Lit

Chaucer; Medieval
We went to see The Canterbury Tales staged in Greenwich.  I only realised the point of some of it later.
Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse (a Poem of the Week, see below)
On Re-Imagining the Medieval - about recent and less-recent books aimed at helping us understand the medieval world.
The Miller's Tale (A Poem of the Week, see below).  For me, the most wonderful of the Tales, with a perfect, dovetailed, plot that works like a machine, with no words out of place. 
Which of course meant that I also had at some point to add the General Prologue.
Chaucer feels rich and contemporary to me, so it was only reasonable for me to buy the paper version of the Geoffrey Chaucer Blog. Which opened the ay for more spoofs by Alexander Pope and Bill Bailey (note: not Harry!)

Austen 
On Emma and specifically Chapter 11 - and then a trip to Box Hill

Poetry - General
Equivalence and Arundel (includes discussion of Larkin's An Arundel Tomb, and other material). Prompted by a Radio 4 programme, the next of which, on Browning's My Last Duchess, was disappointing.

Poems of the Week
Adrian Michell, To Whom it May Concern
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harry Ploughman
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt
Anonymous, The Ruin
W. H. Auden, September 1,1939
George Herbert, The Collar
Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush
Robert Graves, The Welsh Incident
Derek Jarman, Untitled poem from Modern Nature
Philip Larkin, Mr Bleaney
William Wordsworth, Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known
Not the poem of the week: Jilted John, Gordon is a Moron
Terry Pratchett, Ode to Multiple Universes
Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning
Benjamin Johnson, Ode to Himself Upon the Censure of His New Inn
Charlotte Mew, In Nunhead Cemetery and a short discussion in the context of the local area
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Peter Porter, Strontium to Mendeleyev
Another Poem (Brian Patten, Gust Becos I Cud Not Spel)
Graham Yates and Jonathan Young (Madness), The Liberty of Norton Folgate
Tom Barnes, Poem for Edward Lear (by request)
Wendy Cope, A Nursery Rhyme, as if it might have been written by T.S. Eliot
John Donne, Twickenham Garden
Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller's Tale. Before you ask, I am wholly unapologetic about choosing a long (or long-ish) poem as the PotW.
Tony Harrison, A Kumquat for John Keats
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Roger McGough, The Leader.  To be honest, as the negotiations on the makeup of the Government continue, there seemed to be no other choice.
Tomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. After the Aurcaria crossword earlier in the week with "Paths of Glory...Grave" as a solution I couldn't resist it.
John Hegley, A Somewhat Absent Minded Attempt To Be Politically Correct.
Philip Larkin, Toads.
G.K. Chesterton, The Rolling English Road
Humbert Wolfe, The Grey Squirrel
Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology
John Betjeman, In a Bath Teashop
Edward Thomas, This is no Case of Petty Right or Wrong
Thomas Hardy, In The British Museum
John Taylor, the 'Water Poet', The Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or The Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr - added, of course, following my Meandering.
Kerry Michael Wood, Hommage au Fromage
Spike Milligan, I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas
Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Lord Byron, So We'll Go No More a-Roving
Alexander Pope, In Imitation of Chaucer
Charles d'Orleans, Rondel: Le temps a laissé son manteau
Paul Verlaine, Mon Rêve Familier - and a note on translation
Ernest Dowson, After Paul Verlaine-I -and why it was chosen
Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Jenny Joseph, Warning and the prompting crossword
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
Bill Bailey, Pubbe Gagge
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Mine Own John Poynz
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Clive William Langer and Declan MacManus, Shipbuilding
Bertolt Brecht/Marc Blitzstein (English translator in 1954), Pirate Jenny
Madness (Michael Barson), My Girl
William Rose Benet, Mad Blake
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Lie
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland
Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnet 1: Loving In Truth
John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Henry Reed, Lessons of the War
The Specials, Ghost Town
John Betjeman, Hunter Trials
William Blake, London
Robert Burns, 1786, Epigram on Rough Roads
John Keats, A Song About Myself
Adrian Mitchell, Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody
James Thonson, William Blake
Ken Saro-Wiwa, The True Prison
Tomas Hardy, At a Luna Eclipse
John Keats, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
John Skelton, The Tunning of Elenor Rumming
Freddie Mercury, Killer Queen
Neil Hanlon and Thomas Walsh (aka the Duckworth-Lewis Method), Jiggery Pokery
William Blake, Jerusalem
John Lennon, Working Class Hero
Robert Southey, Porlock
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
John Cooper Clarke, I Don't Want to be Nice
T. S. Eliot, The Hippopotomus
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Madness (Michael Barson, Lee Jay Thompson), Embarrassment
W. H. Auden, After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
Bare Naked Ladies, The Big Bang Theory Theme Song
John Taylor, The Water-Poet, The Prayse Of The Needle
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: To a Young Child
Douglas Adams, Share and Enjoy
James Dyrenforth and Kenneth Leslie-Smith, Television
Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot
... and then in November 2011 I got carried away and started posting an awful lot of Pope.  Go to the month's archives for those verses.
Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
Charlotte Bronte, Apostasy
Clement Clarke Moore, Twas The Night Before Christmas
Walt Whitman, To A Stranger
... and again, there was a lot of Pope in December 2011
Thomas Hardy, The Woman In The Rye
By Lord Byron (George Gordon), She Walks In Beauty
T,S,Eliot, Rhapsody On A Windy Night
Charles Dickens, Gabriel Grub's Song
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Crossing The Bar
Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of Edinburgh, Scooping the Loop Snooper: an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem
Anon, The Tournament of Tottenham
John Keats, Sonnet. To A Lady Seen For A Few Moments At Vauxhall 
Bertolt Brecht, Radio Poem

Science
Sometimes, popular science books work best when read in a certain order.
Fossilising Hamsters, and Clay Shirky
My time in the Foyles' Maths and Physics department
About a meta-science blog
And there was a short sequence on Haldane prompted initially by the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture 2010. Which included his comments on beetles. And how his comments on size of organisation are reflected in Matthew Engel's book on railways. And a final note on size and scale generated by a Web site that youngest spotted.

Miscellany
Books in translation
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Holiday Reading
Revenges, Reworkings, Translations
Crenellation Request
On Slow Reading (Austen and Thomas)
On Bill Bryson and travel writing.
Miracle at the theatre
Derek Jarman's On Modern Nature
On getting things flat
On Let Me Die a Youngman's Death and its re-envisioning
On Ninian Smart and The Phenomenon of Christianity
On Calvino's Mr Palomar - linked, I'm afraid, to Monty Python
On The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and local pubs.
On Tolkien, Harry Potter, Books and Films - and how series and linked books change and develop. And a Potter crossword clue.
The Tempest on the Rye - and a picture.
A meander around London - and Turkey.
Black Wine of Thentis, Brollies and the British Museum
And an outbreak of bad language...
Something notably missing from J K Rowling's Harvard Commencement Speech.
A Reminiscence on reading Peter Tinniswood.
On Bunhill Fields and William Blake's Grave

Recent Reading
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carre (1974)
Snuff, Terry Pratchett (2012)
Terry Pratchett: The Spirit of Fantasy, Craig Cabell (2011) - execrable.
The Death of Grass, John Christopher (1956)
Reamde, Neal Stephenson (2011)
R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots, Karel Capek (1920)
The Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton   (1871)
Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, Savid Seed, (2011)
The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good, Matthew Crawford (2009)
Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley (1948)
Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley (1928)
Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley (1921)
Surface Detail, Iain M. Banks (2010)
The Life of Pi, Yann Martel (2001)
Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing, Peter Silverton, (2009)
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media, Brantley L Bryant (2010)
The Age of Wonder: How The Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes (2008)
Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History: Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, (2006)
A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin, (1982)
Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, (revised and expanded edition, 2006)
I Shall Wear Midnight, Harry Potter, (2010)
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud, (1993)
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson, (1999)
The Sky Road, Ken Macleod, (1999)
The Cassini Division, Ken Macleod, (1998)
The Book of Dave, Will Self, (2006)
The Stone Canal, Ken Macleod, (1996)
The Star Fraction, Ken Macleod, (1995)
Transition, Iain Banks, (2009)
Retromancer, Robert Rankin, (2009)
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker, (2004)
The Road to San Giovanni, Italo Calvino, (1990, English Translation, 1993)
The Invention of Everything Else, Samantha Hunt, (2008)
Penguin Modern Poets: 10; The Mersey Sound, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, (revised edition 1974)
That Awkward Age, Roger McGough, (2009)
Defying Gravity, RogerMcGough, (1992)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark, (1960)
Crash, J. G. Ballard, (1975)
Mr Palomar, Italo Calvino, (1983) (translation by William Weaver)
On The Pleasure of Hating and other Essays, William Hazlitt, (1818-1826)
The Phenomenon of Christianity, Ninian Smart, (1979)
Faraday, The Life, James Hamilton, (2002)
Selected Poems, Charlotte Mew, (2008)
Lifemanship, Stephen Potter, (1950)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver, (1981)
How to Get Things really Flat, Andrew Martin, (2008)
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C.S. Lewis, (1964)
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, Ian Mortimer, (2008)
Edexcel Text Book: "A" Level Maths Statistics S1 Module
Guidebook to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, (2004)
Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, (1991)
Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, (2008)
Jennings Goes To School, Anthony Buckeridge, (1953)
Anathem, Neal Stephenson, (2008)
The Road to Science Fiction: Vol 5: The British Way, James Gunn, Ed, (1998)
The Road to Science Fiction: Viol 4: From Here to Forever, James Gunn, Ed, (1982)
The Road to Science Fiction: Vol 3: From Heinlein to Here, James Gunn, Ed, (1979)
The Science Fiction Century, Ed, David G. Hartwell, (1997)
The Door Into Summer, Robert Heinlein, (1956)
Emma, Jane Austen, (1815)
Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
I've just reread three old Asimov's in close succession. I originally read all three together in an omnibus edition. They stood up fairly well in this rereading:
Pebble in the Sky (1950)
The Stars Like Dust (1951)
The Currents of Space (1952)
Raleigh, Sir Walter, Selected Writings, (1590s, Penguin)
Tremlett, Giles, Ghosts of Spain, (2006)
Nooteboom, Cees, Roads to Santiago, (1992)
O'Hare, Mick, How to Fossilise Your Hamster: and Other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist (2007)
Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, (1938)
Wells, H.G., Mr Britling Sees It Through, (1917)
Marshall, Peter, The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in Renaissance Prague, (2006)
Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, (2008)
Rereading lots of Vimes
J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, (2008)
Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt, (2003)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End, (2007)
Rereading Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender, (2006). Really invigorating. At some point I'll blog about this and how it relates to something more traditional like Muscatine's "Chaucer and the French Tradition" from 1957
Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (2008). Truly wonderful and strongly recommended.
I've been rereading lots of Larry Niven's "Known Space" novels. Definite falling off of quality after Ringworld of course. Perhaps more interestingly, I realised this time just how right-wing/misogynist he seems. Perhaps I was unfair on Pournelle for all these years. Then again, maybe not....
Simon Elmes, And Now On Radio 4: A Celebration of the World's Best Radio Station
J. K. Rowling, All of the Harry Potter series (rereading)
Terry Pratchett, Nation
Humphrey Lyttelton, the best of Jazz
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, (1958)
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)