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what books do I have on my desk right now?
variant on a meme that seems to be floating around ...
1) The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, on which I am just finishing up a somewhat overdue review. Just a fabulous and rather overwhelming work of scholarship.
2) Mozart's Symphonies by Neal Zaslaw, which I'm using as source material in a running attempt to refute a nutball who believes that Mozart didn't write his own works, and that Haydn didn't either. (My contributions as "Kalimac" begin about halfway down this page, dated 11/23. Warning to those who wish to start at the beginning: there's a lot of sludge in this topic.)
3) Farewell to the Chief ed. Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Walch. A clumsy book arguing that the U.S. should better employ the wisdom and experience of our ex-presidents. Oh, right. Best for its anecdotes on how ex-presidents spend their time, including an explanation of why Lyndon Johnson grew his hair long.
4) The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. New biography of C.S. Lewis. Pretty good, with a minimum of factual bloopers. Well-written, fresh perspective on the facts without a hobby-horse or an attempt to make Lewis out as inexplicable.
1) The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, on which I am just finishing up a somewhat overdue review. Just a fabulous and rather overwhelming work of scholarship.
2) Mozart's Symphonies by Neal Zaslaw, which I'm using as source material in a running attempt to refute a nutball who believes that Mozart didn't write his own works, and that Haydn didn't either. (My contributions as "Kalimac" begin about halfway down this page, dated 11/23. Warning to those who wish to start at the beginning: there's a lot of sludge in this topic.)
3) Farewell to the Chief ed. Richard Norton Smith and Timothy Walch. A clumsy book arguing that the U.S. should better employ the wisdom and experience of our ex-presidents. Oh, right. Best for its anecdotes on how ex-presidents spend their time, including an explanation of why Lyndon Johnson grew his hair long.
4) The Narnian by Alan Jacobs. New biography of C.S. Lewis. Pretty good, with a minimum of factual bloopers. Well-written, fresh perspective on the facts without a hobby-horse or an attempt to make Lewis out as inexplicable.