Kicking off the New Year in the middle of a quartet of novellas, ones I am very much enjoying: The Murderbot Diaries from Martha Wells are narrated by an AI "construct" (some human parts melded with a bot) which hacked the governor module which allowed it to be controlled; it gave itself the nickname "Murderbot" after killing a bunch of people it was supposed to be protecting. It is trying to figure out what happened in that incident, and doing its best to blend in as an augmented human while doing so. It's sarcastic, shy, and self-deprecating. The stories are fast paced and the relationships are good, and I really like Murderbot - as, apparently, does pretty much everyone else who reads it going by the number of awards it won in 2017 and 2018. Go Murderbot, go! (. . . hide out in your cubbyhole and watch videos like you really wish you could.) Happy New Year!
I would have started this topic. but I decided not to start it a little before midnight, and I just woke up.
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey in which the highly skeptical author visits Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and so forth. Great travel writing and political journaliam by Nobel Prize winner (and rather prickly person) V. S. Naipaul
Well, Ismitje started this thread five minutes after midnight... You were doomed once you went to bed.
I start it every just after midnight; for whatever reason, it's one of my annual highlights on BigSoccer. So I appreciate EvanJ going to bed.
A Pilgrims Progress: Orestes A. Brownson, a revised and expanded senior thesis, one of two revised and expanded senior theses published just before WWII by recent Harvard grads, this one being about the 19th century American socialist-turned-Catholic Orestes Brownson by Arthur Schlesinger (the other book being Why England Slept by some guy named John Fitzgerald Kennedy).
It says 3:05 A.M. for me, and you're in my time zone. It was five minutes after midnight for Ismitje, but my midnight came first. If my time zone was 3 hours away from Ismitje in the opposite direction, I would have started the topic.
Thanks again for not doing so EvanJ. - - - - - - - - - "Impulse Borrowing" is inexact to sat the least, so I have checked out and started some books I am pretty unlikely to enjoy, and they get tossed aside within 20 or 30 pages. This one I finished - the least likely book I've finished since last century. It's a romance called The Decent Proposal by a guy with the unlikely name of Kemper Donovan. Anonymous benefactor has two people summoned to a law office to pitch them a deal where they each get $500k if they spend two hours a week together, in sincere conversation, for a whole year. It being a romance, they are opposites and don't like each other much but love grows in mysterious ways . . . And I finished it. I don't recommend it to anyone who reads this thread publicly, though.
So I'm sitting in the downtown coffeeshop reading and a group of 9 or 10 or so people sitting around a couple of tables are having a meeting/discussion. I have no trouble ignoring them. Then three of them are standing around my table saying "excuse me, but we'd like to ask you to join us." I'm thinking "WTF" and start to think about excuses to leave even though I'd just purchased a refill. One of them said "let me explain" and it turns out that four of them assumed I lived in their neighborhood because they'd seen me walking on Sunday afternoons, and it turns out that they live pretty far apart, and one of them lives two towns over. Turns out, they're a bunch of "community leaders" (business owners, judges, etc) who are trying to do some old-school civic improvement. They gave me a book to read: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, by a cit-planner named Jeff Speck, who apparently is coming to town next month. I guess they figured they may as well have someone in the group who ACTUALLY WALKS. We'll see. My thinking is basically, "hey, free book." And so far it's pretty interesting, though how applicable it might be to our stiff neck of the woods will likely be debatable.
Almost any story that includes the line "hey, free book" is a good one, IMO. One exception is the one that starts "I was sitting in the airport..." and includes "three guys" while ending "hey, free book..."
That makes me think of https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/css/index.html which is about the "National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University®"
Confessions of a Fish Doctor -- Scott Bodie I have no idea why I first picked up this book as a teenager, but this is the most engaging of personal narratives. Bodie is just a guy who works in a fish store in Manhattan in the 60s and 70s, but he happens to make house calls and this is his story of what he knows as a non-vet, but it ranks alongside James Herriot's works for it's charm and grace. On a plus side, it will tell you how to keep fish. 10 years later I was back in my hometown library and the book had been de-accessioned and I snapped it up in a heartbeat. I've read it maybe a dozen times since and it's one of the few books my son and I have truly enjoyed together. Well, it was a snowy afternoon here and I've recently gotten back into the fish hobby so I spent a very pleasurable afternoon with an old fave. And so for the maybe half dozen folks who read this thread, let me make the strongest of recommendations. If you have a friend or family member who is into keeping fish, get them this book. It is a present that they will remember for years. I have tracked this book since the dawn of the internet and we're down to maybe the last three or four copies that are affordable. Really, I guarantee your friend will love you if you give them this book.
This is worth your time if you're at all curious about the professional women's game over the past 7-8 years: Gwendolyn Oxenham's Under the Lights and In the Dark is quite sobering. Maybe hopeful too, but the challenges in some cases are so extreme that it's a cautionary tale. Then there's Portland, which comes across as a true mecca for the game. I like the book a lot.
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which I'm considering assigning for my Freshman comp classes in the fall or next spring, depending on whether or not it's in paperback yet, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Mrs. Ismitje didn't even bat an eye when she saw this book coming our way from Amazon. That's one of the beautiful things about our relationship.
Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are which is partly an interpretation of Nietzsche's later writings, partly a memoir, and a plausible entry in the genre of books about walking by UMass-Lowell philosophy professor John Kaag. As with his previous book, American Philosophy: A Love Story, this one is also in the same vein as Robert Pirsig's legendary (and much more lucrative) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence
The World's Largest Man: A Memoir, a Thurber Prize-winning comic memoir set in Reagan-era Mississippi by the very funny Harrison Scott Key. The move from Memphis to rural Mississippi is rather comically told.
Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock, wherein "Woodstock" refers to the small Catskills town and not the music festival by that name that took place, like, 60 miles away, by English music journalist and one-time Woodstock resident, Barney Hoskyns
I'm gonna grab that. And I'll recommend this one: Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country and Other Stories By Chavisa Woods
It's in the county library system. A request has been made. Apparently, last year she won two prizes, one named after Shirley Jackson, the other named after Kathy Acker.