Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Things that books can do for you...

A list of great works from Dean Duncan, film history professor at BYU:

http://duncantalkingaboutfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/things-that-books-can-do-for-you/

The message: READ MORE!


How, or what, or where, you might ask.  Fair enough—here are a few helpful categories, and some terrific titles that you might start filling ‘em with:

Books that make me happy: Comet in Moominland/Moominland Midwinter (Tove Jansson)

Supplementary titles: Marcovaldo (Calvino), The Pickwick Papers (Dickens), Mythology (Hamilton), The Silent Clowns (Kerr), The Jungle Books (Kipling), Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Leacock), The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), Who Has Seen the Wind? (Mitchell), The Alligator Case (Pene du Bois), Borgel (Pinkwater), Wyrd Sisters (Pratchett), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), The Hobbit (Tolkien), Detectives in Togas (Winterfeld)

…and a few films…: The General (US/Keaton, 1926), City Lights (US/Chaplin, 1931), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (US/Hawks, 1953), Mon Oncle (France/Tati, 1958), My Neighbor Totoro (Japan/Miyazaki, 1985)

Books that make me work: The Well-Tempered Clavier, books I and II (J.S. Bach)

Supplementary titles: Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), Labyrinths (Borges), Lord Jim (Conrad), The Divine Comedy (Dante), The Wasteland and other Poems (Eliot), Short Stories (Faulkner), A Passage to India (Forster), The Trial (Kafka), An Experiment in Criticism (Lewis), The Sea Wolf (London), Under the Volcano, (Lowry), Songs Without Words (Mendelssohn), Paradise Lost (Milton), Complete Works (Shakespeare), A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)

…and a few films…: Ordet (Denmark/Dreyer, 1955), Pickpocket (France/Bresson, 1959), L’Aventura (Italy/Antonioni, 1960), Playtime (France/Tati, 1967), Distant Voices, Still Lives (UK/Davies, 1988)

Worlds (big books): The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard)

Selected titles: “The Princess and the Pea,” “Inchelina,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Magic Galoshes,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Wild Swans,” “The Flying Trunk,” “The Swineherd,” “The Angel,” The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Red Shoes,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Old Street Lamp,” “The Neighbours,” “The  Shadow,” “The Collar,” “The Flax,” “Everything in its Right Place,” “Under the Willow Tree,” “Five Peas from the Same Pod,” “She Was No Good,” “The Bottle,” “’Something’”, “The Old Oak’s Last Dream,” “The Bog King’s Daughter,” “A Story from the Dunes,” “In the Duckyard,” “The Ice Maiden,” “The Butterfly,” “The Janitor’s Son,” “Who Was the Happiest?” “Great Grandfather,” “The Gardener and his Master,” “The Cripple”
Supplementary titles: Watership Down (Adams), Brigham Young: American Moses (Arrington), Documentary (Erik Barnouw), Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Burns), Don Quijote (Cervantes, trans. Raffel), The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer, trans. Coghill), My Childhood/Apprenticeship/ Universities (Gorky), The Complete Fairy Tales (J. and W. Grimm, trans. Zipes), A Sound of Chariots (Hunter), The Moccasin Telegraph (Kinsella), Jerusalem (Lagerlof), Klondike Tales (London), Island (MacLeod), Moby Dick (Melville), Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (Yeats)

…and a few films…: Nanook of the North (Canada/US/Flaherty, 1922), Die Niebelungen (Germany/Lang, 1924), Rules of the Game (France/Renoir, 1939), Red (Switzerland/ Kieslowski, 1994), To Live (China/Yimou, 1994)

Heathens: The Plague (Albert Camus)

Supplementary titles: My Land and My People (the 14th Dalai Lama), Peter Pan (Barrie), Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk, trans. Neihardt), Analects (Confucius, trans. Huang), Beowulf (trans. Heaney), Catch-22 (Heller), Odyssey (Homer, trans. Fitzgerald), High Wind in Jamaica (Hughes), The Heroes of Asgard (E. and A. Keary), Dharma Bums (Kerouac), Tales from Ovid (Ovid, trans. Hughes), Saint Joan (Shaw), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), Barry Lyndon (Thackeray), Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

…and a few films…: Greed (US/von Stroheim, 1924), The Searchers (US/Ford, 1956), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Germany/Herzog, 1972), The Black Stallion (US/Ballard, 1979), The Story of the Weeping Camel (Germany/Mongolia, 2003)

Books that make me better: A Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan)

Supplementary titles: The Uses of Enchantment (Bettelheim), Mother Courage and Her Children/The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht), Forty Stories (Chekhov), Pinocchio (Collodi), The Wind in the Willows (Grahame), The Temple (Herbert), Imitation of Christ (a Kempis), Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), Nathan the Wise (Lessing), Perelandra (Lewis), The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle (Lofting), Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell), Black Beauty (Sewell), Walk in the Light and Twenty-Three Tales (Tolstoy), L’Assomoir (Zola)

…and a few films…: King of Kings (US/de Mille, 1927), Paul Tomkowicz, Streetcar-Railway Switchman  (Canada/Kroitor, 1953), Pather Panchali (India/Ray, 1955), …and Life Goes On (Iran/Kiarostami, 1991), Babe, a Pig in the City (US/Australia, 1998)

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Isaac's Storm in October

So, I'd been planning in my head that we'd get together this thursday, the 10th, but I forgot to post anything about it until now.

If that doesn't work, I'm booked all the other Thursdays in the month, so we'd be looking at November.

What say you all?

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

See you Thursday night

How about we go back to the South Fork of Provo Canyon and talk around a campfire at the same old place across the creek? Meet at my house at 7 to carpool or join us up there. I'll bring root beers and cream sodas.

Friday, August 16, 2013

September 12?

August has been a pretty busy month - what do you guys say to getting together the evening of September 12 for Master and Commander?

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Scott's Nominations

I decided to include something from a variety of genres, though I have included two non-fiction titles which is unusual for me. Aside from the two non-fiction books, I am very familiar with each author, but have deliberately picked titles I have not yet read so I will be equally pleased with whatever wins. Here goes.

In Sunlight And In Shadow - Mark Helprin

Elantris - Brandon Sanderson

Team Of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Down The Great Unknown - Edward Dolnick

Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke

A Perfect Spy - John Le Carre


September Nominations

I'm going to go ahead and post these suckers. I'll host our meeting in September. I dare you to find a book among these 6 that won't blow your mind.

The Cyberiad - Stanislav Lem

The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

World War Z - Max Brooks

Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson

The Double Helix - James Watson


Saturday, August 3, 2013

Another round?

My friend Dan Reed asked if we were still doing that man's book club. Not sure where we left off, but I'll put out some suggestions there and let you guys rank them for our next read. 





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