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Books I've read in the past 64 days: Stein on Writing by Sol Stein. I'm pretty sure I blasted through this in less than 48 hours. Phenomenal book on how to #writebetterdammit. Even though the majority of the book is advice on writing fiction, there is a lot to learn when you want to write nonfiction, so it's an enjoyable and engaging read nonetheless. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. A fun and self-aware book on how to be happy. Burkeman dispels the common (read: American) approach to happiness and takes the reader through a bunch of different philosophical ideas from Alan Watts to the Stoics that go against the grain. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. At almost 37 hours, this is not a small book, but Pinker is forgiven for it because he covers such a large scope and depth. In a Tony Judt-esque fashion, Pinker explains the large and steady decline in violence through decades and millennia with a bucketload of insight, evidence and anecdotes to back it up. The only thing that bored me to tears were his methodological chapters where he explains how he got his data, but other than that I found it intriguing. Dollars and Sense by Dan Ariely. I then wanted something more fun-sized so I read Ariely's new book. If you're well-read in Freakonomics or behavioural economics, it's not very insightful but it was a fun read nonetheless. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by Don Thompson. I'd put this in the same bucket as Narconomics which I read earlier last year: take a niche and explore/explain the economic forces that drive the behaviour that looks weird on the surface but makes sense once you have the full picture. Interesting, but sometimes Thompson loses pace. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot. This book is...basically a political pamphlet, and is researched like one. I liked his proposed ideas, but his argumentation is shoddy and easily shot-down. I found his proposal of a renewed Commons that is separate from government and market forces very intriguing. After those books, I semi-accidentally bought myself a trifecta of memoirs. The first was Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman. Chapters alternated between "not so significant youth experiences" and "trying a little to hard to sound wise and insightful", so I didn't make it far before giving up. Autobiographies always focus too much on rosy and fuzzy childhood memories, but this was a bit too much for my liking. The second was Hitch-22: A Memoir by Hitchens. I also haven't finished this yet, but that's mostly because it is quite a long book and the audio recording makes it hard to listen to him for too long at a time. I like Hitchens and his writing, so I'll finish it one day. The third is Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier. This looked like a Jaron book on VR, but really is a Jaron memoir that has like four chapters about VR sprinkled in between. There are fascinating insights in there, but on the whole, they are few and far between when compared to his other books. I think he expanded too much on experiences that I could not relate to at all, and too little on the interesting anecdotes and stories he could've told. Today I started reading Orientalism, which has been high on my list for quite some time.
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I recently read Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town at the recommendation kleinbl00, and can't recommend it enough. If anyone knows of a similarly excellent book about the current opioid crisis, I'd love to hear about it. I also just finished Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City as recommended by Bill Gates in his year-end book recommendation list. It may be the most visceral and enraging account of poverty and exploitation in modern America that I've ever found. I'm struggling to come up with productive responses to this situation, but I'm sure some other radical hubskiers may have thoughts here as well.
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Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me!If anyone knows of a similarly excellent book about the current opioid crisis, I'd love to hear about it.
FirebrandRoaring · 658 days ago · link ·
After reading David Cain's take on consumerism, I've decided to start reading the collection of books I've amassed with the thought of "Ooh, this could be an interesting read". First is Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Ironically, I had to order it; but I wanted to buy it for a month now, so I think it's fair. I've been reading The Art of War when on the road, to see how I can apply it to "conquering" the real world and its obstacles.
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; I enjoyed Jane Eyre by Charlotte more. Charlotte wrote an interesting forward to WH that is in my edition, however. She makes apologies for the books faults, which seems curious to me. I'm also reading Distributed Ledger Technology: The Science of the Blockchain by Roger Wattenhofer. Just started it. ecib just gave me this as a belated xmas gift this morning, so all respectable reading is going to be put on hold for a few days:
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That's fair; David Foster Wallace isn't lighthearted. My wife was nervous about getting into DFW too - she studied Tense Present in undergrad and knew about the suicide and depressive substance abuse - so I started her on a BIWHM audiobook while we were on a flight 2 weeks ago. She got a taste of some of the weirder character biographies and DFW's metafictional style, which intrigued her. I think the most challenging short from that series is #6 ("soft" subscription paywall, couldn't find a .pdf). Then I asked her to read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which might be his funniest short piece but still hits with the hallmark agoraphobic/dissociative anxiety that's in all his stuff. Thing is, DFW perceived broken-up types. He wrote those characters unnervingly well, and it feels like exposure if you self-identify as much as he did - makes it difficult to extricate. Take care of yourself. Glad to hear you're coming out of it rather than heading in.
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I don't think Infinite Jest is itself depressing, but you'll want to avoid some of the books that came after. After reading Oblivion I didn't feel surprised that he killed himself. From the wiki:In general, Marshall Boswell claimed that this was Wallace's "bleakest" work of fiction. In Oblivion, he "uncharacteristically" provides "no way out" of solipsism and loneliness. Boswell further suggested that the collection "repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation" from loneliness, like communicating through language, that Wallace presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion," he writes, "remains unique in Wallace's oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism."[26]
My favorite moment of an otherwise thoroughly mediocre film came when the protagonist of Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts confronted a college kid in hospital after a suicide attempt. (Paraphrasing here:) Jesse: That's it, I'm taking you off the postmodernists. Dean: What? Why? Jesse: DFW is a great writer, but he's also great at reminding us how shitty and fucked up the world is. You've got enough of that. Here, go read the Romantics.
I just finished reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was pretty good. Now I'm working on Mieville's The City and the City, which actually was shipped to me as part of a long-ago and far-off Hubski book experiment by user Creativity. Sorry, Creativity. We kind of borked that one up, didn't we? Anyway, The City and... is pretty good except for one major issue I'm having with the text. The setting, and much of the conflict of the plot, is established as one physical city which, for reasons lost in the sands of time, are actually considered two separate cities, in fact, two separate countries, essentially. It is a very interesting premise at first. 100 pages in however and I just can't help but wonder why any person in either city would opt to continue the charade. I guess pride? Nationality? Fear of Breach? (When a citizen of one city knowingly acknowledges the other city which they're surrounded by, it causes breach and there is this special supernatural force of Breach which magically whisks that citizen away post-haste. But my question is, where do all those citizens go? How many citizens per year are lost to breach? Like, this seems like it would be difficult to keep population figures up.) Anyway, I know I'm supposed to employ willing suspension of disbelief here, and I'm trying, but the just total lack of practicality and reasonableness in this set-up is distracting me from the text itself. Like, whose ancient brilliant idea was it that one geographical location should be two cities, neither of which are allowed to interact with each other, supporting 2 governments, 2 class infrastructures, even 2 economies? And that while so doing, somehow feel it's a totally reasonable ask or expectation that individual citizens grow and live while consciously blocking out half of what's around them? It's an interesting thought experiment, but so is having six children and naming them things like "Shithead," "Poop," "Princess," "Favorite," and "Least Favorite," and seeing what happens. Fun to think about, but only a total asshole would try to implement in reality.
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Creativity · 653 days ago · link ·
I don't remember who did the book experiment but it wasn't me :) I remember seeing the thread though.
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Complexity · 653 days ago · link ·
It was me, yes. I wonder where the rest of the books are. I took The City And The City to be a parable about Israel, specifically Jerusalem, and the close quarters within which different faiths and hatreds nevertheless are drawn to live due to a shared attraction to the holy city.
user-inactivated · 654 days ago · link ·
My friend told me about this book. They said there's even a system, where if you want to go from one city to the other, you have to go through some kind of checkpoint or something. I don't remember all that well. The conversation was a while ago. From what it sounds like though, it sounds like that it's a very forced way into looking into classism and social stratification and how people go about their lives dealing with it.
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Yes. You have to go to Copula Hall which is in the center-ish of the city, and you basically have to go through immigrations/customs. that's the only way to get from one city to another...even though they are literally right next to each other geographically ("grosstopically," in the book).
johnnyFive · 657 days ago · link ·
I'm trying to narrow things down a little more. Currently reading: Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Technically not reading, doing the audio book. Almost done, but am really enjoying it. Grant, also by Chernow. U.S. Grant is not someone I knew much about, despite being a bit of a Civil War buff (although not a very good one, apparently). It's a great book so far. Tigerman by Nick Harkaway. I loved his previous two books, with The Gone-Away World probably in my top 10 of all time. This one is not as good...it just doesn't quite have the same humor as the previous two.
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 Toland also did The Last 100 Days, a multi-perspective account of how WWII in Europe ended. It was great. But the narrator was also great, while the narrator for Rising Sun is not. Biggest problem is his voice is all in low registers which means I can't listen to him while driving. However, the book is every bit what I was hoping; it basically outlines exactly how Japan entered WWII and why and how they were pretty much fucked from the get-go. In two weeks I begin my 90-minutes-a-day of audiobooks for six weeks. This time I don't have a minor in world history to pursue via the Durants. I also have a backlog of 27 audiobooks I need to kill. We'll see if I can get through all of them.
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That sounds very interesting, to say the least. May have to pick it up. Will be of a piece with my recent Ellsberg reading, which discusses the decision to drop the bomb in pretty good detail. Ellsberg concludes, as have many others before him, that the bomb was unnecessary and can only really be understood as a warning shot to the Soviets, given how splendidly our targeting of civilians was already going in Japan. I read Making of Modern Japan, but that book, as informative as it was, doesn't really distill the proximal reasons for Japan's behavior in WWII; it focuses more on the bigger historical reasons. I've as yet not found a really good text on WWII from the Japanese perspective. Is this it?
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I dunno, man. I recognize that it's the fashionable thing to say these days but my grandfather was a machine shop foreman at Pickatinny Arsenal during WWII and a machine shop foreman at Los Alamos National Labs after WWII. He loved regaling us with stories of the throttle detents on a B-29 made of copper wire that, if broken, allow you to throttle the things into "get me the fuck outta here and go ahead and shitcan the pistons in 15 minutes" mode. He enjoyed telling stories about the acetate discs they put in bomb timers that would be eroded by acetic acid slowly so that depending in the discs, the bombs would go off an hour, a day, a week or a month (or some combination thereof) after the bomb hit while meanwhile, a mercury switch kept you from moving the bomb. Unless you had Jews, of course. The Nazis just used Jews. He enjoyed telling tales of "Little David", the 36-inch mortar they were working on where the shell was keyed into the lands of the gun barrel to reduce friction, an 80-ton siege engine with a six-mile range intended to take Japan one trench at a time. American forces had spent ten months with kamikaze attacks by August 1945. Toland describes a lot of fatalism and misunderstanding in the runup to Pearl Harbor; the US mistranslated some secret cables so that they sounded a lot more aggressive than they actually were and the Japanese didn't understand how lenient we actually were about Manchuria. I had an interesting discussion once with a girl whose grandparents were wiped out in Hiroshima. We came around to the viewpoint that the first bomb could be justified but the second one couldn't. But then, I was a lot younger then and a lot more jaded. We're still using Purple Hearts manufactured ahead of Operation Downfall. Was it Judt who argued that WWII was the direct consequence of the lack of unconditional surrender in WWI? Yeah, a warning shot to Stalin was probably part of it. But if I had a choice between doubling my war dead or nuking Japan until they rolled over forever, I'd fly the bomber myself.The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific, with an estimated total of over 82,000 direct casualties on both sides: 14,009 Allied deaths and 77,417 Japanese soldiers. Allied grave registration forces counted 110,071 dead bodies of Japanese soldiers, but this included conscripted Okinawans wearing Japanese uniforms. 149,425 Okinawans were killed, committed suicide or went missing which was one-half of the estimated pre-war local population of 300,000. The Battle resulted in 72,000 US casualties in 82 days, of whom 12,510 were killed or missing (this figure excludes the several thousand US soldiers who died after the battle indirectly, from their wounds). The entire island of Okinawa is 464 sq mi (1,200 km2). If the US casualty rate during the invasion of Japan had been only 5% as high per unit area as it was at Okinawa, the US would still have lost 297,000 soldiers (killed or missing).
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That sounds like something Judt would have said. I specifically recall David Fromkin saying that WWII should really be called The Great War, Part II, so it's certainly got credence in history circles (of course, ironically, the US and Japan are one of the major switches in terms of allies/adversaries from WWI to WWII). To the point about whether we should nuke Japan to annihilation or invade, Ellsberg makes the point that it's a false choice, that Japan was going to surrender when they did without use of the bomb (and FWIW, 7/8 5-star generals or admirals in WWI, including Eisenhower, thought that it was unnecessary). The argument against the bomb basically rests on the premise that (1) we were already targeting civilians in Japan from March 1945 onward (the time-delayed bombs, for example, were supposed to hit the responders). Curtis LeMay was brought over from the bombing campaign in Europe specifically because he was so damn good at it. The firebombing of Tokyo in spring 1945 killed at least 20,000 more people than the A-bomb on Hiroshima did, and the list of other cities in which 10,000-50,000 civilians were killed is long. None of that required an A-bomb. There may be some reason to think that an A-bomb was more terrifying and thus hastened the surrender, but there are reasons to think otherwise, as well. Mainly, the Japanese-Soviet non-aggression pact was expired, and the Japanese surrendered just as Soviet troops were amassing in and around Mongolia. Japan was stretched thin enough that there was no way to survive opening another front, thus they gave up. Of course it's an unknowable counterfactual but there's at least reason enough to consider that the atomic bomb was a bit player and not a star of the Pacific theater. However, it sure as fuck was a star of the war generally, given that everyone knew it was coming, but no one knew when or what might happen when/if deployed (and that everyone knew the H-bomb was also inevitable as early as 1942). Ellsberg argues that the use of the bomb was of course meant as a punitive measure against Japan, but given that the widespread destruction of civilian centers was trivial by August 1945 (as the B-29s were having an easy enough time avoiding being shot down by then), the real target was Berlin. As in, "Dear Stalin, This is what we have in store for you if you violate the Allies' claims in Berlin and the rest of Germany." It's sort of a cynical view of things, but it's difficult to not read the arms race cynically (since they were plotting the destruction of humanity). Edit: We apparently tried the same strategy in Germany, but due to local conditions (which include building material and weather patterns) we were only able to create firestorms twice--Dresden and Hamburg (and of course we were originally developing the bomb for Hitler). The strategy was in play from 1942 on, however, so it's wrong for anyone to think that Japan was unique in the targeting of civilians as a war strategy.
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There's a lot of 20/20 hindsight in all these perspectives. The question is not whether Japan was going to surrender, the question is when was Japan going to surrender and under what terms. Japan wouldn't have gone to war in the first place if we weren't calling for their withdrawal from China. How much would Japan have given up and when? It's not what we know now, it's what we knew then and we didn't know a lot. Example: we'd been firebombing the shit out of Tokyo and they hadn't surrendered. The targeting of civilians wasn't novel on either side. The post-war considerations were definitely important. And I am not Daniel Ellsberg. But I have a more than passing interest in this question, have held positions on both sides of the debate at one point or another, and haven't seen anything that compels me to regard it as a settled issue in 30 years of looking. Marshall Plan terms were extended to the USSR. Stalin rejected them. Peace Love and Capitalism was open to anybody who would sign the IOU; the notion that we were destined to stare at the Soviets over gunsights is just as revisionist as framing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a part of the Cold War instead of part of WWII.
I am a third of the way through Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick. Whenever a high-profile news article about ISIS would rear its head i'd always tell myself that i'll have read it, but I never got around to any of them. I figured that this book would be a good way to get up to speed. It won the the 2016 Pulitzer Prize* for non-fiction and my initial impression is that it is very much deserving of it. The way it's written makes it incredibly gripping. I've seen others say that it plays out like a thriller novel and I think that's a good analogy. It also helps that a lot of the factors surrounding the events are insane. It's general knowledge that the invasion of Iraq was disastrously handled, but the dive under the surface is another level. Like, how could all these things happen like this outside of fictional tale? And yet they did. It has sparked my interest in more non-fiction. * Q: What do you call the annual award for the best Christmas cracker joke? A: The Pull-it Surprise Sorry, that's my friend's joke.
user-inactivated · 658 days ago · link ·
http://a.co/iJ21a7y Starting this series and t the end of the first book. I like the world he is building, and the "magic" system he created is different from most of the stuff I've read. The story and the characters have real development and at least one book in, I can suggest it to those of you that like hard fantasy. http://a.co/24lZm5v My brother and I got into a conversation about the new Pulp novels that are coming out by self-published authors using Amazon as a publisher. This is the story set that he told me to go read. The books are quick reads, and the author pumps out a story every quarter or so. I'll start these as soon as I am done with my serious books. And finally fiction book for January is Artemis. http://a.co/6zgBWaa I know zero about the book, don't know anything about the story and will probably crank thos one out at the end of the month. The goal this year? a book a week. And I am already at 1 for the year.
user-inactivated · 658 days ago · link ·
Dala recently downloaded The Song of Roland for me. She got a translation by K.C. Moncrieff for free from Project Guttenburg. I've heard so many summaries for this poem from "moving and inspiring" to "bleak" to "a slow, tedious, slog." If anything, this tells me that this is a pretty complex poem with a lot of elements. I'm gonna give it about thirty pages or so, and if I like it, I'll continue. If not, I'll probably move on to Grettir's Saga that someone on here mentioned to me quite a while ago. I don't know where I'm gonna go after that.
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FirebrandRoaring · 656 days ago · link ·
It is an interesting place.You'll probably find some interesting titles.
Let's see. Currently reading: The Whale, Phillip Hoare. I liked The Sea Inside, so I figured I'd also like The Whale. So far, it's been a correct prediction. I just finished Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. Loved it. Hard sci-fi that makes you think. Also was a bit of a thriller, which made it easy to read. Before that was Walter Issacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe. Issacson is a brilliant biographer and he did a decent job in making Einstein's theories easy to digest. This was also the first major book I 'read' via audiobook. Tend to realize how many things around the house I can do while reading, which is nice (eg washing dishes). Looking forward to having audiobooks on my commute during my internship. Still Here, by Lara Vapnyar was an interesting commentary on the app mentality, and a love story at heart. Enjoyed it. Ali Smith's Autumn, supposedly the first "post-Brexit" novel to talk about Brexit, was less than I'd hoped. It rambled all over the place and the story didn't seem as connected to Brexit as it was made out to be. The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner, was a good history of Bell Labs. Lots of stuff came out of those labs and from the people who worked there. American War, by Omar Akkad, was marvelous. Annie Proulx's Barkskins transported me to a time when forests were an 'infinite' resource. And that was most of December!
Started and did not finish several non-fiction books over the last few months; did not meet my 2017 goal of 26 books. Starting this year off with something light to get back into the swing of things, so I am reading It Devours! (A Welcome to Night Vale novel) before I work my way back into my real reading list. Set my goal for this year at 20 books, hopefully I can get at least close.
AnSionnachRua · 657 days ago · link ·
I only started reading consistently again very recently. Hoping to do a lot more in the next year - which might well be easier since my sister bought me a Kobo Aura for Christmas. It's class. I mean, I love physical books - but you can store so many on such a small device, it's easy to find free copies of a lot of books, and you can read with one hand! The minimalist in me is in love. Currently I'm reading All Quiet on the Western Front on the Kobo. I'm not even sure why , it just seemed like a short, well-known read to put away. I think, though, that we're way over-exposed to depictions of WWI, so it's not exactly as shocking as it may have been in the past. Reading over the last while: Dubliners by James Joyce. I have an irrational hatred of Joyce, though I did rather enjoy seeing something of the old Dublin spirit. It makes me wonder about Irish literature in general; I suppose I haven't actually read much, but sometimes I feel like the Irishness is pumped up to the max. Stráinséirí (Strangers) by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh. I had to buy this when I found it in a second hand shop because it was actually written by a man from my town! He's a well-known Irish author, but this is the first time I've read any of his work. It's fairly short and fairly simple, a story about two schoolgirls, one of whom is a traveller (i.e. Irish gypsy), and some problems that arise in the community as a result of their friendship. HHhH by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor. First book I read on the Kobo, and I absolutely zoomed through it. It was nice to read something relatively new after mostly reading older books for some time. A sort of meta-historical-novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, with a lot of little tangents about the author writing the book itself. Maybe a bit much for some tastes, but I did enjoy it. Narziss and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop. A book that a friend of mine loves and I found a second hand copy with a mysterious inscription, so now it is precious to me. My first exposure to Hesse. I'm not really sure about novels set in a different point of time - you always feel like they just don't quite ring true - but it was interesting, the question of which of two conflicting natures to follow. Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac. Can't remember who translated this. I actually really liked it. Something about the ridiculous French high society is always appealing, even sadistically.
ButterflyEffect · 658 days ago · link ·
Just finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Liked it a lot, but it's also causing me to have a mini existential crisis. Which is maybe the point of the book. Not sure what the next book will be, maybe Racing Weight to go back to non-fiction, and something fiction after (hell, maybe I'll do a real book club).
Listened to Artemis by Andy Weir. Wanted to really enjoy it and found myself rather disappointed. I have high standards for this kind of fiction it seems. Without spoiling too much, the plot simply isn't believable for me. The idea that someone living in an arcology on the moon would casually jeopardize the lives of everyone in it for a payday seems unbelievable to me, but then, I have high standards for colonists-to-be, and Weir's protagonist is distinctly lower-class, approximating that of a serf in feudal times.
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johnnyFive · 657 days ago · link ·
I haven't read that one, but I know The AV Club's review was pretty dang harsh.
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johnnyFive · 657 days ago · link ·
I can believe it. It's got to be terrifying to hit it big the first time around, and I can imagine the temptation to try to make lightning strike twice must be overwhelming.
Just finished Daniel Ellsberg's Doomsday Machine. Talk about enlightening in the most depressing possible way.