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While the selection is quite odd and the search feature less than ideal, it is worth seeing if your public library has a subscription to Hoopla, which allows you to check out (and then stream) music or movies for a week. One significant downside is that you can only check out 6 or 7 titles per month (but as far as I can tell, each family member with a library card can have a different account!). Also, it is a completely free service, so I can accept some of its limitations. The main reason I am mentioning this is that they have the Ahmad Jamal Mosaic in their collection. Not sure about any other Mosaics, but I'll do a search later. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the titles on Tidal also show up here.

It looks promising, but I won't start it until next week. This one is a bit different from his other work as it mostly takes place in Canada.

Maybe I missed this in the discussion, but I just discovered that the Mosaic set has 4 of the 8 tracks of the Ray Brown/Milt Jackson album. For instance, Dew And Mud is not on there. This song is certainly is scored for quite a few horns, though maybe it falls short of a big band. (Or possibly the horns were overdubbed and thus don't count?) I can't really tell, since I don't have the liner to Ray Brown/Milt Jackson. For Someone I Love is also missing, and that sounds like it has a large trombone section. Any ideas? This is a case where I really think they ought to have included the whole album, particularly as it isn't one of those cases where half the tracks are big band and half quartet or quintet. This is a case where at least two of the missing tracks sound like a big band (to me) and thematically would have fit with the box concept -- and it would not be so annoying to have track down the rest of the album.

I'm enjoying this, though I am spending a lot of time thinking back to the film versions. (This probably confirms my general feeling that if you plan to watch the film and read the book, it is better to read the book first. Not always possible of course.) The physics, such as they are, seem completely absurd to me. I don't care how intelligent this Solaris thing is, it can't completely overcome gravity and change the planet's orbit. It simply wouldn't have the mass to do it. (A minor point overall.) After this Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

I just finished Mukherjee's Miss New India, which is probably best described as Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick in Bangalore with the additional twist that the main character is female. The secondary characters are all more interesting that the main character. (One could easily say the same thing for most of Dickens' novels that star a juvenile lead.) I'm partway through Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass. It's short, so I'll probably be done with it tomorrow. It's basically a bar patron writing down the stories of a seedy bar in the Congo. It's not bad. There is a scene early on that seemed inspired by Monty Python's Splunge sketch. After this Lem's Solaris. I'm quite interested to see what I make of this. I've seen the two film versions but know that the book is a bit different.

Not saying it won't happen. Almost anything can happen, but what is particularly interesting and perhaps worrying is that this is happening in two cities that don't have booming job market (like Calgary). So they presumably won't be impacted by lack of new jobs, since people aren't moving here for that reason. And honestly no one knows what will happen with the mass die-off of the Boomers. There might finally be some slack in the housing market. Of the two, my money is on Toronto to weather it better than Vancouver. I'll probably be in my place long enough to outlast any bust.

That is probably true, though it is going to take a pretty deep crash in China/Taiwan/Hong Kong etc. to accomplish this or major changes in immigration law, which I don't see happened, particularly under the Liberals. Toronto is still getting 50-100,000 new arrivals each year, which puts enormous pressure on the housing market. I'm not saying it can't happen, but people are actually inhabiting these houses, which is often not the case in Vancouver, where it is largely property speculation going on.

It's a very strange list that sort of claims to take living expenses into account and yet conveniently ignores them at certain points. Vancouver is just outrageously expensive to rent and buying a house in Vancouver proper is no longer possible even for two professionals with decent incomes. I would drop it out of the top 25 for that reason alone. Toronto is also expensive, though not quite at that level, and I would probably drop it closer to 20. Montreal should be higher than Ottawa and probably higher than Toronto, at least in terms of quality of life, though I am quite satisfied with Toronto (aside from the terrible auto congestion -- fortunately I mostly take transit or bike). Anyway, these lists are basically all ridiculous. There's not a single US city that breaks the top 25?

The Mingus in Europe vol. 1 turned up, and it is the correct disc. It even appears to be a CD not CDr but it can be hard to tell nowadays. Anyway, I am pleasantly surprised. I haven't bought a lot of other music, but I am starting to save up for a Mosaic purchase this summer.

In the home stretch of Slesinger's The Unpossessed. I'm fairly sure this is the second go-around, but it is making a bigger impression on me this time around, mostly looking at how frankly foolish she makes these various dreamers and schemers. The basic plot is that there is a small group of New York leftist intellectuals who have been debating starting a radical magazine for ages when one of them cons an upper middle class patroness into backing the magazine, starting with the purchase of a filing cabinet. This woman and her husband then throw a big party to raise money for the magazine and also for the Hunger Marchers. This is all set in the early 1930s, BTW. Of course, Slesinger is far more interested in the relationships between people and how love, lust and antipathy are far more motivating than party politics, though that plays a role as well, particularly when the young acolytes keep pressing for a harder left stance than the original triumvirate started from. The way Slesinger writes about these internal motivations seem derived from Freudian analysis, so that might be a bit of a turn-off for some people. There is a fair bit of humor throughout, as well as the influence of Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land (and Dostoevsky's Demons as well). It's an interesting novel with a number of characters I don't care about very much. Personally, I would have liked it a bit more if it were zanier, particularly when the file cabinet is delivered. This was reasonably popular among the New York intellectuals (at least those that could stand to poke a bit of fun at themselves) particularly Lionel Trilling, but it was despised by the New Masses crowd (presumably since it was taken as a personal attack on them). Trilling actually wrote an Afterward to The Unpossessed, but it is quite hard to come by (still working on it). I'm really surprised NYRB didn't manage to acquire the rights to republish it, but that's the case.* After this, Bharati Mukherjee's Miss New India. * Actually it turns out the Trilling piece is not that hard to come by. It is titled "A Novel of the 30s" and is reprinted a few places, including in The Last Decade. It is still weird how hard it is to find an edition of The Unpossessed with this afterward, however.

It's very cold out there (-18 C), but essentially no snow. Yesterday and this morning, Toronto was colder than Yellowknife! It's supposed to warm up a bit today and tomorrow will be hovering around freezing. Doesn't change the fact that I have to go out today and am dreading it a bit.

I've certainly enjoyed DeLillo novels and think White Noise is an incredible book. I have plans to reread it, though it falls far enough down the list, it won't be until early 2017! Anyway, I wasn't that taken with Underworld and can't remember all that much about it. I think he was trying a bit too hard to emulate Pynchon here. I'm wrapping up Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights (NYRB), which is a weird hybrid of memoir and fiction. There's a section where Hardwick discusses seeing Billie Holliday perform and then becoming a bit of a devotee, even meeting her offstage and then at Billie's hotel. It's hard to tell how much truth there is here, but I am having trouble seeing it as accurate. The book at least so far is largely confided to Hardwick's doings in New York in the 50s and 60s. After this, I move back two decades or so to New York of the 1930s with Tess Slessinger's The Unpossessed (also NYRB).

It's a neat idea. I saw this a day ago. I'll actually be in Chicago at the end of March and will check out the exhibit. I think my family needs a slightly bigger hotel room than this, however...

I just finished Murakami's After the Quake, which was quite entertaining -- short and snappy. I'm currently reading Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, which is sort of a companion piece to his CD of the same name (or vice versa). It's pretty good so far, as we follow a doctor who has lost his license and now caters almost exclusively to treating whores and their johns for VD and occasionally providing abortion services. He's a hard-core junkie to boot, haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams. He and some neighbors are about to go on a short "pilgrimage" to see Jackie Kennedy as she shows up in San Antonio. I should add that it is 1963 and JFK is still alive. As I said, pretty interesting and good pacing.

Agreed. It is far more important to read these books than to obsess over translation. Speaking of other barriers, I am almost done with Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. That is a tough slog, and in some places I have no idea exactly who is talking to whom and whether this is a conversation that happened in the past or it is an imagined conversation. Either seems plausible. I was reasonably well-versed in the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, but I can imagine these novels will feel more and more foreign as time passes, though racial strife seems eternal in the heart of America. I can only imagine the difficulties in trying to translate this, let alone The Sound and the Fury, and then the critics coming along and saying what a mess the translators had made of Faulkner.

Yes, I am not going to sign up to Scribed to find out what axe Morson has to grind. I can say that I read 3 translations of Master and Margarita, alternating chapters like Leeway, and I thought P & V was the best. I don't read Russian, so I can't speak to the accuracy, but this one seemed to convey the ideas the most clearly and generally had more felicitous phrasing -- for me. Though I did copy over in the margins a few places where I thought Burgin was better. It is clear that some people get very heated when there are different translations to choose from, but it seem that some of these people are expecting some Platonically perfect translation, which is of course absurd. For at least a subset of these critics, only reading in the original is acceptable.

Good luck with that. I've basically always found the P & V translations to be the best, though I've only read their Anna Karenina, The Master & Margarita, Demons and Notes from Underground. I'll probably get around to War and Peace in a couple of years.

Midway through Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. Enjoying it, some stories more than others. Some of the humorous scenes in "The Fire and the Hearth" are the equal of anything in The Reivers, which is to me just an excellent comic romp. Granted, Faulkner deals with many heavier themes in Go Down, Moses, particularly when looking at black characters with "mixed" blood. I'm going to take a short break before starting in on "The Bear" and read Bove's very short novel Armand.

I've been pretty good for a while now, avoid purchases aside from the eMusic renewals, though I did get a classical box set (Jean Martinon) just a while back, but it was a steal, so that doesn't count... Anyway, I'm on a mini-Mingus kick. I ordered Mingus in Europe v.1 (Enja) and am hoping against hope that they ship this instead of v.2, which I already own. It's something I could have picked up easily a while back but now it's become fairly rare. Also, I guess I've been sleeping on the two-fer from Collectibles that combines Me, Myself an Eye & Something Like a Bird. Jack Walrath himself has an Amazon review saying that the mix isn't the best -- and that there were unused takes that could someday be released -- but I'll settle for this for now. I"m pretty sure I haven't heard any of this music before. While I'm waiting for this to arrive, it's time to break out the Mosaic Mingus box. I really have barely scratched the surface of this set.

I've not read that many of Henry James novels, either the early or later ones. I'll probably get around to it one day, and have 3 or 4 that will someday make my to read pile. The one that I read in college was indeed The Ambassadors. I found it a novel that one admired more than really enjoyed, which is the case with a lot of late James.

Congrats.

Sad, but not terribly shocking. He was 94 and apparently passed away peacefully, i.e. he wasn't ill. Nice way to go if you can get it. RIP

I am quite abashed that I didn't see this until today, though in the wake of Bowie and Rickman, pretty much all celebrity deaths took second stage. Brian Bedford, a mainstay of Stratford, passed away of cancer on Jan 13. He was 80. A nice obit here: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2016/01/13/brian-bedford-a-veteran-of-ontarios-stratford-festival-dead-at-80.html I believe I saw him 3 times in various Stratford productions, including a powerful Julius Caesar in an otherwise muddled production. He had slowed down and more or less stopped performing since 2013, and I've only been able to start going to Stratford on a regular basis since 2014. But he left a very strong legacy at Stratford -- and very limited work in films or TV, which unfortunately means he will not leave much of a trace in the general culture. He did have a role in the movie Nixon and was the voice of Robin Hood in the Disney movie, which is probably the height of his fame. It is likely that Stratford has some DVDs available, though probably not for the roles I'd be most interested in. But I'll check around this summer when I go down. RIP

I finished God's Grace by Malamud last night. It is the freakiest book by a well-known member of the "literary establishment" that I can recall. Maybe Bear by Marian Engel, but she is basically an unknown outside of Canada, and I'm not really sure she was ever part of the establishment. I didn't like it for lots of reasons, but I can't really go into them now. I am starting Galapagos by Vonnegut. I'm enjoying this more, though the narrative voice is a bit overbearing at times (and even smug) as John was discussing. Still, even though Vonnegut probably has an even bleaker worldview than Malamud, the tone is not as off-putting. I've read a couple of the stories in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, and think they were pretty good. I'll turn back to reading this full time after Galapagos.

Yes, it is called Henri Duchemin and His Shadows. It's five or so short stories and one slightly longer story (not quite a novella). It's good, but probably not the best introduction to Bove.