Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
After reading the play by Shakespeare last week, I decided to tackle Chaucer’s epic 8,000-line poem about the Trojan lovers, Troilus and Cressida (or Criseyde as Chaucer writes it). It’s…
books
Believing is Seeing
“He who permits himself to tell a lie once,” wrote Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, from Paris, France, 1785), “finds it much easier to do…
Troilus and Cressida
I’ve always found Troilus and Cressida a difficult play. The characters all seem jaded, cynical, opportunistic, stuffily sanctimonious, lecherous or simply underhanded. Some are merely unpleasant, others are despicable, reprehensible.…
Racism and the US Civil Rights movement retold
As I read through Rick Perlstein’s book, Nixonland, about American politics and life in the 1950s and 60s, the Civil Rights movement and the reaction to it by white Americans,…
Reading, Writing and Memory
“Memory,” he read the headline as he settled into the armchair, resting his elbows on the wide arms to expand the National Post paper to its fullest, “declines much slower…
The Game of the Book of Thrones
No, it’s not about that heavyweight book series by George Martin, or the TV series based on it (or even about how you really need to read the books to…
Review: Adventures of Unemployed Man
The Adventures of Unemployed Man is a comic book about the modern economy. How can an unemployed superhero believe in himself? How can the superheros fight against against the Just…
Review: The Life of Pi
We watched Life of Pi last night, a film that has garnered much critical acclaim and won four coveted Oscar awards (although it has not been without controversies). I had…
More’s Speech to the Mob
The scene is a riot, on the first day of May, 1517. It would later be known as Evil May Day,or Ill May Day. An angry mob, mostly comprised of…
This is not a post about being sick, although I am
I’ve been sick for 10 days now. I’m tempted to go on and on about my symptoms, but you can only get away with that if you blog regularly about…
What if you’re wrong?
Great visualization of the now-famous response from evolutionary biologist, author, and well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, when asked in 2006 about his argument that there is no god, “What if you’re…
What the Future Holds
In researching my latest book, I’ve been reading about predictions for the future: what will happen in technology, science, politics, government and medicine. It’s pretty fascinating what some see coming…
Notes for a Spring Evening
Late spring, Saturday night, sitting here surrounded by the trees and garden in full bloom, everything lush and full of life, my view from the front porch of verdant trees…
Midway in our Life’s Journey…
So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to…
Musing on Melville’s Poetry
I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is…
Hungry Planet pictures what we eat around the world
Whenever I shop for groceries, I’m reminded of our collective obsession with processed and packaged foods. As someone who makes an reasonable effort to make decisions that are good for…
Little Dorrit: BBC Drama
We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere…
Book Review: Letters from Nuremburg
The past week I’ve been reading Letters from Nuremburg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice by Senator Christopher J. Dodd. The introduction to the book pulled me in,…
10,000 or 20,000 hours?
Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent,…
Mastery: Self Help or Just Opinion?
Robert Greene’s new book has me somewhat flummoxed. It’s not at all like his previous books. The other books of his I have were all ‘meta’ books – books about…