What BOOK are you reading right now?

Just finished Malcolm Gladwell's BLINK. Enjoyed it, it was thought provoking, as they say. His explanations made a lot of sense, and I found it interesting how the psychologists figured out how to test people's reactions - some science at work in there. (I once changed from a psych major because I found it all too mushy headed.)

I found his writing manner a tad on the rah rah! side, but as I think I said on another post about the book, I got over that because of the material.

DANIEL BELL

Daniel Bell died this year. I have followed his writings with interest all my academic life and I had another look at them when I heard of his death. He began to teach sociology at Columbia in 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith. He then taught at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. I won’t give you chapter and verse of his distinguished career which you can easily access on the Internet.

I began studying sociology in 1963. I taught it from 1974 until my retirement in 2005. I won’t give you chapter and verse of my quite undistinguished career since I have been a generalist and taught many subjects. I was not the precocious student, nor the specialist academic and prolific writer that made Bell the famous professional in the social sciences.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 8 August 2011.

You were born the very year
those Tablets1 were unveiled
in New York……I always liked
your writings on ideology and
post-industrialism in your two
books listed as among the 100
most important books: 1950 to
2000.2 There is, as you say, an
ambiguity, irony, complexity, &
paradox woven into our very real
world politics,3 you who were, a
socialist in economics, a liberal in
politics, a conservative in culture.
Thanks Daniel Bolotsky! I’ll write
more about you on another day.

1 Daniel Bolotsky(10/5/’19-25/1/’11 had his name changed to Daniel Bell in 1932; The Tablets of the Divine Plan, Abdul-Baha, 1919.
2 The End of Ideology(1960) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) were so listed by the Times Literary Supplement.
3 Russell K. Nieli, “R.I.P. Daniel Bell,” The Socjournal: The New Journal of Sociology and Media, 15 February 2011.

Ron Price
8 August 2011
Updated for: able2know
On: 24/9/'11

One important way you might improve your compositional powers Ron is to follow Flaubert's advice and avoid using phrases such as "I won’t give you chapter and verse" twice in quick succession.

You might have said " It is un-necessary to elaborate on my quite undistinguished career because most viewers here will have long experience of such a thing and don't need me to describe it for them."

Just about to finish The Know-it-all.
It's a great book about a guy who decided to read the whole Encyclopedia Britannica A-Z. It's a great and funny book.

I'm at the start of Gravedigger's Daughter, by Joyce Carol Oates. It was sent to me by a friend who has been smart, very smart, re what I might enjoy.

I'm presently loathing the main character. I assume I'll get over this, and that my loathing will be a lesson. But it's not so much the character that gets me - I assume she will develop, but Oates and her machinations, orchestrations.

I'll admit I haven't read much of her, because she usually puts me off.
This book starts with the character's ruminations, and I could have written that part myself - recitative, but past that, phony sounding, however well worked out in many details.

I'm not sure where my hostility comes from. A friend was a student of hers and spoke very highly, so I would have been apt to like her as a start.

We'll see.

I'll probably show up here in a week and rave about the book.

I read that! You're talking about the parents, or mother? Good grief yes, I do agree. But the little girl is the main character. The book wanders. Seems the parents didn't learn English, or something, that heavy something. Couldn't seem to get off the ground, got nowhere with their life. Fear, I think. A big secret somewhere.

Yes, already I see fear as the subject.

Stay tuned to as the book turns..

Not to be a total dump sort -

I, toughie, liking taut structure and words, at least some of the time, was taken by The Art of Racing in the Rain. Not that description, taut. Just a book of someone talking well. Rather the opposite of the taut mode.

I don't know, I loathed Tess of the d'Urbervilles after the second chapter, and that never really went away.

Yes, but that's what the book is about, that poor little girl overcoming that family. The brother, I seem to remember, didn't make it.

I'm about halfway through The Greater Journey by Doug McCullough. The journey is to France by some adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, and architects who set off for Paris between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excell in their work. Some of the students were: America's 1st female doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, former slave Charles Sumner, staunch friends James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F.B.Morse (invented the telegraph while there), Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, George P.A. Healy, medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James -- all "discovering" Paris.

During the same decades they also braved the Franco-Prussian War, the long seige of Paris by Germany, and the atrocious Commune.

Mostly, it's the descriptions of Paris, the parisiennes and how they lived, and how happily and merrily they went about their lives in such a beautiful city with so many public gardens, the River Seine, the museums, etc. Too great a book, incredible story!

Where you see 'poor little girl' I see a bloody miserable pessimist, whose decline is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I stopped reading that (Tess), says she of little patience. Don't remember the whys except that I had a negative reaction and other books to read.

Quoting myself to make sure it's clear that's my recent favorite book, and what I meant was that that it is my favorite is a little unusual for me re the writing, and maybe re the good feeling part of it (I can't take too much good feeling or get suspicious, y'know.) In this case I did hate for it to end, and felt the book a treasure, and plan to reread it.

Some of the problem I'm having with Oates is her almost musical writing style, a kind of largo ponderousness, and repetitive covering of the same territory (repetitive in the protaganist's mind and re the content) until it really sinks into your reading ears. So that the story becomes (to me) about Oates and her writing. I've had to put the book down for a bit.

Sounds interesting, Pem. Did you, or you, Iz, ever read Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose? Not that they're the same at all but non fiction re times I've wanted to know more about.

LOL Elephant and Piggie! Antonio took his bath, put his PJ’s on and I read him half of Elephant and Piggie before he fell asleep.

Very cute.. so, are Elephant and Piggie friends?

I’ll find out tomorrow night when we finish the book, I have a feeling someone will get sat on LOL

Lovin this. Gawd, I miss reading to my kids!

I just finished American Adulterer by Jed Mercurio.

Quite an odd book to me - a mix of the style of old time Hollywood books about various stars (a friend of a friend used to write those and was much teased for his writing all the while he was making good money) - that friend was in real life a great storyteller - together with some more serious pages. I found whole sections both somewhat horrifying and hilarious, while repetitive about the events. It's a fiction loosely based on the life of Jack Kennedy. How loosely? some of it, a lot of it, sounds probable, except that you have what Jack is thinking at various times, which is conjecture.
The adulterous bits are nestled with information about what is happening in family life, his political life, and his presidential moves, many of which are described admiringly.

There are medical undertones to most of the book, some fair part of those that I believe, and some other parts that I think are flying b.s., but what do I know, eh? (The author is a british doctor, having been at some point a resident, and an apparent well regarded writer for some medical type tv series.)

All the while I was rolling my eyes I kept reading just to see how Mercurio would work the book out. I learned that the adultery part was more of a vast panoply than I knew (and I knew early, since an internist I worked for at the time of the events shared with us that one of his patients had spent recent sex time with Jack. I was ms. naive at the time, so somewhat appalled, thus I remember it.

Do I recommend the book? Maybe, if you want a quick and not completely uninteresting read. In my case, it's been something of an antidote to my doldrums with the Joyce Carol Oates book. Those doldrums may pass or not; I'm in a rest phase.

I'll give two links for reviews, but they are pretty much spoilers, from differing viewpoints, so reader beware -

by Carolyn See in WaPo -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071603986.html

by Chris Petit in The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/11/american-adulterer-mercurio-review-book