Reviews and Comments

Trippy.

Short and sweet poems of chants, charms, laments, and blessings. Sharing with my friends.

Lots of personal stories and progeny-gushing, and nifty art. More challenges than I can handle given it's a library book, but if I owned this, I'd try some of them.

Did not know how many forms of qigong there were, or that a qigong diet and sexual qigong existed, until I read this book. Qigong in its inner and outer forms apparently has many benefits, and it's gentle enough for anyone.

Reading Oscar Levant is like opening a dusty room and allowing fresh air to blow in. Mindboggling the names dropped in this volume of reminiscences: Glenn Gould, Ignace Padarewski, Algonquin Round Table members, the Marx Brothers, Erik Satie, the Gershwins, the Kennedys.

Best enjoyed in small doses. The iambic pentameter verse in Enlightenment custom, the reach for words beyond the Concise Oxford English dictionary, the peregrinations, the catalogues, can weary. If I encountered someone like this in the 21st century I'd dismiss her as a pretentious influencer who is trying too hard. Still, I figuratively clutch to my bosom a person who enjoys hot baths, Sundays, reading, taking umbrage, cinema the way I do.

At first the deluge of sailing terms slowed my progress, but my memory crawled far back enough to appreciate the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons, not even reaching their teens and camping on unpopulated small islands.

I am wowed to see that at time of press, January 1919, bookseller Roger Mifflin dismisses Douglas Fairbanks guide to life book as mere piffle, derides Tarzan the Ape Man as cheap entertainment, and says " to laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit", yet counts among his collected treasures an autographed letter from a Charles Spencer Chaplin.

Not the greatest crime mystery novella, and a lot of ephemeral writer mentions escape me, a few didn't. I do not know if the remark about a cinematic epoch dawning with the Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew's foray into motion pictures is sarcastic or didn't age well. They aren't depicted on many Hollywood history or encyclopedia books.

I read over a dozen Pinkwater novels, and from the 5 Novels for the past three summers (my family and) I read a Pinkwater novel. The Last Guru started out well, but... well, I finished it ad it was pleasant. Delighted to know that Mr. Pinkwater is familiar with at least one work of James Hilton.