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I stated his claim that the Odyssey was written by a woman, and he recreates what he imagines to have been her life in the novel Homer's Daughter. But Paul Fussell (a WWII veteran) said that WWI had a special sadness, as chronicled in his work The Great War and Modern Memory, advised to read by Ms Pearl. Coomaraswamy's writings on Oriental textiles are still used in art schools. Someday poetry will regain a structure and intelligence, and Riding's poems will be seen as the jewels that they are.I had also mentioned Brian Aldiss, and his great S/F novel, Greybeard." Aldiss was part of the "New Wave" of British S/F writers, after the originals such as Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. You will discover that American politicians were as thorough sleazebags then as now. Aldiss is still writing.I will tell you about Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, Walpola Rahula, Batchelor, Herrigel, Cleary and other writers on secular Buddhism, but Huber's book has a special quality that makes Zen personal, even emotionally intimate. Nor should you miss reading The White Goddess, a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth), which Graves called his poetic lexicon.
That is the perfect description of the Spanish azure. I have read D.T. The historical facts are that in the late 4th century CE the Roman Empire was crumbling. Read The Transformation of Nature in Art. I have not told you all I know about them because a lustful lover of either (or any) sex never reveals all he, she or whatever knows so that ardor is kept at fever pitch.(TRC 08-17-09) Jimenez won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1956.For a book much different in subject matter, read Sweet Zen by Cherie Huber.
(He was a Buddhist, and perhaps the hounds and the women became too much for him). The book is the story of how Maximus constructs his legion together with his cavalry general, Veronicus. Various barbarian tribes were threatening to invade across that great river and extinguish civilization. Augustine and his milieu miserable before sort of dissipating in the African heat). A movie should be made from this book. (You can find them at Borders).For all you romantic lovers, I would advise you to read Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont. He considered himself a poet and a poet only, but was forced to write other works to feed his poetry habit.
He is exceptionally difficult to read, and I am not certain how I got through many of his works. BOOK AFTERGLOWREVIEW: Pearl, Nancy. He is someone for you to explore.Finally, I will advise that you read the works of Frithjof Schuon. Riding's poems are very difficult and much under-appreciated. Therefore, I will supply a few titles she might have listed.INDIVIDUAL WORKSFor WWI fiction, I thought Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End was the standard bearer, but it does not appear in the book lust lists. He was protecting the core of the empire in Italy, and did not have the time, personnel or funds to guard Lower Germany and Gaul south of the Rhine. The treatment of the Cupid and Psyche legend is precious. The book gives us an insight into the minds of our South American cousins.I have long admired the treatment by Robert Graves of the book called The Golden Ass.
The book has never been revised, to my knowledge, and so is unique in that what you see is what you get, ---something that I have rarely found to be the case with women. I also discovered that there were serious omissions in Ms Pearl's lists of books. Historically, in 405 CE the Rhine froze solid and about 180,000 Vandals stormed over it, wiping out by sheer mass of numbers the remnants of the Roman guard that was stationed there. It would be a great time for a movie of it now when the West is threatened by another inchoate force, radical Islam. ISBN 0918528070). Stilicho, the Romanized Vandal, was master of the Roman army in the West. It mixes theology and American political theory in a potent brew.In the Science Fiction genre, Brian Aldiss's Greybeard must be mentioned. I do not understand why it has not been made into a movie.
was at the top of every S/F list, but Pearl overlooks it. His sentences are long and complex. I found the book to be terrifically informative, and believe that no man, woman, person of alternate sexuality or beast in the modern era should be without its insights and perceptions. They are collected in a thin paperback. It is a cult book and on Kindle.I would suggest you read the late 19th century book by Henry Adams titled: Democracy, an American Novel. I bought the second book in hopes that she might have included the works I thought were missing, but did not locate them. SPECIALIn parting, I will mention one more book that Nancy Pearl could have listed for the perusal of speakers of English.
It ends with Maximus, after the battle, with his sword hand cut off, ending his own life. These works, known as historical novels, but which he called his "historical reconstructions" are all of them treasures. It is interesting to note that the work used to be a trilogy under the name given above, but now there are four books as part of it. Only a Frenchman could write such a work, and I hasten to add that I have a French-Canadian connection.The most serious omission by Nancy Pearl of books that should be read is Eagle in the Snow, by Wallace Breem.
Robert Graves was advanced for his time. Seattle, Sasquatch Books, 2005.I picked up Nancy Pearl's original book to discover the fiction I may have missed over the last number of years. Coomaraswamy was a colorful man, and collected Borzoi hounds and mistresses. De Rougement considers romantic love to be a pathology, and with historical proof, as he is a scholar. It is a translation into a novel of the book known as The Transformations of Lucius Apuleius, an ancient collection of Milesian tales from Cappadocia, once part of the Roman Empire but now in Central Turkey. He is not a writer from a past century, but modern, ---and died in 1958 in Puerto Rico where he had gone to escape the Spanish fascists of Franco's time. Kasuzo's book is number 189,165 on Amazon's rankings, and might have been listed for that reason alone. (This chaotic force went on to sack all the cities of Gaul and Spain and crossed into North Africa where they made St.
In the novel, Breem describes the desperate tactics of the legion to stave off the masses of barbarians in the freezing weather but without avail. The book functions as a cautionary lesson for men not to get involved with magic, as it is the prerogative of women. It is an "old wave" now, though, as it started in the 1960s-70s. He wrote before the cinema, TV, modern journalism and the Internet claimed our attention and when readers could settle down on a long winter's night and really get into a book. He has written many other S/F books (read his Report on Probability A), straight novels and memoirs.
The resulting society in Britain and on the planet together with the eventual final resolution is spellbinding. (I appreciate this work because of my personal background, and because the Byzantine Empire has vanished almost completely from the consciousness of Westerners, both European and American). (By the way, if you have ever wondered what no man's land was like - the area between the trenches of the allies and the Germans in WWI - Fussell tells you in his book. Nancy Pearl mentions the two works on the Roman Emperor Claudius: I, Claudius and Claudius the God (made into a BBC TV series in 1976) but other of his novels include: Homer's Daughter, a development of Graves' idea that the true author of the Odyssey was a woman; Hercules, My Shipmate, on the journey of the Argos; King Jesus, about events in the Mideast 2000 years ago (Graves also wrote a ponderous tome about the New Testament with the scholar Joshua Podro, The Nazarine Gospel Restored, but I am not advising you to read it); Watch the North Wind Rise (called Seven Days in New Crete in England), a utopian novel placed on the island of Crete; and many others including two novels about Sergeant Lamb, a British noncommissioned officer in colonial America.
As fine a work as is Heart of Darkness, I think Conrad's Nostromo is nearly its equal, ---or close enough in quality to read. Schuon made the most perceptive statement about the tribal peoples in the American continent that I have ever read. He wrote on the metaphysics of comparative religion, first in German, then in French and then in English in the same refractory dense prose. (I could not resist it).ENVOIThere is no end to books. (I was younger when I read them and had more patience with authors).
(Published in 1980 by Edgepress, Inverness, California. His book, described as prose poems, translated into English as Platero and I, is the story of a man who takes a journey with his burro to find out about life,---and discovers that his donkey is smarter than he is. My personal favorite is Count Belisarius, the life of the great general of Justinian the Great who re-conquered Italy from the barbarians. The author is Japanese but wrote his book explaining the tea ceremony and its philosophical and cultural implications in unique English that is wistful and heart-felt. Eagle in the Snow is a superbly tremendous historical novel. One of the advantages of going to book sales is that you can find books that you would not normally buy and even be interested in, but since the cost is usually one dollar, it is irresistible to buy them and keep them around the house,---and maybe read them on a dull night. (You will get into his prose style, soon enough.
(The fourth novel, making it a tetralogy, is not equal in quality to the first three). In Graves' novel of the voyage of the Argo, the introductory character Ancaeus, the helmsman, is a Pelasgian from the island of Samos, a descendant of a people native to Greece before the arrival of the Greeks, and who believes in the religion of the Triple Goddess, an ancient matriarchy. It is Josephine Herbst's book of memoirs of the early decades of the 20th century.I believe Nancy Pearl should have included The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. You must admire the mind of a man who would admit to it, even in a humorous way. His mother was English and his father was a patrician from Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka).
Ms Pearl describes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness four times in her first book, but not another of his novels. More Book Lust: 1000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. The very title of the book, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, indicates its ambience. There have been so many other wars each with its own pathos that the mind tires of it. The death of Decoud, the Latin-American liberal patrician, is one of the best sustained literary passages in the English language. But the ruling goddess has him killed by the island worshippers of the Triple Goddess who are savage goat men because Ancaeus is considered to have been corrupted by his life with the Greeks. He said that they lived in a sort of paradise that was fated to fall. The only facet of Graves' books that might put you off is the periodicity of his sentences.
He had much to say about Islam and its esoteric expression in Sufism, and this may be his relevance for today. The novel is rather wooden in its character development, but I consider that to be a perfect delineation for politicians and those they associate with, and not a flaw of style.I cannot understand why Ms Pearl failed to mention the Spanish poet and writer Juan Ramon Jimenez. I had not paid much attention to fiction. They make an indefinitude. Conrad writes in a similar style). I will let you discover it).For Science Fiction, I thought A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M.
It is an historical novel. I did find a few novels and short story collections that I may read, ---and thank you. Van Vogt, and others. He dies from solitude, a devastating commentary on modern civilization. Graves' book has recently been reissued.
At his request, he is released onto a small island in the Mediterranean still ruled by the matriarchy. In his Sergeant Lamb books, he writes of a Native American tribesman whom we would call "homosexual," and who was accepted by the members of the tribe as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Ah, things change, ---and it has been decades since I even looked into Ford's work. The premise of the story is that children stop being born in the world. This is to his regret, unfortunately, because after that great voyage when he returns to Samos he is banned from it by the Olympian Greeks, as a worshipper of the nymph. He had a position at the Museum of Natural History in Boston, and died in 1947 when he was preparing to enter a monastery in the Himalayas.
His books interpret the East to the West, and include Buddhism and art. I read the entire 701 page reference book, entry by entry from ABBOTT, Sidney.to ZARETSKY, Eli right through the radical feminists who want to main men with surgery and chemicals to control their aggression (you can imagine), and including the substantial reference sources at the end,--- over about three years. (Francis Ford Coppolla should make the film).AUTHORSI had mentioned Robert Graves above but you should read more of him. It is the story of the reformulation of civilization in the American Southwest after a nuclear catastrophe. Breem, for his novel, makes the premise that Stilicho appoints a Roman legate, Maximus, from Britain (where the legionnaires are melding into the local population by intermarriage while maintaining Hadrian's Wall), as commander of Roman forces to build an army from local resources to keep the barbarians north of the Rhine. This is how I discovered and brought home as a treasure, The Nature of Women: An Encyclopedia and Guide to the Literature, by Mary Anne Warren. Miller, Jr.
(The white goddess changed to a black goddess sometime later).By the way, while exploring the works of Robert Graves read the poems of Laura Riding with whom he lived for a while. It is a case study of Roman military genius, and involves the wife of Veronicus and includes a cameo episode of a captured blonde German maiden that is priceless. It is considered by some to be the primary proto-novel. You might want to read Huber's other Zen books on depression, death and dying and other subjects.
Pearl, a lifelong reader and noted librarian and reviewer, assembles almost 1000 books, both fiction and non-, into 175-odd themed lists, much as Gilbar did--and, like Gilbar, she's read them all. Most of her recommendations include a more or less brief explanation of their appeal to her (even horror, of which she professes not to be a great fan). I once remarked in these reviews that I wished Steven Gilbar would provide us with a "Son of Good Books" to update us on what he's been reading in the 20 years since he compiled it. Her recommendations, while leaning heavily toward more recent titles (which is why you should probably read Gilbar first, in the interests of chronological continuity), range from Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics) to All Quiet On The Western Front to Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam's Greatest Traveler, from The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N to Remembering Heaven's Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam to Wind, Sand and Stars, and from Caroline's Daughters to Book of Puka Puka to The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero; her authors, from the anonymous chronicler of the battles of Beowulf to Lemony Snicket to George MacDonald Fraser, Van Reid, and Robert Heinlein; and her lists (alphabetically arranged) from "A.My Name is Alice" (authors with that first name) through "The Jewish-American Experience" and "King Arthur" to "Zero: This Will Mean Nothing to You" (books about the concept of zero). Whether you browse among the lists, search through the index (which includes both authors and titles), or just sit down and begin at the beginning, have a paper and pen handy--you're sure to find titles that interest you. He hasn't, and it doesn't appear that he's going to, but meanwhile Nancy Pearl has ably taken up his torch and compiled something that could almost have gone by that title as well as it does by the one it has. Ms.
Every possible catagory of literature is broken down in these books (Book Lust and More Book Lust).I recommed using a highlighter when reading. This is a must have for any book lover. You will find tons of new books that you will want to read. If you are like me, you love a good book, but they are hard to find. I don't know a lot about most of the authors to know if their works would interest me.
Doesn't that title make you want to read the book.Magical Realism with a listing of renowned and not-so-known writers: of course, One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S). Do you have that problem. Example: Alice Walker's Meridian, an autobiographical novel of the early years of the civil rights movement and an interracial marriage.The last category is "Zero: This Will Mean Nothing to You." And she lists fabulous books about, yes, the concept of zero. After a while I will order an armload and still don't know what kind of order to use to select the next book to read.
That headiness is too focused for my weary wings that like to flit to that book, then this one, and over yonder--that one. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo.I just realized something--what I created in this review is a potential reading list. These books are just a speck in an entire, more-than-one lifetime-of-reading in one book. Enjoy. I'm flighty, a regular flibbertigibbet (if you'll pardon the oxymoron). Reading reviews on Amazon has made me worse. So here's what I determined to do: Use "Book Lust" created by the librarian's Librarian, Nancy Pearl. Included are writers whose given names are Alice, and a short list of titles and descriptive phrases.
The first is "A.My Name is Alice" (there is even a children's book by that name). I read that one during late spring afternoons on the lovely little patio of a townhouse I rented for awhile. And thank you, Nancy Pearl. This category was so unique to me that I well remember where I was when I read it, much like the JFK assassination.Nancy also includes Latin American literature: Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (Pantheon Modern Writers Series), Jorge Luis Borge's Borges: Collected Fictions (a most heady read.)., and Rosario Ferre's The House on the Lagoon.Iris Murdoch: The Philosopher's Pupil and a list of 25 more novels.Postmodern Condition: (Her explanation is so accessible)--Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo; or Nabakov's Pale Fire (Everyman's Library (Cloth)); or Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections: A Novel.Aging: Doris Lesser's The Diaries of Jane Somers.Africa: Today and Yesterday: Michaela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr. There's even a deluxe Action Figure of Nancy: Librarian Deluxe Action Figure that you can place at your favorite reading station just for a laugh or two. I read it for a graduate class in Latin American literature (in translation).
I'll pop this book into my cart, then that one. A fascinating title is The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything. I don't know how many times different ones will ask if they can check out "this book"--it's a single tiny book in the set).Here's how the book is arranged: alphabetically by categories of her naming. Typically, I'll go through my shelves (or stacks on the floor) to find a book for my mood.I have Amazon Friends who read entire collections by one writer, including Conrad, Melville, Wells, Nabokov before moving on to the next writer of profound importance. (Mine is at school where the kids LOVE rearranging the items in the set.
I came a way with quite a few books to add to my wish list. While I didn't read this book in its entirety, I did skim the whole thing, focusing on certain sections that caught my interest, and found it quite delightful. Pearl does a great job with the categorization of her recommendations, and I look forward to obtaining and perusing her follow-up, More Book Lust. It is a great reference for any bibliophile who would like to explore a further theme or subject. Of course, I'm a sucker for book lists and books about books, so Book Lust was right up my alley. I loved highlighting book titles I had already read and exploring genres and topics I was most interested in.
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