The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on June 20, 2019, 08:46:40 am ---What book?
--- End quote ---
Some weeks ago I decided that over the course of the summer I was going to re-read the entire series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels. After I finish, probably all will go in for recycling. I need to start thinning my library, and my copies are all mass-market paperbacks. They go back to the Eighties, so the paper has gone brown. The cover of the first book was so brittle that a large piece of the back cover broke off while I was reading the book, and by the time I was finished the back cover had come off altogether.
I'm reading the third book now. It's called Monk's Hood, after the poisonous herb also known as wolfsbane. All of them are very nice little mystery stories. It's been so many decades since I last read them that they're all new to me again. :D
serious crayons:
I've done that with Raymond Chandler books. And someday I'd like to read an old Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe book or two.
But I'm always reading about 20 books at a time already, not to mention the New Yorker, the newspaper and the internet, so it's hard to fit in re-readings.
Maybe I'll save the Nero Wolfe books until I'm in a nursing home and a) have plenty of time and b) won't remember the endings! :laugh:
Front-Ranger:
That sounds like my copy of The Virginian. Very brittle covers.
I didn't read all of the fiction in the fiction issue, so I'm saving that issue to read over the course of the summer. I often get ideas of books I want to read from the stories in the NY.
A series I like is the Isabel Dalhousie novels by Alexander McCall Smith. The main character lives in Edinburgh and is the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She is a philosopher and gets entangled in adventures and mysteries, nothing as serious as a Sherlock Holmes problem. Perfect summer reading. But, why is everyone always talking about summer reading? Winter is the time for reading, when you can't go outside.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on June 21, 2019, 11:06:00 am ---Perfect summer reading. But, why is everyone always talking about summer reading? Winter is the time for reading, when you can't go outside.
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That's why they distinguish summer reading. In summer, you want to read something you can absorb while lying on the beach or in a hammock, something you would take on vacation to fill the time between sightseeing. Summer books are light in mood, not too intense or deep or difficult. More effortlessly entertaining. So for me that would be, like, a Tom Perrotta novel or Gone Girl or Raymond Chandler or maybe something like The Great Gatsby.
Winter is when people tackle books that require more time and attention: War and Peace or Ulysses or Moby-Dick or maybe, if something relatively light is needed, Middlemarch
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on June 20, 2019, 02:01:00 pm ---Some weeks ago I decided that over the course of the summer I was going to re-read the entire series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels. After I finish, probably all will go in for recycling. I need to start thinning my library, and my copies are all mass-market paperbacks. They go back to the Eighties, so the paper has gone brown. The cover of the first book was so brittle that a large piece of the back cover broke off while I was reading the book, and by the time I was finished the back cover had come off altogether.
--- End quote ---
Since posting this, I have learned that there have also been "omnibus" editions of the Cadfael mysteries, with three stories per book (there are 21 stories in all in the series). I'm thinking it might be nice to assemble a collection of the omnibus editions, as that way I can still have all the stories to read again in retirement (if I live that long), but they will take up half the space on a bookshelf.
I wonder why they call them omnibus editions? ??? Isn't omnibus the real, full name for a public transportation "bus"? ???
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