Read A Book A Week
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Carto’s Recent Posts
- Earthsea — Dragons and Wizards
- Flowers on Note Cards
- An Exhibition of Paintings by Monet
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- The Thinker Waits
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- Favorites 2017 — Transition to Winter
- Transformation — Land’s End turns chilly
- Peek — Halloween in Palo Alto
- Stanford at Night
Carto’s Most Viewed Posts
- Téa Obreht—Tigers, Myths and Death Rites In The Balkans
- Zero To Hero — Donna Tartt spins a murder tale in Vermont
- Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch Unchained
- About Carto
- Collective Bargaining in Butte Montana
- Blue Dogs in my Dreams
- Georgia: An Echo of Chain Gang Justice
- Happy New Year—Has The Harry Potter Series Really Ended?
- Day-By-Day-2011
- John Irving—Twisted River, A Writer Drifts Through Life
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Posts Organized by Category
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Wallace Stevens has the final word
Piled on a chair in front of me is a stack of books about 2.5 feet tall. The topics in these books range from Nuclear Engineering to Great Speeches in History—the former being about the principals of nuclear reactors and … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, Poetry
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Art, Zen and Self-help
Continuing the project of cleaning up my library, I begin sorting out some of the art and self-help books. (Self-help is another class of books that should do well in the eBook market). One of the first books I notice … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, eBook, Non-fiction
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Animal Spirits Rule
The conservatives had their Voodoo Economics and now liberals have Animal Spirits. The term Animal Spirits, as an economic concept, originated in the works of John Maynard Keynes in the 1936. Keynes argued that private-sector decisions sometimes produced inefficient outcomes, … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, eBook, Non-fiction
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Beautiful Books are Exciting
Reviewing the books in my library as part of this downsizing project has reacquainted me with several of my books that I had not picked up in quite a while. I am looking now at three hardbound volumes by historian Barbara … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, History, Non-fiction
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Scholars, Spain and the Americas
Once, while studying the expansion of Spain’s empire and the conquest of the Americas, I accumulated a hodgepodge of books that included several scholarly tomes about Spain and Latin America. These books, in general, seemed to be written to satisfy … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, eBook, History
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The Impenetrable Umberto Eco
In general I’m all for a novel that presents difficulty for a reader, but the novels of Umberto Eco seem to raise obscurity to a new level. I’ve enjoyed and continue to enjoy complex novels by García Marqués (A Thousand … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, History, Mystery, Translation
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Too Many Birding Guides
Today I tackled the shelves containing my birding field guides and the stacks of travel guides that I usually consult before a birding trip to another country. Other than actually being in the field looking at birds, here is nothing … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, eBook, Nature
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Reading in Bangkok
Removing the several C. P. Snow novels from my library uncovered a tall stack of paperbacks from the days when The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by Le Carré sold for 75¢. Included in the stack were several … Continue reading
Posted in Classics, Deaccession, Fiction
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Avoid Boring Conversation
While going through a stack of C. P. Snow’s novels to pick some to remove from my library I came across a bookmark: “Old Chinese Proverb—ABC, Avoid Boring Conversation”. Good advice. However, conversation was often hard to come by when … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, Fiction
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Grimpow in Translation
The medieval adventures of the teen-aged Grimpow tapped into the potentially vast bonanza of sales to Young Adults that was created by the Harry Potter series. But, the first volume of the Grimpow series, Grimpow—The Invisible Road, didn’t quite measure … Continue reading
Posted in Deaccession, Fantasy/Adventure, Harry Potter, Translation
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