"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

                                                                  Rosalind Russell as Mame Dennis

Such is the case when you walk into the hodge-podge pot pourri of books known as HALF-PRICE BOOKS.  HPB is an all-you-can-eat of ideas.  That's why I always walk out of there with a motley assortment of brain- ticklers.  Variety is the order of the day.  You're at once amazed at how much drek is published as well as how many jewels remain unmined.  I go in looking for polished gems, but most often come out with rough, semi-precious stones.  Turquoise instead of diamonds.   

The Greek phrase book I attacked right away.  Compact, sturdy and loaded with color illustrations.  Nice.

The Pater book is an edition from THE MODERN LIBRARY.  Originally published in 1873, it's a collection of essays and stories about a tiny coterie of artists spanning the French, Italian, and possibly Dutch Renaissance.  My ML edition was published in 1940.  It has the soft sepia tones of aged paper and the scent of your grandparents' closet.  That scent. That's what absolutely sends me.  Ever since I was a kid, I associate that scent of musty closet with hidden treasure.

The Writing Life is also a collection.  National Book Award authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, John Updike, and Norman Rush write about writing and a writing life.  Just flipping through it, whole paragraphs of sane, erudite, blunt prose have hooked me.  This is going to be my next portable feast.  It even has a great, useful blurb.  The blurb on the back groups the authors in three and offers a brief description of their contributions. Excellent! Above that it says "America's most honored authors, National Book Award winners and finalists, reveal what it means to be a writer."  Okay. Nice. I can use that information.  William Zinsser, in ON WRITING WELL,  bravely addresses many of the themes covered by the dozen and a half writers in TWL all by himself.  Annie Dillard, in her own WRITING LIFE, beautifully and simply pulls us into the isolation that is so necessary for a writer. 

The 100 Operas book is NOT written by the composer of "Fingal's Cave".  It's another Felix M.  One "S", not two.  This most portable of portables is the size of a large pack of cigarettes.  The slip cover is long gone; all that's left is the red hard cover with gold lettering.  It was copyrighted in 1913, then published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1940.  In the foreward, the publishers explain how the book was compiled to bring the wonder of opera to the masses.  Hey, it worked for me.  I went to see a Met production of "La Sonnambula" last week, and if I had not read the story of the sleepwalking lady, I would have come away with less -- not unenthusiastic -- but less appreciation of the drama.  In fact, I was a bit thrown by the fact that there's not much to the story.  It's short, not even particularly interesting, and the characters are a bit thick.  But when you see it in live HD with glorious voices and gorgeous costumes...wow!  They make you care!

I updated my SHELFARI site today.

RELATED POSTS:

ODD BITS ON A TRIP TO BARNES & NOBLE

HEAPIN' HELPIN' OF OLDIES BUT GOODIES

OLDIES BUT GOODIES, PARTE THE SECONDE

OLDIES BUT GOODIES 3: HORS D'OEUVRES OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS, APPETIZERS OF A. CONAN DOYLE

I totally adore Borders at Huebner Oaks!  Great service: I didn't have my discount card so they looked it up by my phone number.  Sweet!  And...AND! They had several Loeb Classics Library editions. Say what?! Oh yeah, bay-bee! I bought 4 -- because I felt guilty about buying 6.  They were located in the miniscule Philosophy section. South Texas.  Go figure.  I put F&D aside for the 18th time to start reading Thucydides.  (T-Diddy!)  It's the history of a war, but the beginning explains the settlement of Greece  before it was even called Greece.  I love that angle of history.  It reminded me of this other cool book I have about the barbarians vs. the Romans in Europe and Northern Africa.  And that stuff I like because it reminds me of Conan comics.  For more detailed information about this book series, visit my blog post ONLY ANTICIPATION REMAINED THERE IN ITS UNBREAKABLE HOME

Then there's this book, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE -- AND ZOMBIES.  I do not kid.  It's exactly what it sounds like! I'm pissing myself laughing already -- just from the premise.  Haven't even started reading the book yet.  You HAVE to see the cover: George Romero undoes a Regency Lady.  Oddly, my dad found a paperback of P&P that the library was getting rid of so he got it for me.  He told me about it when he saw the Zombies version.  The fickle finger of fate gave me a bit of a tickle.  There's just something about seeing the two versions side by side.

The wonderfully portable volume by Roman speech-meister Cicero has useful marginalia (not as icky as it sounds).  He lived in an exciting, turbulent time that makes for great History Channel documentaries.  The book is a collection of speeches and letters to and from him.  What makes this book stand out among the crowds on my shelves is that is has an interesting introduction.  Cicero lead a dramatic life that makes even dry, scholarly prose vibrate with vivacity.

For some reason, I was in the mood to re-read Nauti Dreams and Nauti Nights.  I like Dreams better.  Nights is too much like a 1970s romance where the guy is horrible to the woman and she falls in love with him while he's being horrible. WTF! In that sense, I am modern. A woman who falls in love with a man who treats her like crap is so wrong in so many ways. It reminds me of the Harlequins I used to read back in the day.  The man treated the woman badly because he hated himself for being weak and loving her. WTF, like, to the 10th power!  But I bought it.  And I accepted.  Because I didn't know any better.  Nowadays, not so willing to be a good little enabler and accept.

In the romance vein, Maverick is the new Elite Ops book from Lora Leigh.  The first book was about Nathan Malone and his new nom de guerre.  This one is about "Michah Sloane", former Mossad agent, and "Risa Clay", the daughter of "Jansen Clay" from "Hidden Agendas" (Keil and Emily's story).  It's pretty good, but like Wild Card, it shows signs of getting a tad stale.  I think I'm growing impatient with certain strains of character -- emotionally tortured ones, it seems like.  I guess I just no longer care to read pages and pages of unrelieved emotional turmoil.  I find such emotionally unbalanced stories irritating.  All the angst must be balanced out with moments of levity or simple sanity. Still love Leigh, though.

F&D is like an old Harold Robbins novel from the 1960s. Except without the glamour.  Without the money, sex and drugs.  Without attractive people.  Ha!  I know it won a Nobel Prize for literature, but that doesn't mean it's easy to read. Right now, I'm about 6 chapters in and it still sounds like a freakin' soap opera about men.  I'm sure it will get better as it goes along.  For the love of God, it has to.

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

Other posts that mention Loeb Classics:

ONLY ANTICIPATION REMAINED THERE IN ITS UNBREAKABLE HOME

ODD BITS ON A TRIP TO BARNES & NOBLE

Other posts that mention Lora Leigh novels:

AN ELITE OPS TITILLATING TIDBIT COMPLIMENTS OF LORA LEIGH

2009 PRE-ORDERS: FANNING THE FIRE OF DESIRE

NEW SERIES BY LORA LEIGH -- ELITE OPS (UNDER DEEP COVERS)

Wow! Ancient people are just like us!  They make mistakes; they wonder why the younger generation is so different from theirs.  They fight.  They make crude jokes.  Mothers and fathers complain about their kids.  Wives and husbands -- Oh my God!  Traveling through snippet after snippet, one tenet keeps making its presence felt:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A couple of the funnier (as in funny-ha-ha) bits are Lucian's dialogue between Pan and Hermes, entitled "Don't call me Daddy", and a raunchy scene from Aristophanes's Lysistrata. Pan and Hermes sound like Lex and Lionel Luthor having one of their heartless-to-heartless talks about their love lives and "why don't you love me, daddy?"  The original "desperate housewives" are Lysistrata and her married friends deciding to cut their husbands off from sex unless they end the war with Sparta.  And that's the polite explanation.  They are incredibly crude -- like trailer-park-trash crude.  Pan, as well.  I was shocked.  Was the original Greek really that earthy? (again -- polite euphemism)

The high road of ancient Greek writing is Hesiod's "Works and Days" and Pindar's "Olympian Odes". There's the Greek literature you learn in college.  High-minded, poetic, grand.  Pieces of key moments in Greek history are also included and make for exciting reading: the Peloponnesian War, the bit from Phaedo where Socrates is talking to his friends on the day of his execution, and, in a supremely ironic word-portrait -- the nobility of Brutus.  Yeah, THAT Brutus!

The Greek writings included in this vade mecum lean towards poetry, plays, and mythology.  Half of the book, however, is dedicated to pieces from the Latin/Roman writers such as Seneca, the 2 Plinys, and Petronius.  When you reach the Latin writing portion of the book, the subject matter takes a distinctive turn.  More story-telling, letter-writing, natural science, and one of my favorites -- a wonderful explanation of the zodiac by Manilius.  Ovid's Dido's letter to Aneas is also a favorite.  Considering when it was written, it has a modern feel to it.

What the Greek and Latin writings have in common is a penchant for recording history.  Cesear's The Gallic War, Josephus's the Jewish War, Herodotus's The Persian Wars, and  Livy's History of Rome.  On the lighter side, the Greeks have Aristophanes with his desperate Athenian housewives.  The Latin contingent has Petronius with his forays into the seedy party life of Rome.  They both also tell tall tales of temperamental gods and goddesses.  What's not to love!

This book should be a lot bigger than it is.  Really, it's ridiculous to take a tweezer's worth of these writings and consider that satisfying.  Either use longer sections of the selections or put more selections. It's like a dish of fussy little canapes where you have to eat about 47 of them to equal one good bite. But if you need a vade mecum, this is a really good one. 

The Harvard University Press has a web site where you can see all the books they offer in the Loeb Classical Series.  They even have a series for Renaissance classics called I Tatti Renaissance Classics.  Greeks are green covers; Latin writers are red covers; I Tatti is in azure blue and written in Latin and Italian, depending on the author. VIVA AZZURI !!  I get mine through www.amazon.com because my local seller probably doesn't even know these exist.  They're not cheap, but you can't call yourself educated unless you have experienced these writings.  There's a lot of them, so pick a topic you like, such as mythology or poetry or military history and read those.  Enjoy the visual treat of the original language and the translation on facing pages!

OTHER POST WHERE I MENTION THIS SERIES:

ODD BITS ON A TRIP TO BARNES & NOBLE

MY COLLECTION SO FAR: (I'm not broke enough yet.)

I Tatti Renaissance Classics

• Humanist Comedies
• Short Epics compiled by Maffeo Vegio

Greeks

• The Learned Banqueters by Athenaeus
• Aristophanes collection: Birds, Lysistrata, Women at The Thesmophoria

Latin

• The Art of Love and Other Poems by Ovid
• Agricola, Germania by Tacitus
• Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica by Horace

These are best stored with their own color because the red, especially, comes off on the other colors.  So I have a blue with red smudges on it and a green with red smudges.  I'm not so anal that I lose sleep over it, but someone out there will be and I live but to serve.  They run on average about $24.00, but some of the Latin and Greeks get marked down to about $19 sometimes. 

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My collection at SHELFARI

Here's a book that actually has a good blurb.  It sounds like a trailer for an action movie:

Lone Wolves of the Battlefield!  They track the enemy over land and lie in wait for a target to appear. Then they shoot to kill.  Armed with an unerring eye, infinite patience and a mastery of concealment, combat snipers stalk the enemy like a hunter after big game, with one deadly goal...ONE SHOT -- ONE KILL.

THE BOOK

Damn, that's heavy.  But this isn't a movie.  It's not a Tom Clancy novel. It's for reals, y'all.  It's not glamorous, fun, or hip.  It's damned dirty work. Soul-sucking, back-breaking, lonely work.  After reading this book, it's my considered opinion that, while all the armed forces have their "special" teams, sharpshooters/snipers are the most special.  For the simple reason that they have to do their job alone or with 1 spotter. Lonely.  They get dropped in dangerously close to the enemy. Suicidal.  They have to keep still for hours and hours and hours.  Torturous. 

You have to be the sort of man (as far as I know, there are no women snipers) who is okay being alone with only your thoughts for company.  You also have to be really good at math and physics.  I really liked how the men's stories included details about how they measure wind speed, barometric pressure, angles of the sun, and most impressive of all, their intimacy with their rifle and scope.  An experienced sharpshooter could tell you how much a bullet from his rifle will veer off-course depending on the slightest breeze and terrain.  All this from the book.  This was the pleasant part!

THE MEN

These stories of real-life missions are unapologetically un-PC. Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese are referred to in derogatory terms. Blunt, earthy, even salty, language – exactly what you’d expect from career military. The authors Charles W. Sasser and Craig Roberts collected stories from

• Roberts himself – A Marine Lance Corporal, Vietnam 1965
• The legendary Marine Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, Vietnam 1967, including the story of his famous signature – a white feather
• Army Sergeant William E. Jones, Normandy 1944
• Army Sergeant John Fulcher, Italy 1943-44
• Army Corporal Chet Hamilton, Korea 1952
• Marine Captain Jim Land, Vietnam 1966
• Marine Corporal Tom Rutter, Beirut 1983
• Marine Corporal Ernest R. Fish, Korea 1951
• Marine Corporal Ron Szpond, Vietnam 1966
• Marine Lance Corporal Jim Miller, Vietnam 1968
• Marine Private Daniel Webster Cass, Jr.; Okinawa 1945

THE RIFLES

If you’re into military history or history of weaponry, you will love Ch. 23. It doesn’t have a title, but reading this little chunk is a blast! Throughout the whole book, the men talk about their weapons. And they name names: M-1 Garand, Winchester Model 70, .45, .38, M-14, 106-millimeter recoilless anti-tank, Remington 700, M-79 grenade launcher, German Jaeger.  Pages 246-7 are peppered with letters and numbers designating different types of rifles and scopes -- it's enough to make you high if you're an afficianado of military weaponry.  There's a paragraph in the middle of p. 158 that details how intimate the relationship is between a sniper and his rifle. 

THE TRAINING

P. 171 pretty much sums up what it takes to be a successful sniper.  That comes straight from the mouth of Major R. O. "Dick" Culver, one of the men, along with Jim Land who started the first sniper school at Quantico.  Training is brutal.  Again -- you have only yourself.  At least in BUDs Training, you have a team to help you.  In sniper school, you learn to be a one-man lawn-mower.  You learn the mechanics AND psychology of being a sniper.  Ch. 23 gives a potted history of European sharpshooting since about the 1600s.  Now THAT'S cool!

Amazingly, as snipers are extremely, almost robotically disciplined, they are writers.  They journal every kill they make. They include details such as the rifle, scope, and bullet they used, terrain, weather, target data, success or failure. Painstakingly handwritten.  I found that particularly fascinating.

Again, this book does not glamorize the job of military sharpshooter.  It's honest, often sad, a little funny, dead serious when they discuss their weapons, and gruesomely detailed about missions.  This is a great little book about a painful, uncomfortable job.

View my collection at SHELFARI 

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"Hell in a handbasket."  Who uses handbaskets anymore?  Hell if I know...

Matt Groening knows hell.  He shows us hell.  He gives us hell -- from the POV a long-eared white rabbit (Contest: how many philosphical/psychological wisecracks can you make from the image of "long-eared white rabbit") suffering from weltschmertz.  From the sturm of school to the drang of love, Groening's message seems to be "vae victis" -- woe to the vanquished.  And even when it goes right, it's freaky and wrong! Two words: Akabar, Jeff.  In their little Freudian bubble.  Ick!  LOVE IS HELL is brilliant. The section titles are disarmingly blunt. Funny -- yet not.  True -- in a "trying to make it sound like a joke, but it's actually real" kind of way.

1. LOVE IS HELL
2. SCHOOL IS HELL
3. WORK IS HELL
4. HOW TO GO TO HELL

There are more, but those are the ones I have.

LIH and SIH pretty much remind you of stuff you already know: what types of boy/girl-friends to avoid, which types have "been hunted to extinction".  H2G2H is a conspiracy-theorists dream.  Simply stated -- distilled, concentrated anti-establishment rhetoric.  This book, in Mexico/Central/South America, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East would get your testicles electrocuted.  If you were a woman, they would sew some on you just to rip them off.

LIH is super hilarious. It has a lot of cool charts such as "9 Secret Love Techniques That Could Possibly Turn Men Into Putty in Your Hands" (some potential for feasibility but you wouldn't even want the type of man who would fall for these) and "9 Secret Love Techniques Women Find Well-Nigh Irresistible"  (Which they don't!).  The truth about fine art.  And my favorite: "Your Guide to Modern Creative Artistic Types -- The Writer". 

THE WRITER:

• Dominant Personality Trait -- self-absorption (what are blogs for, after all?)
• Secondary Personality Traits -- pomposity, irritability, whining (just the tip of the iceberg, really.)
• Distinguishing Features -- nervous twitching, bad posture (Please, you're too kind...)
• Haunting Question -- "Am I just a hack?" (2 true 2 B funny)
• How to Annoy Them -- "But how do you make a living?" (Also works for English majors, dance majors, philosophy majors, poets, artists)

If you like jugular humor, this is great stuff.  If you like THE SIMPSONS, this guy is why.  If you like to be cynical, bitter, and/or supercilious, these are your textbooks.  If you want a career in politics, read ANIMAL FARM, read H2G2H AND WIH -- then choose a career that will enable you to keep your soul.

 View my book collection at SHELFARI

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