What’s the word?
Well – what is the mental equivalent of a typo? I meant to use the trite but marginally humorous phrase, “cheap at half the price” – I am not sure I can blame #autocorrupt for that one, though.
It’s Thunderbird
Sorry, this is “What are you reading?”, not “What are you drinking?”.
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Are you looking for an argument?
Two doors down on your right.
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That’s what I heard.
No it isn’t.
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Yeah, I was going for an extreme undergraduate false equivalency. But if you think drinking lots of vodka is really bad advice, we may have a problem.
Having done a lot of “business drinking” in the former Soviet Union, I can tell you from personal experience that that is also bad advice. But that was not the focus of my original critique.
I have crashed upon those shoals as well. My liver was not cut out for those meetings.
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With Blood Meridian looking over both their shoulders, taking notes.
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This is excellent advice. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a bizarre and enjoyable novel about the Devil’s visit to the Soviet Union. Read it when the Soviet Union existed. Theological sociological satire, very diferrent from Tolstoy and Brother D.
An even better choice among the lesser-known writers is Mikhail Lermentov and “A Hero for (of) Our Time” — Russian does not use articles and there is no preposition in the Russin title, so your translation of «Герой нашего времени» may vary. A wonderful contemplation of culture, colonialism, and the nature of ideals.
FYI, there is a new VOX podcast (The Gray Area) with an interview of Emily Wilson on those two books/translations.
We went on a cruise the week before Thanksgiving and I read 2 books, Starship Titanic by Terry Jones (based on a Douglas Adams game/idea) and The Fifties by David Halberstam.
Starship Titanic was pretty blah. It wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be, nor as compelling. Pretty much reads like it is, a novelization of a computer game.
The Fifties was a great read. It was shocking how much Trump’s schtick is a carbon copy of McCarthy’s–like when McCarthy said he had a list of 200 commies in the State department, but when pressed would say things like “well I left the list in my hotel room” and things like that. The book does a good job of deflating the idea that the 50s were some sort of golden era; to paraphrase Fitzgerald, the 50s were just like the 20s now, only different.
The other book I just finished was Geddy Lee’s autobiography My 'Effin Life. I ended up being mostly disappointed in it, as it was pretty light reading. I wasn’t looking for salacious details or anything (although those are always vicariously fun), but there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about songs and music. I get that it was a the story of Geddy Lee’s life and not Rush’s, but I would’ve like more musical meat. I feel that there wasn’t much in the book that your Rush fan reading the book didn’t already know. I will say the beginning chapters regarding his mother’s (and the rest of his family’s) experiences during the Holocaust were very well done. All in all I found it a very guarded tale. I would definitely spring for an “author’s cut” of the book since he has said if he had his way it would be ~700 pages (much like Pete Townshend’s book).
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I loved reading The Fifties. Halberstam was a great historical writer. I have read a couple of his Baseball books also.
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Halberstam is a treasure.
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Buried treasure. RIP.
He gave the commencement address at my college graduation. I was so excited, along with a good friend of mine who was also a huge baseball fan and had read much of Halberstam’s baseball books as well. It was a great speech, but he didn’t mention baseball once. Mostly he talked about how when he was a kid he dreamed of being a circus clown.
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Howard Nemerov gave the commencement address at my graduation. He was very terse. All he said was, “I could go on and on, I could tell you that your future is ahead of you, but you all know the future is uncertain so I will tell you that well fitting shoes and good companionship are the true joys in life. And a joyful life is a successful life.”
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