The Summer Reading Thread

or go right ahead. whichever you prefer.

And I went into my local remainder store yesterday, and found the latest John Barth, 'Coming Soon', at £2.99. I haven't read it yet, but he's a writer I love who is at least worth sampling. Try Giles Goat-Boy, his SF exploration of heroic myth, Lost In The Funhouse, his volume of experimental Postmodern short stories, or Tidewater Tales, a sailing story that is also a sequel to the 1001 Nights, Don Quixote, the Odyssey and Huck Finn.

The big thick book that will take forever: There Once Was a World: A 900 Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok

trashy: jeffrey steingarten's "man who ate everything" and "it must've been something i ate" along with nigella's "summer cooking"

tomes: "wilder shores of gastronomy" collection (from gastronomy), june / july / august issues of Gastronomica magazine, "gift of southern cooking" by edna lewis.

I am a big Robert D. Kaplan fan. His books always transport me to a world I've never known before but somehow, subconsciously, know intimately. I've gotten acquainted with Ethiopia, West Africa, the -stans that gained independence from Mother Russia after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Balkans, Iran, China, and the poverty-stricken nations of Southeast Asia because of Kaplan's writings. And I don't think his books are too intellectual for a summer read. I've learned a lot from reading his books and, at the same time, have been entertained by what I've read. They read like travelogues with little history lessons tucked neatly therein.

So there. That's my (somewhat biased) recommendation.

and what's your trashy recommendation?

Oh yeah, a second book was requested, wasn't it? I'll go ahead and say my "trashy book" choice is the Guinness Book of World Records, because it's always entertaining and fun and a great light read. Besides, I can't really think of anything beyond Bridget Jones' Diary that I've read in the last several years that *could* be considered a "trashy read". Oy. Too many textbooks. :)

Tell me about this book. Who's the author?

We all still going to start Ulysses on Bloomsday? Guys?

The Mirror Maker, Primo Levi
Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks
World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay
Tales From Ovid, Ted Hughes
King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild
Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
Austerlitz, WG Sebald

I knew about Kaplan and the whole "Clinton read Balkan Ghosts and decided not to get involved in Yugoslavia because of it" debacle, but I sincerely believed that was a cop-out Clinton used to not become committed to the region. Kaplan never talked about the situation in the Balkans in a manner that would lead me to believe he thought what NATO's peacekeeper troops were doing was in any way a bad idea. All of this paragraph, of course, is tainted by my own personal views of Clinton and of Kaplan's POV re: conflicts in general. You know what I'm like already. ;)

I'm perfectly willing to agree to disagree here. In fact, after arguing politics with people for years, I'm actually asking to. Right now. Just don't have the energy in me to argue something for an age and a day, especially if you're not the "convincing" type (i.e. you've got your mind made up).

cross-post! turner: eventually!

I'm still up for this.

OK.

if i remember correctly, tomorrow is bloomsday.

anyway, is there anywhere in the web or elsewhere where i can get translations to phrases written in other languages throughout the text?

trashy - "walt whitman's selected poems" edited by harold bloom (library of america's american poets project)

classy - "War music" and "all day permanent red" by christopher logue
"collected poems" james merrill

Summer "non-fluff" reading - Middlesex, all of Dawn Powell's books that I've not yet delved into, a whole stack of 'histories of various towns/countries/regions' that all appealed to me at one time or another, so I bought them and now have to read them.

Crap - actually my summer reading list is so large that I can't even figure-out how to get it into some semblance of categorical order. I'll just post whatever I finish, instead.

But I recommend the Isaac Adamson/Tokyo books - not brilliant fiction, but just plain delightful.

Warrior Politics is actually a bit of an oddity for Kaplan in that it's 100% a book about theories and ideas instead of a travelogue that supports some theories and ideas. With that book, you really don't get to be swept away to some exciting foreign destination that doesn't involve resorts or tons of tourists. (Well, Greece *could* count there, but Kaplan never made it a point to cover Greece in that sort of manner.)

If you're looking for a starting point for Robert D. Kaplan, go ahead and read The Ends of the Earth, and then Balkan Ghosts. Those two will definitely get you started on him. And should you become a fan of his, you will be able to get into his "pure theory" writings as well. If you just like the books, though, that's good enough.

I know he has a good reputation, and I'm sure there must be something more substantive behind it than the rather vague bromides of Warrior Politics - so I imagine he must be a capable reporter. However, when shorn of context, his ideas (not sure if they're really developed enough to call "theories") seem elusively vague. Perhaps political realism as such is not particularly conducive to a theoretical explication. After all, isn't the point that you can't rely on abstract theories? Every situation is different. It might be interesting to read Kaplan's interpretation of a particular political situation, but in this book he is resolved to base his examples on the classics, and I don't think his grasp of classical history is really strong enough to support this kind of approach at book length. Perhaps if he stuck to contemporary situations that he has first-hand knowledge of, the results might be more engaging.