Good for you, reading to people. I’m not good at that. One of Kings best, the new? Unredacted? Version was my fav. “Fever” is reminiscent of “The Stand” without the weird quasi religious stuff and malevolent crows. More how it could be.
There are about 50 crows living in my neighborhood this year. They tend to do flyovers when I'm exercising in y back yard. So I'm not going to read anything by Stephen King about malevolent crows, that's for sure.
My first reaction after finishing Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War 2 was wow, I need to read everything else she has written, followed close behind by wow, how could I handle the emotional burden of reading anything else she has written? This was originally published in 1985 in the USSR. There's so much here that is common to her interview subjects while each vignette is simultaneously unique. There's lots in there to break your heart, both within and without the war. One oral history from a woman whose unit was responsible for pulling men out of burning tanks had me flabbergasted. There were no additional vehicles in the unit, and no room in the tanks, so the women rode on the side of the tanks - hanging on and trying to keep their legs from the treads. That image of them riding into war in that way is so incredibly ridiculous in conception - but, like everyone else in the story, they didn't just do it but demanded the opportunity to do so. I recommend this wholeheartedly. (I did find myself wishing more notes about the conversations Alexievich had with the still-active Soviet censor system were available somewhere. The snippets she shares in the introduction weren't enough for me.)
I have to confess that I'd never heard of her until this thread, which is humiliating since I was a Russian history major in school. But she's going into my queue now. Any thoughts which book I should start with?
She has this book, as well as one with people who were children during the second world war (Last Witnesses), and books on Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan (Zinky Boys), and the fall of Communism and the aftermath (Second Hand Time). I've read all but the Chernobyl one, and they're all pretty good. And in many cases, ghastly, esp the ones pertaining to war.
I wanted to see if I'd posted this author before so I did a search, and he turned up in one thread, a two post thread on the 2015 Nobel Prize, in which a writer I'd never heard of was listed at 5-1 odds to win the thing... and she did: Svetlana Alexievich, the author of this book... Ten Thousand Lives, which at one level is a Korean variation on the theme established by my Knox county homey Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology and Harlem renaissance genius Melvin Tolson in Harlem Gallery, only taken a few levels higher. Ko Un was listed as 18-1 that year.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented - Thomas Hardy "Was there another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, “All is vanity.” She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death." Third read for me. And every time I read it, am more convinced that this is one of the best novels ever written in English.
I have actually never read that, and I ought to. Just finished: Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark is about the Golden State Killer, active from 1973-86 in three major spurts. The book was published posthumously, and shortly before they actually caught the guy. I don't read much true crime, but McNamara - while completely possessed of all the bona fides of someone who knows what she's doing and meticulous in her methodology - has a knack for very interesting writing. And so it worked for me. I haven't seen the HBO series based on the book or anything else about the case except for when the guy was caught/arrested and convicted.
https://sellercenter.nuriakenya.com/img/products/Mind******** NuriaKenya.jpg Mindf•ck is a book about Cambridge Analytica's tactics of voter manipulation by one of the architects of it. He describes how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions using social media data from Facebook, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. For example, if CA found someone who Liked a post about some Jade-Helm or anti-vax nonsense, you could predict a ton of information about them using their social media profile. Then they target that person, and only that person, with information designed to terrify them into radicalism. CA also had access to all of their Friends and could examine all of their profiles too and use personalized propaganda on them too. All told, Cambridge Analytica was able to tap into hundreds of millions of Facebook profiles on behalf of their clients in Russia and the Republican Party.They were able to radicalize millions of people on the right and dishearten millions of people on the left in 2016 alone. Nothing whatsoever has been done to prevent this from happening again.
There was a retired math prof that I know through a coffeeshop I used to hang out in: man, they bombed him, and turned his vote from Gary Johnson to the eventual winner. Some of the shit he was angsting about was really odd. But it worked.
A Drinking Life: A Memoir, an interesting book by a guy who grew up the son of a one-legged father who, it turned out, lost his leg due to bad medical treatment after a soccer injury. And like the author Pete Hamill, I was known as my father's "boy" or "son" in several hometown bars long after the old man passed away. My dad died in 1982, but after my mother's funeral in 2008, my brothers and I got a free round by virtue of being "John's kids." (I was 47... my older brother was 61). And Pete Hamill, a legendary NYC news guy, was "Billy's kid" well into his fifties. And he was kinda famous as "Pete Hamill" by then.
Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. Pretty interesting book about the many ways in which the Bible as we know it is nothing like the "original" writings. Explains the methodology used to determine where there have been edits or omissions, either accidental or on purpose.
Leonard Gardner -- Fat City Read this last weekend. Excellent, evocative short novel. Now reading: Renata Adler -- Speedboat
NYRB books now? What, Library of America isn't good enough for you???? Anyway... Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, which I picked up because I saw the author's name and remembered reading her memoir back in the 90s and misremembered it as one of the good ones, and not one of the many that were somehow self-absorbed and completely self-unaware. Yay, verrily that book, French Lessons, is a piece of shit, but in Looking for the Stranger, Alice Kaplan has redeemed herself and then some.
American Journals, notebooks chronicling two trips, one to the US and Canada, and the other to Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, by French novelist and essayist Albert Camus, right at the point he was becoming famous outside of France. Have to say, did not expect Camus to be waxing rhapsodic about the pleasures of ice cream, not to make a trek into the mountains to witness a voodoo-like ritual, but there it is.
Right before the semester started, I finished Kory Stamper's excellent Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. What a great mix of informative and fun this is! After this experience, I will read pretty much anything she wants to write about - especially the footnotes.
I will add that as I began my class on the United Nations today, I trotted out something I learned from Stamper's book: the difference between an acronym (which is pronounced, as in UNESCO and NATO) and an initialism, where the initials are spelled out (as in UN and WSU). (I did give her credit.) And then some of the students turned something back in at the end of class where they used "initialism" and I was most pleased.
Greaney wrote another grotesquely over the top story in the second Gray Man book, On Target. There's a love interest, kind of. There's a whole mess of stuff in Darfur. It's ridiculous in the best possible way. So far I like the character and writing better than the Bourne books. Sunnie Giles apparently has succeeded at something in life. I have no idea what. She repeatedly refers to her own research in the book with a name that's way too long, but the methodology seems shoddy, at best and she's a TERRIBLE writer. She falls into the trap of occasionally praising things without any hint of investigating whether or not it's good, like the already decimated open office idea. The book is wildly unscientific in many parts, either by not attempting to explain why the science is relevant or even showing an understanding of what's being applied. Despite that, there's quite a few good examples of how innovation happens, most of which contradict her own point that she's trying to make. Not the worst read, but not a book that needed to exist. Scatter is the first of two books my church asked me to read and give a recommendation on either positively or negatively for use in small group study. It's a solid read about the wrongheaded approach to church missions in much of the protestant world over the last 2 centuries and a refreshing acknowledgement of the need for people to take real skills and use them for the good of the less fortunate before broaching the subject of faith. Plugged In was the second of those books I was asked to read. It's an interesting take on assessing culture from a meaningful, engaged Christian perspective, that's written by West Ham United fan who lives and teaches in London. As cringy and clueless as many of the more prominent Christian names are when trying to even understand culture, Strange was solid and self aware.