Well, then. Here I am at mom's for the weekend, lying as usual about how many books I brought. (When she asked, I said, "Three.") Actually, I brought three mysteries--Robert Parker, High Profile; Beverly Connor, Dead Past; and Jimmie Ruth Evans, Best Served Cold; two nonfictions, The grandest of lives : eye to eye with whales / Douglas H. Chadwick and The yellow-lighted bookshop : a memoir, a history / Lewis Buzbee. (The purse book is still the Allingham mystery. One or two more nibblings on it while waiting for this or that and it will be well-started and I'll have to read it. Allingham is pleasing to read.) The ones that are sitting next to me on my mom's marble coffeetable are the Buzbee and Connor. Buzbee came very highly recommended, and is nice but not a knockout. The Connor is dynamite. Things are what they are.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Reading News
Two days after I returned The Concept of the Buddha: Its Evolution from Early Buddhism to the Trikaya Theory by Guang Xing to the interlibrary loan system after struggling with it for a MONTH and in such little pieces that I retained almost nothing, I find out that its topic is exactly what Roshi wants us to study up for a meeting at the end of the month. No I didn't xerox it before sending it back.
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4 comments:
I neglected to mention that I also have a new and inscribed copy of Nikki Giovanni's newest book, Acolytes, waiting in the wings. All or most of it was written while her mother was dying...
She read a bit from it recently at the Free Library, in between telling us highly entertaining anecdotes.
Thanks for mentioning Nikki Giovanni's book, Karen, the library had not ordered it yet.
And, oh God, Sam: Shakespeare authorship. One of my colleagues was obsessively talking up Sweet swan of Avon : did a woman write Shakespeare? by a local woman, Robin P. Williams, for a solid year. The rest of us nearly lost our minds having to hear about Mary Sidney, and the Mary Sidney Society, and so on by the hour, over and over. I finally told her she must not push the book while working the reference desk with me, that it was an abuse of the intrinsic authority people grant to the reference librarian, and besides that that every one of us was talking behind her back about being Deathly Bored with having to listen to her and I simply couldn't stand it any more. Gradually she stopped, but not before she managed to persuade her ex-husband, the quintessential true cowboy--he was the model for Jack Schaeffer's 1963 novel Monte Walsh and is still running cattle south of Santa Fe though the suburbs have splashed out around his family ranch-- persuaded her ex-husband to attend a Mary Sidney Society party in Elizabethan costume (!!!).
Ha! I love the reference librarian story. It's just that each school of thought is so convincing. I mean, how couldn anyone in the universe believe Shake-spear was anyone other than da Vere, Earl of Oxford? But then there's The book called I think The Last Word or something, which insists it was Will Shaksper all along, and says it disproves finally and beyond a doubt any other theory, including da Vere. So I have to read that next.
I can see it's a slippery slope ...
mb, I can understand your frustration, but I have to say that it's so refreshing to hear of some other kind of evangelism, obsessive or not.
Sam, On the way to and from a viewing tonight, one of the faculty (for whom I used to work) mentioned that he had recently read Joan Didion's "A Magical Year," and was now reading Calvin Trillen's "About Alice." Didion's book is one I've been intending to read, but haven't yet. Trillen's I read a few weeks ago-- a touching love story. Didn't you mention reading Didion's book awhile back... or am I making that up?
As for Shakespeare... just count me as a traditionalist. I believe-- just because I can-- that one person wrote all of that work. Truly, a genius. Why is that so hard for people to believe? Because he had so little Greek and Latin? Pshaw! I say... and I've never said that before.
But there's something tickling at my brain about this now... I know! I think there was another book awhile back, written by a man, who made a case for Homer being a woman. I found that more believable. Sorry, that's all I remember at the moment.
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