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I expect this to take a while.

Got part of the way through it.

A tough one to finish even though it's very short - Quine drops a lot of information on you. A good one. I hope I can find my copy of Word and Object.

A discussion yesterday about tomatoes growing atop high strands of flowers, of their own accord, out of reach and out of season as we enter winter here.

Very sad.

Highlights: Witchgrass, The Red Poppy, Midsummer, Vespers (End of August...).

Extended thoughts:

The book is in a semi-circular shape, tracing the arc of the seasons, The book is considering the perspective of the flowers-of-the-field. The poems move through the seasons, with the center of the book being Midsummer, and the speech of people (as in humans, I assume, and not flowers; those who are maintaining the flowers and, I assume, being maintained themselves - or not - by the gardener above) labelled with either "Matins" or "Vespers" depending on which side of Midsummer they are. Shortening or lengthening shadows.

Is "Ospreys: A natural and unnatural history", published 1989.

Sontag drops a lot of names, a trait which is of varying attractiveness. Many of these references are interesting, but what am I to make of a sentence like (from One Culture and the New Sensibility):

Some of the basic texts for this new cultural alignment are to be found in the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Antonin Artaud, C.S Sherrington, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, André Breton, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Siegfried Gideon, Norman O. Brown, and György Kepes.

That's quite the reading list, and she neither cites any texts or expands upon what these authors have in common.

That is the worst example (she cites McLuhan later in a more sensible way) but it gets at what I don't like about her writing.

Fine and interesting series of essays on photography. Written in the 1970s, it feels quite dated in today's online culture of images; but it's insightful to know how far back the philosophy of images actually stretches. I didn't know how far the philosophy of photography had got in the 19th century, when the technology was barely there.

Again, not sure of purchase date but in the last few months - Definitely this year. Speakings on moral education and the nature of the self. One to annotate or read commentary on - to talk about the nature of reality is very serious without knowing what parts of it reflect culture and which parts are mystical.

Not sure when I started reading. Not long - could have been read in one sitting. Essays, mixed quality. Purchased because I'm interested in reading writing from the very old, and he was 90 at time of writing.

Negatives: A setting of average to low interest, and a feeling of railroading toward the end to "finish", with some things resolving much too easily. Not much to distinguish it.

Positives: Good character writing! Even those that are one-dimensional are quite lively in their particular dimension, and they remain memorable writing this review now.

Not a series I will continue with, but a fine diversion.

Some books begin with a world. Others begin with their characters. I believe this was the latter (I heard something about the author starting from the part where Kell and Lila run into each other in an alleyway). It feels it - the setting lacked interest to me, but the characters pulse with inner life and feeling.