The heroine of one of my Works-in-Progress has been stuck in a hayloft, in the middle of the night, for years. The reasons she is stuck there are legion, as I have slowly realized over those same years. A fiction book written today has to have a story arc. I'm betting that books always did, [...]
Category: books
Ridiculous comparisons, slightly useful thoughts
Sometime in the past year I read several books from a modern author. The author is an immigrant, the books are award winning, the prose is exceptional, and the books are unrelentingly depressing. This person is supposedly writing about a particular immigrant experience, but the whole canon was utterly alien to me. I spent some [...]
More about Mary Evershed and Dante
I'm still reading Mary Evershed's own book about Dante and the early astronomers. She begins with a useful set of chapters explaining various theories and discussing Ptolemy. Part II is then her discussion of Dante. I'm not there yet. However, I did finish the biography that George sent me by Tracy Daugherty. Besides being interested [...]
Language
Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The Kingdom of Speech in 2016. I recently reread it. Its most basic premise is that what differentiates man from animal is the ability to speak. What differentiates man from animal is the ability to speak Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech He writes extensively about Daniel Everett, a [...]
What came before the Internet?
I recently read a fascinating book called The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (Walker and Company, NY, 1998). The author's thesis is that the telegraph was very similar to the modern internet in its ability to connect people from all over and to send information anywhere, almost instantly. He traces the invention of the telegraph [...]
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