Books: What are you reading tonight?
We have ongoing threads on t.v. and movies we're watching lately; it's time for one for books. daveT's thread on favorite books covers ones we've already read, but let's put ones we are reading/going to read soon or have just finished(i.e., let's make this thread more like a log than a resume) here.
Below is some stuff I've pulled from daveT's thread, where I felt compelled to talk about my recent book-buying craziness, with some new comments.
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I'm one of those guys who will often read many books at once. Right now I'm at various depths into:
Stephen King -- On Writing
textbook on real estate
Ode to Kirihito - supposedly best graphic novel ever done by Japan's best graphic novelist ever
American Splendor (second collection put out after the movie) -- Harvey Pekar, graphic short stories
various meditation books -- Mantak Chia
How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker -- Penn Jilette
Cosmicomics -- Italo Calvino -- another re-read of it
On the burner to read next:
From Hell -- Alan Moore, graphic novel
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm Wine Drinkard -- some African dude won a Nobel prize for this I think; supposedly absolutely fantastic; the album by Brian Eno and David Byrne certainly was
God is Not Great -- Christopher Hitchens
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As the fantasy bods are here, I'm currently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Shadows of the Apt' series.
Interesting fantasy/steampunk world with lots of kingdoms based on different insects. The characters are human but have certain characteristics of the insect kingdom they are from.
Tchaikovsky is probably much better know for his sci-fi stuff, which as won a ton of awards, and he's the opposite of GRRM and Rothfuss in that he completed this 10 book series, plus numerous short stories, in only six years.
The best fantasy book is the Bible. Also the most influential, at least in Western History and Culture.
Making Democracy Count by Ismar Volic.
Volic is a professor of mathematics at Wellesley College, and applies math to explaining why our voting system is broken. Provides a lot of explanations of other systems, and gives what seems like a good argument of the pros and cons of each.
Also gets into topics like allocating representation and gerrymandering.
I'm not politically active, but am interested in improving any system. Found this quite interesting, and felt a compelling argument was made for what he ultimately suggested, which is ranked-choice voting. Unfortunately, I think the public in general is too innumerate to try to understand a new system, and current powers-that-be have no reason to change.
A good read, if a bit of tilting at windmills. Who knows, maybe someday; Alaska and Maine (IIRC) are starting to use RCV.
Ranked-choice voting is a terrible system with many known flaws. You can have a winner that nobody voted for as their first choice. I don't think Americans will ever be down with that.
The Language of War is about life as a Ukrainian right now. This is probably a bad analogy (aren't all poker analogies?) but I'll give it a shot anyways. One of my favorite stories about poker is that one year at the WSOP final table they gave all of the players actual money to play with but everyone nitted up and was unable to make big bets when they were putting the actual dollars in the middle. They obviously went back to chips afterwards to increase the action. Online poker takes it a step further since there aren’t even real chips, just pixels on a screen.
I've spent a lot of time trying to understand Ukraine, but I still feel removed to the point that I'm looking at the pixels of chips. I don't think anyone can truly understand what it means to play with real dollars unless they've lived through something similar, but this book brings you far closer; like holding the actual chips in your hands, starting with the cover:
Spoiler
Ranked-choice voting is a terrible system with many known flaws. You can have a winner that nobody voted for as their first choice. I don't think Americans will ever be down with that.
It perhaps makes more sense in a parliamentay system than a presidential one. Presidency is a terrible idea.
Rory Sutherland - Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity
Advertising Exec. focusing on how using non-rational thinking can solve problems, and the dangers of always adhering to a logical approach. Very interesting looks how our mind works and how we think, and good examples of completely ass-backwards approaches that were very successful.
I think particularly relevant today, with the US election coming up (he mentions Trump v Hillary as examples several times), with things like the pitfalls of reliance on big-data.
He's a great speaker and has tons of his talks on Youtube. Definitely worth checking out if you're interested.
IX Above, on the crest of the hill, above the doubled roof of the monastery gate, there suddenly appeared, in the clear blue, luminous sky, a few enormous, dark, angry clouds, as if a menacing troop had suddenly rushed onto a mute, motionless, indifferent stage; in one moment there was still the luminous sky, and in the next — with a wind of dreadful strength at its back — this mass, coming from the northeast: gloomy, weighty, encroaching, its amplitude impossible to gauge as it kept growing, swelling into unforetold dimensions, warped, swirling, flooding, completely covering the sky within a few minutes, because a hellish tempest had driven it here, chased it, pursued it before itself, beating, shoving, thrusting forward this black lethal mass which suddenly made everything grow dark; there was silence, the birds all around grew silent, the gentle breeze died down, and then there arose a moment, and everything simply stopped: a moment during which the entire world came to a stop, and for this one single moment the murmuring of the leaves stopped, and the flexible swaying of the branches stopped; and in the conduits of the trunks and the stalks and the roots, circulation stopped, a colony of ants, which had been carrying and carrying its supplies diagonally across a path, came to a dead halt, a pebble, which had begun to roll, rolled on no further, the woodworms left off their chewing in the columns and the wooden brackets, the small rat in the vegetable garden behind the enormous cabbage paused, holding up its head, in brief every creature and plant and stone and all of the assembled secretive inner processes suddenly, for one moment, suspended all existence — so that the next moment would also arrive, and everything would continue where it had left off, the rat once again bent its head into the cabbage stump, the woodworm began chewing along its pathway again, the pebble rolled forward a little bit, but truly, everything began again: the circulation in the trunks, in the stalks and the roots, the branches’ pendulums and the play of the leaves’ quivering, the entire world started up again, at first just cautiously, then the birds nearby began to chirp more shrilly, above, everything above became lighter, the somber sky now clearing up from the northeast, although those weighty clouds, the dreadful tempest wind at their back, still stormed in a frenzy toward the southwest, and now nothing of that immeasurable mass even seemed credible, because only the end of it could be seen, its edge, then just a scrap, a matted, torn, ominous rag floating in the sky, which now — as if nothing had happened a moment ago — already was swimming in its former blue, the sun was shining, there was no longer any trace of that wild, tempest-like wind, moreover, in between the leaves of the gates there once again appeared that previous gentle, mild, little breeze, which began trying immediately with the leaf on the right-hand side, but of course that leaf — collapsed, broken off, its entire weight pressed against the upper bronze hinge that still supported it — had frozen into the story of its previous ruin and so remained unmovable, well, of course this breeze smoothed it up and down, chafing it a bit to see how heavy it might be, then it ran on, dashing out into the unoccupied space of the courtyard, so that, running around in a circle there, it could once again commence its particular work.
László Krasznahorkai
I love this sentence. I find this guy totally immersive.
I'm thoroughly enjoying Ina Garten's memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens. Good at every she does and awesome in about 17 different ways, it's no big surprise that she's written an awesome book. I used my last book credit on my expiring Audible account, so I even got to listen to her lovely voice as she tells her story.
Land Without a Continent by Matt Savino.
The story of Savino's travels through Mexico and Central America. Originally intended to be a trip to Patagonia, but things happened.
Savino tells a nice story, somewhat in the mode of William Least-Heat Moon in Blue Highways or some or Bryson's travel work--generally the story of their (mis)adventures, with occasional deeper dives into history around a place he's visiting.
A nice read, recommend to anyone who's into travel writing.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey - Booker Prize nominee about astronauts on the ISS. There's no plot, and being barely more than a novella doesn't give much much room for character development.
There's a lot of evocative writing, but I need more meat on the bones to really enjoy a book. This is just too slight. Some of the observations about how small we all are when viewed from space, the wonder of our planet, the horror of climate change, etc. are too clichéd to be impactful.
Forge of Darkness
Way too many characters, needed to read a summary of chapters in order to keep up with the story, moved quite slowly but is clearly building to something awesome.
Standard Erikson, A+
I completed Lucinda Williams' memoir Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You in a single day, very rare for me. It's a good book; she's led a fascinating life and tells her story in a fresh way, which you'd expect if you're a fan of her music.
Rory Sutherland - Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity
Advertising Exec. focusing on how using non-rational thinking can solve problems, and the dangers of always adhering to a logical approach. Very interesting looks how our mind works and how we think, and good examples of completely ass-backwards approaches that were very successful.
I think particularly relevant today, with the US election coming up (he mentions Trump v Hillary as examples several time
I enjoyed this book. Some of the writing might be described as hyperbole, but he's Mad Ave ffs. Interesting Read.
Another ad guy named Olgivy wrote a worthy book in the 50s. I'll try to track down its title.
David Ogilvy, co-founder of one of the greatest ad firms, famously wrote Confessions of an Ad Man. Pub date 1963.
The brilliant non-fiction Say Nothing, about the IRA 'Troubles' in 1972 and a mother who disappears has been made into a series on Hulu this week.
If you have any interest the book gets my top recommendation.
Suggie Bain -the very definition of "middlebrow". Easily digestible poverty porn. A book should be more challenging to win the Booker.
I'm reading the 48 Laws of Power, some good stuff in there, but some "laws" seem to just be padding the book or trying to be edgy.
This Is Happiness, by famed Irish writer Niall Williams.
A tale of a 17yr old boy sent to live with his grandparents in very small-town Ireland, as told ~70 years later by the narrator. The town has no electricity when he arrives, etc.
It's brilliant. The 'story' loosely revolves around an adult friend who comes to live with them and that man's searching for his lost love who lives in the town, as well as the young man's journey into adulthood.
First book of his I've read, man, this dude can write. I was moved in several parts of the book.
Christian Marclay's The Clock is showing at MOMA through February, so I just read Zadie Smith's essay "Killing Orson Welles at Midnight.
If you've never heard of The Clock, Zadie Smith's essay is a great meditation on the film and time itself.
Here's a link to the essay.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc...
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I want space opera. I want lasers and spaceships and aliens and distant worlds, all the stuff you get from Star Wars/Star Trek. The kicker is that I want that all with good quality prose writing, at least on a par with Dan Simmons. I googled "literary space opera" and browsed through some Reddit threads, but the extracts from recommended books did not seem promising. Any recommendations? Maybe this is too much to ask. It seems like there are some good writers who turn to fantasy, but fewer in the space opera genre.
I just knocked out Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, it was fun but not very nourishing, shall we say. I'm glad I came to it fresh without prior knowledge. I doubt I'll ever spend time with the movie but I might watch a little of it if I ran across it on cable. Uh except that I don't have cable anymore hahaha.
Note: I'm all about the pop culture nostalgia, but this guy just had really bad taste in his. Some good stuff mixed in but overall a lot of total crap.
I want space opera. I want lasers and spaceships and aliens and distant worlds, all the stuff you get from Star Wars/Star Trek. The kicker is that I want that all with good quality prose writing, at least on a par with Dan Simmons. I googled "literary space opera" and browsed through some Reddit threads, but the extracts from recommended books did not seem promising. Any recommendations? Maybe this is too much to ask. It seems like there are some good writers who turn to fantasy, but fewer in th
There is The Expanse book series:
I just knocked out Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, it was fun but not very nourishing, shall we say. I'm glad I came to it fresh without prior knowledge. I doubt I'll ever spend time with the movie but I might watch a little of it if I ran across it on cable. Uh except that I don't have cable anymore hahaha.
Note: I'm all about the pop culture nostalgia, but this guy just had really bad taste in his. Some good stuff mixed in but overall a lot of total crap.
any writer who can work Tomb of Horrors references into their works are top-notch imho
