Our Reads of 2023

Discussion in 'Books' started by Ismitje, Jan 1, 2023.

  1. Excape Goat

    Excape Goat Member+

    Mar 18, 1999
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    [​IMG]

    It is a soccer forum. People should be interested in this book. I already knew about his story growing up during the war so that I did not feel much.
     
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  2. chaski

    chaski Moderator
    Staff Member

    Mar 20, 2000
    redacted
    Club:
    Lisburn Distillery FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Turks and Caicos Islands
    Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

    [​IMG]

    " It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts."
     
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  3. rslfanboy

    rslfanboy Member+

    Jul 24, 2007
    Section 26
    :sleep::sleep::sleep:

    Wait, what was that? :p

    I have a purely irrational and entirely emotional hatred of Thomas Hardy after being forced to read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in AP English.
     
  4. chaski

    chaski Moderator
    Staff Member

    Mar 20, 2000
    redacted
    Club:
    Lisburn Distillery FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Turks and Caicos Islands
    reported
     
  5. Chesco United

    Chesco United Member+

    DC United
    Jun 24, 2001
    Chester County, PA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    Cahokia by Timothy R. Pauketat. A work on the history of the great, pre-Columbian city of Cahokia in Illinois. Pauketat focuses more on the archaelogy than the history, which is kind of disappointing for me. Should be an interesting read.
     
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  6. Q*bert Jones III

    Q*bert Jones III The People's Poet

    Feb 12, 2005
    Woodstock, NY
    Club:
    DC United
    I read this too partly because, when I was a kid, we lived within the metropolitan region of greater Cahokia. As a kid, we'd commonly be digging for worms and we'd find a spearhead. It was so routine that we'd just throw them over our shoulders and get on with the worm business. It never occurred to us that this wasn't completely ordinary in every way.

    Of course, part of the problem was that we teach American history as if it started with the Mayflower. But even once we admit that's wrong, we have to do the harder work of learning (and teaching) the history beyond the most simplistic and fetishistic stereotypes. This book, for example, should rightly be the first book everybody reads in American History 101.
     
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  7. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    And to follow up Q*Bert. I took a archaeology class in college and was assigned Cahokia as my project (other people had other sites in Illinois). Interestingly, this was the 1980s and most of the archaeologists I worked with studied got their Ph.D's in the 1960s. Thus, in their reading, life around the mounds was depicted as a hippy commune bordering on Burning Man or something.

    Not to give away any spoilers, but more digging has revealed some pretty serious brutality.

    We had a cigar-box full of arrowheads, with a couple of spearheads that, I learned in college, were likely older. Most of them were found on worm digs and when we dug up a chunk of the backyard for a garden. No idea where that box went.
     
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  8. EvanJ

    EvanJ Member+

    Manchester United
    United States
    Mar 30, 2004
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    upload_2023-3-7_18-2-14.png

    I just started it.
     
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  9. TheJoeGreene

    TheJoeGreene Member+

    Aug 19, 2012
    The Lubbock Texas
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Germany
    I can only imagine the level of vitriol this book gets for being written by someone named Bluestein.
     
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  10. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    [​IMG]

    The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, a long and detailed meditation on race and history from the agrarian perspective that is guaranteed to offend literally everyone on some point while on other points drawing assent from pretty much everyone on other issues by Wendell Berry.
     
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  11. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I think it I tried to read this when I wasn't so busy, and could give it the "work" it needs to engage and follow along, I'd enjoy it more.

    [​IMG]

    It's Lincoln in the Bardo from George Saunders, and it isn't an easy read. Interesting concept following the death of Lincoln's son Willy, but it's neither about Willy really nor Abe but the collection of spirits in the bardo (a Tibetan concept of an interim status between life and death) near the White House. I needed escapism and this really isn't that.
     
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  12. Q*bert Jones III

    Q*bert Jones III The People's Poet

    Feb 12, 2005
    Woodstock, NY
    Club:
    DC United
    Reading Saunders for escapism is akin to taking Joyce to the beach.
     
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  13. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I don't see the issue reading Joyce at the beach?

    upload_2023-3-12_20-46-54.jpeg
     
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  14. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    @TheJoeGreene . . . Good call!

    [​IMG]

    Freedom, a pretty decent walking-based book that, unlike any other I've read, passes through a town I used to live in and one I used to work in (Greensburg and Latrobe, PA, respectively) by Sebastian Junger. I'm not sure how plausible some of the passages are (there are some might distances traversed over the course of a day), but that might be because he (admittedly) portrayed the trip as one continuous walk when it was actually done in 4 or five stages. An interesting contribution to the genre wherein a writer uses a long walk as a framing device for a lot of random but interesting reflections (I'm thinking of W. G. Sebalds The Rings of Saturn, Iain Sinclair's London Orbital, London Overground and my favorite Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out Of Essex,. And probably Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines... though Chatwin claims that as fiction.

    Anyway, Thanks, Mean Joe!
     
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  15. Chesco United

    Chesco United Member+

    DC United
    Jun 24, 2001
    Chester County, PA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    Candide by Voltaire. "Truly this is for the best, in this the best of all possible worlds." It's the classic novella by Voltaire. The main character goes on several bizarre adventures. Should be an interesting read.
     
  16. Q*bert Jones III

    Q*bert Jones III The People's Poet

    Feb 12, 2005
    Woodstock, NY
    Club:
    DC United
  17. TheJoeGreene

    TheJoeGreene Member+

    Aug 19, 2012
    The Lubbock Texas
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Germany
    [​IMG]

    I first read Amusing Ourselves to Death around 2001-02. Reading the "20th Anniversary Edition" in 2023 (2 years before its 40th anniversary), it's really interesting to see where Postman's work really holds up. I've always been more of a believer in Huxley's dystopian worldview than that of either Orwell or Bradbury, and this further solidified that. Maybe the most prescient thing in the whole book is his take on computers, which he barely touches on, but still suggest that years from now (1985) computer usage in the average person's life will have created at least as many problems as it has solved. Not a bad take on what the smartphone/social media boom has actually done, and it's largely due to his correct assertion that we don't seriously examine new technologies when they first appear at large scale.

    Maybe my favorite point of his is that "bad/junk" TV is better for us than TV that pretends to be useful.

     
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  18. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    I read that in the 80s. It was the very first book of contemporary cultural criticism that I assigned in a first year composition class which I had not previously read, a practice I continue to this day, when possible.

    That passage you quote is what sets Postman apart from other critics at the time. And when you come across people to this day who dismiss Postman as yet another elitist snob who dismisses TV, you know those people haven't read the book.
     
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  19. Chesco United

    Chesco United Member+

    DC United
    Jun 24, 2001
    Chester County, PA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    I prefer the Procopius history.
     
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  20. Excape Goat

    Excape Goat Member+

    Mar 18, 1999
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    [​IMG]


    I added this book to my Goodreads' "Want to read" list, but I did not know why I did. Flynn Berry's previous book won the Edgar Award and I probably added the wrong book to the list.


    I did not like it.
     
  21. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Fantastic! One of my favorite things is the where-did-I-come-up-with-this moment.
     
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  22. Excape Goat

    Excape Goat Member+

    Mar 18, 1999
    Club:
    Real Madrid
    [​IMG]


    This book was about two Jewish families who originally from Baghdadi who made their fortune in Shanghai via India and became two of the richest families in the world prior to the Second World War. I heard of the Kadoori family of Hong Kong, but I knew little about the Sassons. Victor Sasson seemed to be a character straight out of a Hollywood movie. As you might have known from my recent post about "the Great Gatsby" in this thread, I did not found Jay Gatsby the character interesting. Victor Sasson was more "dramatic" than the fictitious Jay Gatsy. He was liked a composite character between Jay Gatsby and Jake Barnes (the Sun Also Rises). He suffered an injury in the First World War that put him on a wheelchair for life. The book hinted that he was impotent. In shanghai, as one of the richest man in the world, he threw lavish parties for the foreigners while he seemed to jump from one woman to another and was known to take photos of naked women. While his mother came from a prominent British family and he himself was associated to the British upper class, he and his family were still rejected by the British upper class in both London, Shanghai and Hong Kong because of antisemitism. He tried to be "British" while taking a limited interest in Zionism until the 1930's when thousands of Jewish refugees escaped to Shanghai at the eve of the World War Two creating a situation in Shanghai. Suddenly, he was forced to be involved with the issues. he found himself caught between the Japanese which was at the door step of Shanghai and the European powers that were controlling Shanghai at the time. Before the Pearl Harbour, he was known to be anti-Japanese while maintaining a relationship with them. While all of this was happening, the Communism were rising in China which eventually led to his downfall. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, the Sassons ignored the plagues of the local Chinese population while they partied in Shanghai during the Roaring 1920's.
     
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  23. Chesco United

    Chesco United Member+

    DC United
    Jun 24, 2001
    Chester County, PA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    War on the Run by John F. Ross. It's a historical tale of Robert Rogers, an American guerrilla fighter of the 1750s to the 1770s. Apparently, my grandmother (who died at 104) liked Rogers. Should be a good, lengthy read.
     
  24. phedre44

    phedre44 Member

    SKC
    Apr 1, 2008
    Kansas
    Club:
    Sporting Kansas City
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Last few books I've picked for myself:

    Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence - Loved Lawrence's Book of the Ancestor trilogy. The world building is insane. A planet orbiting a dying sun, so at some point somebody hung a big mirror in the sky to reflect a focused beam of sunlight across a narrow strip of the planet, creating a warm enough corridor to continue life. Everywhere outside that corridor is ice. Also, ninja nuns. Prince of Fools wasn't nearly as good. It was just okay. It's really hard to be a woman and to read a novel told from the perspective of a guy who's just....so constantly horny. He's not mean about it or anything, but.....eh.

    How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - Contains the Combahee River Collective Statement and interviews with members of the original collective. My husband got this for me for Christmas. He knows me so well. :inlove:

    The Bone Valley by Candace Robinson - So. I like Fantasy, obviously. I also (want to) like Romance, cuz I think love and sex are great. Apparently Fantasy Romance is, like, a thing, so I've been exploring the genre a bit to see if there's anything I like. This ain't it. This was, and I cannot stress this enough, terrible. I really, really hope this was put out through a vanity publisher. It's so bad. The editor should be embarrassed. And fired. The "witty banter" between the characters is painful. Physically painful. I genuinely do not understand how this has a 4.4 rating on Goodreads and a 4.5 on Amazon.

    Books I've read for neighborhood book club:

    1st to Die by James Patterson - Also terrible.

    Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus - Much better. I usually prefer at least a touch of subtlety in "feminist" novels, and this did not have it. But this was lighthearted/humorous enough that it didn't grate.

    Now I'm reading A Promise of Fire by Amanda Bouchet. This is another fantasy romance attempt. I'm only about 60 pages in, and I reserve the right to change my mind, but so far, it's so much better than The Bone Valley.
     
  25. Ismitje

    Ismitje Super Moderator

    Dec 30, 2000
    The Palouse
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    This is an amazing tidbit just sorta dropped in there. :)
     

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