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Recent reading
Feb. 23rd, 2021 04:40 pm I did pretty well with my Goodreads reading challenge in the second half of 2020, ending up with an even 30 books for the year against a challenge goal of 25. This year I set the goal for 30, and have already clocked in 7, so assuming I'm able to keep up that pace I should clear the 2021 goal with no issue. (On the other hand, I'm woefully behind on movies, only having watched 5 this year to date!)
Currently I'm about halfway through Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which covers the history of the New Hollywood movement of American auteurs that started in the late 1960s (Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate largely set the stage, with Easy Rider bringing it to the mainstream and confirming the end of the traditional studio system) and lasted until about 1980 (with the failure of Heaven's Gate). The book is exhaustive and, with a relatively small print size, feels longer than its 440 pages of text, but overall it's very interesting and certainly a good way find movies to add to my watch queue.
A particular highlight among books I've read thus far this year is Machines of Another Era, the debut collection of Bess Winter. The stories all in some way deal with a looking back toward the past, whether that be just into the personal history of the lead character, or looking back into an entirely different period (often the 19th or early 20th century). I discovered its existence and subsequently bought it after hearing Winter read an excerpt of "Talking Dolls" on the Smithsonian's Sidedoor podcast (an episode about Thomas Edison's early talking dolls of the 1890s) and will look forward to this author's next work.
Currently I'm about halfway through Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which covers the history of the New Hollywood movement of American auteurs that started in the late 1960s (Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate largely set the stage, with Easy Rider bringing it to the mainstream and confirming the end of the traditional studio system) and lasted until about 1980 (with the failure of Heaven's Gate). The book is exhaustive and, with a relatively small print size, feels longer than its 440 pages of text, but overall it's very interesting and certainly a good way find movies to add to my watch queue.
I also recently read Jean Shepherd's collection The Ferrari in the Bedroom. This was the third of the four collections of his work published during his lifetime (preceded by In God We Trust: All Other's Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters, and followed by A Fistful of Fig Newtons), but the last one I hadn't yet read, and unfortunately Ferrari is by far my least favorite of them. The first two Shepherd books were marked primarily by coming-of-age/nostalgia stories, many of which served as the basis for the movies A Christmas Story, My Summer Story (aka It Runs in the Family) and Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss, and while the third book, Ferrari, contains a handful of those, it's more focused on essays railing about modern-day (for the 1970s) popular culture tropes. There's some amusement to be found, but overall a lot of it comes across as dated and "nothing-we-haven't-heard-before." Fortunately, the fourth book, Fistful, is a return to form and contains a good mix of coming-of-age stories, college and army stories and some cultural essays. Ferrari is the one of the four Shepherd collections I'm considering not keeping in my permanent collection, but it does have at least two really good stories - "The Indy 500" and "Harold's Super Service" - so I may end up hanging onto it for those after all.
A particular highlight among books I've read thus far this year is Machines of Another Era, the debut collection of Bess Winter. The stories all in some way deal with a looking back toward the past, whether that be just into the personal history of the lead character, or looking back into an entirely different period (often the 19th or early 20th century). I discovered its existence and subsequently bought it after hearing Winter read an excerpt of "Talking Dolls" on the Smithsonian's Sidedoor podcast (an episode about Thomas Edison's early talking dolls of the 1890s) and will look forward to this author's next work.
