Home @ 04 Jun 2007 03:24 pm by Christina Waters
Well, I’ll tell you. Here’s what’s sitting on the coffee table as we head into summer. Gertrude, Hermann Hesse’s third novel - a love triangle
involving a composer and his colleagues. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, v.2 - in which the chatty renaissance art historian/painter devulges behind-the-scenes secrets of the Cinquecento Mannerist masters. Delicious stuff. The Ambassadors, by Henry James. Rocky going at first, I must admit, since James believes in rooting out the subtextual psychology of even the least dust mote. But I know he’s on to something, and besides three people I respect have told me I must read it. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? one of the top three genre-busting sci-fi tomes by Berkeley’s own Philip K. Dick. It just gets better — and more shockingly prescient — with each reading.
And don’t miss the profile of Paul McCartney in the current New Yorker. At sixty-four, the cutest Beatle is enmeshed in a web of high celebrity and the sadness many of his generation feel for what has happened to their dreams. Love was such an easy game to play.
speaking of summer reading, I picked up a book at the bookshop in the Aptos center(great bookshop!): “Pomegrante Roads”, which is the memoirs of a 1950’s Soviet ag researcher posted to an obscure mountain valley where he propagated over 1,000 species of pomegrantes he collected from his travels all over the Central Asia region. A great yet sad story of the failure of the station as it died (literally) due to lack of gov’t funding after the fall of the Soviet Union. Dr. Levin tells the reader every pertinent fact about pomegranates; history, lore, uses, etc. translated from Russian,;it is fascinating. Highly rec this book.
Found this blog via a recent Chowhound.com mention. Lovely! Bookmarked!