Sunday Music: The Best of the Four Tops

Album Title: The Best of the Four Tops

Why I Bought It: Motown!

What I Like (Melancholy): "Ask the Lonely". Some nice stringwork, and Levi Stubbs's voice is achingly beautiful in the lead. Honorable Mention: "Shake Me, Wake Me".

What I Like (Nice Cover): "Walk Away Renee". Left Banke's version is better, but I don't have it, and this one's almost as good.

What I Like (Here for You): "Reach Out I'll Be There". I've got three covers of this one; the others are by Diana Ross and Merrilee Rush. This is the best. Levi's voice has a harsher edge this time, but hope and joy shine through.

Overall: There's nothing here I dislike. "Bernadette", "If I Were a Carpenter", "Standing in the Shadows of Love", "I Can't Help Myself" - all the moods and stages of love are on display. The Four Tops didn't have - or, on this album, don't display - as much range of topic as the Temptations, but what they do, they do very well.

Halfway Mark

I'm a little behind my usual pace; so far this year, I've only finished fifty books. Part of it, I suppose, is that I haven't been going onto campus much this summer, so that my bus book reading has been neglected. Even when I do take the bus, I often don't take my book, so as to leave my hands free for grocery shopping on the return.

On the nonfiction front, Charles Mann's 1493 is the standout. I didn't find it as enlightening as his 1491, but there was still a lot of interesting material there. Carl Zimmer's A Planet of Viruses contained an entertaining (if not particularly detailed) set of vignettes on notable viruses - smallpox, HIV, the common cold, influenza, bacteriophages, and the giant (for viruses) mimiviruses. Robert Wolf's A Tour Through Mathematical Logic was interesting, but not for a non-mathematical audience. The other four nonfiction - a biography of Hugo Black and three variably interesting histories - lagged well behind these.

A large fraction of my F/SF this year was taken up with a (re)read of the Ring of Fire series to date, up through Ring of Fire II, Grantville Gazette V, and 1636: The Saxon Uprising. The standouts were Weber's At All Costs, Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, and John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. Lots of rereads; I'm kind of marking time, waiting for the next Harry Dresden and for Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. (The LMB list is already discussing the latter; I've dumped more than a hundred posts into the Spoilers folder, to be perused after I get my hands on the book.)

I'm thinking of going back to Dorothy Dunnett, reading the Niccolo and Lymond series straight through. Or maybe I should read some of the mainstream stuff I get from Library of America. Decisions, decisions....