My birthday was a couple weeks ago and I'm doing OK on money for the first time in a while so I bought a couple books for myself. Most pictured I bought last year. I'm terrible about buying books and not reading them.
I'm reading the history of communism (with an old credit card as a bookmark) but I'm most excited about White Flight. I started to read it in the fall but I took it back to the library because it was going slowly and the due date kept interfering. The author Kevin Kruse is great at Twitter and I recommend people follow him. He has a beef with Dinesh D'Souza and uses Twitter to explain American history to him 280 characters at a time. He also made a list of like 150 historians saying D'Souza is wrong about American history. He's randomly funnier than a lot of comedians on Twitter too
Any way, whatcha been reading or planning to read?
Read Raven Rock followed directly by Fear by Bob Woodward. That was an unintentionally v. stressful progression. Woordward's book was poorly written, which surprised me. Also: don't like the idea of current president clenching dick with one fist, nuclear briefcase with other. You're welcome for imagery. Cleansed palette with Lincoln in the Bardo by Saunders. Pretty, but will have to give a few more reads to get the full effect. Then I needed some trash so I read Children of Time. Play a stupid game, win a stupid prize. Terrible book. Dialled back the schlock, now reading The Alienist which is nice because it's trash but written in a poorly-conceived 19th c. vernacular, so you can pretend it's highbrow. Next: Killers of the Flower Moon before I give up and revert to something by Stephen King.
You might like it. Picked it up because I thought it was gonna be all sorts of crazy shit about underground facilities- which it is, in part. But mostly it's about the arms race and how our leadership is constantly pushing the nuclear envelope even when everybody recognizes that it's not in any way a good idea. It's infuriating. Not so much a frog slowly boiling in a pot as a frog sitting in the pot and periodically turning the burner up.
I’ve only read five new books since the last book thread, which sounds like a humblebrag but is genuinely much lower than usual. I dunno what it is exactly, but I’ve been leaning more towards podcasts / YT / Netflix lately. Anyway, read Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, Reappraisals by Tony Judt, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and Rebel Talent by Fansesca Gino. Carreyrou was a page turner, the rest was a bit meh.
I just started Herzog by Saul Bellow, and am digging it so far. I also have high hopes for finally finishing Steppenwolf. Beyond that, I'm looking for some good sci-fi to read when I don't want to think quite so hard.
Spoilers ahead. Essentialism - Greg McKeown The main thing I got from this book is that I happen already embody its core precepts. It was interesting to get some soundbites and outside thinking on my previously subconscious behavior though. ---- Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem I read Solaris. It was my favourite book of last year. Then I read The Invincible. It didn't quite reach the greatness of Solaris, but it's still good. Then I went for Fiasco. There's still elements of what I love about Lem's writing in this the book. The creeping atmosphere, true consideration for what it might mean to be 'alien', and mysteries that are creatively untangled. However, as the first part ends and we're propelled a century into the future, Lem seems to get bored of telling an engaging story and instead descends into 10 page, 'scientific' explanations of how all the technology in the book works. He did this to some extent in the aforementioned books too, but they were less frequent and revolved around fundamental themes/events of the story. In Fiasco, he too often goes down mundane rabbit holes of little interest or importance. In doing so, he ruins the pacing of the book and atmosphere. It was like there was a section of science text book spliced into every chapter. When, in the final chapter, you finally get to the event the whole book has been building up to, it's all over almost as soon as it begins and it blows up in the protagonist's face because... he's dumb basically. To summarise, he needs to check in with the mothership at an exact time lest they obliterate the alien planet he's currently on. He's told this with crystal clarity. And he reminds himself that it's almost time to do so just before he decides to jog a mile away from his radio. Guess what happens? I do think it was clever how the first part of book metaphorically outlined how the main narrative would play out. The same foibles that plagued the protagonist in the first part come back to haunt him and cause his ultimate demise. And the exploration of people's nature to try to achieve, at any cost, a goal that has long since become fruitless or even perilous was interesting. But overall, it just didn't come together as well as I hoped. ---- Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Phillip K. Dick I was listing my issues about Fiasco to a friend and, on finding out I hadn't read any Phillip K. Dick, he suggested I read some of his work. After the last book, it was refreshing to read something that was all character and narrative with little to no fluff. Our protagonist is a famous tonight show-esque host/singer/actor type. After a targeted attack, he wakes up in world where no-one know who he is and all traces of his physical and digital identity have evaporated. Whilst this a relatively engaging premise by itself, what gives it its real weight and tension is Dick's well realised, police state dystopia. In this world, who you are is everything. As a result, the protagonist goes from being interesting to the world because he's famous, to because he's a nobody. My main criticism would be that whilst the central plot reveal was interesting, it was completely unpredictable not foreshadowed in any way. This makes it less satisfying to me. This was also a problem with the next book of Dick's I read. ---- Ubik - Phillip K. Dick Great concept, underwhelming execution. Everything felt a little unfocused, like it was a draft rather than the final copy. The book starts by making a big deal about a new psychic who has a never-before-seen power to change the past and thus the present. Despite her introductory fanfare, she is soon relegated to brief appearances/mentions and plays no role other than being a cheap red herring. As one of the most interesting characters, it's bit of a shame. And interesting characters is what this book needs as almost all of them are under-developed. The reveal this time was at least minimally foreshadowed, but the end still felt rushed and underwhelming.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand I can't recommend this book because it is 64 hours long. Ain't nobody got time for that. I can't recommend it for the rational philosophy of objectivism either. I would argue against it except I zoned in and out through a bunch of the preachy parts so I couldn't do it justice. Ain't nobody got time to re-listen to that. Also every character in the whole world is a complete asshole with only one exception, and that single exception was literally a feudal serf. --------- Norwegian Wood by By Haruki Murakami Far far far better book than Atlas Shrugged, but I still don't want to recommend this book to anyone. Maybe some people recommend it for the same reasons I don't. The story is in internal struggle of a college-age guy, and for almost the whole story the emotions and motivations seemed just a bit too alien for me to get. I don't know if it's cultural differences or lost-in-translation or if this alienness is intended. My wife almost never likes stories without happy endings, but that generally doesn't bother me at all. But with this book I started getting the 'everything is going badly' feeling long before the end, and it got to me in a way that most books don't because whatever other themes there are, the book is about how incredibly fragile minds are. So I didn't enjoy it. The characters were like a house of cards - holding each other up but also being knocked down by each other and everyone around them.
Recently: Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen. As with all Carl Hiaasens, it's a tongue-in-cheek love-letter to the bizarreness of Florida. There are better books. Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Risked Everything To Solve One Of The Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson. It's about a pair of macho dumbasses that dive on a U-boat. the mystery they solved didn't seem important enough to mention. Got halfway. Meh. Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan. Not as good as Thirt33n yet somehow, the exact same book. Richard K Morgan seems to write exactly one story, with exactly one set of archetypes, and the only real change is how far into the future you go. The Last Palace by Norman Eisen. In case you were wondering if it's possible to tell history in an interesting way by making the protagonist a mansion in Prague, no it is not. 1491 by Charles C Mann. Argues that the inhabitants of America before Columbus were way more sophisticated than you think. Says nothing that disputes the conventional wisdom of the past 30 years. Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the First Age of Terror by Bryan Burrough. Points out that white kids used to blow shit up all the time in the '70s and nobody gave a shit. The minute black kids did it they got killed in shootouts. Weathermen, SLA, whoever - if you were white, you ended up teaching anthropology at Columbia but if you were black or brown The Man had no patience for your bullshit. Also Tupac Shakur's mom was way more interesting than Tupac. The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. Basically a mile-high sketch of every stupid thing in history which would have been a lot more interesting if I wasn't already drearily familiar with every stupid thing in history. The Last Warrior by Barry Watts. Andrew Marshall basically shaped the American side of the Cold War the way Ayn Rand basically shaped domestic monetary policy. Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld. Unfortunately barry Watts doesn't think Andrew Marshall has anything to answer for. Gold by Matthew Hart. Gold mining is terrible and fucks people up. The end. Supposedly there are squatters in South African gold mines who haven't seen the sun in months and they're pale and there are hookers down there but [citation needed]. Also some guy who was on Big Brother South Africa shot three of them. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings. Best laid plans. Basically Vietnam has forever been in the shit because the French are horrific colonialists, the Japanese are horrific imperialists, and the Americans are horrific capitalists. The Curse of Bigness By Tim Wu. Tim Wu makes the point that EVERYONE hated monopolies except for William McKinley, who did the world a favor by getting shot and allowing monopoly-buster Teddy Roosevelt to assume the presidency, and Robert Bork, who is an asshole for reasons well beyond his insistence that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to privacy. Also the Chicago School of Economics is bullshit yet has been calling the shots for 50 years which is why Google now owns you. I've got Harry Potter on hold. It'd be nice to read something that doesn't tell me how fucked the world is. On a lighter note, Frontline did a lovely little piece about how fucked up our indefinite detention of illegal immigrants is... in 2011 so I've got that going for me which is nice. ALSO because apparently I've broken my library: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism By Shosanna Zuboff. Which should have been a good book but is not. In part because Zuboff writes like she's trying to bore you, but mostly because she seems to think that Google is evil because it is, not because it does. I really wanted to like this book, I tried real hard, but when an author makes you feel that maybe Zuckerberg has a point she's doing a bad job of convincing you Facebook is evil. Especially if you are already pretty sure Facebook is evil.