In the meantime, I’ve read “Taking the Leap - Democratic Schools - Former Students about their Lives”. It mainly consists of interviews with young adults who used to be students at various Democratic Schools (comparable with Sudbury) in the Netherlands.
Quite interesting to learn how they view their experiences with school(s) and what they are now doing with their lives!
Is this the one you refer to?
To be honest, never heard of it before, but looks interesting (so if I was young again …)
No 
The “original” school is the Sudbury Valley School in the US. But now there are some schools elsewhere who work with the Sudbury concept and sometimes call themselves “Sudbury Schools” or “Democratic Schools”. The Netherlands have relatively many of them!
Planning to read soon (in Dutch) Alex Rowson’s The young Alexander.
An impulsive nice price buy from one of my visits to my favourite bookstore.
Alexander the Great’s story often reads like fiction: son to a snake-loving mother and a battle-scarred father; tutored by Aristotle; a youth from the periphery of the Greek world who took part in his first campaign aged sixteen, becoming king of Macedon at twenty and king of Asia by twenty-five; leading his armies into battle like a Homeric figure.
Each generation has peered through the frosted glass of history and come to their own conclusion about Alexander, be it enlightened ruler, military genius, megalomaniac, drunkard or despot. Yet the first two decades of his life have until now been a mystery – a matter of legend and myth. This extraordinary history draws on new discoveries in archaeology to tell the early story of Alexander and his rise – including detail on the tempestuous relationship between Alexander’s parents, Philip and the Molossian princess Olympias, his education by Aristotle and the strict military training which would serve him so well in later years. And more than ever, it emerges, the story of Alexander’s reign confronts us with difficult questions that are still relevant today – of the relationship between East and West, the legacy of colonialism and the impacts of authoritarian rule.
Drawing together startling modern archaeological discoveries, this book brings Alexander’s ancient world back into focus. With each fragment of this shattered past, excavated by shovel, pick and trowel, a new history is being written. The forgotten story of young Alexander is being unearthed.
(source above)
When you finish that, you might want to read the most authoritative ancient source, Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander. I’ve been meaning to read that since it came out in the magnificent Landmark series edition (The Landmark Arrian, Pantheon, New York, 2010).
I also highly recommend the source for much of the cloud of legend that surrounds Alexander, the medieval compilation known as The Greek Alexander Romance, which I read last year. It is available in the Penguin Classics edition.
I
Never mind. Half an hour into it and everything deleted. I’m in foul humour.
Okay, here’s a highly condensed version of something I tried to say earlier. If you’d care to read a novel about the great South American patriot Simon Bolivar, I would strongly recommend The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The setting is Columbia in 1830, and it seems that everything the general has worked for is in disarray. Convinced that he has nothing more to offer, and his health failing rapidly, he undertakes a river voyage to Cartagena where he hopes to board the first available ship for Europe. There are several stops along the way, and Bolivar and his retinue are met with varying degrees of adulation and hostility. More than relating events, the novel will give you a sense of the texture of that time and place. The zeitgeist if you will.
There’s a large cast of characters here, perhaps more than the average reader might comfortably keep track of without a score card. But it doesn’t seem to matter much because Garcia Marquez keeps the general front and center all the time, exploring the often paradoxical nature of the man. A sound decision I would say, and very satisfying.
Happy new year everyone.
I just finished reading “The will of the Many” by James Islington. A 9 out of 10 book for sure.
Now I am waiting for the fifth and final book of the Stormlight Archive to arrive a bit after Christmas, but these people got it early and decided to make custom work and print them in A3 size (!?!) and hand-bind them and make custom leatherbinds and present them to Sanderson himself:
Impressive craftsmanship and skill!
I think that this is worth the time watching for anyone with even a passing interest for books. Enjoy
I recently bought a used copy of Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam, and I’m about a quarter into it. I didn’t think I would ever see a copy of it, but I didn’t know it was reprinted in 2016. Weirdly, it sold two million copies when it came out in 1946, and yet none has ever shown up in the used book stores I’ve haunted all my life.
Frank is best known for his classic nuclear-war novel, Alas, Babylon, still the best ever written on the subject (I’m not counting the great A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is set in the far future). He also wrote Forbidden Area, which was adapted by Rod Serling as the first Playhouse 90 teleplay.
I saw a dismissive critique of this many years ago in an essay mainly about Alas, Babylon. However, after checking the essay collections by Knight, Blish, and many others, I can’t find it. My guess is that the critic couldn’t muster much interest in what is primarily a work of satire, rather than “serious” speculative fiction.
The story concerns a young geologist who is the only fertile male left in the world because he was in an old silver-lead mine a mile underground when a nuclear accident sterilized the rest of the males in the world. (Yes, the premise is very far-fetched, but this is satire.)
Frank was a successful journalist and government propagandist who despised bureaucracy in all its forms. He tells of the horrendous treatment of Mr. Adam by the government, military, media, and everyone else. It would be a horrific dystopian story if it were written seriously. Frank was an exemplar of “English plain style” (think Orwell or E. M. Forster), and tells the story quite well without any frills. I’m enjoying it much more than I expected.
Rereading the book (released in 1967) that gave Latin American literature a definitive place in world literature.
Can you guess which book I am reading?
Very likely it’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (I’ve read two of his novels but this isn’t one of them.) Garcia Marquez not only put Latin American literature on the world map, he is also the writer most identified with “magic realism” which uses elements of metaphor as actual plot devices. Some well known examples of this include Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.
----or maybe you’ve been reading something else lol. I’m often wrong.
No, you are not wrong.
If you click the blurred area, you will see it.
Just added
another book
to the pile of
books that
I want to
read
someday.
Bookshop decided to make this one a nice price (eur 15) book.
So …
The trouble with having about 10,000 books and old pulp magazines at age 70 is that I have read only about half of them. I know I’ll never read all of the rest, and Fate teases me with the question of what will be left unread. Even my immediate priorities—to read more of Doris Lessing, Octavia Butler, and Hesse, and finish reading all of Simak’s novels (just nine to go)—are repeatedly interrupted by new acquisitions.
For example, I just started Langston Hughes’s first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), which I bought last week. I am a great admirer of Hughes’s prose, based on his superb short stories in The Ways of White Folks and The Best of Simple. The first chapter drew me in completely with its description of a tornado striking a small Kansas town and the response of a tight-knit community of Black families. The writing is vivid and powerful, just as I expected it would be.
A footnote: This book has the first print use I have ever seen of “gallivantin[g],” a word my mother often used (“Don’t go gallivantin’ all over creation”) and that I used in my youth. I believe its sexual connotation (from “gallant”) was archaic even in the 20th century, leaving just a rough equivalent for “traipsing about.”
Reminds me of a Japanese word I recently learned: Tsundoku, meaning a stack of books you haven’t read
To my knowledge, “Tsundoku” actually means a little more than that, it includes the acquisition also:
About twenty years ago I was very happy to learn that there exists a word that describes part of my life 
Based on the definition, that appears to be what it means to do tsundoku; I just gave a gloss of the noun sense
Well, I guess that there are a lot of tsundokuists participating in this thread.
Still waiting for the day that I can read @Conrad_Melville’s posts in this thread without having to consult one or more dictionaries.
Gallivanting is a beautiful word that I had never heard of before.
Refers to travel, roam, or move about for pleasure or to go about usually ostentatiously or indiscreetly with members of the opposite sex.
To traipse is “to walk or go aimlessly or idly or without finding or reaching one’s goal”.
(Source: https://www.dictionary.com)
