I finished Kurt Vonnegut's last "official" book (meaning, not collected unpublished stuff released posthumously), A Man Without A Country from 2005. Delightfully brief essays on a variety of subjects, though it was just after the Iraq Invasion and he didn't like Bush and his ilk, so that colors more of it than I would have liked. Some great bon mots in there.
This book sat on my book shelves for 25 years. I read it in 2 hours tonight. It is only 90 pages. He based his entire of his essay on a single event of Leonardo's early childhood. He was attacked by a vulture, but it turned out that Freud read the wrong translation of word "vulture". His entire essay actually meant nothing without the Vulture. Nevertheless, I found the book deep in meaning.... but also Freud might have stretched his theory very far.
Leonardo da Vinci apparently had an early memory of being attacked by a vulture. The vulture supposed to mean "mother" in the Egyptian culture. Freud linked it with Oedipus complex analysis and other Freudian's sexual theory. Then, it turned out that Leonardo da Vinci's memory was mistranslated.... it was a "kite" (a bird of prey), not a vulture. The idea of the Egyptian meaning of the vulture meant nothing if the bird was a kite. Anyway, how does Da Vinci know about the Egyptian meaning of vulture when he was a baby? I thought the essay was stretched. He did a good job explaining "Mona Lisa", "john the Baptist", etc through analysis of Da Vinci's relationship with his mother, etc. Freud discovered his mistake only a few years after it was published.
The Half-Finished Heave: Selected Poems by the Swedish poet Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtromer, well translated (well, compared with other translations and not my actual knowledge of Swedish) Robert Bly Friends! You drank some darkness and became visible.
This is almost a novella rather than a novel, especially when figuring the conversion from larger type in the hardback to what it will look like in mass market paperback; the average chapter was about 3.5 pages long. I enjoy Arkady Renko as a protagonist, and the early books had him more or less aging normally alongside events in the USSR/Russia. But that stopped a few books ago else he would be in his mid-70s like the author. Instead, here he's a senior investigator but probably in his mid-50s. I miss the contemporary nature of these books, but this is a nice story with familiar themes, and a worthy way to spend a day and a half.
That's one of the hazards of coming up with a great protagonist in one's crime novel. Robert Parker's Spencer (and his sidekick Hawk) also were kicking some serious ass well past their retirement ages. They might still be, because I think another author inherited the franchise.
On The Road - Jack Kerouac “Everyone looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-- a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?”
After the Funeral -- Agatha Christie I was pretty sure I knew all the Hercule Poirot titles, and yet, this showed up on my shelves at home. My wife gives away a couple thousand books a year for kids, but sometimes adult books end up in her stores. And the better ones make their way onto our shelves. So I am frequently surprised. In many of the Poirot novels, Hercule doesn't show up until late in the book. In this one, he is introduced on the 80th page (of a 282 page book) when the narrator is stumped and needs help. It is a great plot device because the book speeds up once Poirot is one the case and Christie hasn't had to do anything, really, to effect this change of pace. It is a stunningly great writer's tic. I learned a long time ago not to try to figure out the murderer of a Poirot or Miss Marple murder. But this one I got. Gotta claim those little victories in these trying times.
It could just be me, or these strange times, but I'm trying to read The Mysterious Affair at Styles right now and I'm struggling to find any enthusiasm whatsoever. I think what bothers me is the same thing that keeps me from enjoying superhero movies, Poirot is a Mary Sue with no character weakness or room for development. What made Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes interesting was that he was transformed from a Mary Sue to a highly functioning autistic with deep character flaws. But Christie's Poirot is stuck as a one dimensional vision of boring omniscience. I haven't tried reading a mystery since I was a child and I'm having a hard time imagining coming back if I can finish this one.
Yeah, character development isn't really a thing for mysteries of this time. There's not much character development in the written Sherlock Holmes, either. The plot is the thing in traditional cozy mysteries. I couldn't recommend anything else if you aren't a mystery person, except to say that Styles is Christie at her beginning. She did get better. Three books later she wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which has a much greater ending.
I am re-reading a mystery series that I loved when I first read it about fifteen years ago and, in an era of no library visits, have pulled back off the shelves. James D. Doss's Charlie Moon/Shaman series set in SW Colorado on the Ute Reservation are very good. Just finished my favorite of the series - The Shaman Laughs - and am on to The Shaman's Bones. Good characters, good mystery, interesting setting, and some humor mixed in.
I read that in college, and I learned how far south of the border Mexico City is. I didn't expect it to be on the border, but I expected it to be closer. Brownsville is the southernmost city in Texas, and using latitude degrees, it's about 446 miles north of Mexico City (and Brownsville is east of Mexico City but I don't care about that).
Many years ago, I bought this book "Norwegian Wood" because I like the Beatles' song with the same title. But I never read past the first five pages for some strange reasons. Oh well, on the first page of the book, the main character talked about hearing a cover version of "Norwegin Wood" while sitting on an aeroplane. That tone brought back memories of a girl he had while he was in college. In 1988, I headed to the United States for college as a foreign student. Before my departure, my high school sweet heart gave me a cassette tape of Beatles' greatest hits. I cried at the airport... and left. Fifteen hours later, the airplane approached the San Francisco International Airport. I looked out the window..... I forgot it was dawn or sunset, but it was a beautiful scene. At that moment, "Something" was playing on my walkman as my plane circled around Highway 101. The song never appealed to me before.... I was 18 at the time. Suddenly, I noticed how beautiful the lyrics were.... "Something in the way she moves, Attracts me like no other lover." And I missed the girl badly while looking over San Francisco's skyline . If I have to write a book about that girl, I would have started with that scene on the aircraft. The book sat on my self for at least 10 years. Last week, I picked it up for no reason and read it in 6 days. I could not say that the story was personal because the story was dramatic and weird, but it did touch on subjects about relationships that I have experience as a college student.
I had to read this for work. I've read little quips from Maxwell before and figured this would be okay. It's not. It's like someone took a bunch of clickbait listicles and turned them into a poorly constructed book. On several topics, especially "follow your passion" and habit formation, he repeats moronic crap that has been disproven by mountains of research. He has a stunning arrogance where he references himself and his previous books like it's a bodily function. He also had dozens of quotes throughout the book that don't have an actual reference attached. He openly mocks people who aren't in the top 10% of their chosen field. The worst part of the book, though, is the repeated quotations of world class fraud Napoleon Hill. He brags about having written over 100 books even though he's only 70. It shows, as this is garbage that looks like almost no thought was put into it. That kind of volume in writing basically makes him the leadership writing equivalent of John Grisham or Stephen King, just without the occasional classic. This is the second worst book I've read in the last 5 years and I'd gladly use the entirety of chapter 9 as toilet paper before ever reading another word from this oaf.
The book may have been shit but your review was worth it. What was the worst book you've read in the last five years?
Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It reads like something written by someone who has a faint awareness that human conversation is possible, and it's all built around a childhood that didn't actually exist. Kiyosaki is also a proven fraud who, despite the tripe in his book, has failed repeatedly in the business world.
I began to read books on financial planning. Now I'm currently reading "Secrets of the millionaire mind" by Harv Eker. The author very clearly explains the importance of the ability to manage your budget, regardless of its size. Teaches financial literacy and explains how is dangerous financial ignorance.
Seriously. Kinda makes me regret I don't have any totally shit books in my house, and that there's no way to get one at the library.
Funny, a friend recommended that to me when I told him I was financially illiterate. Thankfully I never took him up on it. The shittiest book I've read in the past year was by noted historian David McCullough. The entire literature of history has changed in the past 50 years. Social history has become the norm, the use of data and science has become commonplace. Exploring, if not celebrating, the experience of "others" is practically mandatory. McCullough's The Pioneers is a look at the great white men who conquered Ohio. There's practically nothing about the native Americans who were on the losing side. There's zero data or science or discovery or novelty. There's nothing whatsoever about the experience of women or African Americans or working-people. The book is a simulacrum, a glorification even, of what a history book would have looked like in the 1950s. Honorable mention goes to Jared Diamond's Collapse. Diamond has always been a terrible writer with fascinating ideas. But in Collapse, Diamond is a terrible writer with uninteresting ideas. It's like a high school book report by a kid who didn't read the book.