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Ain't got no rainbow, ain't got no cellar door
I don't normally booklog, but I have been spending a lot of time in baths with books lately. It looks like mysteries are a popular choice.
I don't think I read anything in the ER last Friday. I wasn't carrying a book.
Last weekend in the bath, I read Mary Stewart's Wildfire at Midnight (1956), Dick Francis' Slay Ride (1973), and re-read Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers (1965) and My Friend Mr Campion and Other Mysteries (2011).
This Friday in the ER, I read Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (2013), Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (1970, trans. Josh Billings 2015), and re-read Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985).
This weekend in the bath, I have been re-reading Elizabeth Peters for the first time since high school and college: Crocodile on the Sandbank (1971), The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981), The Deeds of the Disturber (1988), and The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991). Most of my mother's Amelia Peabody mysteries are in boxes at the moment; I'll have to get the rest out of a library. I remember being fond of The Hippopotamus Pool (1996). My favorite character remains Kevin O'Connell, the semi-reputable reporter. I view Amelia as a much more unreliable narrator these days.
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strange_selkie, it looks to me like burrito-wrapped Achilles is grieving the death of Patroklos; Thetis has just shown up with his new armor. Any second now he will un-burrito and go kill a lot of Trojans, not yet realizing that killing people does not console the loss of a loved one. [edit] My Brandeis advisor Leonard Muellner has an article on vase paintings of grieving Achilles! Take note of the concept of "multiform representation." We want a single canonical Iliad, the one true text from which all other versions depart; the epic tradition is a polyphony. We got the one we got, but it was just one.
I don't think I read anything in the ER last Friday. I wasn't carrying a book.
Last weekend in the bath, I read Mary Stewart's Wildfire at Midnight (1956), Dick Francis' Slay Ride (1973), and re-read Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers (1965) and My Friend Mr Campion and Other Mysteries (2011).
This Friday in the ER, I read Anya von Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (2013), Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (1970, trans. Josh Billings 2015), and re-read Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985).
This weekend in the bath, I have been re-reading Elizabeth Peters for the first time since high school and college: Crocodile on the Sandbank (1971), The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981), The Deeds of the Disturber (1988), and The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991). Most of my mother's Amelia Peabody mysteries are in boxes at the moment; I'll have to get the rest out of a library. I remember being fond of The Hippopotamus Pool (1996). My favorite character remains Kevin O'Connell, the semi-reputable reporter. I view Amelia as a much more unreliable narrator these days.
P.S.
strange_selkie, it looks to me like burrito-wrapped Achilles is grieving the death of Patroklos; Thetis has just shown up with his new armor. Any second now he will un-burrito and go kill a lot of Trojans, not yet realizing that killing people does not console the loss of a loved one. [edit] My Brandeis advisor Leonard Muellner has an article on vase paintings of grieving Achilles! Take note of the concept of "multiform representation." We want a single canonical Iliad, the one true text from which all other versions depart; the epic tradition is a polyphony. We got the one we got, but it was just one.
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I realized only on re-reading The Last Camel Died at Noon that it must have been the reason I recognized the name "Blacktower" in
(The Last Camel Died at Noon was actually the first Amelia Peabody I read, which set me up for something of a disappointment when none of the other books in the series turned out to be anything like it. I had the same thing happen with Reginald Hill and Pictures of Perfection (1994), which is the Austen pastiche of the otherwise rather gritty Dalziel and Pascoe series. I've read most of the rest by now, but Pictures is still my favorite and I still haven't read enough Austen to get most of the references!)
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