{"id":1315,"date":"2020-11-30T15:32:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T20:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2023-10-21T10:11:25","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T14:11:25","slug":"november-2020-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2020\/11\/november-2020-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"November 2020 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>America&#8217;s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake<\/em>\u00a0&#8211; Ted Levin, 2016 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>Nabokov&#8217;s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing<\/em> &#8211; Ben Blatt, 2017. A Jonathan recommendation &#8211; very interesting if a little slight. Great book design with mauve ink. My favorite bit was the graph of exclamation points per 100,000 words (James Joyce tops the list!).<\/li><li><em>The Whisper of Glocken<\/em> &#8211; Carol Kendall, 1965. A sequel to <em>The Gammage Cup<\/em>, one of my childhood favorites, which I just discovered. It&#8217;s not as good as the original, but not bad at all &#8211; if I had read it when I was a kid I would have been very fond of it. Where the first one&#8217;s message is that ordinarily eccentric people can be heroes, this one says (among other things) that heroes are just ordinarily eccentric people. <\/li><li><em>An Ideal Husband<\/em> &#8211; Oscar Wilde, 1894 &#8211; for Irish Writers. Quotes marked but lost.<\/li><li><em>Troubled Blood<\/em> &#8211; Robert Galbraith, 2020 &#8211; In my notes I had the title of this newest Cormoran Strike (J.K. Rowling pseudonym) as &#8220;Tedious Murder,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t that far off&#8230; I do enjoy these, and to me Rowling&#8217;s problematic views don&#8217;t come through as strongly as some say, but boy does the lady need an editor. Also, apparently &#8220;disorientated&#8221; is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.grammarphobia.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/disoriented-disorientated.html\">totally UK standard<\/a>, but it bugs me and I feel like I only see it in Rowling (don&#8217;t read enough PD James, I guess).<\/li><li><em>The Trial<\/em> &#8211; Franz Kafka, 1925 (Breon Mitchell tr, 1999) &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>Captain Harlock Space Pirate: Dimensional Voyage<\/em> &#8211; Leiji Matsumoto, 2017 &#8211; The <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Space_Pirate_Captain_Harlock\">Captain Harlock TV show<\/a>, or rather <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x4yWOwGXQyY\">Albator<\/a> since we were living in France, is one of the formative esthetic experiences of my youth. I can&#8217;t quite recapture the way it made me feel, even re-watching the original episodes, and I hoped this manga might help. But I didn&#8217;t realize it&#8217;s not the original. I still enjoyed it, and boy do I wish I could rock that cape&#8230;<\/li><li><em>The Prestige<\/em> &#8211; Christopher Priest, 1995. I saw the movie a decade or so ago and the final twist made a huge impression on me because it was so infuriatingly preposterous. A blog I&#8217;ve been following and enjoying recently, <a href=\"https:\/\/vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com\/\">Occasional Mumblings<\/a> by &#8220;vacuous wastrel&#8221;, loved <a href=\"https:\/\/vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/20\/reaction-the-prestige-christopher-priest\/\">the original book<\/a> and prompted me to pick it up. Good not great to my taste, but it does sort of resolve my biggest problem with the movie&#8217;s approach (my attempt to explain without spoiling too much: the &#8220;prestige material&#8221; is frozen rather than dead).<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>America&#8217;s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake\u00a0&#8211; Ted Levin, 2016 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD Nabokov&#8217;s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing &#8211; Ben Blatt, 2017. A Jonathan recommendation &#8211; very interesting if a little slight. Great book design with mauve ink. My [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2013,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions\/2013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}