All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. A bit dated now, but good to read after the Louisiana elections.
I'm currently reading "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin. It's quite a novel (length-wise)! I watched the movie adaptation and I found it very heart-warming, so I decided to pick up the book and see if the movie was true to the story. Unfortunately, so far, I seem to have enjoyed the movie more than the book.
A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons, an interesting memoir by Ben Folds, who while not quite the prose writer that Patti Smith or Bruce Springsteen have proven themselves to be, is still a good writer and this is an interesting life story, which sheds interesting light on music in the 90s, which is about when my interest in keeping up with new bands started to fade.
The part in bold is very much me, too. I read this recently: Sebastian Abbott's The Away Game, The Epic Search for Soccer's Next Superstars first taught me about a staggeringly massive tryout system run by Qatari sheikhs in 2007, called Football Dreams and coordinated by an academy in Qatar called Aspire. And that's what I find really worth it in the book, which is why I recommend this article from Slate rather than the book (which is fine, but Aspire/Football Dreams is the real story here).
I don't get that. It's not like the 90s was some golden age in music. It was just the age, I'm guessing, that was special in YOUR life. But there are plenty of people who had special moments in the 70s or the Two Thousandsies or whenever. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find great music from today. For example, subscribe to the Tiny Desk podcast and get 15 minutes of new music every few days. There's just so much great music right now. Kendrick Lamar for example is a generational talent. It's not his fault he wasn't born at the right time for our generation.
I got full. I had the 40s through early 90s, and then started listening to Bluegrass, classic country, and other genres and lacked the time to actively listen to new bands. I don't actively reject it, I just don't really care one way or the other about new bands any longer.
Tiny Desk is a national treasure. I proposed a take-off on it at the university in conjunction with the World Beat Festival, in a space near my department (I run the International Studies program) - the "Small Space Concert" which I think would draw well, especially on a Friday afternoon. But I can't get a partner on it. I read a book this summer called The Quantum Magician by a first-time novelist named Derek Kunsken that tries something pretty unique IMO: a futuristic sci-fi heist-thriller/con job book. I had a cross-country flight and decided this was just the thing. And it was indeed enjoyable.
That reminds me of a book I read in elementary school: The Hardy Boys started out as hardcover before moving on to softcover, and Casefiles followed which may have been all softcover. There were also a few softcover supermysteries combined with Nancy Drew, and a later Hardy Boys series that I didn't like. With Trump's interactions with foreign leaders, it reminds me of Blown Away, albeit hopefully no American does something like what I'm going to describe. The Hardy Boys' friend Phil works for Futron, who makes military equipment. Soon, Phil's boss gets in a really bad mood. The Hardy Boys listen to the police radio and can't tell if they heard "nobody" or "no body" at a crime scene. It turns out that bad guys are smuggling a tracking system out of Bayport to be used on the Doomsday Gun in Katara, a fictional country in Africa. The first part ends with one of the Hardy Boys falling out of a plane, landing in the water, and being okay because he landed on top of a bad guy who also fell out of the plane. The Hardy Boys track the bad guys to Katara, where they have to walk for hours through a desert to get to a complex. At the end, they realize that when they got captured it was because they got the language wrong and said "these are our shoes" instead of "these are our passes."
I think it is just an age thing. I'm just not as emotionally open to music as I was when I was younger. One thing you are not allowed to say is that you don't like music. You can get away with saying you don't like babies.
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, a damn fine piece of reporting that overturns the usual narrative of the rise of Silicon Valley as emerging from the garages of libertarian-leaning hippies by pointing out that, in reality, the internet grows out of military surveillance technology, which is why it's so good at tracking your every move and selling that information to people who want to sell you something, by Yasha Levine, whom I don't think Mark Zuckerberg likes very much.
Hmmm, I am headed to the library later today when I leave work to impulse borrow some stuff for the coming week. And that's on the shelf - but if I plan to check it out, then it can't be impulse borrowing. That's a conundrum. I recently read News Articles on the Life and Works of Honorable William E. Borah, Late a Senator from the State of Idaho by William K. Hutchinson. I direct something called the Borah Foundation for the Outlawry of War, and hence receive periodic research or media inquiries about a famous Borah quote in which he laments not being able to sit down with Hitler to hopefully talk him out of going to war. Hutchinson was a famous journalist, and good friends with Borah, and upon the senator's death he submitted this little book to the Senate and it was printed by the government. And since all references to the quote come from this book, and all of the "news articles" are more like columns with remembered conversations, I decided it was way past time to read all of it in context rather than simply reflected in his biographies.
So this was profoundly disappointing: James Burke's Twin Tracks has a terrific conceit: start with an event, pick two people involved and trace a series of events forward to a common end point. The event is on a given odd numbered page, then "track one" is on the 3-4 ensuing even numbered pages with "track two" on the ensuing 3-4 odd numbered pages, with the tracks coming back together on a final even numbered page. Super neat idea. Except, the tracks are more or less long lists of very casually linked things - nothing causal, just casual - which removes any punch I might have enjoyed from it. But people seem to enjoy it based on the reviews I've read. So, perhaps, will you. I don't in part because of the expectations engendered by the subtitle, the dust jacket, and the introduction: this is about the origins of the modern world. Okay, sort of; it is.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, a landmark piece of investigative reporting that predates the events depicted in the movie Spotlight, which is so good that, in fact, it is name-checked in the movie, by Jason Berry, who should be considered a Hero of the Faith. Published in the mid-80s, it traces the events that became the horrific cover-up that it was and may still be.
That's kinda James Burke's thing... to show connections. Once upon a time, he was good at it and unique. But, I can imagine with all the Youtube versions and the number of years he's been doing this that he may have run out of really compelling material to mine.
Apologies if this has been mentioned already but this is the first book of a terrific trilogy. I'm on the third book now. Basically, 10% of the population is born with abilities that could rightly be called super powers (not flight or invulnerability, but intellect or other skills). Some, as you might expect, go rogue, and that's where Nick Cooper comes in. He hunts them down for a government agency. Oh, and he's also an abnorm, and eventually (of course) he gets framed for a terrorist attack and now they're after him. Hijinks ensue. (Seriously, it's a great read. I ordered the second one halfway through reading the first. And I'm deliberately slowing down reading the third so as not to end it yet.)
I know I'm really enjoying a book when I feel torn between reading one more page and putting it aside so I can 'live in this world a bit longer.'
The Octopus, A Story of California – Frank Norris "He searched for the True Romance, and, in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs."
I've read most of Neil Gaiman's catalog but had missed Stardust until last week. It's definitely pitched at teens, but it is utterly delightful.
So clearly I'm not very good about keeping y'all updated on what I've been reading lately, but I recently finished N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, and it deserves mention.
Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, which I assumed would be a biography of the great Sauk leader from my ancestral homelands that, alas, were his first, but which is more a "life and times" with a slight emphasis on the "times," which is good, by historian Kerry A. Trask.
I finished a nine book series from Kevin Hearne called The Iron Druid Chronicles. It's about the last druid on Earth and his Irish Wolfhound, and their interactions with all of the other supernatural folks. It works pretty well while set in Tucson (a place where the Fae have a hard time reaching him) and then gets less enjoyable as it becomes a global war with Olympians and Norse and vampires all involved. The core relationship between druid and dog is the best consistent part, while the attempts to tie all of the introduced story lines together made the last couple of books comparatively tedious. Enjoyable on the whole.