Duke Ellington's America is this month's free e-book from Univ of Chicago Press. Only downside is you have to use some kind of Adobe Digital Editions thing to read the books. It works with some iPad app or other, I'll post here when I figure out/remember which one.
Discovery by Steve Nicholls - A good read that really made an impression on me as to how utterly we have screwed up this hemisphere. (It is still in the sale catalog)
Hmm. That one does appeal but I tried to get the last free book you mentioned from them and could never get Blue Fire Reader and/or the book download to work on my iPad.
ETA, some interesting titles in that sale catalog as well...must resist though. My campus bookstore recently changed ownership and they sold off the old stock - the final sale was 75% off, and they gave me my 15% faculty discount on top of that. I walked out with a several-feet-high stack of books for a very modest price, and now feel honor bound to read them... Therefore trying to find time to dip into:
Plus a friend just lent me several large novels, so I just finished
(I like Stephenson a lot when I like him; this one had good parts and bad parts and was just a good kind of OK in the end)
Just about to finish The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick which, as usual with him, I loved, and just in time for the full real ease of the new Amazon series.
Also still working slowly on IQ84, reading bits of In Praise of Copying, and just finished volume 2 of Allen Moore's Swamp Thing. I got a bunch of comics with birthday credit; Swamp Thing, Frank Miller Daredevil, the Superman that somebody, I think Doofy mentioned above and more Doom Patrol.
I loved 1Q84, thinking of re-reading it this winter. Murakami is a winter read for me. And you are probably OK in your dread....it is similar to most of his novels (cats, whiskey, American Jazz, alternative worlds, etc.)
Interesting read from the sound designer of "Apocalypse Now," and the near-disaster that occurred when they initially couldn't get rights to use Solti's recording of "Ride of the Valkyries." (Sir Georg eventually intervened)
"The problem with many of the versions of “Valkyries” that I rejected was they were monotonously rhythmic: The result was a robotic stagger, a simulation of musical life rather than the real thing."
Copies of my latest book just arrived at the publisher, was able to pick some up this morning. This one took 6 years, so it feels good to have it finally be a thing.
Nothing to do with music, I'm afraid, except that there is a musical theme in the Paradiesgärtlein on the front cover that is discussed briefly inside somewhere.
It's about the history and present-day of how metaphors with theological roots have been/are used to talk about teaching and learning. It has three sections - gardens, pilgrimages, and buildings. (So for example, when we say Kindergarten (=children's garden), the roots of that go back to Froebel and then to Comenius and from him to the medieval monastics and from them to the church fathers and from them to biblical passages like Isaiah 5 - there's a long and rich tradition of talking about learning environments as gardens. But whereas it has often bleached out to a cliche these days (the post-Romantic 'children are like little plants that blossom in the sunshine') the older tradition is actually a lot deeper and richer - gardens are tied to images of justice and social exclusion, for instance (from Isaiah onward), as well as beauty and generosity and moral formation. Likewise, the history of pilgrimage imagery is a lot more angular and interesting than the Hallmark 'life is a journey' version. We wanted to recover some of the angularity of past imaginations, and to write it not like an academic history but with meditations on paintings, classroom narratives, brief commentaries on historical examples, some poetry...so while it's scholarly it's meant to be meditative reading, to stir the imagination and give us a chance to imagine schools and classrooms in unfamiliar ways.
It's primarily written for teachers, but anyone interested in how we think about learning/growth/education and/or theological imagination should be able to find something of interest in it.
Congratulations GP - sounds a fascinating approach to the topic. As a Christian, education academic (retired but still heavily involved in church based schooling) I'm sure I'd be interested in it, so I'll look our for it. Has it/ will it be published in the UK?
Thanks, Greg (and welcome back). Yes, was going to say Amazon UK should carry it. (We spent enough time tracking down international rights for pictures of medieval paintings!)
Thanks GP - yes it has been a hectic couple of weeks or so. We had a family bereavement, then into Christmas, with lots of visitors at different times, then three days with grandchildren whilst decorating was going on .... etc. No time for music or internet!
There's a list floating around of David Foster Wallace's favorite books and this was on it and I found it cheap as a Kindle book so I got it. There seems to be a lot of comments about the "lowbrow" nature of a lot of the list, and people wondering if Wallace was serious, but I really enjoyed it and felt like I could see some hints of this coming out in Infinite Jest. I wouldn't be surprised if Quentin Tarantino had read it too. Or at least seen the movie.
Still really slowly working my way through Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying; I really like it but in small doses. Still working on IQ84. Just started All Star Superman and Best Non-Essential Reading of 2015. I really enjoy those Non-Essential reading comps; I've been getting them for a few years now. Trying to actually finish this one before it's too far into 2016.
This is very important to my wife, so I'm sharing it around; I thought some people here might be interested: Save the house that Charlotte Bronte based Jane Eyre on:
Signed up amc2. I could become very political about how our national government is cutting back on spending to councils like Lancashire. I don't blame the council planning to make the savings here, they are between a rock and a hard place. I could easily go on but won't on emusers!
How Music got Free by Stephen Witt, all about Mp3;s, piracy and record companies especially Universal. I had lunch on Friday with a friend who worked for them and he was talking about this, lots of insight and felt like I was in a parallel universe referring back to the book
Comments
GP - That top book looks interesting but heavy going! I'm reading something much more mundane at the moment:
Also still working slowly on IQ84, reading bits of In Praise of Copying, and just finished volume 2 of Allen Moore's Swamp Thing. I got a bunch of comics with birthday credit; Swamp Thing, Frank Miller Daredevil, the Superman that somebody, I think Doofy mentioned above and more Doom Patrol.
Craig
Craig
I finished 1Q84 the other day. Really enjoyed it.
Now reading:
Shea Serrano is the best.
Craig
Craig
It's really good, and it's got Bob Marley!
Craig
There's a list floating around of David Foster Wallace's favorite books and this was on it and I found it cheap as a Kindle book so I got it. There seems to be a lot of comments about the "lowbrow" nature of a lot of the list, and people wondering if Wallace was serious, but I really enjoyed it and felt like I could see some hints of this coming out in Infinite Jest. I wouldn't be surprised if Quentin Tarantino had read it too. Or at least seen the movie.
Still really slowly working my way through Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying; I really like it but in small doses. Still working on IQ84. Just started All Star Superman and Best Non-Essential Reading of 2015. I really enjoy those Non-Essential reading comps; I've been getting them for a few years now. Trying to actually finish this one before it's too far into 2016.
https://www.change.org/p/lancashire-county-council-save-jane-eyre-s-ferndean-manor-and-the-bronte-way-heritage?recruiter=15777200&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
Arrived in the post from Amazon thirty minutes ago, looks good!