gurdymonkey: (pretties)
One of the consequences of social interaction with Certain Of My Friends is the exploration of just how much of a capacity for knocking back sake I have and how late Andy can make me I can stay up at my age. This is not a complaint - not when I have been having such a wonderful time with these folks - just an observation.

As a result, I did not get anything much done today. In fact, I spent a fair amount of time crashed out on the futon sofa downstairs drifting in and out to old movies on TMC.
Circadian rhythms completely hosed and appetite returning, I did venture out late this afternoon in search of reading matter. I tend to read a lot on my lunch hour at work and have just finished Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job.  Having a gift card still left from Christmas, I hit the Barnes and Noble in Emeryville (Jack London Square is closer, but never seems to have what I want when I go there). 

New acquisitions:
David McCullough's John Adams - yes, interest was piqued by the HBO series and no, I did not by the tie-in edition with Paul Giamatti on the cover.
Lindsay Davis' new Marcus Didius Falco mystery Saturnalia.
Buddha
by Karen Armstrong (recommended by my father who had been listening to it in audiobook form on his commute).
And on DVD, Persuasion, with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, because it was on sale for $9.99. (Picture especially for [personal profile] callistotoni and anyone else who likes good lookin' men in uniform.)
gurdymonkey: (Default)
Due to traffic, we missed the first few minutes of "In Bruges." If you like things like "Pulp Fiction," or "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels," hunt this one down at your art house. Ralph Fiennes'  telephonic rant about Bruges as a f****** fairyland is every bit as blue-in-the-service-of-a-great-speech as anything David Mamet wrote and if Ireland had Living National Treasures the way Japan does, Brendan Gleeson would be one. At turns hillarious and horrifying, "In Bruges" takes you on a journey.

Unfortunately as well, due to traffic, we did not get a chance to order dinner with our movie, so the complete Speakeasy Theatre experience will have to be tried again. Instead, we ended up having gourmet burgers at Barney's up on Solano. Ellen had the French burger (bleu cheese and bacon on a baguette) and I had the pesto and swiss, also on a baguette. The steak fries were every bit as good as I remember.

WTF moment of the day: There I am reading a biography of an august personage of the 14th century by a well known professor from NYU. I neglected to inspect it more thoroughly at the bookstore, but am I totally wrong to be frustrated by supposedly scholarly works that do not contain footnotes? Then there's the "Whoops, I haven't mentioned homosexuality for at least twenty pages. Better throw something in there right now!" Even when it has nothing to do with the subject at hand.  The last straw, however, was when I found myself reading a completely speculative (you know, fictitious!) love letter from said august personage to his mistress in which he reminisces about how impressed he was by her rack the first time he ever saw her. I'd never read any Norman Cantor before, I'm not bloody likely to ever again based on this piece of trash.

As long as I'm in media review mode, I had acquired Eleanor Herman's Sex With Kings at the same time as the Cantor.  As I have been guilty of my own brand of snappy, smartass titles for articles of my own, the title was hardly a turn-off. It has footnotes! Ms. Herman's book is clearly a labor of love - or at least fascination. Touching on the lives of various royal mistresses over the course of several centuries, she describes how the role of royal mistress changed with the times. The heyday is clearly the 17th and 18th centuries (until 1789), when mistress was an official court post. Enjoyable, interesting, and will have you thinking, "Must go look for more on that Nell Gwynn!" Or Pompadour, or Dubarry or Lola Montez.
gurdymonkey: (Default)
Pearson Prentice Hall http://www.phschool.com/curriculum_support/reading_list/high_school.html

Interesting to see what's still on the list so many years since I was in High School - and what's new.

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
Alvarez, Julia. How The García Girls Lost Their Accents.
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg,Ohio.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Arnett, Peter. Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Bagdad.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
Baker, Russell. Growing Up.
Blais, Madeleine. In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Brooks, Polly Schoyer. Queen Eleanor, Independent Spirit of The Medieval World: Biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth.
Cather, Willa. O Pioneers!
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House On Mango Street.
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Last of the Mohicans.
Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Delany, Sarah and Elizabeth. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years.
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies.
Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face.
Gunther, John. Death Be Not Proud.
Haley, Alex. Roots.
Hardy, Thomas. Return of the Native.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of Seven Gables.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.
Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises.
Homer. The Iliad.
Homer. The Odyssey.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace.
Kuralt, Charles. Charles Kuralt's America.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
London, Jack. The Sea Wolf.
Malamud, Bernard. The Natural.
McCaffrey, Anne. Dragonsong.
McCullers, Carson. Member of the Wedding.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind.
Myers, Walter Dean. The Glory Field.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.
Orwell, George. 1984.
Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Tales and Poems.
Potok, Chaim. My Name is Asher Lev.
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
Shepard, Alan and Deke Slayton. Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon.
Shute, Nevil. On the Beach.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck, John. The Pearl.
Steinbeck, John. The Red Pony.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Thurber, James. My Life and Hard Times.
Thurber, James. The Thurber Carnival.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome.
Wilder, Thornton. Our Town.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy.
Wright, Richard. Native Son.

This one is from the Washington Post

Profile

gurdymonkey: (Default)
gurdymonkey

March 2024

S M T W T F S
     12
3456 789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 02:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios