Going for a short entry today, these are the current books I'm reading, looking forward to how they will all, in one way or another, add to The Story:
- How the world of 19th-Century France produced the woman we know as Colette and how she, in turn, added to what women can be today.
- One woman's connection with the music that helped make my world. I'm beginning to see strands of connection between this world and that of the world of Colette - both growing out of and contributing to a cultural shift.
- Haymarket, Leopold and Loeb, Scopes, Sweet - amid myriad other trials both in and out of the courtroom - and the man who fought some of the most important battles of our time.
- I'm only about half way through this one, but I'm assuming, given the title, that Barzun is about to tell me where he thinks we went wrong.
- It must have been one of the great dramas of discovery in art's history, a Quattrocento buddy movie: Brunelleschi and Donatello, one at each end of the measuring string, flushed with effort and determination, clambering over the ruins, chopping aside the entangling bushes and creepers, measuring heights, widths, and spacings, tirelessly noting inscriptions, discovering a lost Rome. I'd pay good money to see that movie.
- Still chopping my way through the brambles of the Wars of the Roses.
- On Kindle. Another tale of the time of Alfred the Great, in which Cornwell, through his hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg, reminds us that there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel. A cautionary tale.
In-depth reviews to follow at the proper time.