I'm almost done with The Earth Abides. It's pretty good, though I think in my opinion the whole of the book doesn't live up to the amazingness of the first chapter. I think my only real quibble with it is that the author thinks some things will last a lot longer than they really would. After twenty years, most canned food would be without flavor or nutrition, and even if they were able to get a car running again, by that point gasoline would have long since gone bad. The ideas are fun though, especially when the author describes what's going on in the world outside of Isherwood's view, and the whole story unfolds very easily. It's not bad.
Ordeal By Hunger, also by Stewart, is a great read. I seem to recall us talking about his book "Storm" where he personifies a terrible hurricane that hits California. I read that one in high school.
- I think my only real quibble with it is that the author thinks some things will last a lot longer than they really would.
Bear in mind: this is the first book to describe a post-apocalyptic future without Morlocks and Eloi in it. Gasoline was a petroleum distillate with tetraethyl lead, not the postmodern witches' brew we have these days and power generation was a lot less optimized and therefore more stable. When the book was written in 1949, "gasoline" was a newer technology than "fax machines" are today. Shit, when that book was written, fax machines were fifteen years in the future.
Now? Sure, we've got a popular culture sheep-dipped into Dark Tower and Walking Dead and Road Warrior and every other postapocalyptic tale I'm forgetting but Patient Zero is that 70-year-old book that you're quibbling science over.
I stand corrected on my minor quibbles. Even then, they don't detract from the book. In all honesty, I think it's a lot more fun because it doesn't have ghouls, or raiders, or crazy mutated animals, or oppressive governments, or whatever other tropes you can think of. Those things are all cool ideas, but they're over used and often not always that well executed. When one of your biggest sources of conflicts in the novel is a community's overall lax attitude, it's pretty refreshing.
I spent most of February reading Gravity's Rainbow. I had to because I started it in January and kept reading lighter books instead - it's one of those books you don't really want to read at the end of the day. It was interesting, but I don't feel at all enticed to read more of Pynchon's work. That kind of overwhelming style makes me go "hmm" but not much else; it's just not my cup of tea. I was surprised by how funny parts of it were, though.
I read The Shallows, parts of which make you think "shit, this perfectly describes my behaviour". I was expecting him to talk more about reward-system hijacking and addiction and so on; I was pleasantly surprised when he discussed it more from the angle of memory and attention span, particularly with reference to reading deeply. I've tried to reduce my internet usage since. A bit.
I also read the first Harry Potter book... In Italian! This is the first time I've read a book in a language other than English or Irish. And I understood what was going on, even if I had to consult the dictionary a lot; it was reading, as opposed to decipherment. Okay, it's for eight year olds, but I'm fairly chuffed with myself.
Right now I'm about a third of the way through Moby-Dick, which I really didn't expect to be so funny (especially the earlier sections) and the dreaded cetology section was all of ten pages long.
But I was still slogged enough by it to start reading Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch, part of the Locke Lamora books. I don't read a lot of fantasy but I read the first two of them years ago and they have a warm place in my heart. I especially like that it basically takes place in magical Venice instead of the usual fantasy worlds.
I also read a book about octopuses, but it was only okay.
I started reading fiction again! But first, the non-fiction I read since the last thread:
Orientalism: rarely do you see someone successfully smackdown a field of "science" like this. While it feels like it is written for snobs with frequent and unabashed French and Latin paragraphs, it is a comprehensive account of the roots of academic and institutionalised racism. I think this is the kind of book that I need to reread a few years down the line.
Fire and Fury: read it for the hype. It's what I expected: a soap opera style story of the current White House. If the Russia investigation is Stupid Watergate, this reads like Stupid West Wing.
Who Owns the Future: how do we use technology to stop the middle class from eroding? An interesting question that, if I remember correctly, Jaron Lanier doesn't really answer but spends a lot of pages twisting and turning around. With slightly more modern eyes I'm tempted to shout 'blockchain!' at the problems he outlines, but I don't think it'll be enough, really.
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. No, I did not read this because of the lobster thing, mostly because I didn't even know that was a thing until today. I did find that a weird and unconvincing part, but that doesn't really matter in the context of the book itself. It reads, and should be read, entirely as a long Sunday sermon buy a pastor who goes on unscientific tangents every now and then. Meaning, science and I disagree with most of what he says, but there are pieces of advice in there that are just what some people need at some moment in their life, which is what redeems it. I would not recommend the book, but might send some passages to people some day.
I've been meaning to read more fiction ('more' as in 'more than zero') for a long time. Recently, a few discussions on here and a handful of scifi-related movies and videos led me to pick scifi as my focus and pester kleinbl00 with dumb questions. I'm on my fifth book now and I don't regret reading any of them yet.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. The audiobook had an introduction by another author (whose name I forget right now), but she remarked that Earth Abides is the kind of book that is so memorable that it is hard to even forget about it. Having read it two months ago, I quite agree. It starts off fantastic as rd mentions and is a great book that foreshadows the plot of every disaster movie you can think of. My only beef with it is that I found the characterization to be a bit flat, but the fact that I will probably recommend this book that is almost three times as old as I am is a testament to how well it has held up. It was probably groundbreaking at the time, especially its ideas about what we now call sustainability. I honestly wonder if the book has had an influence on, say, the Club of Rome.
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. Interesting premise, but too much dialogue for too many uninteresting characters.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. A good book that is about war on the surface, but is much more about society and one's place in it. I wonder to what degree Haldeman has put himself into the main character, especially regarding the protagonist's disillusionment and stubbornness to change. Decent book, although I wouldn't plaster it with superlatives.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Primary & Secondary Phase (BBC Radio Series). I absolutely loved reading the Guide when I was 14. It was the funniest book I've ever read back then, so when I heard that the original hearplay was on Audible I didn't hesitate. I personally loved listening to it, and I still think it's hilarious. Adams' absurdism is just my kind of humour, I think.
Currently, I'm about two thirds into William Gibson's The Difference Engine, aka steampunk's Citizen Kane. It did not start off strong in my opinion; it isn't really clear what the plot exactly is first few chapters, but after the second protagonist was introduced and the point of view changed, the plot started to gather momentum and I've been liking it since. (Except, maybe, for the sex scenes. No 1850's Shade of Grey for me, thanks.) Gibson's writing style is really great; I love how he manages to paint such vivid pictures.
Ooh boy, I've had to read a little bit of Orientalism a while back for a brief university module that I took up, an introduction into a few of Japan's cultural archetypes. I might go for a full read some time in the future.
Even now you could point out traces of cultural influence from the Orientalism paradigm, still persisting in Western media.
I am finishing up 1984 and am moving onto a book called Why Homer Matters. I was a Classical Languges minor and can read Greek and Latin well. The Iliadand the Odyssey have always been favorites of mine, so I am interested to see a historical/philosophical approach. Meanwhile I am currently translating and writing a commentary for Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation that will be published this year.
The Hot Zone - A gripping dive into the world of dealing with deadly viruses. I felt like like the book peaked a bit too early and lost some steam as the events unraveled at the end, but that's nitpicking. The chapter in which Dr. Nancy Jaax gets contaminated in the level 4 zone is probably the fastest I've read a chapter in quite a while.
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The Checklist Manifesto - A quick, worthwhile read. The primary interest lays in the various case studies it presents in which checklists have been used to great effect. Despite it already being short, I felt it should've been 50 pages shorter still.
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Brave New World - One I've been meaning to read for a while. I enjoyed it but wasn't left a raving fan. I felt the characters were a bit one-dimensional and felt nothing for them. The most interesting bit of interaction was right near the end between 'The Savage' and 'The World Controller'. I also admired the consideration that went into all the technology and conditioning that the citizens go for. I guess the book should be lauded for that considering when it was written.
I read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin last a year, a book similar in its 'happy' dystopian setting, and I personally found the writing to be superior. Though the world/setting is perhaps less believable as an actual potential future when compared to BNW, it is all the more interesting. The characters were better developed and you could more keenly feel the inner conflict the protagonist was struggling with. It was also written 10 years before Huxley's work.
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The Pale King - David Foster Wallace's unfinished, posthumously published novel. I'm 35% of the way through it and it certainly has all the personality you'd expect from DFW's writing. It's impressive how he makes what should be quite a boring idea for a book so intriguing to read. My opinion is still mostly unformed on it though. I will say that I wasn't exactly thrilled to come across a 100 page long chapter.
Got a little frisson reading Winter of the World because the Partisan slogan of the Spanish Civil War was "They Shall Not Pass." I've always found LoTR to be entirely too trivial, and Tolkien insisted it wasn't an allegory for squat... but once you've been dragged through a dramatization of the European Theater from 1907 to 1937 you begin to wonder.
I recently finished Shelley's Frakenstein. It stuck with me like every masterwork does. There's something about the travel and the fact that the creature just keeps appearing that got to me. That, and that Victor is in such utter denial of his poisonous nature. It just feels like Shelley was writing about something else that she shared with us, yet didn't.
From George F. Kennan: An American Life
- “Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven’t kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children’s pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there’s no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer’s little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what’s up, he says triumphantly ‘The bull’s busted out and he’s eating the strawberry bed’.”
Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you’d got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, “the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn’t foresee it a long time ago.” Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: “Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?”
The farm analogy feels uncomfortably familiar, and I have a bookmark in that biography as well as Hidden Order while I make slow progress through A History of the Jews.
Yet I still open e-mails from Bookperk and couldn't resist grabbing a digital copy of Reamde on sale for $3.
The guy who recommended The Road to Wigan Pier reminded me of the Great Brain series, which absorbed February and were just as delightful this century as last.
Hella fantasy/sci-fi. Notably, Dune, which I've been listening to the audiobook of whenever I'm on the move. I've also started playing it at a low volume during naptime at the school - turns out plopping toddlers into the middle of a geopolitical struggle will put them riiiiight to sleep.
I finished Into The Wild last week and still think McCandless was an ass (but that doesn't mean I think he deserved to die).
Next up is a book about misadventure in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I assume it will be about people who mostly did everything right and had one or two things go wrong (as opposed to McCandless doing nothing right and having one or two things accidentally go right).
I also have an outdoor survival book. I figure I should make more attempts to learn the things McCandless didn't (and that I'm critical of him for not learning).
And I reread Ender's Game a month ago. Still a fun, easy read.
I'm about halfway through the Lord of the Rings 50th anniversary edition. Not much to say other than re-reading Tolkein is good for the spirit. His writing grips me in a way that makes me feel as excited as a kid opening up the latest Harry Potter right after getting away from the release night party. I've read LOTR before as a much younger person and while I knew it was good fantasy, I didn't get the emotional depth and maturity Tolkein uses as his basic character to character interactions. The word 'respectful' goes over and over in my head when I think about the Council of Elrond, and how disagreement don't have to end in bitterness and malcontentment and division.
My girl sent me a copy of Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey, a poetry collection. It's not mind-blowing, but it's certainly evocative and a nice gift.
Too stressed to read.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, ironically.
Just finished Feynman the graphic novel. It has inspired me to make a project of reading the memoirs and biographies of people who worked on the Manhattan Project. Sadly it does not seem like there is much about Robert R. Wilson, who I think I am most interested in reading about.
Feynman is entertaining. Of that posse, the one who has always struck me as the most interesting is Leo Szilard.
Wrapped up reading The Conquest of Bread a week or so ago. The various ramblings about agriculture are a bit of a slog. The Lovecraft-esque casual use of a slur near the end was disappointing. Next up on the radical leftist list is some Bookchin.
Got half way through I am a Strange Loop, set it down and haven't looked back. Douggie just isn't for me.
Also been plunking my way through Zinn. Just hit the 1900's. Woot.
Haven't managed to read any fiction since I stalled out on War and Peace.
Finished Zinn, and Bookchin's The Next Revolution.
Liked both, will probably read them again at some point. Zinn suffers a bit from being too quick of a survey. The Next Revolution has really come into it's own in light of the decentralized push of block chains and git.
I've started some new stuff, but will leave that for the next book thread.
Somewhat stalled in my reading, so much of this is redundant, but here we go.
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. Absolutely brilliant, but difficult to describe. Layers upon layers, and manages to be about as meta as you can get, both within the story and outside it, and that's the whole point.
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. I have to do this one in small doses, as it hits closer to home than just about anything else I've ever read.
El Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. They made a movie of this back in the late 1990s called The Ninth Gate with Johnny Depp, that no one saw. It's pretty good. I'm reading it to my daughter, who knows it only as "the Spanish book" (as it's in Spanish).
Honduras: Challenges and Difficulties in Democratic Reconstruction. Published by the Centro de Documentación de Honduras, it's a series of essays from 2011 about issue with democratic reform there.
The cleaning lady in my office is from Honduras, and in asking her about it, she said that she has no interest in going back because the current present is terrible. I realized I knew basically nothing about Honduras, so have been trying to educate myself. The Congressional Research Service's background is a good starting place.
I pay to get reports from George Friedman's thinktank. They send me about eight emails a day. It's a commitment but it's usually thought-provoking. Once a week they send out a "what we're reading."
Last week, the three books on their list were the three books I had most recently read.
I've talked about Toland's Rising Sun before. b_b - we've discussed Hiroshima. After Rising Sun and Japan 1941 I have even less sympathy for the "no nukes" standpoint. Japan suffered strategic and tactical defeat in every conflict after Pearl Harbor and still fought tooth and claw because surrender was dishonorable. The military faction undertook an armed coup to depose the emperor after Nagasaki. Upon reading Toland, there is no responsible way to regard Japan as a rational actor and ample evidence that the only way forward was to utterly break them as a nationality. We stopped at two because they surrendered unconditionally. We could have gone to five before needing to build more bombs. There were Russian considerations to be sure but the principle drive on the American side was to end the war - we talked about the firebombing of Tokyo but we haven't talked about how it was diplomatically ineffective.
The other two books discussed were Books 1 and 2 of Ken Follett's Century Trilogy. It's easy, it's fluffy, it's accessible, it's Downton Abbey writ large across WWs I and II from the perspectives of British aristocracy, German aristocracy, Russian peasants, Welsh coal miners and American businessmen.
Follett knows how to write page-turners that don't leave you feeling stupid. They don't leave you feeling smart, either - they leave you feeling like you were there.
I recently read Rising Sun, and then I followed it up with Masuo Kato's The Lost War, and frankly, it swayed my opinion on the bomb from "bad idea" to somewhere on the "good idea" side of ambiguous. Even more interesting than the bomb was the bombing campaigns. Toland and Kato (whom I believe Toland must have been using heavily for source material) both point out that the US went far out of its way to inform the population exactly where the bombs were going to fall and when. This is in opposition to a lot of the apparently revisionist history I've read that tried to claim that the point of the firebombings was to terrorize civilians. In fact, it was to limit Japan's warmaking ability by targeting the mom and pop shops where a lot of the machinery was made, and these shops were often two to five man operations that existed throughout the neighborhoods. You can't help but feel good about America after doing these readings to find out just how well we treated our vanquished enemies, even though they sure didn't show us the same respect. The average Japanese citizen had fuckall to do with the decision to go to war, and all credit goes to the US government and armed forces for treating them as such. They turned their anger toward their own government after the war, and that was the right place for it.
I just finished listening to The Passage by Justin Cronin. It's a strange combination of apocalyptic/sci-fi/vampire. I enjoyed the whole thing. Not sure if it would stand up as well to a second closer read. There are a number of loose ends that I assume are lead-ins to the next in the series. On the whole, I liked it.
I just started reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read it since middle school I think, and I didn't get or forgot most of it.
It kept my interest well enough to request the second one from the library but now I want your suggestions of better books too
Thanks. Lucifer's Hammer is the only one of those I've read yet.