The smell of Christmas goodies,
that are baked with tender care.
The smell is just the greatest,
there's nothing to compare.
The evergreen's so fragrant,
the smell of Christmas season.
Like the hanging of mistletoe,
thats done for a good reason.
The red berries of the holly,
in that arrangement on the table.
Which I'm sure is much better ,
then Christmas in that stable.
Poinsettia's all around,
to balance off the garland.
Music boxes everyplace,
bought by my sweet darlin'.
Cinnamon and Peppermint,
fills the air thats in our house.
And what is stirring in the night,
is not the Christmas mouse.
Those pies that make me drool,
just sitting there on that shelf.
Is as if they were made special,
for that jolly old Christmas elf.
(Written by Bernard Howe)
posted by theoldman at 5:10 am (EST) on Dec 25, 2009
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 11:39 am (EST) on Nov 25, 2009
posted by MeditationesMartini at 4:34 pm (EST) on Nov 8, 2009
posted by Third_cheek at 3:04 pm (EST) on Nov 8, 2009
if you can get it, read Brodsky's essays collected in Less than One. He is quite the most brilliant writer on other people's poetry I have encountered. i refer to it constantly. I think for a poetry lover such as yourself, it's a must read.
I love berets, and Greek fisherman's caps.
posted by tomcatMurr at 10:03 am (EST) on Nov 6, 2009
I also liked your thoughts on A Distant Mirror. I marvel how Tuchman is able to fully enter different historical periods and make us see them so vividly. Perhaps if I were a better historian, I could find fault with her writing--but I am simply in awe. I would like to take your suggestion to read some of her critics; would you give me a particular recommendation?
Thanks.
posted by Banbury at 3:00 pm (EST) on Nov 5, 2009
belva
posted by rainpebble at 11:37 am (EST) on Nov 5, 2009
(for Joseph Brodsky)
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.
The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,
uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.
"The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva."
Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,
the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,
the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light
in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.
There is a Gulag Archipelago
under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring
of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains
as hard and open as a herdsman's face
sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.
Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,
the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse
of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard
of treaties and white papers as we lose
sight of the single human through the cause.
So every spring these branches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—paper to snow—
but, at zero of suffering, one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.
As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.
He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desolate it mocked destinations.
Who is that dark child on the parapets
of Europe, watching the evening river mint
its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,
the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,
then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?
>From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,
under the airport domes, the echoing stations,
the tributary of emigrants whom exile
has made as classless as the common cold,
citizens of a language that is now yours,
and every February, every "last autumn",
you write far from the threshing harvesters
folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,
far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,
a man living with English in one room.
The tourist archipelagoes of my South
are prisons too, corruptible, and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?
>From hand to mouth, across the centuries,
the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,
when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,
a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase
whose music will last longer than the leaves,
whose condensation is the marble sweat
of angels' foreheads, which will never dry
till Borealis shuts the peacock lights
of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,
and memory needs nothing to repeat.
Frightened and starved, with divine fever
Osip Mandelstam shook, and every
metaphor shuddered him with ague,
each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,
"to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,"
but now that fever is a fire whose glow
warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates
exchanging gutturals in this wintry cave
of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside
mastodons force their systems through the snow.
by Derek Walcott
Eclogue 4
(to Derek Walcott)
In winter it darkens the moment lunch is over.
IT's hard then to tell starving men from sated.
A yawn keps a phrase from leaving its cozy lair. The dry, instant, version of light, the opal
snow, dooms tall alders - by having freighted
them- to insomnia, to your glare
well after midnight.
by Joseph Brodsky.
( I can't put the whole thing, it's really long....)
I remember years ago seeing a documentary about the two of them, in some cabin in winter, smoking like chimneys, drunk as skunks discussing Auden and Virgil together and laughing like cahoots.
posted by tomcatMurr at 8:25 pm (EST) on Nov 4, 2009
I am reading slowly The Divided Child and am bowled over by it. Omeros, Midsummer and Tiepolos' Hound are the ones I am most familiar with - oh , and The Schooner Flight. Wonderful rich stuff.
You know about his great friendship with Joseph Brodsky?
posted by tomcatMurr at 8:20 am (EST) on Nov 1, 2009
Best,
Brent
posted by EnriqueFreeque at 11:35 am (EST) on Oct 30, 2009
posted by slickdpdx at 8:11 pm (EST) on Oct 28, 2009
posted by neopeius at 1:27 am (EST) on Oct 13, 2009
Hope you're well :)
Dani
posted by philosojerk at 2:55 pm (EST) on Apr 26, 2009
posted by urania1 at 10:14 pm (EST) on Jan 5, 2009
posted by urania1 at 6:23 pm (EST) on Jan 4, 2009
posted by urania1 at 1:12 pm (EST) on Jan 3, 2009
posted by moibibliomaniac at 1:25 pm (EST) on Dec 12, 2008