Sunday Music: The Definitive Collection, Patsy Cline

Album Title: The Definitive Collection. (This is the first of three albums I have with the same title, distinguishable by the artist involved. It must have been a series or something.)

Why I Bought It: Because... well, because Patsy Cline. (Seriously, I'd heard so much about her without ever having actually heard her, that I jumped at the chance.)

What I Like (Rich and Poor): "A Poor Man's Roses". Yeah, it's an old-fashioned story, but she sings it well. And yet the hand that brings the rose tonight / Is the hand I will hold / For the rose of love means more to me / More than any rich man's gold. (You know, there are a lot of these songs from the male perspective - "Down in the Boondocks", "Poor Side of Town", more distantly Gene Pitney's "Follow the Sun" - but offhand I can't recall another from the female POV.)

What I Like (The Original): "Always". This, along with "Crazy", is probably among her most-covered songs, but the clarity of Cline's voice makes the original stand out from the crowd.

What I Like (Determined): "When I Get Thru With You". The singer maps out a campaign, and poor Suzy's gonna cry.... This is the flip side of "She's Got You", which is also on this album, and also pretty good.

What I Don't Like (Fish and Bicycles): "When You Need A Laugh". Absolutely pathetic. Even Lesley Gore at her most helpless wouldn't stoop to this.

Overall: Patsy Cline ranks very high on the "purity of tone" scale, and I would love her for that alone. The themes of her songs are mostly well-worn and sometimes mockable (xkcd ran a cartoon on the inanity of "Walkin' After Midnight" in the cell-phone era), but newness isn't everything; the specific context may be obsolete, but the situation is still a familiar one. "I Fall to Pieces", "San Antonio Rose", "Why Can't He Be You" - they're almost all good. (I could do without the pseudo-yodeling in "Lovesick Blues", but that's an exception.) If only she had lived longer....

Amazon Raid

I just paid a visit to Amazon, for the first time since last November. I need some new light reading....

The big-ticket items were A Course in Combinatorics, by J. H. van Lint, and A History of the Spanish Language, by Ralph Penny. Between them, they cost over $110, but I've been wanting them for a while now.

Those are not light reading. On that front, we find: Steven Utley's The 400-Million-Year Itch (which was on my to-get list, but I have no idea how it got there); Blackout, the concluding volume of Mira Grant's "Newsflesh Trilogy"; volume 6 of Digger, by Ursula Vernon (and if you haven't yet read it, even on the web, shame on you! Go google!); Julia Spencer-Fleming's I Shall Not Want (I've fallen behind on the Fergusson/Van Alstyne mysteries); A Rising Thunder, yet another Honor Harrington story; the first volume of Fables, by Bill Willingham (he was nominated for a Graphic Novel Hugo in 2008, and I read a later volume then); and Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts by Julia Gelardi (recommended by desert_vixen at some point in the past).

Should keep me occupied for the next while.