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.
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.
"Do not accumulate for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. But accumulate for yourselves treasure in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, your heart is also." Jesus
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.
Last edited by Yppej; 2-11-18 at 11:01am.
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
www.silententry.wordpress.com
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.
Last edited by rosarugosa; 2-11-18 at 6:25am.
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.
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
www.silententry.wordpress.com
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