Classics Club Spin #22 Is . . . .

No. 13!  Which on my list means I get to read The Tempest by William Shakespeare by January 31st.  I am up for it!  It's funny because a few weeks ago a booktuber, whose channel is named Totally Pretentious* asked for help narrowing down what he'd read next and one of his choices was The Tempest.   And I voted for that.  I joked that he could read it for me and I'd watch his review.  You see, I saw an incredible production of the The Tempest at the National Shakespeare Company several years ago.  I really wasn't very familiar with the play.  I read a short summary of it before going but that was it.  I absolutely loved seeing that play.  The production was gorgeous!  The acting was wonderful!  And ever since then I've been thinking to myself I really ought to sit down and actually read the play myself.  So now I will!  And I just so happen to have a No Fear edition of The Tempest on my shelves, no doubt, left over from when my kids took a high school Shakespeare course at our homeschool co-op.


*His name is Lukas and he's a PhD candidate in Psychology and an incredible reader.  I really like his channel a lot.  Just a super smart, thoughtful, nice guy who really enjoys the intellectual life and learning about high culture (art, opera, etc). 

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Emil and the Detectives - Book 54

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner is a classic German children's novel.  It was written in 1929.  I had heard about it over the years some place, not sure where!  But I saw it at a used book store recently and purchased it for a dollar.  It was a quick read and a fun one though the fact that it is set in the late 1920s in Berlin cast a shadow over the whole story.

Emil is a young man (maybe 11 or 12?) who is traveling from his small town to Berlin to visit his grandmother and cousins.  He hasn't been there for a while as he and his mother don't have a lot of money.  His father has passed away and his mother works as a hairdresser in the living room of their apartment. Emil is a very smart and sweet young man, who is very attached to his mother.  The grandmother is also rather poor and Emil's job is to bring seven pounds (money) to the grandmother.  This money has taken a while to slowly save up.  While on the train Emil falls asleep and is robbed.  He knows who did it and desperately follows the man, getting lost in Berlin and not sure how he can rectify the situation.  However, the code of boyhood and lots of helpful city boys come to the rescue.

The whole story is charmingly told.

I am currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the idea of a bunch of boys banding together to fight crime in a city that was actually torn by violent political strife at the time (and which never enters the story) is an eerie and ironic reflection of what really went on with the storm troopers and the Hitler Youth.

Emil is a sweet young man and he'll be just old enough to be drafted into the Nazi army and go to war when the time comes.

The story is a fun and clever one.  The author inserts himself into the plot as a reporter which was a fun touch.

I'm glad I read this book, I'd heard about it over the years.  It's kind of an artifact of prewar Germany when perhaps people thought life was more innocent and simple.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

A Time of Gifts - Book 53

A Time of Gifts On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor is an amazing memoir of a young man's trek across Europe in 1933-34.  Fermor's love for life and his exuberant enjoyment of all he experiences makes for a wonderful tale of adventure.  He's a young man of 18 who has been released from the confines of formal education (he could never settle down enough to follow the rules) and from training for army life.  Now he's free and he has gotten it into his head he's going to be a poet.  He plans to walk across Europe as fodder for his muse.  His good-natured mother lets him do it.  He begins in Holland, proceeds through Belgium and then into Germany and Austria, some Czechoslovakia before entering Hungary.  Hitler has just come to power and all of Europe and, indeed, the world, is on the cusp of devastating war and formerly unknown levels of evil.  But Fermor is having the time of his life.  He meets all kinds of people on the way, many hospitable and friendly.  He explores all kinds of art and history and architecture.

Fermor has an amazing talent for the English language.  His descriptive powers are marvelous.  We get to experience things as a 19 year old, but also has an older man looking back 40 years to his youth and also looking back on his time during World War II.

The book is a delight to read.  I am so happy I've discovered Fermor and plan to read the next book which continues his travels.

Five stars!!!  Two thumbs up!  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

A Day of Pleasure - Book 52

A Day of Pleasure and Other Stories for Children by Isaac Bashevis Singer was a pure pleasure to read.  This was a re-read for me.  As I read, I recalled the stories I'd first encountered many years ago.  Singer wrote in Yiddish and so all these stories have been translated into English, many by him with some other translator.  Singer won the Nobel prize for literature in 1978.  He wrote many adult novels too but they have many of the same features and same mood as these children's stories. 

The first third of the book is actually short chapters of memoirs of Singer's own childhood in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, just before and during World War I.  His father was a Hasidic rabbi.  His world is steeped in the Torah, the Talmud, Jewish neighbors and customs, Jewish folklore, grinding poverty, study and simple pleasures.  During World War I, the economy got so bad the family was in danger of starving to death, so they returned to their tiny village Biloray where Singer's grandfather was rabbi. 

All these stories have a sweetness to them, yet they are realistic, clear and intelligent.  Many have supernatural elements involving witches, house imps (with a name in Yiddish), dybbuks, Elijah visiting to help, angels, miracles, dreams.  Many of the stories feature Hanukkah, many feature young innocent love. 

The whole book is full of poignancy because all this takes place before the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.  Singer himself immigrated to New York in 1935 because he feared what was happening next door in Germany.  And of course, he was right.  So a deep sadness fills these stories even as they reflect the innocence of childhood and a basic belief in a God of Creation who gave us this beautiful world.  Singer is looking back on a lost world and culture that was brutally obliterated by almost inconceivable evil. 

Two thumbs up for this exquisite book!  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Classics Club Spin #22

My twenty to choose from:

1)  Utopia by St. Thomas More
2)  Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila
3)  The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich
4)  Civilization by Kenneth Clark
5)  Out of Africa by Isak Dinesan
6)  Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
7)  Margery Kempe
8)  Kathleen Norris
9)  Kathleen Thomas Norris
10)  Wise Blood
11)  Things Fall Apart
12)  Testament of Youth
13)  The Tempest
14)  Metamorphosis by Ovid
15)  The Faerie Queen
16)  Short Stories by Louis Borges
17)  Dark Night of the Soul
18)  Ascent to Mount Carmel
19)  The Moviegoer or some work by Walker Percy
20)  Pensees by Pascal

A Generation of Sociopaths - Book 51

A Generation of Sociopaths; How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney is a take down of that generation (born roughly between 1946 - 1964) whose bad behaviors, cultural influence and government policy mismanaged our country into towering national debt and a whole host of bad outcomes that do not bode well for the next generations.   Gibney's thesis is that the boomer generation had more sociopaths than any other and this influenced the way they wielded power once they gained adulthood.  Apparently there has been a study (or maybe two) asserting that more sociopaths can be found in this particular generation.  Buying into this idea and using it as a filter to analyze all the failed policies this generation seems to have perpetuated, Gibney gives a really sweeping and harsh condemnation of pretty much anything this generation did.

I myself think the baby boomers (and I am one of them) have perpetuated lots of harmful policies and cultural norms.  Sociopathy is described in the DSM-V and Gibney takes each characteristic (no empathy, no impulse control, not able to foresee consequences of behavior, manipulative, etc) puts it at the front of a chapter before he launches into a particular dysfunctional law or attitude of the boomers.  So for instance he takes on no fault divorce and how the rate of divorce was at an all time high at the height of baby boomer influence.  This shows how unstable they are.  However, to me a huge blind spot in his book is that he never references abortion in this same light.  In fact he asserts that abortion is a moral good. But might it not be pretty obvious that any generation that say, ' my body, my choice' and is willing to snuff out the life of their offspring in utero, probably isn't going to really put their children's needs or desires before their own? 

The strongest parts of this book, I thought, were in the author's very detailed analysis of both what caused the national debt to grow to unimaginable proportions and how it really is a shaky, scary situation that no boomer seems to take seriously.  He also details all the financial scandals, growing lack of oversight and integrity and loosening of laws to the benefit of the rich and older generation (i.e. the boomers).  Gibney really seems to know his economics and finance history.  He's a rich venture capitalist himself, who made it big because he was friends with the founder of PayPal.  He does seem to me to be balanced in his recounting and analysis.  While he is center-left politically, he is pretty even handed in criticized both Republicans and Democrats.  It's not so much partisan for him as generational.  And he goes on and on about it. 

I did agree with much of what this author posited.  However, I think he went overboard in too sweeping a way which essentially weakens the force of his argument.  He is definitively trying to whip up anger.  He must say the word 'sociopath' hundreds of times in this book.  At the end of the book, after excoriating the boomers page after page, he says, hey but I don't think we should rise up violently against them.  Gee, thanks, Gibney!

I thought the book was weakest when he was trying to explain why the boomers might be sociopaths.  Because they bottle fed, listened to Dr. Spock and stopped spanking their children, watched TV and dodged the draft during Vietnam.  I honestly thought he was a bit off his rocker when making these arguments, which again, further weakened this book.

Like I said, I actually agree with the author on many points and I truly appreciated his analysis of some of the issues, all the financial stuff, and other issues as well.  So in spite of this being a really hard book to read, both because of the detailed financial, tax, economic stuff but also because it was just such a bleak take down of my own generation, I think this is a worthwhile book to read.  The guy can really write.  He truly has moments of brilliant insight and a stunning turn of phase at times.  And he offers practical solutions to some of the corners the baby boomers have painted the nation into.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.