Finished Whirlwind at lunch today and so I've completed The Asian Saga. Whirlwind is good, did get lost a few times with characters/places since the novel spans Iran from Hormuz to the border with Azerbaijan. With so many characters it did get a little bogged down at times, especially with them spread out. My rankings of all the novels 1. Shogun 2. King Rat 3. Noble House (barely ahead of...) 4. Tai-Pan (barely ahead of...) 5. Whirlwind and in a distant 5th place....Gai-Jin 1-5 in my rankings are all solid and not much separates them. Gai-Jin is a steaming hot pile of garbage and should be skipped by everyone, it doesn't fit into the Saga/narrative at all (even though it involves Struan's in-between Tai-Pan and Noble House so you think it would) That being said, Shogun and King Rat are standalone, however the main character in King Rat does have a part to play in Noble House but I don't think you'd be missing anything if you skipped King Rat. Chronologically, Tai-Pan -> Noble House -> Whirlwind should be read in order. From reading all the books I've learned that James Clavell likes women who put their husbands on a pedestal, have their favorite drink ready without being asked (they should just know), unfettered capitalism, and he absolutely 100 percent hates the Labour Party.
Read A Book About American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates. About the abortion issue. Oates conflates Operation Rescue and the Army of God, but otherwise a pretty good book.
I took my time with this one. Interesting book from 2004 that has a good overall message while drifting into some weird, an occasionally anti-scientific, areas. Usually I'd have fun railing against things like organic food and alternative medicine, but they're outweighed by interesting insights into areas such as education, work, and even city planning. It was well worth the $6 I got it for.
Read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. A memoir about raising a younger brother after the deaths of his parents.
Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, A Memoir 1946-1965, in which that word "Penkelemes" refers to the early days of Nigerian independence in which a strange form corruption dominated public life and some cases, threatened the continued existence of the author, Wole Soyinka, who in this memoir refers to himself as "Malen" and disguises other identities as well. He calls this memoir a work of "faction," in which certain events are disguised as fiction in order to protect some of those who might still need protecting given the vagaries of Nigerian politics when this book was published in the '90s.
Read House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa). It's a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about an Amerindian WWII vet who returns shattered.
I am in an odd place book-wise. The public library is still closed, though if you make a borrowing request they will prepare it and bring it out to the parking lot for you. But usually I supplement what I am actively looking for with my impulse borrowing forays, of which there have been none since pre-Covid, and my list of things I was looking for (that they have) is exhausted. And I have already re-read most of what I am ready for here in our home collection. I am reading some work-related stuff but I need to re-stock the "for pleasure" reading queue. Global Health & International Relations by McInnes and Lee is my current work-related read, the better to put Trump's decision to pull the US out of the WHO into context for my students.
Pudd’nhead Wilson – Mark Twain "One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives."
My wife, our 12-year-old son, and I are reading these together. We finished Voices Friday and started Powers yesterday. Reading these for a half an hour or so has become our lunchtime habit while everyone is working/schooling from home.
I read this remarkable, brief novel yesterday afternoon while on furlough (and then deep into the night): The Deep has a fascinating backstory. In the mid-1990s, an obscure techno group called Drexciya which included lyrics about a sea-born race of creatures akin to mermaids and descended from pregnant slaves thrown overboard whilst on the transatlantic voyage. Somehow the producers of the radio show This American Life discovered the music, and as part of an episode dedicated to Afrofuturism in 2017, asked an experimental rap group called clipping (comprised of the three additional co-authors listed on the cover of the book - Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes) to compose a song called "The Deep" which you can hear here: The album was nominated for a Hugo Award. And then it became the basis for The Deep written by Rivers Solomon. I knew nothing about this and certainly not the backstory of the music. The other day, my wife and I took a housewarming gift to a friend of our daughter's who we've known for twenty years. The group of friends is scattered all over but they take turns choosing books and mailing them out so they can have a book club conversation, and the one we visited had a copy of The Deep to send our daughter who is fairly itinerant right now in her domicile. And I decided to read it before I mailed it to her. I recommend it. My copy of the book uses the artwork shown here while the hard copy issued originally shows the shape of the protagonist (mermaid-ish) whereas I wasn't quite sure in the book how they looked. I am not sure which is better, if either.
Read Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. Not the levels of his two classic novels but pretty good. About a 30 year old bookstore clerk and his misadventures.
The book won Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989. The pace, the plot and subject of the book normally does not appeal to me, but I could not put it down. I still do not understand why and how I enjoy reading it so much.
The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football, an interesting book in which Harry Pearson returns to his northeastern roots after a decade and a half in London and decides to get into football at all levels, from the local premiership sides (Sunderland, Newcastle) and lower tier teams (Middlesbrough) down to lower non-league sides like the legendary Blyth Spartans (who the internet tells me are struggling, but in the 1993-94 season chronicled here are still not struggling). An interesting book that I put on my kindle (for $4) after reading this article a couple days ago... https://unherd.com/2020/10/why-i-fell-in-love-with-the-northern-league/ Oh, while the season and tournaments narrated in the books happened almost 30 years ago, even before I could watch the premiership on cable, it's still worth a look because Pearson is funny as hell.
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad "Truth shall prevail—don’t you know. Magna est veritas et . . . Yes, when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt—and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune—the ally of patient Time—that holds an even and scrupulous balance."
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy an interesting piece of social criticism that sounds like a "digital detox program for greater workplace productivity" but which is really nothing of the sort... in fact, it's a critique of the idea that the highest purpose of the person is to be a productive workplace contributor. Quite the critique of capitalism in the digital age, in short, by artist Jenny Odell.
This book has been used by people who can't read to promote vegan/vegetarian lifestyles. Instead, it's an interesting comparison of 5 distinct locations, with absurdly high concentrations of centenarians, and the similarities and differences of their diet (only one is actually vegetarian), family, religious, and activity patterns. I'm fairly close to many of these basic things, but I'm guessing the asthma and chronic back issues will get me out of here before I'm 100.
Slipless in Settle: A Slow Turn Around Northern Cricket by the guy whose soccer book I finished last week, Harry Pearson. That's right, I thought his soccer book was so good that I'm reading his book about cricket. Oddly enough, when I finish this book it will be the 3rd book on the topic I've read. It might not be the best, but it's probably the funniest (and I'm guessing that I'm missing a lot of jokes, since I don't know the ins-and-outs of mostly amateur cricket)
What did you think of this? I'm reading Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution right now.
Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals a less-dated than I expected book by a poet who should be better known who was also quite capable as a conservative intellectual (like, way better than Eliot ever was) named Peter Viereck, who in this book, unlike most of his 50s counterpart, actually gives intellectuals credit for being quick to oppose Hitler, but less quick to realize that Stalin was a pretty evil dude. Full credit to Viereck for being one of the full conservatives to credit FDR's New Deal as actually saving capitalism (and thousands of small businesses) instead of being the first frozen patch on the slippery slope to communism. Interesting to read someone unpredictable compared to the people who came out of the 50s as the brand name conservatives of the cold war era (William F. Buckley, for one, whose first book, God and Man at Yale gets a pretty serious beatdown in this book.