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Our Current Reading and Listening Favorites
Our leisure time is often spent reading and listening to music. Here are our favorite reads and recommendations.
Books
Sadly, Terry Pratchett passed away March 12, 2015. He will be greatly missed. Over the years, we went “ape” over Terry Pratchett’s writings. We’ve pretty much devoured most of his work. All we can say now is: OOOOK… [sad orangutan sound]
A complete list of Terry Pratchett’s books
Our connection with Terry is founded on our love of British humor, such as that created by the crazies in the Goon Show. (Those ‘crazies’ included Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.)
Continuing in the vein of British Humor, Bob has been a fan of Bill Tidy for years and years. Great Stuff! Bob has enjoyed reading some of the Fosdyke Saga, as well as collecting a few of Tidy’s older cartoons.
Our enjoyment of boating got us into reading all of the Patrick O’Brian books concerned with the lives of Aubrey and Maturin. Wonderful reading, and a fascinating look into life at sea and land around 1800.
Moving along from humor to outrageous behaviour that ought to be humor: there is the political arena. We get a regular chuckle from the Mallard Fillmore comic strip. Absurd political behavior is not pointed out by the mainstream any more, but is more clearly documented on the web. For instance, Ancipient provides links to various opinion items.
We also read books and columns by:
Investigative Reporters [from the New York Times, no less]
Online Columns and Opinions by:
Founding Questions [note content warning]
Opinions from Everyone [note content warning]
And Books On Such Subjects As:
Why we will never run out of energy, and saving fuel doesn’t help…
Revenge effects and unintended consequences
Bob read a lot of science fiction from the “classical” era. One of the best was a fellow who wrote under the pseudonym: Cordwainer Smith.
Jambands
Here are some music links, including Bob’s long-time enjoyment of the Grateful Dead. His interest includes lots of other jambands, such as Phish, Bela Fleck, and Steve Kimock.
Classical Music
Note that we were season ticket holders of the Maui Symphony Orchestra, before its untimely death. We were spoiled forever on classical music when we lived in the Twin Cities. We were season ticket holders for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which we believe to be the finest small orchestra in the United States.
It’s obvious that we like Classical music, from Bach on up. We’ve especially enjoyed:
The cello mastery of Mischa Maisky
Beautiful violin performances by Schlomo Mintz
The Netherlands Bach Society has released (and continues to release) a remarkable set of Bach performances on YouTube.
We are very long-time fans of The Canadian Brass
We’ve enjoyed much guitar music over the years, including performances by:
Hawaiian Music
And speaking of guitar music, we lived on Maui for 10 years, a slack-key guitar heaven! Some of our favorites are:
Dennis Kamakahi [deceased 2014]
Photos we took in 2007 of Dennis and David (During a “father and son” concert).
Other Hawaiian musicians we admire include:
Actually, ANYTHING released by Dancing Cat Records.
The number and quality of musicians in the Hawaiian Islands is staggering!
The Cazimero Brothers created a remarkable opus of Hawaiian songs for 40 years. All of their CD’s are still available “in print”. Sadly, brother Roland Cazimero performed for the last time in 2014, and passed away in 2017. The remaining brother, Robert Cazimero continues to perform, we are told.
Bob, especially, enjoys Jazz, including:
and on and on….
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