I am finishing up Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, which I received as a Christmas present. It's fantastic, which is probably why it won the Pulitzer. It relates the run up to the Great Depression from the perspectives of the four preeminent central bankers of that time: Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, and Hjalmar Schacht of Germany's Reichsbank. Ahamed weaves a good narrative, and it provides insight into something I knew little about, and something that is quite relavent today. If you, or anyone else you know is a fan of the gold standard, read this book.
My next read is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, however it won't take me more than a few days. I am also planning on reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but I decided to wait on it coming through my local used bookstore. I check in every week or so.
I am looking for the next read. I'm up for most anything as I have been reading mostly nonfiction lately.
A couple weeks ago I finished Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw, which was really great. Now I'm reading A Cook's Tour, which I'm liking but not quite as much as the former. I really love Bourdain's insights on the subculture of food and foodies and cooks. It's a world that's completely foreign to me outside of watching his show, and I really love his voice and his stories of himself and the places he visits.
Someone was like "I just love Andrew Zimmern's show!", and so I was forced to punch them in the face.
The Dead Hand, on kleinbl00's rec. Lives up to the hype, although I find myself sympathizing with Reagan at times, which makes me feel shame. I just reread The Joke the previous week, in preparation for Kundera's new novel that I believe is coming out in June. What a fantastic novel it is.
Yes, I suppose empathy is the right word; my mistake. Chapter by chapter I keep thinking, "You moron, you know SDI won't work!", but I can see that he was like a really nice grandpa who, based on his diaries, appears to have had good intentions, but was blind to the reality of the situation. I also respect Robert Gates a little less than I did previously, having only been familiar with his time as Sec'y of Defense under Bush/Obama. I wasn't aware of his involvement in the hawkish wing of the nuclear arms race.
Don't get me wrong--I despise Reagan and modern day reaganists especially. I just happen to find this topic fascinating, especially that he can seem to be so right and so wrong simultaneously on this particular issue. Hoffman points out in the beginning of the book, perhaps even in the prologue, that RR was a person who could hold several seemingly conflicting views on a given topic. This is evident in his dealings with the USSR.A nice grandpa who ratted out all his buddies to the HUAC, you mean.
I'm reading https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/. It's a collection of Elizer Yudkowsky's essays on rationality and science. I'm enjoying it immensely, it's been extremely mind opening. He's an extremely good writer, and he has a particular style of passionate rationality that I haven't really seen anywhere else. I'm also reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's a self-help and motivational book written in the 30's. It's been extremely motivating so far and I've enjoyed it immensely (I've always had a soft spot for 30's style writing) Some of the advice is a little hokey, but it makes a lot more sense in the context of modern science. I'd definitely recommend reading Thinking Fast and Slow first, it explains why a lot of the things that Hill attributes to God (or "The Infinite Intelligence") actually work - he's basically talking about how to train your subconscious (or the fast system) to motivate and help your conscious mind (the slow system) towards a particular goal. Your subconscious directs your attention, selecting what your conscious notices and also gives your conscious commands (an example from "Thinking Fast and Slow" is a person having a strong urge to brake before they consciously notice the deer about to jump in front of their car), so if your train your subconscious to really really want something you'll be more likely to notice opportunities relating to that thing, and more motivated to work towards it. At least that's my take on it. Apparently a lot of this hokey sounding advice is removed from the abridged version, which probably makes it more palatable to modern audiences but also completely neuters the book, so if you want to read it make sure you get the unabridged version.
I've made quite a lot of (long) train rides and drives lately which allowed me to plow through books with Audible. It's all non-fiction though. - Finished Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying, which was very insightful in detailing the systematic problems with blogs and online media manipulation. I knew sites like Gawker were shit but damn, they're even worse than I thought. Only downside to the book is that I found the second half to be a bit repetitive. - Finished two Chuck Klosterman books (Eating the Dinosaur and Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs). Enjoyable and witty collection of essays but nothing more than that. I'm I bought it during the sale. - Almost through Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 years. Better than I expected, although I have the tendency to lose track of the narrative when Graeber goes on a historical or etymological tangent, which he does more and more further into the book. I took Economics in high school where I was taught the simplified history of money. Debt definitely changed that view and quite some other ideas I had about money, debt and economics. - Halfway through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. Interesting read. Most of the examples she uses I've already read about before, but she highlights and explains clearly that our concept of 'truth' is much more malleable than one might think. - Still haven't made much more progress with the Hubski book. I will finish it though, just not in the next weeks.
I have to work on my hubski book too. Then again I haven't seen hair nor hide of Complexity in a minute, so - paging ?
I've been overwhelmed by whirling projects for the last month or two. I am an organic device that filters coffee and excretes creative action. That sounds worse written down that it did in my head. I am reading: project proposals; synopses; budgets; schedules.
I picked up my roommate's copy of The Bell Jar on a whim last night, because no one except me hasn't read it. It's not very good yet (75 pages). I suppose everyone and their mother has thought to contrast it with the male version, Catcher in the Rye? I'll finish it and make a post or something. kleinbl00, I found a copy of On Writing at a garage sale (maybe I mentioned this). I know you're not as high on it now but I'll work my way up. I have avoided reading Stephen King's actual books my whole life -- technically -- I honestly wonder how many people in the entire world got to On Writing before any of the others.
It's a small, small demographic but I'm in it. I read On Writing because it was mentioned here, his popular books never really caught my interest. Nevertheless I still found his advice useful and having read his works is not a requirement for understanding the book.I honestly wonder how many people in the entire world got to On Writing before any of the others.
Currently in the midst of James Joyce's Dubliners. An absolute masterpiece. I've also just read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and between the two of them, I may convince myself to tackle Ulysses this summer. Dubliners is a collection of short stories--vignettes, if you will-- detailing life in Dublin c. 1900, with all the associated oppression, sterility, etc. One thing Joyce is big on is paralysis; he sees Dubliners totally unable (or unwilling?) to change their situations for the better. Anyway, highly highly recommended. Favorite stories so far: --Araby Arguably the most poignant ending I've ever read. --Two Gallants Fantastic tale of disillusionment. --A Painful Case Most recently read. Absolutely heartbreaking story related with masterful command of the language.
Joyce's work changes over the course of his life, so I don't know what in particular you enjoy (other than, of course, that he is a fantastic author) about him, but Ulysses is a huge step from his previous work. Not to discourage you, at all, but it is helpful to review what you have just read after finishing a section by seeking out annotations, as a lot of the subtleties are easily passed over. But not before you read it for yourself. If you like his work, though, you're probably gonna dig his contemporaries, too. Swann's Way is the first of seven volumes in Marcel Proust's book In Remembrance of Things Past, which is the considered to be the mother of all modernist literature. It is incredibly good, introduces the whole "stream-of-consciousness" thing which will get beaten to death over the next 60 years, but gets caught up in the fussy bourgeoisie drama that was so hot at the time. Virginia Woolf is the shit. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are the American entries into the club, and are both beautiful novels as well. I would highly suggest you fuck with Faulkner before you move on to Ulysses. You're younger than me when I first read Dubliners and Portrait, and are getting a lot more out of it, too, so what do I know. Fare the well and keep at it, dude.
Did you get to Cryptonomicon? Goodreads is a good place to go for ideas. Do you have a profile there? I am reading flagamuffin's second-most-enthusiastically-recommended book, Blue Highways. So far so great. The story behind the writing of Frankenstein gives great context, without spoilers if you keep to that section. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves by reading German ghost stories translated into French from the book Fantasmagoriana, then Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening in the middle of summer, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream".During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Chillon For my money, they weren't far from a true-life scary story. Like Byron, I've been inside this castle and its dungeon ... the room is under "lakelevel"; when it rained the lake would spill through narrow windows and begin to drown the prisoner. That said, as places of imprisonment go, it is maybe the most beautiful.
I'm currently reading Blue Highways which is a captivating read and has been a goldmine of quotes related to rural America and societal changes at hand back in the late 70s. I highly recommend it. I'm also very nearly finished with Team of Rivals which I've been tackling in between things, very dense read but it will tell you everything and more that you could possibly want to know about Lincoln and his cabinet.
Which book by Bryson have you read? He's been on my list for some time now.
I think I've read The Lost Continent. I've also read A Short History of Nearly Everything , Made in America and started reading At Home. TLC: don't remember much, ASHoNE: great stories but I already knew some of the science tales, MiA: disappointing / boring, AH: great first part. Bryson's best when he's passionately telling a story. For me he hits the sweet spot between fascinating and informative writing. Of those four I'd suggest At Home or ASHoNE, both are great.
Are you opposed to kindle? I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg a few years ago: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680 I started Frankenstein last Fall after reading https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/345. If you want non-fiction, Gulag Archipelago will blow your mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago. Google Books has the first chapter if you want to see what you think: https://books.google.com/books?id=OW0poTnuCiIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gulag+archipelago&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gFw2VbTyM9PfoATO2IHYCg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=gulag%20archipelago&f=false I am also planning on reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
WHO WANTS TO HEAR ALL ABOUT HOW THERE'S A BIG SECRET (AKA NO ONE ELSE CARES) LITERATURE CONTROVERSY AS TO WHO REALLY WROTE FRANKENSTEIN? Seriously, one of my favorite undergraduate professors literally wrote the books about Frankenstein - he's convinced she really wrote it, and of course, as his student (he also taught my mother in undergrad) I agree, but there's this dillweed out there named John Lauritsen who's convinced that M. Shelly didn't write the book essentially because "a woman couldn't write it." If you're into literature, it's pretty fascinating. Lauritsen blows up the romantics list-serv about once a year clamoring on about how "clearly Percy Shelly wrote Frankenstein for his wife" and so on.
There's a tad more to the argument than that, but don't let that get in the way of your bitter anti-classicism. In all seriousness, Bryson wrote a damn fine book about Shakespeare that talks about the controversy. The conclusion is basically, we'll never know for sure: almost certainly the Bard wrote >90% of his plays, but it is equally almost 100% likely that a couple of the lesser-known ones aren't really his. The shaky attribution thing was common at the time for various industry reasons. The nuts who say it was Bacon or whatever are just nuts.
I recently bought a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and was warned that to read it without also reading the Archipelago is to commit a sin against history. The used book store around the corner has a sort of militant owner/proprietor.
I have a tendency to have multiple books under way at the same time. This week I've been working my way through Catch-22 and the Dune series. Initially I had trouble with Catch-22 as it seemed very repetitive and overly "wordy" but soon the absurd and paradoxical world really won me over. The last time I read Dune was in my early teens and it is interesting to note how differently the story now reads (I'm now in my late 30s).
It is one of my favorite books in its genre. :) I can't really articulate exactly what draws me to it but I do find many of the political and philosophical ideas presented in it fascinating. The series is also worth reading as it expands the lore quite a bit and makes re-reading of the first book even more interesting.
Glad to hear how expansive the universe is. I read Ender's Game when I was in high school and I really hope Dune will grab me as much as that did. It's really interesting how many parallels to Native American genocide I'm picking up on as I rethink it's plot. I'm assuming Dune alludes to Oil production?
I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach right now and it's probably one of the best books I've ever read. It lays down the true foundations of Mathematics and introduces you to formal systems in a really accessible and insanely interesting way. The whole book is an argument on how to explain human consciousness using the idea of a "Strange Loop," which is a fundamental concept in Mathematics (and is beautifully reflected in Escher's and Bach's work).
Currently reading "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote and really enjoying it. Finished "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline last week and it was pretty good. Finished "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller before that and really enjoyed it . Finished "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson before that and it was pretty good. Planning on reading "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman next.
I quite enjoyed "Ready Player One". I just bought "The Martian: A Novel" which is about a a guy stuck on mars, it's in the style of a logbook. It should be okay. If this book doesn't satisfy me I think I'm going to go back and start the "Red Mars" series again. I got halfway through book two and then just stopped reading previously. Oh and I also just finished "Nymphomation" by Jeff Noon. That guys writing style is insane, but the book was actually quite interesting. The end was a bit of a disappointment but it could have been much worse. Also, sorry for putting all my reading in a comment to you Kaius, I forgot where I was posting for a moment... But on the note of Neal Stephenson, have you read Anathem? That book is a commitment, but it's totally worth it.
Yea "Ready Player One" was a good quick read, I enjoyed some of the games references as I recently built a raspberry pi game emulator for my kids and loaded it up with all the old games I used to play. I'm more of a 90's kid but it was still fun. I read The Martian a few weeks back and thought it was really good. I recommended it to a few friends who like science and space stuff. I haven't seen Red Mars or Nymphomation mentioned before, I might check them out. I quite like Neal Stephenson and have read some of his stuff like Snow Crash (ok) and Cryptonomicon (Fantastic). I think someone else on hubski recommended Anathem to me but I might try out the Baroque trilogy first. I really like his writing style but I find after I read one of his books I need to take a break and read something else for a while. Usually I change things up a bit, Fiction followed by Non fiction followed by Sci-fi followed by something random. Almost always as audiobooks.
Yeah, Stephenson can be an exhausting read at times. I wish I had gotten more into Cryptonomicon. I started it but just couldn't get past the beginning. Anymore the only reading I do is either technical or SciFi/Fantasy. And I haven't read a fantasy book in a couple of months. I've got a couple of autobiographies of musicians I want to get through but my list of books is just never ending...
Yea I know what you mean. I started Mongoliad once and just couldn't get into it. I loved Cryptonomicon but there were still large sections that could have been cut out. I think GRRM ruined fantasy books for me now and I would have a hard time reading anything similar. I occasionally take a look around for something with the same caliber but nothing really hits me. Biographies are good, I enjoyed Master of the Senate by Robert Caro much more than I should have. He really got into Johnsons life and the amount of detail was amazing.
If you're looking for good fantasy, there's a series called "Tyrants and Kings". It's kind of SciFi fantasy. But the world is great and the characters are fairly interesting. I read the first book when I was a freshman in high school. I read the second book at some point but never bought the last book. They're also on my list to reread sometime this summer.
Same, I've been reading some books on linux system administration and I've been perusing a powershell book. It's powershell 2.0 though. So far I've not learned much that I didn't know from experience powershell wise.
Interesting, i use powershell every day but not for sysadmin, i have a bunch of scripts to simplify build processes and run unit tests etc. I use it in some open source stuff too. I bought powershell in action and its pretty good but usually i end up googling for commands a lot as its not always obvious what you need to do. Goodreads profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6634319
If there's anything I've learned about powershell it's how messy the documentation is. How is that Lean Architecture book? My degree is actually in computer science but I've always done either sysadmin jobs or electronics repair. So I've always been interested in different methods of agile software development. I'm pretty sure SCRUM is still pretty popular but I honestly have no idea how it works...
Yea we are going through a large transition to Agile in my company right now, its exciting and painful all at the same time. Lots of talk, whether it works is another story. I like Agiles core concepts but the snake oil salesmen have set up camp and it gets promoted as a solution to all problems. It cannot fix bad code/people/processes for you... The Lean Architecture book is a recent purchase, not sure about it yet really. I bought it without seeing the rather mixed reviews which has soured me on it a little.
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, a reexamination of primitive accumulation and the way capitalism organizes social reproduction from a feminist perspective.
Good question to ask if you want a glimpse in to my world these days. I'm reading The Challenger Sale again. I've been trained on this in the past and it was time for a refresher. Anyone in the business development space, this is a must read.
I started reading the Dune series chronologically. I'm on the first book House Atriedies (or something like that). I like the book despite all it's wired . . . Things. Like the secret sex cult trying to breed the messiah.
The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad I picked it up off my grandpas shelf and started reading without knowing anything about it. I would say it is a hard read for me (a junior in high school) but rather interesting. Though as I get through it I am starting to realize it isn't about the events that are happening. It is about the relationships and politics behind the events that aren't even described. It is a real page turner for how little actually occurs in the book. It carries some interesting themes and repetition that I am not sure what they mean. I am definitely going to read opinions and analysis on the book after I finish it.
I'm doing a summer book list with my girl friend who's in China right now. We each picked 5 books then conjointly chose 5 books to finish by August. •Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan •Drown - Junot Diaz •Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden •Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov •Dracula - Bram Stoker •Frankenstein - Mary Shelly •Tom Jones - Henry Fielding •Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes •Metamorphoses - Franz Kafka •Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley •Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard •Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Neitzsche •Brave New World - Aldous Huxley •Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges •[Undecided] You can kind of see where out tastes begin to divulge. I prefer something more transcendental while she prefers something more visceral. I've been on an economics binge recently and have read 'Manufacturing Consent', 'Death of the Liberal Class', and Ludwig Von Mises' ' Planned Chaos' along with different Economics text books. I highly recommend 'The Brother Karamazov' by Dostoevsky. It is what got me into existential thinking in the first place.
Yesterday I began reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. The first hundred pages reveal, in an overly blunt, tasteless fashion, Salinger's depiction of a frightened, depressed, bitter young man. It is not a work that I am eager to complete.
Do you mind me asking what age you are? I only ask because I imagine that my opinion if that book would have been different if I weren younger, the same age as or older than Holden. Not sure how it would change, but my guess is it wouldn't be static. Cheers!
I have lived beyond thirty years. I welcome your further assessment of this work. Are there gender issues involved in being able to appreciate this piece? I am a female. Thanks.
I too am beyond 30 but shy of 40.... for now. I'm not sure if there are gender issues involved, but I do think that this novel resonated with me as a kid because of the whole, "older people are all phony" aspect. If I read the book now, would that ring less true? Perhaps it would. I remember reading that the book was a favorite of John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman to the extent that he wanted to legally change his name to Holden Caufield. He had thought Lennon was "selling out" and becoming "phony" etc. Apparently John Hinkley, the guy that shot Reagan was also a fan. I don't recall too much detail about the novel as it's been over 20 years since I read it. I recall him being at a turning point in life where he is expected to be acting more "adult" but he still very much feels like a kid. He has a little sister in the book which he seems to really love and he wants her to remain a "kid" very much. I think if I read it now, I would think he was a little shit. I guess I'm a sellout now.
I am impressed with your recall abilities. I vaguely remember the connection between the story and the deranged behaviors of Chapman and Hinkley. Because you mentioned Holden's sister Phoebe, it occurred to me that she, along with his friend Jane, appear to be the only glimmers of light in his life. Perhaps the message that Salinger tries to highlight, through a young person's point of view, which at times can be gross, is that, to some degree, most people are "little shits" that eventually become, in some respects, "big shits". In other words, he attempts to expose the imperfections of human existence with which we all must contend. Thanks for the insight. I will finish the work and let you know how I feel about it thereafter. Have a nice day!
The Millionaire's Fastlane by MJ Demacro - one of the smartest books I have ever read on making money. Don't be fooled by names and introduction of the book.
Not much now that school's picked up again--there's always so much to do and I'm trying to kick a nasty askreddit habit. Slowly making my way through 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Story's got me intrigued and the writing is pretty, even in the English translation.
Actually I just took that out of the library. While I was in the library, I saw In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age by Nev Schulman. He is apparently the host of a TV show called Catfish which I had never heard of. The book begins by being about himself and others who have "fallen in love" and had "relationships" with people they have never met -- who then turn out to be not who they said they were. 25-year-old female models turning out to be 19-year-old boys, for example. It's enough to make me want to stay off line forever. Almost. Cumol and I recently exchanged videos of each other's speeches, so we might be the people we say we are... at least I hope. I'll get to DFW shortly. Thanks for the shout-out thundara (who, by the way, claims to have a gender unlike our new friend lambda, who when asked whether he had a gender, said this:
Cosmology is the beat behind a piece of music.
I don't even think in terms of "typical" or "arab" or "graduate student" or "scientist" or, or, or... and I'm not your typical rapper, for that matter. but yes, of course, anyone who is wondering, Cumol is adorable, as we all are, much cuter than our imaginary persona. Real-life hubski meetups tend to validate that.
lil, did you ever try to rap? calls eightbitsamurai... hand her a mic please!
I wrote and performed a dub poem once called "Counting Pens" about working in a Jail School and how the kids would steal everything all the time. I was going to post it but I can't find it. It dates back to before my last hard drive crash. Now I know things can be recovered from hard drives. Now I know to back up. I just got a back-up drive programmed to back up every night and to do a full back-up once a week, but I had to disconnect it since it messed up a bunch of other things, like having the computer start in the morning. Note to self: plug in your back up drive soon
Robert Putnam has a new book about inequality and it's getting some great reviews. Have you read Bowling Alone by any chance?
I just listened to Marc Maron's interview with Ronson from last week, and was thinking of checking this one out. From the interview and his wikipedia article, he sounds like a really upstanding and thoughtful guy. I'm bummed but not surprised to hear that he doesn't come up with actionable advice for the issue.Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed was done last week. I really dig Ronson as a writer and believe he has an awful lot to offer the world but I'm not sure Shamed really comes to any conclusions, and I feel like it's trying to. I enjoyed it greatly but I wanted more out of it. I guess it's just hard to say anything definitive or actionable when one is talking about the Internet.
He presents Anwar Al-awlaki in an incredibly human way. You see the guy go from peaceful middle class kid to angry jihadist over the coarse of a few years. It's unsettling how much harassment from the us govt happens during those years. I think Scahill tries to use it to make the point that the enemies we're fighting now are our own creation. Dunno, the ending left me feeling pretty haunted. Let me know what you think.
I'm currently reading the third book in The Wheel of Time series, The Dragon Reborn. The series itself is good, but I hear it slows down a lot later. I'm only about a third of the way through this book, but I'm getting tired of the recap and refresher that takes up the first part of them all. I'm considering re-reading The Lord of the Rings in its entirety. It's been a long time, and I just got War of the Ring, 2nd edition at Origins! It's put me in a Middle Earth kind of mood.
School has been eating my time recently but I've just started The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. It was recommended by my crew coach and several fellow rowers. I'm not very far into it, but it's a very engaging story thus far...Even if you're not remotely interested in rowing its a fascinating story about what these men had to face at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Currently sitting through Eichmann in Jerusalem. It's kind of a slog, really really pinned down by the insanely quotidian details of the horror of the Holocaust, but Arendt is trying to put a face on the bureaucratic insanity, and it gets across her point very well. I now know far far more about the orchestration of the Holocaust than I ever thought I would, and it really makes the entire event more mundane but also more horrifying at the same time. For instance, the renewed interest in Zionism wasn't merely a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, but was actively pursued by the Nazi regime before the final solution was undertaken, and the brutal Romanian anti-semitic campaign (arguably even worse than the Nazi regime's, who actually told Romania to chill the fuck out) was capped off, after massacring half the jewish population, by deporting (directly and indirectly) the rest to Palestine, setting off mass emigration from all over Europe and sparking the fire of the Israeli state. In no way shape or form is this even a half-hearted attempt at apologetics, nor is this an indictment of Zionism, mind you, but Zionism had been viewed as an academic curiosity amongst Jews in Europe up until Fascism was a rising power, and The Nazi govt. colluded with Zionists to sell this idea to long-standing populations of European Jews. Standouts from the past year: King Leopold's Ghost The Power Broker I love me some good old fashioned politicking. Kinda like a early 1900s House of Cards, only real. The Devil Finds Work Made me fall in love with James Baldwin, an, incredible author and soul. Complexity I finished up East of Eden a month ago, I've been trying to find the time to do something special for the next reader, but I've been bogged down lately :( Any idea about how I should put out a call for the next interested party?
It's trash and I don't care. It's fun trash. Saturday was Record Store day so of course that meant 10 hours of drinking, 3 visits to the local used record/book/CD store, and I picked this up alongside what's supposed to be a really great bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay that I'm also looking forward to. But trash first. My big plan today is to go home and devour it in one setting, perhaps alongside a box of something sweet and delicious and undecided (I'd say chocolates but - I don't like chocolates...) I'm also reading Ashbery's Self Portrait in a Convex mirror, but that's side reading.
I do a thing where I start a bunch of books at once, so when something strikes my fancy at a given time, I can do that and switch between them as I feel. So currently I'm reading: Rise of Endymion, book 4 of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. I can't give an opinion on this one yet, but I really love the series. His writing is so, so bad, but his storytelling is so, so good. I love the universe and world-building and attention to detail in creating this world realistically. Count of Monte Cristo, this is my main focus right now. I'm only about 50 pages in, but really what can I say about it? It's the greatest revenge story of all time and we all know that. Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. This is the newest addition to my cycle. I have to decide if I really hate it, but I'm willing to give it a fair go. Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn. Masterpiece. Gulag Archipelago is my next to tackle, but that's going to be a sole focus kinda thing. And a lot of Jim Harrison poetry whenever I can find it. thenewgreen, I've been on a Montana kick. Any good Montana authors I should know about? I was suggested one by a native Montanan while leading a scotch tasting, but was too far gone to remember the name. I believe his first name was Ivan?
Ted Kaczynski's writing made a pretty strong impression on people, though I've never read him myself :)
For Montana, how about some old school Charles Russell Western short stories? He was a painter, but good friends with Bill Hart and thus had some influence on what became the Western movie industry.
You need to read it. It's totally different. Any of the films are fun, but everything I've heard is they fail to really capture it, but the book is a massive tome. Any film version of it cuts out huge swaths of the book to make it a proper length, and when the book is about the absolute perfect calculations of a wronged man, it has to be in full.
I'm currently reading a translation of Andrezj Sapkowski's Blood of Elves, and it's pretty damn good. It's gritty fantasy with an interesting protagonist. Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, a preternatural exterminator, and reminiscent me of a less-angsty Elric.
I'm reading Under The Cloud by Richard Miller. It details U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the '50s and '60s. It's particularly fascinating because it details where the subsequent radiation fallout drifted over the continental U.S.