MemberPatrickMurtha

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Joined
Jun 29, 2008
About My Library
My listing here includes books I am interested in (although far from all of them!) as well as books that I own. Books currently in my library have the tag "Owned"; all others should (but don't yet) have the tags "Purchase" or "Purchase Urgent," because, in an ideal Apollonian world, I would live in a library with all the books I have ever read or ever want to read. Obviously, that ideal world doesn't exist, but I can construct a virtual version of it here at LibraryThing.

Eventually I will add all the books I have read to my listing, too -- I have records going back to grade school -- but that will take a while.

I'm not a huge fan of rating systems, but they have some use as a kind of shorthand. That said, my ratings here are intended to compare like books to one another, not to assess every book against some mythical standard of absolute quality. Any rating of four or five stars should be considered a strong recommendation. I think that even my three star books are worthwhile reads, although below that it gets iffy. I tend to be a high rater; I am easy to please, but I also pre-select my reading carefully based on reviews, recommendations, literary history, and so on. I want to spend my time reading good books, not indifferent ones if I can help it.
About Me
I've always been keenly interested in literature, film, theater, art, music, history, geography, philosophy, and much else besides -- a real "life of the mind" type. Now, at 53, I happily consider myself a "senior scholar," on the model of the title character in Sir Walter Scott's wonderful novel "The Antiquary," and I obsessively organize my intellectual life into scores of projects. As an educator, I have taught almost every subject on the humanities side of the ledger, at the high school and university levels -- literature, history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, art history, film, journalism, and public speaking. I am currently teaching most of those subjects - all except the last three, in fact - in the humanities department of a top-notch, university-based international high school in Mexico. If all goes well, I hope to spend the rest of my career in this beautiful, fascinating country, and to retire here as well. I am a contented gay single guy who always shares my home with companion animals -- I recently adopted two young female cats from the same litter, and named them Frida (Kahlo) and Remedios (Varo) after the great Mexican painters. They are a complete delight. I like baseball and golf as a spectator. Classic menswear -- I almost always wear a suit and tie -- and fine beer round out the list of my key enthusiasms.
Location
Culiacan, Mexico
Homepage
http://patrickmurthasdiary.blogspot.com/
Currently Reading
Rural Rides (Two Volume Set) (Everyman's Library) by William Cobbett
Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip by Robert C. Harvey
Uncollected Sherlock Holmes, the (Sherlock Holmes) by Arthur Conan Doyle
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
The Tichborne Claimant a Victorian Mystery by Douglas Woodruff
The Grotesque in Art and Literature by Wolfgang Kayser
Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough
Belgium: A Personal Narrative (2 Volumes) by Brand Whitlock
The golden hoof;: The story of the sheep of the Southwest by Winifred Kupper
The Founders on the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era by John P. Kaminski
The Scholar Adventurers by Richard D. Altick
A History of English Literature by Alastair Fowler
The Penguin Book of Irish Verse by Brendan Kennelly
The Canterbury Tales (original-spelling Middle English edition) (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer
Ulysses (Oxford World's Classics) by James Joyce
American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip F. Gura
The history of England from the accession of James II by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay
Letters by Pliny the Younger
Jorrocks's jaunts and jollities by R S. Surtees
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy
The Cornwall Coast by Arthur L. Salmon
The open polar sea; a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner "United States" by I. I. Hayes
The Rainbow: Cambridge Lawrence Edition (Penguin Classics) by D. H. Lawrence
Silius Italicus, Punica by Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy
Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
The cat of Bubastes : a tale of ancient Egypt by G. A. Henty
Harbingers of Books to Come: A Texan's Literary Life by Dave Oliphant
aka bpNichol: A Preliminary Biography by Frank Davey
Galveston: A Novel by Nic Pizzolatto

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