We haven’t had this post in quite a while. So I thought I would ask.

I'm reading your mind and you should be ashamed of yourself.

You should never be ashamed of "self". Be ashamed of actions but never of self!!!

You read my mind.

I was reading OP's mind too but you read it first.

I just finished a newly-released book, on an unmentionable (on this board) subject, by Mary L. Trump.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand the real life backstory.

I'm reading the same one. A view from the inside. Fascinating.

Tevai Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ... a newly-released book, on an unmentionable subject, by [Dr.] Mary L. Trump.
>
> Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand the real life backstory.

Titled- Too Little & Never Enough: How MY Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man

She was interviewed on Democracy Now today. Good show! Must watch-listen. https://www.democracynow.org

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/7/mary_trump_how_dysfunctional_family_shaped

The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe

I’ve been switching between two books. The Book of Enoch and the unmentionable book Tevai is reading. Sometimes I get confused between the two.

wondering Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I’ve been switching between two books. The Book
> of Enoch and the unmentionable book Tevai is
> reading. Sometimes I get confused between the
> two.

Are you reading the Ethiopic Enoch or the Hebrew Enoch?

I am not sure. Didn’t know there were two.

It says translated by R H Charles. What is the difference, should I read the other one too?

“My Absolute Darling.”

Not for the faint of heart.

This book will remind you of families at church where you always wondered if something weren’t ... amiss.

^^^ My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent.

I’ll be reading the unmentionable book after I quit reading The Librarian of Auschwitz.

I just read that one, knotheadusc. I was fascinated by the title and amazed to imagine that the camp's inhabitants were "allowed" to have a library.

Then I read the book.

Oh.

Heavy stuff here. I'm reading the latest from Daniel Silva, The Order. Waiting for the new James Lee Burke offering out soon.

Just put down Henry Miller’s The Colossus at Maroussi, an account of a trip to Greece upon the invite of Lawrence Durrell.

In the middle of Emile Zola’s Germinal. It’s breaking my heart, and shocking me with its immediate relevance (alas).

For essays I have a few things going. Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere (NYRB) is fascinating, for one because Cobb is so fascinated. I’m halfway through a collection of Joan Didion.

Going away for a while and wondering what to take. Most likely my better half and I will trade Alice Munro stories to read.

tHE jOURNAL OF DISCOURSES.

bEING A cOURT REPORTER MYSELF, i AM VERY INTERESTED IN THE STENOGRAPHER WHO TOOK IT ALL DOWN.

tHAT STENOGRAPHER EVENTUALLY LEFT THE CHURCH.

i HAVE ORDERED IN FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY.
lOIS,

mILD MANNERED COURT REPORTER WHO HIT THE cAPSLOCK KEY

Just finished "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Next up is "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, unless I decide I really need some brain-candy as a palate cleanser.

Re-read • The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Book club reads:
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt (June)
• The Vanishing Half by Bret Bennett (July)
• The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah (August)

Finished since Covid:
• Not Into Night by Max Zimmer
• Horse Dancer by Jojo Moyes
• The Forest Unseen by David Haskell
• Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

Presently reading:
• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
• The Girl from Widow Hills by Megan Miranda

Nothing memorable...

These Truths, Jill Lapore.

Can't say that I love it although I'm picking up occasional bits of previously unknown to me important info.

Looking across the room I see Infinite Jest that I read some time ago. Highly recommend it.

Just finished The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. VEry very entertaining. Some big laughs.

Just started Night Boat to Tangier. Too soon to tell but stunning writing. Having trouble with the Old Irish vocabulary though but wanted to read something about crusty old men with heavy pasts. I can relate.

I read a long intense review of the unmentionable "Agent Orange" Book by the unmentionable family member. I got enough from that to know I couldn't take knowing any more of the ugliness at this moment.

I have "Barn 8" on the backburner. All fiction here. I can't handle any more reality. It's in your face everywhere all the time.

Reallly tempted to get The Death of Jesus--fiction sort of. Getting such amazing reviews.

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Just started Night Boat to Tangier. Too soon to
> tell but stunning writing. Having trouble with
> the Old Irish vocabulary though but wanted to read
> something about crusty old men with heavy pasts.
> I can relate.

I should write my memoirs.

Why? Are you a crusty old man? :)

I am still studying and evaluating what I consider to be one of the great translations of ancient Sumerian cunieform tablets.
The Lost Book of Enki

Reading Chad and Lori's horoscope.

Uh, oh.

I can't take any more reality stories either, so am binging on Brandon Sanderson'a epics.
The Stormlight Archive runs to 3,000 words in print form, and much more on my laptop.
For comic relief there is Terry Pratchet and Johanna Lindsey.

"The Ring Around Rosie" is a fictional autobiography written by J. Mencken Froebush that details how Teddy Roosevelt spent his gap year in Bavaria, where he learned to be proud of his Irish brogues.

It's both an endearing 'coming of age' saga, as well as a sultry tell-all, with only the chokehold barred.

But there is not as much yodeling as I expected/hoped for. All in all, I gave it a 74; it was easy to dance to, but the words we're too big.

Just finished:

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
The Last Season by Eric Blehn
I'll Be Gone In the Dark by Michelle McNamera
Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown

Currently reading:

Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall by Denica Fairman
Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Stasiland is a fascinating book! Good choice!

And Andrew Roberts is the bomb. None of his books are bad.

It's a great read but I find I have to pay really close attention.

Yep. He does very serious books. Definitely not a bedtime novel.

Update since last post here.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte- very entertaining and scholarly.
Starting today -The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.
May switch to a bodice ripper if things get too grim.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I needed something to do during lockdown so I took this challenge. I like his essays, not getting much out of this to be honest. Only 200 p in out of over 1000.

Stigma by Imogen Tyler. I make an effort to read extreme left texts from time to time, but this is my online book club's suggestion not my personal choice. As usual some of the right questions (and some wrong ones) with the wrong answers.

Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry. A great novelist. Barely dipped into this one yet. No pun intended. Based on his experience on British freight ships pre-war.

The Geek Book of Sci Fi Cinema - self-explanatory title. Lazy choices and lazy writing, although I have learned some interesting things about the Lumière brothers.

w/r/t Infinite Jest - are you reading the endnotes? Those are essays, and if you like his essays, you'll like those.

I put that book down a few times thinking, "This is supposed to be good?" I gave it another shot on a camping trip, and I was hooked around page 100 when I started reading the endnotes that I'd been skipping because, well, they're endnotes and all the cool kids skip those. My favorite one is about the demise of the videophone. Once I realized what The Great Concavity is and WTF is going on with the Statue of Liberty, his snark grabbed me. In some ways his prescience is scary.

I don't know if I'd read IJ again. DFW was a Tier 1 asshole, hindsight being what it is. DFW reminds me of Faulkner. (I don't know what tier Faulkner is on.) Once you get what's going on in "The Sound and the Fury," it's good. Very good. I also like unreliable narrators, so there's that.

So I'd give IJ another shot. It *is* good. He had an interesting brain, and that thing is on full display. DFW was supposed to be the next great American novelist representing Gen X. Maybe he was. That's one angsty book. It's a well-deserved notch on your belt.

ETA: Don't read any plot summaries. Figure it out on your own. If something is written in French and you don't know French, look that up. Otherwise, don't spoil it for yourself.

EATA: The purple prose is a literary device. You have to roll with that. Like with the endnotes.



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 08/09/2020 03:10PM by Beth.

Liane Moriarty

That woman can write!

Also read "The Husband's Secret". Same author.

I’m reading “How the Scots Invented the Modern World” by Arthur Herman. Learning lots about the Scottish Enlightenment and history.
And I’m sort of on a break from another book that I’m halfway through called “419” by Will Ferguson. It’s about the email scams that originate from Nigeria (where the area code is 419) told from the perspective of both a scammer and his victims. A very good read, but intense and I needed to put it aside for a while.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/07/2020 09:49PM by looking in.

news mostly

Read Mary Trump’s book, Bolton’s memoir, (tedious) Silva’s, which was fun but not his best.

Also finished The Devil: A New Biography. It is a history of what people thought about the devil through the ages.

I’ve got some history and political books to read, but I think I’ll download some mysteries next.

That is heavy fare.

Agree on latest from Silva. Not up to his standard.

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene. A book speculating on the full history of the universe.

God: an Autobiography, franco Ferrucci. A quick read, and pretty funny. God was lonely in the void, and started creating stuff. He discovered that he can create, but can't uncreate. His creations have to run their course. The universe is pretty ad hoc, and a case of on the job training, something I've always thought.

On deck: In the Hands of the People: Thomas Jefferson.... , Jon Meacham

Napoleon: a Life, Andrew Roberts. I had an annual (or sometimes semi-annual) tradition with a friend of inflicting on each other books that we had read. His books to me were usually top shelf stuff, and this was the last one he gave to me, just as the pandemic kicked in. I saw up-thread where Lot's Wife pointed out this book is also top shelf. He passed away a couple weeks ago, untreatable stage 4 cancer, so I will move this one to the top of the queue to honor the memory of my friend. Gone too young.


In other news, Eric K made a comment recently about having to practice his music. It occurred to me that I should do some math practice. I do some sporadically, but there was something that I never learned how to do: draw a pentagon with straight edge and compass. So I dug out books, and went online, and found various ways to draw a pentagon. Most were complicated and unintuitive, but I found one that was considerably simpler and clearer. I wondered why the other explicators weren't aware of this. And why does it work.

That took me down a rabbit hole, that eventually led me to a fourth power polynomial of trig functions, something completely new to me. It was in such a form that the quadratic formula still worked even though it was fourth power. Pretty serious gymnastics for a problem that the Pythagoreans had solved in 600 BCE.

So I now can draw a perfect pentagon, and as a bonus know how to calculate the symbolic value of sin(pi/5). Pi/2, Pi/3, pi/4 and pi/6 are easy. Sin(pi/5) leads to that ugly equation.

OK, more than you wanted to know, but I had fun. ;)

I love Brian Greene. I can't wrap my mind around string theory.

Basically anything by Roberts is excellent. His books tend to cluster around Churchill/WWII and Napoleon and are almost uniformly great.

If you are going to read Napoleon, I'd suggest Kissinger's A World Restored as a chaser. It gets a little enthusiastic in a couple of places but is the best volume in English on how Metternich and Castlereagh reconstructed Europe after the French destroyed it. The book is a primer in geopolitics, a discipline that is growing more relevant every day in our ill-starred times.

Until the End of Time is on my shelf, too. I used to think it was a love story but then somebody with an inordinate fondness for quadratic equations recommended it. I'm doing some professional stuff now but hope to move on to that in the near future.

Just read the Illiad for the first time. Hated the ending.

Also, Howie Carr's "What REALLY Happened," how "the most qualified candidate in history" got outfoxed.

Sometimes "most qualified" does not translate into "most electable." A terrible candidate to be sure.

I watched David Blight's Civil War / Douglass lecture series on YouTube (his voice sounds much like Harrison Fords) and I wanted to read the book, Found out some things that I didn't know.

Did you read Frederick Douglass's first autobiography?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/09/2020 03:05PM by Nightingale.

The Final Journey by Gudrun Pausewang (translated by Patricia Crampton).

You can perhaps guess the subject by the book's title. It details a forced train journey taken by Jews in Germany. Unknown to them, their destination: Auschwitz.

It's a small book that packs a punch. A good example of show don't tell.

Gut-wrenching.

Not the usual light summertime read. You will know how it ends so no surprise there. Yet all the way through I kept hoping that somehow everything would be OK.

Heartbreaking.

For a change of fare, needing something more upbeat, I'm reading a book about famous Canadian women. It too is a very short book. :) (No offence to my country or its people!) And yes, so far, it's interesting and informative. With pictures. :)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/09/2020 03:15PM by Nightingale.

Just finished Too Much and Never Enough.


Catching up on the Dresden Files. I'm almost done with "Changes."

I've been also reading The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion. Finishing up Jesus: Mything in Action.

My daughter lived there for a while [East Germany] not long after unification. I can't remember which town, but the people there did long for the old days of low cost beer and sausages, etc.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/07/2020 08:31PM by Tevai.

Did either of you see the move "Goodbye Lenin"

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Bye-Lenin-Kathrin-Sass/dp/B00G4LLZGW

It was excellent.

Actually pretty similar to exMos who no longer believe, but attempt to keep up appearances for Mo relatives who would "just die" if they knew of exMo disbelief.

Good analogy!

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Actually pretty similar to exMos who no longer
> believe, but attempt to keep up appearances for Mo
> relatives who would "just die" if they knew of
> exMo disbelief.

Although Goodbye Lenin panders to sentimentality about the old East Germany, there are some very clever bits.

One of them is when the mother demands ?Spreewald pickles/gherkins, the old Communist East German brand and they can't find any, so they have to relabel some western ones. The mother tries them and says how much better they are than the usual pickles.

The implication here is that her view of East German life is not reflected in the reality. She supports her closed belief system over reality, even when it is proven to be inferior.

There are also some very clever hints about surveillance and snitching, like when she hears one of her neighbors watching Western TV.

At the end, when she abandons her "church", it turns out she didn't like it as much as she thought she did.