Category Archives: books

Notes

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It seemed only right that I include a photo of our younger cat.

Over the weekend, I attended the Ann Arbor Art Fair, the featured artist of which was Katie Musolff. Her work is stunning, and I was delighted to see this magnificent painting in person. The work of Lauchlan Davis also attracted my attention, so much so that I purchased a numbered print of her 2022 “Duck, Duck, Goose.” 

During my music lesson this week, my teacher corrected an embouchure issue with which I have been struggling in piccolo practice. What a difference! Both my concert flute and alto flute are now en route to the technician for annual cleaning and adjusting, so for the next week or so I’m working with my trusty Yamaha.

Only three meetings remain in the Plato’s Republic reading group. Between the discussion and David Roochnik’s fabulous lectures, I am learning far more than I did forty years ago when I first read this work as a college freshman.

Slowly, surely, I am making my way through my Latin I tutorial. I have reached the point at which I can say that it brings me as much satisfaction as my music studies. (And it is just as difficult.)

Also slowly, surely, I’m accumulating mileage. The air quality and increasing temperatures make exercise difficult, but we take our primary walk early enough to mitigate some of the concerns.

I am a few pages away from finishing a smart and entertaining novel:  Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang. (Review here.) In fact, the last few books I’ve read are worth mentioning:

■ The Fold (Peter Clines; 2015. Fiction.)
■ The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman; 2020. Fiction.)
■ The Man Who Died Twice (Richard Osman; 2021. Fiction.)
■ The Bullet That Missed (Richard Osman; 2022. Fiction.)
■ Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language (Nicola Gardini; 2019. Non-fiction.)
■ The Guest (Emma Cline; 2023. Fiction.)

The novels represent my favorite sort of summer reading (engaging, light without being utterly frivolous, sometimes even thought-provoking), and Gardini’s meditation on Latin was perfect. (Review here.)

Saturday morning

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Image captured on June 14 walk.

News of Alan Arkin’s death prompted me to set aside Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty yesterday and watch Glengarry Glen Ross (appreciation here) and Little Miss Sunshine. It had been a long time since I had last seen GGR, but LMS is one I have revisited; both, as they say, hold up. A friend recommended Arkin’s books for younger readers, so I read The Lemming Condition earlier this year (review here); I may pull the sequel from the shelf today.

It’s a gloomy, gray, humid morning here, the sort of morning during which one thinks about the many things one could do, then actually accomplishes little. I’d like to buck that trend. (Is anyone else chuckling?)

A few more books

By Posted in books, music, nature 2 Comments

Two gifts and one recommendation.

I’m halfway through My Murder and about 150 pages into Empire of Pain; music practice is going well; and I’m (slowly) developing a routine for studying Latin.

The drought continues, so I’m using weepers on the days permitted for our location to ensure the trees and bushes make it through another summer. The containers and raised beds are doing all right, but the finches have begun to shred the sedum despite my vigilant refilling of the bird bath.