What Are You Reading Right Now?

[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.

 

[Along Came Jones]

This should make for a few interesting days of comparison and contrast. Wisdom is wherever you stumble upon or trip over it.

 

[Helix]

I finished this one recently. It was good. I like all of the books in the Barker & Llewelyn series.

 

[GIJane]

Just finished "This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Very interesting short read (novella) where two combatants in said time war begin writing to each other, with the two authors writing for the 2 characters.

About to start Exiled Fleet by J.S. Dewes. Sequel to The Last Watch. Fun read

Finished the Silo series by Hugh Howey. Enjoyed it. Have 2 of a new series I'll start over the summer

Read the latest Sanford book in 8 hours. Toxic Prey

Read all of Becky Chambers works. Love her writing. She need to put out something new.

Read Infinity Gate by M.A. Carey (Mike Carey) who did a lot of writing for Marvel comics over the years. Have a sequel in waiting

 

[JBG]

This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row.
Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).

The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick suc-cession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then.

This little vignette, from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has little to do with the central topic. It is one of the ingenious touches that the author employs to maintain people's focus through a very dense and scholarly work. To say the book is exhaustively researched would be an understatement.

Guns, Germs and Steel starts out with a question supposedly posed to the author by a New Guinea native, about why Europeans, rather than New Guineans conquered the world. The book's premise is that race and culture are not a factor. Geography turns out to be the central factor, enabling the Europeans (and others on a smaller scale) to conquer the world. I was exposed to the "Germs" portion of this hypothesis in the book 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Mann posits that horses and rats were that vector and suggests that much of North America's Native American population was reduced by 90% to 98% by the spread of those diseases. In other words the migrant European population found far fewer Native Americans than had existed half a century before. If the native population was dense enough to have the famous major Aztec, Mayan and Inca cities and in the Midwest cities such as Cahokia, there was enough population to support transmission of highly contagious diseases.
Smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid raced through the native populations in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the numbers killed, their leadership was decapitated, resulting in disorganization. Diamond mentions but does not emphasize this, focusing on the spread of crops, animal domestication, tools and weaponry. It is not surprising that Guns, Germs, and Steel appears in the bibliography of 1491; I stopped at the local library today and checked.

Earlier, when making notes, I noted that "(t)he book reminds me of what I flipped from article to article in the World Book. I just finished reading the chapter about Pizarro‘s conquest of the Incas. I feel like I am back in 1965 and 1966 reading the old encyclopedias." That holds true. Overall, I give the book four stars. I rarely give five. Here my quibble is that the book does drag in places, especially near the end. The 2003 postscript was less informative than I had hoped. Otherwise, a great read.

 

[Josie]

Next up for me:

 

[GIJane]

This was a great novella by Amal Al-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, with the two authors portraying two agents through letters they write to each other during combat.

It is a Hugo and Nebula award winner in the Novella category. I highly recommend it.

 

[Loulit01]

This should make for a few interesting days of comparison and contrast. Wisdom is wherever you stumble upon or trip over it.
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I just gave this as a gift to friend.

 

[Loulit01]

Just finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, translated from the Portuguese. International bestseller.

Short, fast, fun; a little fantasy, a little adventure, a little self-help, a little love story.

If you really want something and don't give up, the universe conspires to give it you. Happened to me once against all odds.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America (Paperback) by Les Standiford. Over the years, Carnegie has had a more beneficent image. Frick gets the moniker of being the "bad boy" who unleashed unnecessary bloodshed at the Homestead Steel Mill in 1892. It seems that Carnegie almost deliberately absented himself, left the hard decisions to others and let others take the blame for actions that he "was for until he was against."

As for the book itself I give it a 3.5, rounding it up to four stars. Until the descriptions of the end of the strike and the legal bloodbath between Carnegie and Frick, it does move slowly. For history buffs it is a very worthwhile read.

Frick, obviously intelligent, correctly foresaw what the results of world governance would be:

As I understand it, then, the proposition is to pledge the United States, now the richest and most powerful nation in the world, to pool its resources with other countries, which are largely its debtors, and to agree in advance to abide by the policies and practices adopted by a majority or two-thirds of its associates; that is, to surrender its right of independence of action upon any specific question whenever such a question may arise....Well, I am opposed to that. Of course I am. I don't see how any experienced businessman could fail to be, Why, it seems to me a crazy thing to do."

This book tells us a lot both about the Gilded Age, aabout common sense, and views of history.

 

[Josie]

I just finished reading Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America (Paperback) by Les Standiford. Over the years, Carnegie has had a more beneficent image. Frick gets the moniker of being the "bad boy" who unleashed unnecessary bloodshed at the Homestead Steel Mill in 1892. It seems that Carnegie almost deliberately absented himself, left the hard decisions to others and let others take the blame for actions that he "was for until he was against."

As for the book itself I give it a 3.5, rounding it up to four stars. Until the descriptions of the end of the strike and the legal bloodbath between Carnegie and Frick, it does move slowly. For history buffs it is a very worthwhile read.

Frick, obviously intelligent, correctly foresaw what the results of world governance would be:

This book tells us a lot both about the Gilded Age, aabout common sense, and views of history.

I watched the Men Who Built America on those guys. Great show.

 

[Rogue Valley]

The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
[By Simon Shuster - William Morrow - 2024 - 384pp

An unofficial biography of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from his college days in his home town of Kryvyi Rih, his television stardom, his 2019 election to the presidency, and Zelenskyy after the massive Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 up to Ukraine's successful Kharkiv counteroffensive of September 2022. Very interesting and filled with previously unknown (to me) info about Zelenskyy. I never knew that the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy lived and worked with his comedy troupe and production company in Russia for 9 years, but decided to leave after the Putin government began jailing those who publicly criticised Putin... comedy and satire mattered not. The Zelenskyy family also has not been immune from the trials and tribulations that Putin's war has thrust on all Ukrainians.

 

[NewfieMom]

The Deserter by Nelson DeMille

 

[Josie]

Speaking of deserting - North and South was sooooooo boring so I DNFd it.

 

[Josie]

I went into this knowing nothing. I didn't even know it was a thriller horror. Well, I gotta say this is going to be sticking with me for awhile. What a short wild ride.

 

[JBG]

I just finished reading Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up byAbigail Shrier. It is one of the best rebuttals to junk psychology that I have read. The book tells numerous stories about how both schools and popular culture push children to focus on “feelings” to the exclusion of accomplishment and personal growth. My own personal growth was hardly halcyon.

Nevertheless, despite these facts I agree with the book's premise. The therapy I did receive was of little use. I learned more from peers and certain teachers. I have been successful as a lawyer, husband and parent with little help from most of the professionals I had seen. This book largely confirms my own learning and experience over the years.

Unlike many children in their grades, my children have been encouraged to get wherever they can under their own power. You know, such old fashioned stuff as bicycling and walking. They are none the worse for wear. I cannot fathom either myself or my children being driven everywhere.

The book is a powerful statement in response to "medals for all" and rewarding people for just being on the earth.