Reading for the Week of 5/22/2022

Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. Once again, my article/blog reading was down this week because of my book reading and my renewed focus on fiction writing.

Books

Finished

• The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume 9 by Will and Ariel Durant.
• This Old Man: All In Pieces by Roger Angell. With Angell’s recent passing, I felt compelled to go back and read his writing. I started with this recent memoir, which I had read once before when it first came out. I ordered a bunch of Angell’s books and plan on continuing to go through them.
• The Dogs of Christmas by W. Bruce Cameron. This one requires some explanation. Each weekday morning, I sit with Grace and we read together. She picks the book. Back in January, she picked out this book, and it took us five months to get through the entire thing, 20 minutes at a time each morning. Since I read the whole thing, I felt that it was okay for me to add it the list of books I have read since 1996.

In Progress

• The Summer Game by Roger Angell. This was Angell’s first baseball book, the book made up of the baseball pieces he wrote for The New Yorker beginning in 1962.
• The Bend at the End of the Road by Barry N. Malzberg. A collection of critical essays on science fiction by a master of the form. Some of these I read in the magazines they were originally published in, but I’m now going through the entire collection as an exercise in admiration of the essay form.

Gave Up

• Rousseau and Revolution by Will and Ariel Durant. I was looking forward to this 10th volume in Will Durant’s Story of Civilization. It is the volume that won the Pulitzer prize. But having just read the previous two volumes (nearly 2,000 pages combined) I was ready for something else, and decided to set this one aside for now. I’ll return to it again in the future.

Articles/posts

• Pandora’s Text Box by Paul Ford (Wired, June 2022)
• A Writer Who Was Around the Game, and of the Fans by Tyler Kepner (New York Times, 5/24/2033)
• How to Marry a Millionaire (1953): “Look at that old fella what’s his name..” by Melanie Novak (Golden Age of Hollywood, 5/25/2022)
• Demo Vaults, PKM History, & an editable graph view by Eleanor Konik (Obsidian Roundup, 5/28/2022)

Any recommendations for books, articles or posts I should read? Let me know in the comments?

Written on May 28, 2022.