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Books... (Read 514799 times)

duncan

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#1450 Re: Books...
January 05, 2020, 07:54:41 pm
Many thanks Andy, messaged you.

andy popp

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#1451 Re: Books...
January 05, 2020, 07:58:17 pm
Got it.

Johnny Brown

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#1452 Re: Books...
January 06, 2020, 03:17:11 pm
Being A Beast by Charles Foster. I came to this through an excellent article recommended by FD. I've read a lot of the 'new' nature writing and was intrigued by a different perspective - Foster attempts to understand animals better by trying to live like them. Thankfully, despite going at it pretty full-on - for example he and his son dig a sett and live as badgers, eating worms -  he doesn't take himself too seriously. Funny and insightful, refreshingly different.

The Overstory by Richard Powers. I am trying to read more (i.e some/ any) fiction. This sprawling multi-threaded novel won the Pulitzer prize last year and is based around a tree-sitting protest in the Pacific North-West, following various different lives drawn into and affected by it. It's an easy, absorbing read that may make you look at trees differently. I found the final section a tad unsatisfying, but then environmental protest rarely has a happy ending.

An Anthology of Double Stars by Bob Argyle. This is more my level, genuinely been struggling to put this down in recent months. Once in a while you meet a book at just the right moment in your education, and you go flying along the learning curve together. There is much in here I've yet to understand, but I still feel like No.5 in Short Circuit... ah data!

Utz by Bruce Chatwin. One of the two Chatwin books I hadn't read, this was prompted by a very good Backlisted podcast. His shortest book and arguably the most polished. Despite limited interest in the subject matter - a porcelain collector in Cold War Czechoslovakia - I really enjoyed reading it (it doesn't take very long) which presumably means I'm reacting to his style (which I didn't think I actually liked that much). However I was left thinking half the subtext had gone miles over my head, and unlike his other books I'm unlikely to pick it up again (although it is very portable, which I increasingly value).

Enduring Patagonia by Gregory Crouch. Not sure how I missed this, I thought I'd read all the Patagonia climbing books of note. Recommended to me by Ben Silvestre as something like 'alongside Deep Play the best climbing book I've read'. High praise. Details several successes and failures in the Fitzroy range alongside some 20's autobiographical stuff. Very well written for a climbing book, some sublime moments, I enjoyed it but (despite portability plus points) not likely to reread soon. Unlike Bob Argyle's tome above, it came along at the wrong time in my life. Pushing it in Patagonia feels a very long way away.

Johnny Brown

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#1453 Re: Books...
January 07, 2020, 10:36:01 am
Another one:

Wilding by Isabella Tree. To be honest I'd been avoiding this due to my prejudices. Rich woman marries richer man, moves into his castle, stops farming and delights as wildlife returns, writes book. Ooh how lovely? I was wrong. For starters this is her fifth book and it shows. Then we get a detailed evisceration of modern farming, initially on purely economic grounds, from the very heart of the establishment. The neighbours must be horrified. But if it couldn't work for them who can it work for? And then the miracle of nature returning in unexpected ways that traditional conservation would never have allowed. Recommended: well written and a rare beacon of hope.

teestub

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#1454 Re: Books...
January 07, 2020, 10:58:52 am
Another one:

Wilding by Isabella Tree.

I started this one and got a hundred or so pages in, but was really struggling with the landed gentry side of it. After a couple of good reviews on here I will try again.

Johnny Brown

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#1455 Re: Books...
January 07, 2020, 11:11:58 am
Word - worth persevering. Currently struggling through Cocker's Our Place - loved his other stuff but this is heavier going.

GazM

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#1456 Re: Books...
January 07, 2020, 12:21:26 pm
Word - worth persevering. Currently struggling through Cocker's Our Place - loved his other stuff but this is heavier going.

It gets better after he stops detailing the history of the National Trust etc in the first hundred or so pages. That section was very dull and didn't really add anything to the case he's making.

Johnny Brown

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#1457 Re: Books...
January 07, 2020, 12:40:29 pm
Ah cheers that's encouraging. I read Pete Marren's NN Nature Conservation a few years back and found it more entertaining tbh.

m.cooke.1421

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#1458 Re: Books...
January 09, 2020, 02:23:31 pm
Another one:

Wilding by Isabella Tree. To be honest I'd been avoiding this due to my prejudices. Rich woman marries richer man, moves into his castle, stops farming and delights as wildlife returns, writes book. Ooh how lovely? I was wrong. For starters this is her fifth book and it shows. Then we get a detailed evisceration of modern farming, initially on purely economic grounds, from the very heart of the establishment. The neighbours must be horrified. But if it couldn't work for them who can it work for? And then the miracle of nature returning in unexpected ways that traditional conservation would never have allowed. Recommended: well written and a rare beacon of hope.

I haven't read this but I did hear her on Desert Island Discs. Whilst it sounds like a nice idea it's not really a viable form of land management for food production. What they are doing with their land is less harmful to the environment than conventional farming, but its not really a solution to the impact caused by farming. I think it would be interesting to look at the hectares required per calorie of food produced and the impact to the environment per hectare for each management practice. I would imagine the area required to meet the calorific demands of the UK population would be larger than the area of the UK so we would have to import food, exporting our environmental impact abroad.

andy popp

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#1459 Re: Books...
January 09, 2020, 02:50:25 pm
I would imagine the area required to meet the calorific demands of the UK population would be larger than the area of the UK so we would have to import food, exporting our environmental impact abroad.

This would depend on how we choose to eat, perhaps? But Britain made a very clear choice against food self-sufficiency when it repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, choosing manufactures and free-trade over agriculture and protectionism. One interest was sacrificed to another, after prolonged and intense debate, sealing the direction of the nation's travel for many decades. It would probably be impossible thereafter to again achieve a position of food self-sufficiency. This was a choice easily as stark and consequential as Brexit.

SA Chris

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#1460 Re: Books...
January 09, 2020, 03:07:30 pm
Still plenty of fish in the sea!

Actually not either, the Clearances forced people from the land to the coast, who became fishermen, hence the present day lack of herring

Cornish

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#1461 Re: Books...
January 09, 2020, 07:32:21 pm
I too stayed of Wilding for ages despite all the good reviews, eventually got around to it and couldn't agree more, very interesting, obviously not the right direction for all farming in the UK but brilliant land management (or lack thereof) for nature. Well written and a pretty quick read.

Also, just finished reading Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. Awesome. By the noble prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk. The novel is set in rural Poland and follows an eccentric older woman as a string on shocking events occurs. Apparently its caused genuine political outrage in Poland...
The translation is brilliant, bar one confusing bit were a Blake poem is translated to polish and then back again for our benefit.     

Another one  - The last Hillwalker, my mum gave me this for Christmas, can't stand it, struggled throught about a hundred pages and sacked it.

Johnny Brown

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#1462 Re: Books...
January 10, 2020, 12:03:43 pm
I haven't read this but I did hear her on Desert Island Discs. Whilst it sounds like a nice idea...

You should read it.

Their change was not initially driven by ideals but by facing the stark reality that they couldn't make the economics of modern farming work for their land. What is interesting is that not only did the changes have rapid and significant effects on wildlife, but they also ended up with a viable business.

cowboyhat

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#1463 Re: Books...
January 10, 2020, 07:07:43 pm
Once in a while you meet a book at just the right moment in your education, and you go flying along the learning curve together.

Thats a lovely phrase and I would cast it wider, when you bump into a lot of things in life the timing is important.

lyric from a couple of years ago
I could have been yours
you could have been mine
we didn't want it
at the same time


which applies to pretty much all my relationships, with the exception of the one i'm in.


Falling Down

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#1464 Re: Books...
January 11, 2020, 12:32:48 pm
Some great books there JB.  I was planning to read the Overstory after listening to Richard Powers being interviewed on one of the Emergence podcasts whilst I was cooking.  LINK.  The Lark book covers quite a lot of the farming and land-use history so might be of interest.

This week I read John Higg's short book William Blake, Why He Matters More Than Ever. It's only seventy pages long but really good.  Higgs wrote that great book on the KLF, Robert Anton Wilson and Magick and several other really interesting essay type books.  I've yet to see the exhibition at the Tate so thought this might be a good precursor.

I started an eight week online seminar on Tuesday night with Tom Cheetham on The Visionary Imagination and specifically Henry Corbin's influence upon Charles Olson so have been reading Olson, Robert Duncan, Ivan Illich and Jed Rasula.  Corbin was a theologian and mystic who was the first to translate Heidegger's Being and Time into French. It's a wonderful swirl of phenomenology, poetics, the creative imagination, archetypal psychology and spirituality.  Proper geeking out. :smartass:

"Course Description - Henry Corbin's work first came to the attention of readers in the US in 1957 when his Eranos lecture "Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism" was published in the Bollingen series. Among the early readers was the influential poet Charles Olson. This alone would have assured that Corbin's work would become more widely known in the community of poets. But there were many people in the artistic and literary communities who read the Bollingen books with enthusiasm. In 1960 Avicenna and the Visionary Recital appeared as the first of three full-length books to be published in the Bollingen Series. These kept Corbin's work in full view for many years. His work was widely read and had a significant impact on many poets in the 20th century, in particular in the US. His ideas of the visionary recital and of ta'wil as spiritual hermeneutics were perfectly suited to the radical poetics of many writers and thinkers at the time. We'll explore the influence of Corbin and how his ideas were adapted and applied. But more broadly, we'll explore some of the most interesting current thinking about the nature of language and meaning as it applies to the kind of hermeneutics that is central to Corbin's cosmology of imagination. "


jwi

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#1465 Re: Books...
January 12, 2020, 10:27:56 pm
Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon by Jean-Paul Dubois. The winner of the Goncourt price for 2019.

A melancholic novel about the brotherhood of men. The narrator, son of a Danish pastor and a Toulousaine art/pr0n-cinmea owner is sharing his prison cell with a Hell's angels enforcer. Having nothing in common the prisoners still demonstrate how we can make the unbearable bearable by being sensitive to others, just as the narrators parents demonstrate the opposite. Beautifully written, but as almost every Danish phrase is mistranslated and as the biker speaking with a very unlikely vernacular for a Quebecois gangster (according to Canadians, I would not know) I do not think a lot of research went into this short book.

« Last Edit: January 12, 2020, 10:33:36 pm by jwi »

andy popp

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#1466 Re: Books...
January 13, 2020, 06:43:36 am
A mixed bag then?

Over the weekend I read two short novels by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz - Autumn Quail and The Search. He ploughs a quite narrow thematic path (men having existential crises, basically) but is always absolutely compelling. If you've not read him start with the Cairo Trilogy.

jwi

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#1467 Re: Books...
January 13, 2020, 09:23:06 am
No, good if you like really melancholic stories... Everyone dies. But not all men inhabit the world in the same way.

Nevertheless, well written with a strangely uplifting morale. The canadians really cannot bear that Quebecois gangsters speak with a patois found only in Paris's suburbs, but I did not notice that course. I noticed a lot of mistranslations between French and Danish, the funniest being Østre Strandvej [east beach road] = La route de huitres [The oyster road].

cowboyhat

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#1468 Re: Books...
January 13, 2020, 03:33:44 pm
A mixed bag then?

Over the weekend I read two short novels by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz - Autumn Quail and The Search. He ploughs a quite narrow thematic path (men having existential crises, basically) but is always absolutely compelling. If you've not read him start with the Cairo Trilogy.

Second Cairo Trilogy, i loved that when I read it albeit quite some years ago now. Hoovered it up.

Think its been mentioned on here before.

dunnyg

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#1469 Re: Books...
January 13, 2020, 03:52:41 pm
Yeah, it was, it's sat on my kindle ready for my next travels. Looking forward to it!

nik at work

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#1470 Re: Books...
January 13, 2020, 07:09:43 pm

This week I read John Higg's short book William Blake, Why He Matters More Than Ever. It's only seventy pages long but really good.  Higgs wrote that great book on the KLF, Robert Anton Wilson and Magick and several other really interesting essay type books.  I've yet to see the exhibition at the Tate so thought this might be a good precursor.

Went to this towards the end of last year, was very underwhelmed tbh. Wish I’d chosen the Gormley instead...

Falling Down

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#1471 Re: Books...
January 16, 2020, 01:25:59 pm
Went to this towards the end of last year, was very underwhelmed tbh. Wish I’d chosen the Gormley instead...

I’ve heard mixed reviews - I plan to go in the morning when it’s quiet so there’s some space.

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#1472 Re: Books...
January 16, 2020, 02:17:46 pm


Also, just finished reading Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. Awesome. By the noble prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk. The novel is set in rural Poland and follows an eccentric older woman as a string on shocking events occurs. Apparently its caused genuine political outrage in Poland...
The translation is brilliant, bar one confusing bit were a Blake poem is translated to polish and then back again for our benefit.     



I really enjoyed this too.

Falling Down

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#1473 Re: Books...
March 14, 2020, 01:19:32 pm
Thought a timely update of this thread might be in order.

Lanark by Alasdair Gray the Scottish artist and writer who died earlier this year. This is a brilliant, strange and somewhat difficult book.  Allegory, science fiction, coming-of-age, social realism all tumbling over each other across four books starting with number three, then back to one and two finishing with book four.  It follows two characters, Duncan Thaw and Lanark who may or may not be the same person, or one an imagined version of the other, set in Glasgow and Unthank.  Gray wrote it between the early fifties and late seventies and it has a 'bakelite' post-war quality.  I can't say I enjoyed reading it all, or maybe I did, perhaps uncomfortable would be a better description?  It reminded me a bit of 'Wolf Solent' with some '1984' and 'The Divine Comedy'.  I keep thinking about it.

The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun, also an artist and writer.  Is a lovely book about Cornwall. Part travelogue, part biography, psychogeography (way before the situationists), natural and folklore history. I loved it, especially the chapter on The Woodcutters, a group of photo-hippies who settled in the area near her studio.

Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description by Tim Ingold.  I read this as one of the texts on a course on poetics and the visionary imagination.  It's absolutely brilliant and one of those books that changes the way you exist in the world.  Here's a quote from a review "This book will be of great interest to artists, writers, geographers, climatologists, outdoor activity sports people (rock climbers etc) and anyone with an interest in questioning conventional Western ways of engaging with, using and representing the landscape which we inhabit."  There are .pdf's online as it's quite expensive to buy.  A great companion piece to David Abram's 'Spell of the Sensuous'.


andy popp

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#1474 Re: Books...
March 14, 2020, 01:44:05 pm
Good time for an update, as we're all likely to be spending quite a lot of time at home. Just went out for a brief ride around the neighbourhood and all seems calm and largely normal.

From the little I've read, Ingold is a superb thinker/writer. Three recent or ongoing reads:

The End - the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's Min Kamp series. It is flawed. I could have quite happily lived without the huge digression in the middle, though I did read it and understood its purpose (or, I think I did, somewhat). The "meta-ness" of this volume is also on a whole other level compared to the other volumes. This is a book essentially about its own composition. But when he is simply in his own life, and that of his family, he is often wonderful. There's a greater lyricism to his writing in this volume, I thought. And the final section on his wife's mental illness is heartbreaking and tender.

Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood: taut prose, the wonderfully vivid presence of the narrator (and thus the author), and an economical but very rich evocation of a time and a place, the working class Copenhagen neighbourhood of Vesterbro in the 1920s.

Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology. I'm a little over one hundred pages in and am totally engrossed. The scope and ambition are huge, but I'm very impressed. He controls it all superbly and so far hasn't left me floundering. The writing is very good too, even in translation.

 

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