I am reading a collection of novellas called The Day The Sun Stood Still. It is science fiction about a miracle that happens to prove that god exists. Interesting premise. Robert Silverberg is among the authors who contributed.
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I am reading a collection of novellas called The Day The Sun Stood Still. It is science fiction about a miracle that happens to prove that god exists. Interesting premise. Robert Silverberg is among the authors who contributed.
My daughter gave me this book of essays about some of the songs the Beatles wrote, written by famous writers. It's really a good read.
"My Digital Travel for Seniors" by Jason R Rich. I have learned a few things. Other books by him are also good.
I'm still slogging through Dolezal's memoir, and I've started Dreamland, a highly readable account of the opioid epidemic.
I think we talked about this book here.
I am reading Richard Reeves’ The Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is leaving everyne else in the dust, why that is a problem, and What you can Do About it.
He speaks of “income inequality” as though that is a settled bad thing. This book doesnt even try to attack the 1%, it stakes out the next strata of society to attack as the “upper middle class as defined by income of $112,000 per household.”
I am only 25 page in and will skim the rest, if that. The chapter
I am in now talks about how I (well, before I retired) create “opportunity hoarding” in things like reproduction and parenting. Ooooookkaaay, he is on to me, I purposely hid everyone’s birth control around here. Guilty!
Then he slips into typical East Coast value system talk where he opines about parents who pull strings to get their offspring into prestigious schools, ignoring that most of us in flyover country are perfectly fine with attending State U or Mediocre Private U. and we even achieve his upper quintile of income in doing so.
Where DO these thinktank people get these ideas. He works for The Brookings INstitute.
I found Dreamland fascinating as it explained the Mexican connection in the opioid crisis.
"born bright" a memoir by C. Nicole Mason.
I'd roughly characterize it as the urban female equivalent of Hillbilly Elegy, a bright girl who managed to escape her circumstances and succeed. It's a frank look at her own family's shortcomings, while also outlining the persistent problems of poverty-stricken schools and communities.
One interesting parallel with the Hillbilly memoir by Vance is her agreement that the lack of social capital is a real impediment. If your family isn't aware of opportunities and your teachers are indifferent, you are left to look to your peers or figure everything out on your own. To a teenager it can be overwhelming. A very interesting read.
I'm reading Patricia Cornwell's Dust, listening to Jenny Bowen's Wish You Happy Forever about her work with Half the Sky, and I have Fire and Fury in queue.
Audiobooks:
Winston Churchill's biography of Marlborough (I am all the way to 1710... not much to go).
Next up: Charles Dickens' David Copperfield reputed to be his own personal favorite.
The Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich.
Behave - how our brains shape our lives and behavior. All kinds of interesting factoids from a neuroscientist.
This past weekend I read The Songs of Distance Earth by Arthur C. Clarke.
Wow! What a really great book!
I stumbled upon a rather old paperback called The Man In The Maze by Robert Silverberg. I am a little over halfway through. It seems like a solid, entertaining, thought-provoking sci-fi novel from the late 1960s.
I hope to get my hands on The Harrows of Spring by James Howard Kunstler. This is the fourth and last installment of the World Made By Hand novels.
I enjoyed the first three quite a bit. Perhaps it'll be next on my list.
What is everyone else reading?
Fiction for a change. I have started:
The Buddha in the Attic*
The Year of the Flood
The Whole Town's Talking*
God Help the Child
Soul Mountain
The Round House
Forest Dark
The two asterisked ones, both about long distance courtships, are the most interesting so far.
I loved "the songs from distant earth" - just finished it yesterday.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes, the biography of Elizebeth Smith, subtitled "a true story of love, spies, and the unlikely heroine who outwitted America's enemies."
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry fiction bestseller by Rachel Joyce. NYTimes reviewer said, "..it is about all the wonderful everyday things Harold discovers through the mere process of putting one foot in front of the other."
I think this would appeal to older readers/retirees who can identify with looking back on our lives. Definitely includes humor and interesting quirky charm of small-town and rural English life.
The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe another in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. Always enjoy his works.
Lucky thing is I bought each of these for $1, and it will fetch more than that in credit at the used bookstore. Getting paid to read??
John Le Care "A Legacy of Spies."
I really enjoyed it.
I just finished "Inside the O'Briens" by Lisa Genova. It was a poignant, amazing, educational novel and I couldn't put it down. It's about a man with Huntington's Disease.
Finished listening to The Birth of Venus. Figured out how to use Overdrive to check out and download audio books from the library.
I just recently finished a couple of books I had learned about here on a couple of threads. Full Body Burden, Growing up in the Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen and Dreamland, The Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.
FBB was shocking to me when she talked about the thousands of pounds of plutonium that were "lost", another way of saying "likely released out of the plant and now contaminating everything downwind" and equally horrifying when she detailed how the drinking water for some of the northwest suburbs of denver comes from a reservoir downstream from the plant and very likely contaminated. There's a major water theme park just east of that reservoir that I went to a number of times as a kid, so I've probably gone swimming in radioactive water.
Dreamland was interesting in that it did a great job of showing how successful capitalism can be if you have a product that people really want. Too bad the product in this case destroys a lot of its customers' lives.
Right now I'm in the middle of Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House. This one is oddly comforting because I'm learning just how incompetent this administration is, and thus not as likely to completely eff up the country as I had thought.
Today I checked out from the library:
Ants Among Elephants about untouchables
Where the Past Begins Amy Tan's memoir
Dorothy Day's biography by her granddaughter
Nadine Gordimer's The Outcasts of Time
A Eugenides book of short stories
The Upstairs Wife by Pakistani Rafia Zakaria
The Water Will Come about climate change
Ta-Nehisi Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power about Obama
And for local New England flavor Igniting King Philip's War
Edited to add my vision is getting bad. I started reading The Outcasts of Time and was disappointed. This is Nadine Gordimer? Looked again and it is Ian Mortimer! So I either keep my reading glasses on and can read the book covers accurately but bump into other patrons or vice versa.
I just finished "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt. I think you recently mentioned this one IL, and it has been on my list for awhile so I finally grabbed it from the library. I absolutely loved it! Hobie and Boris will definitely go into my personal Pantheon of Most Beloved Fictional Characters. :)
I'm listening to I Contain Multitudes, the Microbes Within us and a Grander View of Life, by Peter Yong. Fascinating stuff that makes me even more protective of my microbiome.
“The Kingdom Of God is Within You”, Leo Tolstoy. Not as infamous as “War and Peace” but a necessary boulder I must cross in my quest to settle on the proper application of non violent or passive resistance and it’s relation to how organized religion has seemed to embrace government sanctioned acts of violence based on simple patriotism. Or something like that. As a man who often got things done at the point of a gun......I want to know if I still justify it. I need to know.
The Blooding of the Guns, by Alexander Fullerton: a novel centered on the Battle of Jutland.
I think you will be challenged by Tolstoy’s direct interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and his impassioned criticism of the “Church”. He claims that Churches were a direct result of men failing to accept the clear teachings of Christ regarding things like nonviolent resistance to evil. That the disagreements resulted in the establishment of churches in order to define right doctrine from wrong doctrine. That church leaders and infallible Popes were given the authority to interpret and pass along dogma which serves only the purposes of the very same leaders. In short, your Catholic Church, among the many others is as far from real Christianity as the heathen. My paraphrasing. But I am still reading.....maybe there is a surprise ending.
I will provide an excerpt in support of my above statement.....
“Every branch in a tree comes from the root in unbroken connection; but the fact that each branch comes from the one root, does not prove at all that each branch was the only one. It is precisely the same with the Church. Every church presents exactly the same proofs of the succession, and even the same miracles, in support of its authenticity, as every other. So that there is but one strict and exact definition of what is a church (not of something fantastic which we would wish it to be, but of what it is and has been in reality)--a church is a body of men who claim for themselves that they are in complete and sole possession of the truth. And these bodies, having in course of time, aided by the support of the temporal authorities, developed into powerful institutions, have been the principal obstacles to the diffusion of a true comprehension of the teaching of Christ.”
What Tolstoy would say about the church and war is probably something like... churches legitimized certain wars based in their illegitimate position of speaking for Christ ..when clearly Christ taught nonviolent pacifism as a means of bringing the kingdom of God to man not as merely an analogy but as direct instruction for living. But......I read on.
I am reading Under The Dome by Stephen King. Unbelievably gripping novel!
Under the Dome was a good one. He has such a talent for creating characters and populating a town with people and interactions and relationships that feel so real.
"The Essex Serpent" by Sarah Perry. This book did not live up to its excellent reviews. The characters were muddy, the plot did not seem thoroughly considered, and the ending was bland.
I've been rereading some books by Ruth Rendell (aka Barbara Vine) and she is a terrific author. Her descriptions, particularly of nature, are phenomenal. And of course she is a master of plot and character.
I just finished a rather neat book, "The Death of Bees" by Lisa O'Donnell. It's about 2 sisters in Scotland. Their useless drunken, drug addicted parents die, and they keep it a secret and bury them in the garden so that social services won't take them away and separate them.
Hillbilly Elegy was finally on the shelf at the library today. The rest of this week's haul:
The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness by Niebuhr
Fiction by Michael Chabon, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Junot Diaz, and Nicholson Baker
Luis Rodriguez's autobiography about gang life
Class Matters by New York Times correspondents
Hillbilly Elegy was excellent.
I'm reading Rabbit Run by Updike. Pretty dismal so far.
Loved Hillbilly Elegy.
“Dawn” from the exogenesis trilogy.