The Phantom Professor says: “Author! Author! features one of Al Pacino’s comic performances (alongside a giggly Dyan Cannon and a twitchy Tuesday Weld), playing a Broadway playwright who just can’t get the problems of Act 2 solved. And watch for two new films about Truman Capote, one starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the tiny terror—and what great casting is that?

The Phantom Professor says: “How about some movies about the writing life? The Paper captures how it feels to be on deadline for a big story (time seems to devolve into slow motion).”

I stopped reading Freeling’s crime novels years ago; resumed interest on reading about my cousin’s trip to The Netherlands. Could there be a less pompous author? In this book he seems to be writing for himself as much as for the reader. Unfortunately, Freeling couldn’t make up his mind about this book. He comes back to the same subjects repeatedly, particularly his ambivalence about his relationship with his mother, and never resolves the matter. The book is an uneven hodgepodge; as memoir, it’s not nearly as satisfying as The Kitchen Book.

I picked this up on a 2nd hand table because I liked Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Civilizations and it seemed to complement that book. I found it just right for reading during a cold & wet short week on the Maine coast. The book excellent all around: the memoirs, the discussion of sources, and the account of its origins.

A good book, but much longer than it could be with way too much detail about one minor publication of Gibbon’s.

Got it from the pub lib just before our week’s holiday in Williamsburg! Halfway through and liking it.

Mentioned on CT and other blogs. Contains G.A. Cohen’s “Deeper into Bullshit”—Commentary on Franfurt’s On Bullshit (The Importance of What We Care About : Philosophical Essays by Harry G. Frankfurt)

Complements previous reads by N.A.M. Namier (biography of Sandwich and his Wooden World). Unusual combination of administrative and naval history. The 18th c. British navy was a huge accomplishment for a state to achieve.

Saw this on David Bigwood’s reading list. Fits with my current reading of Stories of English. Have it on loan.

Have this on loan. Plan to read along with Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman.