Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)

Once again, in the glow of completing another "classic", I must reflect back on my high school English curriculum. I went to a super-high-achieving public school, but I think all of the emphasis was on math and science. At least that would explain the disparity in my SAT scores. I don't remember a whole lot about my English classes. The last year I can recall doing grammar and vocabulary work was ninth grade, and the literature assigned was all over the map. I believe it was at the tender age of fourteen that Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles was dropped in my lap with little context, so it is no wonder I hated it and ignored it (except for the movie) for the next 26 years.

What I really needed to appreciate it, assuming there was any hope for me at that age, was an historical and a literary context. We didn't learn a thing about the Victorian era in Britain or anything about the role of Wessex in the course of British history. Maybe they were expecting another class to field that one. Secondly, there should have been a more cohesive order to the selection of books to be read. For me, it wasn't until much later that I thought of putting authors like Austen, Dickens, and Hardy on a chronology. What trends were they establishing or working against? How did they approach the writing process?

With Tess 2.0, I had a better sense of these things, plus no problem reading the endnotes and supplements when I needed a little extra understanding. For this, I came out of the experience much better. Even though it was well over a hundred years ago, and in a foreign country, many of the themes of life's experiences shone through. Hardy was a bit of a rebel for being so frank about talking about the kind of things everyone knew was happening, but just didn't write about. Of course without this context, Hardy seems pretty darn prudish. So it's no wonder while so many students choose to revile the book. But all these years later, now I'm wondering if they have tours of the area. I guess that makes me a boring adult now.

On a housekeeping note, I'm tallying up my stats and it has been an embarrassingly bad reading year for me. I'm going to be mature and blame the marathon training, plus much of my reading energy being devoted to studying philosophy. There's a lot of good books on the horizon, so I'm looking forward to stepping up my game in 2017.

Go check out my new blog!

It's been a little quiet here since I've been putting most of my creative writing energy into my new blog Under The Tome. Here you can follow my mad quest to read the entire Stephen King bibliography, as well as watch all of the associated movies. As of this writing, I've read only the first book, Carrie, and seen the first movie, Carrie. So go over there and get in on the ground floor! Read along, comment, lurk, or whatever you like!

Don't worry, Under The Tome does not replace this blog. For the books that apply to both blogs, I will post in both places. Because you care. And so do I.

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (Tom Holland, 2003)

It's so great to begin a new year on March 1. At least that's when I started this. We'll see what date stamp actually ends up on here. Before we plunge into the 2016 Blog Experience, some points of housekeeping.

First, no weekly albums for now. I need a break and I don't relish starting eight weeks in the whole. God willing, I'll bring them back in 2017, hopefully with a bunch of exciting new stuff. Looking over what was reviewed - 365 of them in 2014 and 52 in 2015, I was amazed to see there are still plenty of great albums out there needing attention. And bad ones too. Those might actually be more fun to write about!

Second, while the books are holding down the fort this year, I'm starting a reading project that will live on a different blog site. Unlike this little vanity project, this would be a site I would like to promote in the best of completionista tradition. Essentially, I plan to read every Stephen King book written, from Carrie to whatever he most recently published by the time I finish. This will be a very long undertaking since I still want to read other things, but I'm hoping that the pacing is properly enough to give each work the proper amount of thought and consideration. When the site goes live (probably on the first post on Carrie since I don't want to be a tease) I will give out of the details, including a name and a link (neither of which I have thought of!).

That's that. Now let's travel back in time to late 2015. I am desperately hoping to complete a 43rd book for the year, but must settle for the crushing humiliation of falling ten books short of my goal and not getting a flashy badge on Goodreads. Book 43 of 2015 must therefore become Book 1 of 2016.

Rubicon is a darn fine way to start of the new year, earning a bona fide 5-star rating, something only about one in six books achieve and particularly rare in recent years either because I'm becoming jaded or picking worse-than-usual books. Tom Holland is an excellent writer and has managed the trick of writing books that educate the beginning learners, yet can still be enjoyed by folks with degrees in the field. I was a little worried about what I had gotten myself into when I was a little underwhelmed by his 2005 book Persian Fire, which chronicles the epic conflict between Greece and Persia. I was hoping for a more Persia-centric account, but Holland had a uphill battle in that most of the sources come from the Greeks. Therefore it ended up reading a bit more like a standard Persian War story than a fresh new angle. Rubicon, on the other hand, occurs during one of the most heavily-chronicled periods of world history, plus I think the subject matter lies somewhat closer to Holland's expertise, all of which made for a really enjoyable reading experience.

Why this book, among the plethora of reading choices about the late Republic era? First off, it is a fresh account, which considers the vast amount of prior scholarship in its narrative. Holland moonlights as a novelist, so it doesn't hurt that it reads like fiction (in a good way) at times. More interesting, however, is the lens Holland uses to examine the period. His main interest here is the role of the Roman citizen during a time of great violence among two parties, the optimates and the populares. In fact, he indicates that he had hoped to call the book Citizens, but that title is already owned by a well-respected work on the French Revolution by Simon Schama. The Rubicon incident itself is not the entire focus of the book, but, all cliches aside, it remains perhaps the single most dramatic point in the turbulent flow of late Republic history, therefore Holland wasn't ashamed to use it as the title.

The copy I read was borrowed from the public library and the book is commonly held by most public libraries and many academic libraries. Look up the book on Worldcat to find a library near you that carries it and check it out for yourself!

(Note for a new year: all book cover images are linked to Goodreads data and are intended as fair use for this decidedly non-commercial endeavor.)

Live at Kelvin Hall (The Kinks, 1967)

First, a blog update of sorts. As one can plainly tell from the ever-dwindling content here, my heart has sort of wandered away from the project. I've got some ideas for 2016 to refresh things a little, but clearly I can't keep up with the drumbeat I set for myself. Hell, I can't even conceive of how I managed to blog sort-of-daily on albums through 2014. All I can say is shifting priorities, as with everything, are behind the changes. My plan at this point is to finish dialing up the random albums weekly and I'll mop up in 2016. The books will be dealt with as time permits, since I never plan to quit reading and I'm not under any self-imposed timetable (though I try to shoot for one a week, something I've failed to do since 2012!).

But enough of this hand-wringing, let's talk about the Kinks!

Live At Kelvin Hall (released as The Live Kinks in the United States), is one of the earlier fully-live albums. Technically, they were beat to the punch by The Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It! (with the amusing alternate title Have You Seen Your Mother LIVE!), which was released a few months earlier, but the that recording was particularly notorious for faking some of the tracks. In that case studio recordings were augmented with canned audience noise. The Kinks weren't entirely innocent here either, but the unusually lo-fi sound strangely plays in their favor. The instrumentation is fairly rough and the audio quality is downright awful in places, but this gives it an air of authenticity. The audience noise is clearly faked in a many if not all places, obviously looping around in jarring fashion. Upon the most recent listen, the vocals seem freakishly close to the studio versions. Now I know that some/many bands can do a masterful job replicating their studio sound on stage, but the rough-and-tumble image of the band doesn't support that the Kinks were such a band, not to mention later genuine live recordings by the band vary moderately from the studio versions. The band enjoyed a good deal of audience participation and general goofing off, which leads me to think that they probably weren't overly concerned about note-perfect replication.

In spite of its groundbreaking status as a live release, Live at Kelvin Hall was a bust. It didn't even see the light of day in the UK until early 1968, a full year after the performance itself. Yet, for Kinks fans it is a wonderful document to have, capturing the band somewhere between two of their most inventive albums, during that strange period of time where they were banished from the United States. Not too far removed from Beatlemania, the "screaming girls" audience is still in command, but the song selection favors the two most recent albums. Only Ray Davies could get an arena full of teeny-boppers to merrily sing along with "Sunny Afternoon" like they were playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (girls: "I've got a big fat mama trying to break meeeeee!! AAAAAAAAAA!!!!"). With "Waterloo Sunset" and "Village Green Preservation Society" still to come, I can only imagine what future performances had in store for these fans.

Moving on to 2015

And here ends the project. While I failed to read 52 books this year, I nearly killed myself to write at least something each day about a different album in my possession. I now close the book on that project and leave it as a digital scrapbook to be preserved somewhere in Google world headquarters until the next electromagnetic pulse. If you are visiting from a future year (and about 13 hours from now that will be a fact), please enjoy a big slice of random music and book reviews.

I'm not going away, but I've come to realize, especially in the past month, that this blog thing can consume your life if you aren't careful. However I like to put down my thoughts from time to time, so I'm going to scale back the music to weekly and continue the books as I finish them. I've still got plenty of thoughts on plenty of things around me.

To anyone reading this, have a wonderful 2015 and thanks for stopping by.

Commenting enabled....pray for me

With a minor sense of ambivalence, I've opened up the commenting to anyone who feels so inspired to do so. I don't need comments to validate my life (this project is for me, not for mass consumption). Stupid troll and robot comments will be dealt with as they appear and if the spam gets to be too much I can always reverse myself. So, you think I'm full of bunk? You're probably right, and now you can tell me to my virtual face.

Blog Makeover

I'm refreshing the tags and various non-post-based content on this blog, mainly to reflect the large amount of music blogging I've have done this year. Old posts (pre-2014) have been reverted to drafts (i.e. my own personal scrapbook). Look for a new style (goodbye, minimalism) and probably title in the days ahead. I'm pretty much writing this note for my own amusement, but what the hell.