Opening line of the trilogy: "It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size." I cannot say enough good things about these books.
I've got a Seattle-NYC flight next week, so I've ordered the first book. I'll check back in after that. Thanks!
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain "The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not. Hain’t you got no principle at all?” - Tom Sawyer
I recently got interested in Masonic history. A senior member of the group recommended this book. he considered it the most actual book on their history. The book was co-written by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh who also co-wrote the more famous book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail". I read "Holy Blood" many many years ago, and i thought much of it was probably pseudohistory. This book was similar.
San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, which I read to consider for next fall's comp class and which is much better than the title sounds (it sounds like it's targeting Tucker Carlson's audience, but much of the book would offend them, too) by Michael Shellenberger. Basically, the left-libertarian ideas which are strong in SF and California in general are not working. Probably won't make the cut, unless I can find a similarly provocative title from the left.
Not a book, but this episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, with Jerusalem Demsas as guest, provides a lot of interesting discussion on the topic and mentions a few related books.
Everyday Millionaires - Chris Hogan Everything you would expect from the Ramsey world of finance. Some interesting data, some blatantly false information about credit cards, paying off your house, using an investment professional (aka throwing away money), etc., and a lot of postulating about morals from an author who got fired for diddling his way around their offices for years until he got caught, divorced, and fired. Some interesting data on the average person with a $1 million or more net worth in the US, but not much more.
Read Double Whammy last week by Carl Hiaasen then found the follow up Native Tongue. Whammy written in 1987 is definitely dated, before cell phone days. But the theme, corruption in Florida is still current. A lot like the corner of the cartoon I posted a while back in P&CE thread. Offbeat, weird and readable. Review, Live Journal “Double Whammy is fun and well-plotted; as zany as the plot twists may seem, Hiaasen actually brings it all together, weaving these strange, loony, venal, and oddly noble characters together into a story about timeshares, fishing, and murder. The fact that Hiaasen actually knows Florida and obviously did copious research on the subject of bass fishing just makes the details shine, though it's the characters and the twists that will really hold your attention. While a bit dated now (the book was written in 1987, as you can tell by all the problems that come up that would be solved nowadays by a cell phone), it was a good read. I've read two books by Carl Hiaasen now, and he has a gift for making Florida sound like the weirdest place on Earth and then sticking an almost-plausible plot into it. Rating: 8/10”
Turn Off Your Mind: The Dedalus Book of the 1960s, which explores the esoteric and occult elements that went into shaping the 1960s as most people know them by original Blondie guitarist Gary Lachman. Interesting book with some funny lines. Some of them don't land (he disrespects Ed Sanders' book on the Manson family in order to get a laugh, but that could just be me. I thought his line about Satanic church founder Anton LeVay was pretty good: he called him "Ayn Rand with horns."
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's the classic futuristic novel about genetic engineering. I'm a 1984 guy, but I expect to enjoy this.
Re-read All Quiet on the Western Front which I hadn't read since college and then re-read The Hobbit which I hadn't read since 7th grade. Currently reading Cat's Cradle which I have never read and picked up..... Gentlemen Prefer Blonds The Last of the Mohicans The Master and Margarita The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914 so I've got a lot to get through
King Lear -- William Shakespeare I read this in conjunction with seeing the play last month. Brand new for me. Typically when I go see a play I haven't read before, I'll read the play, see the play, read the play again. I'm not re-reading this. I know this is widely considered to be one of his greatest plays and that there is more commentary written about Lear than any other play sans Hamlet. I don't see it. This is a play that is little more to me than the story of an infantile king who wants to retire. (Which is an affront to the natural order. But Shakespeare doesn't go there. This is a distinctly strange experience for me to be so dismissive of The Bard. I wasn't overwhelmed by the production either, which might be a factor. And now that I'm thinking about it... maybe I should re-read it. Nah.
A lot of recent productions will portray Lear as going through something like dementia, while Cordelia is going through a teenage period of uncompromising hyper-purity. It does seem to be hard to pull off, for sure.
The book "War Lord" is the last and the 13th book of the "Saxon Stories" series by Bernard Cornwell. Of course, I enjoyed the entire series, Hey, I read all 13 of them, didn't I? But Cornwell used the same formula for all of them. I actually forgot most of the previous 12 books.
I lived San Francisco in the late 1980's and I absolutely loved the city. And it was not accidental that I used past tense of "love" in the previous sentence. When I visited in 2016, I thought that i would never return to that city again. I want to read this.
Just back from vacation. Didn't have much time to read, but I got about 2/3 of the way through Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston S. Churchill. It's a 4 volume series. I'm reading Volume 1: The Birth of Britain. He's a PM, and not a trained historian, so there's that. Should be interesting. Yeah, I probably won't be posting in this thread for a while.
What? Pics or it didn't happen! Just kidding. Introducing Swedenborg a book about the legendary "Swedish Da Vinci" by great London author Peter Ackroyd. It was short, and it quoted enough Swedenborg that I'm pretty convinced that I'll never actually read him, no matter how much I dig some of the people Swedenborg influenced like William Blake or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Johnny Appleseed.
Agent In Place (Gray Man Book #7) A familiar but still very different book in this series. Much of the first half is spent with characters other than the Gray Man to set up the various plot points that force him into action. Books 1-5 had an overarching goal for him, book 6 still focused mostly on him working his way through a problem, but now that he's firmly ensconced in his new role we get more time to flesh out the other characters around him. The potential new "big bad" is quite interesting and this almost feels like a Bond movie/book without the gadgetry. Very fun 500 pages.
Before the pandemic, I only read books about crimes, spies, history or sports. Somehow, i got myself reading more literature in the last 3 years. I really enjoyed Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood". It hooked me into love stories that are not romance novel. I began to look at books that dealt with love, nostalgia, etc. This past three days, I finished Haruki Murakami's first ever two books. Both were parts of the Trilogy of the Rat. "The "Hear the Wind Sing" somewhat related to what I am looking for. I could picture myself in that situation. The "Pinball 1973" was strange. I did finish the entire book in a single day, but I had no idea what Murakami was trying to say. The main character was imagining himself to be living with twin girlfriends, but I could not feel his loneliness. He was also obsessed with a pinball machince. And that was his story.
Distant Neighbors:,The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder a decades-long correspondance between two writers who both established roots in one specific place (Snyder outside Nevada City, CA and Berry near Port Royal, KY) while writing at a pretty high level. They are good friends, though there are a lot if major issues on which they seriously disagree. I've read a lot of writers' letters. Can't recall any collection where they discussed what tractor might be useful to their food-growing needs, or whether it would be more efficient to learn how to sheer sheep themselves or just hire a guy.