What Are You Reading Right Now? (1 Viewer)

[Helix]

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Just finished this, most enjoyable.

Yep. We liked that one a lot.

 

[Risky Thicket]

Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson.

Paddy Whacked by T.J. English

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

 

[multivita-man]

Danzig! "Mother"

Totally in a mood to ****en head bang! That's why!

 

[Rogue Valley]

Cold Crematorium: Reporting From The Land Of Auschwitz

By Jozsef Debreczeni - St. Martin's Press - 2023 - 256pp

The author was an ethnic Hungarian living in Yugoslavia when deported to Auschwitz with his wife and parents in a railroad car circa early 1944. On the ramp, he is selected to live. His familiy goes to the ovens in Birkenau. A journalist by trade, Debreczeni is transferred to one Auschwitz satellite slave labor camp after another and always, the camp conditions get worse as his location changes and as time goes on. He finally ends up in a special campus where the SS send the sick to die. Literally on his last legs, he is saved when the Red Army liberates this camp in 1945. Debreczeni wrote this memoir after the war in the Hungarian language and it was published in 1950, but was not translated into English until recently by George Szirtes. I've read many dozens of books about the Holocaust, and this is one of the darkest. Jozsef Debreczeni passed away in 1978. May he rest in eternal peace.

 

[Grogu]

“The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie’s fiery creation have been told—sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others to write “the definitive look at the making of an American classic” (Library Journal, starred review).”

 

[PoS]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick- The one time I read this was when I was 12, and had discovered my uncle's stash of sci-fi books at grandma's house. I was a huge fan of Bladerunner, and I expected the book to be the same thing. Boy I was wrong.

Reading it again after all these years, I think I can understand it better now. The movie only touches on the events happening in the book, and makes it sort of like a noir detective thriller. But the book itself is far, far more. There's just so many things happening. Yes, the protagonist is a bounty hunter who hunts androids, but thats where the similarities with the movies end.

PKD's world building is phenomenal. There's empathy devices that can change someone's mood at the touch of a button, there's a new age religion called Mercerism that one can experience a Jesus-like messiah via virtual reality, and most of all, real animals have become status symbols, because almost all species went extinct due to a nuclear war, so almost everyone's pet has been supplanted with fake ones: hence the book's title.

It's all about what is real and what is fake. The protagonist kills fake things, but things are not like what they seem anymore. If you havent read it yet, and are a sci-fi fan, youve got to read it. Trust me, its that good. Rating 9/10

 

[NewfieMom]

I am reading Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman. I can read other books between the ones in his Leaphorn and Chee series, which I actually started reading decades ago, but I always have to go back to it. The series is not one of riveting adventures, but of rich atmosphere of the southwest and Navajo culture. Tony Hillerman (in contrast to his daughter who picked up writing the series after his death) imbues every book with great depth of knowledge. I can never imbibe it with one reading of one of his books.

I make notes when I come to this thread. I plan to read books recommended here by other readers. I am hoping, eventually, to read Lessons in Chemistry and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store based on what I read in this thread today. Also: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, who is one of my favorite authors.

 

[Along Came Jones]

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn. Daniel Flynn convincingly draws a more or less straight line between the Utopian colonies of post colonial New England to the climate change panic of the 21st century. The book explains that utopianism is often attractive, particularly to people who want to believe it and want to believe in it. Perhaps four words, from the description of the belief in the New Deal, sum it up best: "Action, not outcomes, mattered."

But I digress. The book starts with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock: "\

The Pilgrims, like America's secular communists of the nineteenth century, hoped to build a city upon a hill. And like other sectarian groups that later found refuge in America, the Pilgrims attempted to build their utopia upon communist principles****Under communism, which reigned in Plymouth colony from 1620 to 1623, Pilgrim bellies and investor wallets starved, Historians look back and ascribe myriad causes for these lean years. But the man whom the Plymouth colonists elected as their governor more than thirty times emphasized the role communism played in the colony's early woes. In Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford wrote:

"For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense."

The author makes the case that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The New Harmony commune in Indiana collapsed in ruins in the 1820's and 1830's. Some similar colonies fared marginally better, some worse. Some became sexual playgrounds for their leaders. Certain exploits, including those of the famous researching Alfred Kinsey, are unprintable.
The author traverses the 1960's and the self-immolation of a prosperous, promising era on college campuses. Shades of what is happening now.
I personally am not a conservative, though I am open to their ideas. This book doesn't help inch me to the right.

 

[JBG]

Part 2

In the early 2000's, the "climate change" hysteria has taken over:

Hysteria over global warming combined the worst of the primitive and the modern. Global warming emerged as the Armageddon for people who ridicule people who believe in Armageddon. The disturbing omens that primitives divined from mysterious eclipses, crippling droughts, and foreboding skies, urban sophisticates saw in ever-so-slight changes in the weather-save they had the nerve to call their auguries science. From the climate-controlled, indoor world where man presses a button to make it hot or cold, breezy or not, man hubristically imagined himself the master of the outdoor weather, too. Not the sun, not volcanoes, not the wind currents, but man was exclusively responsible for global warming a theory more heavily steeped in narcissism than pre-Copernican notions of a geocentric universe. And if gluttonous man could destroy the world, enlightened man could save it. Global warming allowed true believers to cast enemies as evil destroyers and themselves as noble redeemers.
Mankind stood on the brink of the end times. Sacrifices to the gods-offerings of recycled cans, forbearance from flushing the toilet, holocausts of SUVs-might appease Mother Nature. Failure to make the proper oblations certainly would unleash her righteous wrath.

Quoting Al Gore:

“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem…Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."

…. (T)he solutions curiously antedated, and are endorsed independent of, the problem. Public restrictions on use of private property, state punishment of large corporations, international bodies dictating national laws, and other long-standing dreams of the Left somehow reemerged as curatives to environmental woes. Alas, if the problem disappeared, the true believers would urge enactment of these suspect solutions as enthusiastically as ever.

A Conservative History of the American Left is clearly a tour d'force and worth the read (though it is a slog because so much information is new and unfamiliar). Then why am I giving it a "four?" The author does indulge in some demonization of the Left. While I am no fan of FDR, he comes close to calling him a Communist. Like many books of this genre, for example The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun by Noah Rothman, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson and others, the books do not concede any redeeming value to other beliefs. Put simply, they are strident.