books read, late June

[mrissa]

W. H. Auden, Complete Works: Prose Vol. 1, 1926-1938. Some good stuff, some silly stuff, some good silly stuff, and some stuff that wasn't either. But very little of the last category. That's Auden for you. He went to Spain and China in the '30s, and also to Iceland, which was of more personal interest to me but less historical interest. Regarding Iceland and also Framley Parsonage, I think it's a very good thing that I had already run into the idea that authors I like don't always like the same things I do. (Madeleine L'Engle introduced me to this. The summer I turned 19, I took a volume of Chekhov plays with me on the retreat to the shore with my summer research group. I had been reading Madeleine L'Engle for over half my life at that point, going on about how wonderful Chekhov plays were, and this volume had the ones I'd been looking forward to most, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. I, it turns out, am not a Chekhov fan. Not in the least in fact. And so when Auden and Isherwood had Framley Parsonage in China and didn't like it much because they were bored by the bits that made me want to hide under the desk, I was simultaneously amused and greatly sympathetic, because I know what a horrible thing it is to be traveling equipped only with a book you find you really don't much care for.) You know how people sometimes refer to Walt Whitman as Uncle Walt? He's not my uncle Walt. But W.H. Auden can be my Uncle Wystan. Of course Uncle Wystan is stupid sometimes, but this happens with real uncles, too, I've noticed. Anyway I had been wondering whether I would want the rest of his Complete Works, and now I know I do. Also I am furious with Bill Holm for being dead so I can't write and ask him if he didn't go to China just because he secretly wanted to be W.H. Auden and had already been to Iceland. Anyway that's my theory. Dammit.

Matthew Baigell, The Western Art of Frederic Remington. Grandpa's. I didn't think Remington was my thing, and in fact he isn't, but this is a pretty good book of his stuff, lots of good prints and no attempts to gloss over the less admirable aspects of Mr. Remington's character. And he was clearly extremely influential--you can look at the prints and see how they influenced cowboy movies, and then you get more or less the rest of movies influenced from there.

Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. Interesting stuff, very much recommended if you have an interest in that generation of folkies. (And I think they're interesting.) Startling juxtaposition with our bio of Leadbelly, though, because Leadbelly's biographer (quite rightly) did not think of him as particularly stable and steady, and yet compared to Woody, well. I have sort of a different take than Mr. Cray on legacy, but that was a minor point, very small section of the book. The main difficulty of this book was that it took me most of a week to dislodge the songs from my head.

Georgette Heyer, The Reluctant Widow. Very silly.

Tony Hillerman, Hunting Badger. Not really as silly as Georgette Heyer.

Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Grandpa's. I read this very shortly after the Woody Guthrie bio, and wow, contrast. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It was interesting, but it seemed to presume a level of awe/intimidation that the reader would feel towards the Founding Fathers and I just...don't. Also I am skeptical of people who quote David Brooks very much. At least if there isn't pointing and derisive laughter. Not that there was a lot of David Brooks in this; but it turns out I feel that David Brooks is for some reason not essential to a biography of Ben Franklin. Any David Brooks at all, really. But it was comprehensive and paid attention to other interesting people but not to the exclusion of Franklin, and the structure made it pretty easy to keep various bits of time straight in important ways.

Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms: Volume II. I finally have grown back enough brain to keep track of the cast of several, including people who show up to die on the next page. I'm halfway through the four-volume set and looking forward to the rest.

Helen Morgan, Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World's Most Valuable Stamp. Grandpa's. This was much less obnoxious than the other stamp book of Grandpa's I've read so far, largely because Helen Morgan has no illusion that we are panting to know more about Helen Morgan when we buy a book about stamps. If you're looking for a present for a philatelist in your life, I'd definitely recommend this one. It goes along at a good clip, and just about the time you think you've heard as much as you can hear about the Blue Mauritius stamp, it turns out you have and you're done.

James Patterson, 3rd Degree. Grandpa's. The title had something to do with the book this time, hurrah. This...continues to be not a very good series. At all. But the unintentional hilarity was there, at least.

Notice that there wasn't any speculative fiction in this bunch? Yah. So did I. We'll be remedying that lack immediately. I read in a bunch of genres, but not all of them are mine. Too long without fantasy or SF--much less without both--and I start to get antsy.

Comments

Woody Guthrie

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

Perhaps at some point I will read the Woody Guthrie bio you refer to. There is also an autobiography, which I believe is called *Bound for Glory.* It is not badly written, but for one reason or another, I couldn't finish it. Lead Belly (or Leadbelly) was quite the character. I wonder if you and I read the same biography of him? (The main thing I remember about the biography I read is that the photo section contains a shot of sheet music called *Goodnight Irene*, from about 1876. Lead Belly is believed to have taken the title from that music and very possibly simply to have lined up a bunch of new verses with that title, something not uncommon for a commercial musician of his era. I am not denying Lead Belly's creativity or musicianship, but it is not as total a thing as, for instance, Paul McCartney's; it was expected that a player on his circuit would know a thousand verses and slip them into "songs" where they seemed to fit. (It is sad, though, that he was never interested in his biological children, of which there were several.)

Nate

Re: Woody Guthrie

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I kind of wanted the distance an autobiography can't provide, but I may get to Bound for Glory one of these years.

The Guthrie bio talked a fair amount about the folk process and how weirdly it intersected with the beginning of registered folk music copyrights and/or recordings. Not as much as I'd have liked, but enough that I think someone unfamiliar with any music model before the Beatles would still have gotten the idea that this was not what they were used to.

Re: Woody Guthrie

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

Who wrote the Leadbelly biography? Want to add it to my already-62-page TBR list. Bound for Glory is already there, added the Ed Cray.

Re: Woody Guthrie

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Authors are Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell.

Re: Woody Guthrie

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

Thank you, added.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Uncle Wystan was, in a manner of speaking, a classmate of mine. I graduated from Swarthmore in 1964, which happened to be their centennial year, so they brought in all sorts of famous people for honorary degrees, including President Johnson, Secretary General U Thant, and Uncle Wystan, who had taught there for a number of years in the 40s.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of the three, I'd take Uncle Wystan.

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Have you read Terry ('Sir Terence') Pratchett's The Last Elephant? There is a section in it that parodies Chekhov which is hysterically funny even if the reader only knows a smidgen of Chekhov.

(Me, I prefer the cute guy on the Starship Enterprise to the lugubrious, bearded Russian playwright.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes I have. And I'd read that volume of disliked Chekhov, so it was all good.

It was only recently that I figured out that Chekhov-on-ST was supposed to be cute, but I liked him without thinking that, so it wasn't like it detracted from anything.

[shana.livejournal.com]

My grandmother knew Woody Guthrie when he was in Pampa, Texas. (She was the librarian there.) She didn't approve of his abandoning his wife and children.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Neither did his biographer, really. But just as his music didn't change the fact of his abandoning his wife and kids, abandoning his wife and kids didn't change the quality of his music. Separate scales of evaluation.

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms: Volume II. I finally have grown back enough brain to keep track of the cast of several, including people who show up to die on the next page. I'm halfway through the four-volume set and looking forward to the rest.

This is actually really good to know, because I was thinking of picking this up, and now I may not. Not because it isn't good (since you apparently like it), but because I have no brain whatsoever and would have to keep a list of characters in order to follow the book... and that doesn't particularly appeal to me right now, blarg.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend that you leave it for later but not put it off forever--it's good stuff, really interesting. But not for low-brain days, not if you're not obsessively good at either keeping track of people or telling immediately which minor character is going to die on the next page and which will be around for two more volumes.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Looks like you have grown back considerably, though - that's a fair chunk of complex nonfiction.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

None of it feels particularly complex to me.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's good, right? If I recall correctly a few months ago you were feeling unable to manage nonfiction at all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Year ago. And it wasn't mostly keeping track of the complexities, it was more emotional than that. But yah.