The Week Ahead

So I've got a fair amount of nearly-finished, just-finished, and soon-to-be-begun books in store for the week. The nearly finished (not page-wise, but time-wise) is Chuck Klosterman's IV. It's pretty good thus far. I might try and break my responses to it up into little mini posts in reaction to individual essays. More reason to come back!

Yesterday I finished Duncan Glen's I, Lucifer. It had me completely in its grips, and you'll read about that at some point. Finally, I pre-ordered Will Leitch's new book Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball. If you read yesterday's Sunday Book Banter, you know how I feel about the Romanticism of baseball, and a book about fathers, sons, and the baseball bond certainly qualifies. The Kindle version seems to have been taken down (that's what I ordered), but Leitch assures me that any problems there will be worked out soon. In theory, it should come tonight while I sleep!

Should be a fun week. I may put up some first impressions of the essays I've read in the new collection of Britten scholarship. In short: the ones I didn't care about turned out to be ok, and the one that I really cared about was really atrocious.

So be sure to come back this week. There's plenty in store!

Like Douglas MacArthur, I Return

Hi there blog! It's good to see you again. Sorry I've been away for nearly two months, but thesis writing got in the way. After doing 80 pages of "The Manipulation of the Perception of Time in John Adams's Doctor Atomic," I didn't want to write any more. But that's all done now, so here I am again. I'll have a new review of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August up tomorrow. (Sneak peak: I loved it).

While writing, my to-read list apparently took the rabbit spirit of Easter and multiplied like crazy, so you can expect some new stuff coming relatively regularly again. I've got William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur, Chuck Klosterman's IV, Jack Lynch's The Lexicographers Dilemma (check out this review at VPO), Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm thinking of taking a trek through some Shakespeare this summer, maybe the histories. And, despite finishing the thesis, I'm already starting some reading in anticipation of the dissertation, so if I find anything interesting, I'll pass it on! I'll see if I can't restart Sunday Book Banter again too.

As for right now, I'm reading a new anthology of essays on my favorite composer (and likely dissertation subject), Benjamin Britten. Edited by Lucy Walker of the Britten-Pears Foundation, the book is a collection of essays written by mostly new scholars. I'm particularly interested in Cameron Pyke's analysis and comparison of Britten's War Requiem with Dimitri Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony.

So stay tuned! There's plenty more on the way, and this blog will be rolling regularly again!