Book Haul

  

Well, its been nearly two months since Christmas, and I was looking for a reward for my accomplishments this year. I’ve been to five bible study meetings so far (we have eleven scheduled, set to end right before Easter) and have learned a lot. I’ve kept with the meditation, having done my 57th sitting this morning, for a total of 14 hours and 20 minutes. I am noticing a “smoothening out” of my personal shortfalls. And there’s a third personal goal that I’m also making progress on, a big, tough one, which falls outside the purview of this blog.

 

So when I want to reward myself, nine times out of ten it’s treating myself with new (used) books. In this case, I went to the local book shop and scored these two awesome finds:

 

 

I’ve been looking for a good biography on Frank for a couple of months now. This one, Frank: The Voice, starts at the very beginning and ends around the time of his Best Supporting Actor award in 1954 or soon thereafter. The follow-up, Frank: The Chairman, takes it from then to his death in 1998. If you google “best biography of Frank Sinatra” these books by Kaplan will come up, so I considered myself quite lucky to find it.

 

Over the past few years I’ve been reading more and more musician biographies. Geddy Lee and Led Zeppelin last year, Mozart in 2024, a book on various classical music composers in 2023, biographies of the bands Yes and The Rolling Stones the years before that. I do remember way, way back in those hazy days a quarter of a century ago living in Maryland of starting a Sinatra biography, but never finishing it. I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank these past few months, so I’m looking for a greater understanding of the man and his music.

 

The other, Mount Doom: The Prophecy of Tolkien Revealed, found me completely by accident. It looks self-published (or at least published by a minor house), but it’s a dense, 562-page dissertation on the Tolkien mythos with lots of mention of Thomistic philosophy and, I’m hoping, a challenge to post-modernism (yuck). There’s charts, diagrams, mentions of the neurology of the brain, the harmonic series in music (maybe also in math), and what they promise to be something like a revisionist explanation of The Lord of the Rings.

 

This has me almost, but not quite, frothing at the mouth.

 

I’ve made two abortive attempts to re-read Tolkien in the past two years, from the Silmarillion to the twelfth volume of Christopher Tolkien’s edited The History of Middle-earth. Perhaps, hopefully, this will jump start that desire and I can notch my sixth reading of Tolkien. Last time was in 2021, right before we moved down to Texas, so its kinda overdue.

 

The dilemma now is which one to start once I’m finished with the English Civil War book …

 

Anyway, happy reading all!