Fuck yes.
Talk bout them pages below.
Since the last thread: I finished Gibson's The Difference Engine, which kinda tapered off into an anticlimax. I then got subsumed by Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy for a few days: After that, I read Thirteen by Richard K Morgan, which is a great scifi thriller. Morgan doesn't fuck around, everything is neatly explained and dare I say it has (some) well-developed characters. I then read the first third of someone's scifi manuscript. If I wasn't sidetracked a bunch lately I would be been further in by now. Read Evicted by Matthew Desmond, partly because it recommended here (blackbootz?). It's pretty darn good. Reminded me of George Packer's The Unwinding, as it follows eight families in Milwaukee that all relate to housing issues in different ways, interspersed with facts and trends about how fucking awful housing for the poorest is, and normal evictions have become. Like how in court, each kid you have is just as bad for your odds as four months of rent backlog. That for every formal eviction, two informal ones occur. How for every poor white woman, nine poor black women are evicted. Poor black men are locked up - poor black women are locked out. To be more precise, it's not just that the book follows the families, it's Matthew himself followed those families around for months as an embedded researcher. And also built the sociological studies that the eye-popping stats and facts are from. Two facts that for some dumb reason he saves for the epilogue, even though it makes the book stand out from so many similar books that only depend on desk research and hearsay. Then I read Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I really loved his book The Gene last year, so had this in my to-read for quite some while. Great read, although it loses some pacing near the end. Fundamentally, it is a hopeful book about science developing over time. One of the stories it tells is of the first public campaign for cancer, where they took a sick child and got his favourite baseball team to see him on-air. I wrote down that Just this weekend I started reading Johann Hari's Lost Connections. The book is about getting rid of the idea that depression is just a chemical imbalance. Instead, the bulk of it looks at nine (mostly) external factors that seriously impact depression and anxiety. The common denominator is that each factor is a form of disconnection: a normal, human craving or need that modern society has severed us from. The disconnect from meaningful work, from people, from social and financial stability, from dignity, and natural habitats. While I like the read and the stories Johann tells (I'm writing a ton of notes), I can't help but find it to be a bit too pop-sci for my taste. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is Scientific American and 10 is academic literature, this is a solid 3 where it could have been a 6 if he didn't simplify everything."...despite the inspiring interview, the illness was not named - the depressing reality that he, too, would die hung over the conversation and the room."
In many ways, I thought that also reflected on the book itself - the depressing morbidity of cancer research hangs over its story of progress and successes.
Oooooooo0oO. Manuscript. I haven't read Evicted but Desmond had an article about homeownership driving inequality that was fantastic.
FINALLY! A book series that has been making me forget adulthood and crawl under the covers with a flashlight in defiance of the coming morning! Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive has me sucked into a beautifully and meticulously crafted world that I can't get enough of. I am currently on the third book Oathbringer after finished the first two. I haven't been able to find a good epic-scale fantasy in a long time. Honestly, it seems to be difficult to find new books and authors in the fantasy genre that I still find myself engrossed so wholly in. The last being The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks. I'm really hopeful for the future of the series as well! It seems Sanderson is a powerhouse of a writer, pushing out about a book a year is quite impressive when working on the scale he does. The fact that he has plans for TEN books in the Stormlight series blows my mind. So much happens in the narrative even between the first three that I can only imagine what the final chapters could include. The characters are so varied and have enticing and believable goals with great room for growth. The world of Roshar, however, seems to be the real star of the series. The environments, landscapes, history, and magic of it has been fascinating and I sometimes find myself flipping through the pages thinking "Can I please just get a geography chapter next?! This planet has 3 different colored moons? What? tell me more!" Anyways, I highly recommend the series. I am excited to see the other stories Sanderson has told, including the Mistborn series!
Solaris --------- A fascinating idea that's steeped in atmosphere. Having recently finished The Pale King, this felt as though it was moving at a breakneck pace. I loved it. It got a little bogged down by some excessive exposition in the second half of the book. The narrator essentially gives you a run down of the scientific literature written about a planet and its curious phenomena. Whilst these sections are highly imaginative and well written in and of themselves, it very much feels like the emergency breaks get put on the otherwise fast paced story. Especially as it's just worked into it by the narrator being in a library recounting it all to you. Still, that's nitpicking. A fantastic book. The Pale King --------------- Finished this one after starting it around the time of the last book thread. It's presented as a series of vignettes focussed around boredom and everyday tedium. Though there are reoccurring characters and locations, there's not really any overarching plot (linear or otherwise). I didn't enjoy it as much as Infinite Jest. However, it had a much greater emotional impact on me. Halfway through, a person giving a presentation to new employees at the IRS says: In some ways, I feel like this is an analogy for reading this book. There is a significant amount of writing in it that seems pointless. Not to an overwhelming degree, but its certainly a theme. Thing such as dense, textbook-esque explanations of tax procedure. Or an entire chapter made up of fragmented conversations, until one of them reaches an important point and its suddenly thrust into full focus. You could argue that it was the same for in Infinite Jest, but there that sort of stuff was usually relegated to the end notes. Here it's slap bang in the middle of the text. It was my conclusion that, in reading the book, its the author's intention for you to take on the same role as the IRS employees and learn to filter out "valuable, pertinent information from the pointless information." And the fact that someone would write a book this way made me feel very... I don't know. I guess it could be described as third-person existential dread. Like, "who the fuck writes a book this way?" Maybe i'm overthinking it. Still, it's the kind of thing you read and think: "I'm not surprised that the person who wrote this ended up committing suicide." I hope that doesn't sound callous or loathsome; I'm conflicted on whether it's a disrespectful thing to say. It's not meant to be, more an honest reflection of how it made me feel emotionally. If you have the patience for it or have enjoyed Wallace's fiction in the past, I wholeheartedly recommend it. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ---------------------------------- Just over halfway through this. It's been a while since I read a book with an unreliable narrator and I'm very much enjoying. Some of the character dynamics remind me of the film 12 Angry Men, in that there's lots of inter-character conflict playing out in a small space. I don't have much more to say on this one other than i'm excited to read on. The Cold War --------------- Another one that I'm halfway through. I picked this one up after OftenBen bumped kleinbl00's Geopolitical book post a month or so back. I'd actually been looking for a book that does the a similar thing for WW2 for a while, but settled for this. It's interesting to see how often the US' attempts to instil the 'right' governments in places such as Chile and Guatemala led to the complete opposite, which they were then basically forced to support. It's also clever how the smaller powers would leverage the US and Russia to their own ends too. It was eye-opening that figures like Mao and Che Guevara were seen as hero figures by their supporters not necessarily for their competence or their results, but simply as they represented 'revolutionary romanticism'. I think it draws parallels to the same sort of attitude that allowed Brexit to pass or Trump to be voted in. Not necessary because they're good or believed to be the right choice, but because they're a 'fuck you'.The darkness was looking at me, amorphous, immense, eyeless, devoid of limits.
Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometime the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X.
Only certain information is good... Your job, in a sense, with each file is to separate the valuable, pertinent information from the pointless information.
I can vouch for Toland. The Rising Sun is a soup-to-nuts chronology of how Japan stumbled into WWII with both arms open despite knowing it was fundamentally unwinnable. And while The Last 100 Days doesn't go into the lead-up, it sure gives you a ground-level view of the fall of the 3rd reich. Those are the only two I've read. There may be better. If you want a fictionalized account of the decline and fall of Eurasia, I wholeheartedly recommend The Century Trilogy even though I've only gotten through the first two books. It's melodrama but it's good. Think Downton Abbey but steamier and largely historically accurate. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/reading-march-20-2018/ I didn’t love Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” while I was reading it. Parts of it were gripping. The depictions of the battles – Tannenberg, the Marne, the Somme – are especially well executed, as is much of the Russian Revolution. And the discussions of strategy were absorbing once I got past the passages of clumsy dialogue. But other parts couldn’t end soon enough. There are multiple sex scenes – for the most part they were as uncomfortable as they were unnecessary. And there are some boring attempts at developing characters who are better thought of as avatars of whole institutions or social movements – the English earl who becomes an officer, the German nobleman who becomes a spy, the Welsh coal miner who takes up arms, the goofy American who becomes a diplomat, the poor Russian who joins the revolution, the other poor Russian who becomes an American gangster, the suffragist. By the end of the book, I was moderately interested in the fates of only maybe two of the dozen or so significant characters. So I didn’t love the book. But I picked up the second installment of Follett’s Century Trilogy, “The Winter of the World,” the day after I finished the first. As you may have guessed, the second book covers Hitler’s rise in Germany, the Spanish civil war, the British efforts to repel fascism, the famous World War II battles, the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviet soldiers, and the development of the atomic bomb. And I’ve found myself thinking about the first book almost daily. I liked the strategic machinations and loved the war stories, but it’s the first-person perspectives that I haven’t been able to shake. Take, for example, the story of Walter von Ulrich, the son of an influential German official who arrogantly drove the country to war, and Walter’s childhood friend, a Brit named Earl Fitzherbert. Walter was a dove, Earl a hawk, but war is an indiscriminate machine that sucks in the meek and eager alike. They soon found themselves on the battlefield, mingling casually in no man’s land. These kinds of coincidences defy credulity, and I have to remind myself that they did, in fact, actually happen. Over and over, the characters just happen to find themselves at the intersections of history. They’re in the key battles, the important meeting rooms. It’s improbable, but unimportant. The characters are just our excuse to be there as history unfolds. And a lot of history unfolds – Follett did a remarkable amount of research for the book, which comes in at around 1,000 pages. Much of what the characters experience was nearly unthinkable. It’s a theme that came up again, even more horrifically, in the second book of the trilogy. I haven’t moved on to the third book yet, but I imagine it’s the outlier – the time when, miraculously, the worst didn’t happen. Still, as I read the headlines of today – about the dissolution of the European project, the brinkmanship in Northeast Asia, the rise of far-right groups and the polarization of America and much of the West – the unthinkability that thematically defines books one and two creeps into my mind and refuses to leave. With hindsight, it’s easy to say those old wars and the surrounding upheaval in Follett’s books were inevitable. But to most of the men and women of the time, they were unimaginable. “Fall of Giants” allowed me to imagine it, and I almost wish it hadn’t.I'd actually been looking for a book that does the a similar thing for WW2 for a while, but settled for this.
I would say Follett's Eye of the Needle is the best thriller I've ever read. He leaves Forsythe in the dust. Century Trilogy is modern; he'd been a living god for 20 years when he started it. It's meladromatic where his earlier stuff isn't. But melodrama sells, and he nails it. Try Eye of the Needle. it's short.
On the other hand, I haven't seen the film. I just finished the book a few minutes ago. Apart from the inevitable ending of the story, I didn't feel it was overly bleak. In fact, hiding underneath the initial conflict and melancholy, there was a quiet sense of hope at the heart of it all. I think this is gifted to book chiefly through the first-person narration by Bromden, which I gather was lost from the film (along with some key parts of his character development). So I can imagine that contributed to a bit of a shift in tone.
Burnt out on history and hot takes on history right now. Since the last thread, I've read: - Understanding Power, which is a curated collection of talks by Chomsky. Was fairly interesting, but is slowly fading away into the past. Worth it for the footnotes, and reads quickly. - From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, which was my first experience of reading about an event and going "wait, that happened how many years ago?" This one was probably my favorite out of the bunch this round. I actually checked it out along with Black Against Empire, but ended up shelving the that one a quarter of the way through once the history burn out set in. - Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I'm actually not quite done with this one yet, but will be before the night is over. Unless there is a magic finish to this one, it is solidly in the "over hyped" territory. - The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, From Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden by Lloyd C. Gardner. Emphasis on Snowden, Debs is hardly featured. This was the most forgettable. By which I mean I forgot I about it until I was looking at my library checkout history to make sure I didn't miss anything. The writing is lack luster, and the facts it brings to the table are more or less along the lines you would suspect. I'm a shit book reviewer. But that's ok.
Curently Reading ------------------------------ Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr. is interesting so far. It's a pretty weighty book and I don't feel like I have the proper insight to discuss it, but it's both dense and briskly written, touching on many ideas at once. It feels like if he wanted to, the author could have stretched everything out to multiple books. While gathering up books to donate, I stumbled on The Phenomenon of Religion by Moojan Momen. I didn't know I had it and I don't ever remember buying it. I'm suspecting it was my father's and it somehow ended up in my book collection and that it's one of those things where I've seen it on my shelf so many times that I've somehow mentally overlooked it for years. It looks pretty big and imposing, but I think I might thumb through it. Edit: Just cracked it open and read the introduction. Looks worth perusing. Edit 2: Actively reading it now. Might Read ------------------------------ I was pretty excited when I picked up Mustard and Passage's translation of Parzival because I didn't know it existed at the time and thought it would be great to read. I've yet to crack it open and I keep on admonishing myself about that every time I glance at it on my book shelf. Honestly though? Because they're drenched in metaphors and symbolism, these kinds of books require a certain mood and receptiveness to enjoy them and I'm just currently not in that frame of mind lately. So I think I'll hold onto it, until I am. Maybe if I stumble on a reading guide for it, I'll be motivated to read the two together. An Aside ------------------------------ Anyone ever tempted to write in the margins of their books? Ideas or emotional responses to what they've just read? References to what's going on in life or other things that they've read that relate to what's in the book? Do you? On the one hand, I think it would make reading more interactive and almost journal like. On the other hand though, I worry about ruining the book.
Depends on the book. I'm generally one who won't even dog ear pages. BUT I have (had maybe at this point...) an AA Big Book that I heavily annotated with how much I thought it was a crock of shit. More academic reads or self helpy stuff? Yes maybe sometimes it depends. Novels?NEVER!Anyone ever tempted to write in the margins of their books? Ideas or emotional responses to what they've just read? References to what's going on in life or other things that they've read that relate to what's in the book? Do you?
Apparently it has been 69 days since last this was asked. And since then, I've been in a car like an hour and a half a day while simultaneously clipping old titles on Audible. So in random-ass order: Mutiny On The Bounty. Think this was a cgod recommendation. It's good. I was impressed by how readable it was considering how old it is, then I discovered it was written in like 1932. I love how Wikipedia is all "Bligh wasn't nearly the dick he's been made out to be" while also being all "he was actually mutinied against TWICE so clearly the fact that he was an utter dick to everyone is revisionist history." Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. I used to think Shackleton was a loser because I get him mixed up with Scott. Shackleton was not a loser. I was once capsized in a stormy lake in a 19' canoe. Shackleton got a 22' dingy across the goddamn Drake Passage with five dudes in it. AFTER being stuck on a goddamn ice floe for a year and a half. Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. This book was a Geopolitical Futures recommendation. It somehow insists that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Margaret Thatcher's election, the Iranian revolution, the ascendancy of Pope John Paul II and something something China are all related. I'm unconvinced. However, it did make me realize that the reason everyone is taught that OH SHIT THE 60s was like the most important decade EVAR is because the goddamn 'boomers were teenagers back then. The Bonfire of the Vanities. This book is about 80% good and then it totally shits the bed at the ending leaving a seriously sour taste in your mouth. The casual racism that permeates it is never resolved. The stereotypes remain empty stereotypes. It's one of those books where you're hanging around going "you're going somewhere with this, right?" and then it just goes "because he was a very shaggy dog" and you're all "fuck this shit." American War: A Novel. Another Geopolitical Futures recommendation. Hot garbage. There's no geopolitics in this, it's another "people hate each other for some reason therefore we're moving the capital to Cleveland" book. I've got 29 unread books in my Audible library (and 235 finished). We'll see how many I have left at the end of the summer.
Mutiny is a good book. Pitcairn Island, the third book in the Bounty Trilogy had a way bigger effect on me. I think I found the trilogy a much heavier read than most people. I found them all gripping but Pitcarin's was way heavy. The book in between the two is misery. If you like tales about being stuck on a long boat for days and days you'll enjoy it. I've read a bunch of lost at sea books and it holds it's own but probably not every ones cup of tea. I like Nordoff and Hall as authors. They write well together they write well apart. No More Gas is was decent, if you see it in the dollar bin pick it up. Hall's book Dr. Dogbody's Leg is a favorite book of mine. It isn't high literature but it's a warm and funny book wherein a Old Navel Surgeon tells twelve totally different outrageous versions of how he lost his leg. Each tale touches piece of British age of sale history, each tale has evidence to support it's veracity but the doctor only has one leg so they can't all be true. Dogbody's leg is part of the Heart of Oak series that has reissued a bunch of great Age of Sale books. They are almost all good reads if you are interested in the genera. They aren't all fiction. A few of the better ones were. Lord Cochrane, Seaman, Radical, Liberator: A Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald was good. Lord Cochrane was the anti Nelson and a bad ass. The wretched Patrick O'Brian stole a third of his plots from Nelsons life, another third from Cochrane's and the remaining lame third came from his own imagination. Dudley Popes The Black Ship is another good an account of another terrible mutiny. Pope is an excellent writer of history and fiction. It ends with a bit of revenge, I dug it. Tales of the sea are their own genera. None of the writers are divine but a few are good at spinning a tale.
I've been bouncing back and forth between Nietzsche's Antichrist, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Basically the same book. Actually, I kid, but the authors do share a boldness of style. Jack Vance is his own thing, and Gary Gygax borrowed heavily. Thanks, kleinbl00.