sick of reading books about politics, so I'm working on biographies right now. I'm in the middle of Big Bill Haywood, and have William Z. Foster lined up.
So, What Are You Freakin' Well Reading Now?
Fri, 2009-07-31 12:48
#52
Fri, 2009-07-31 21:25
#53
I'm now reading Terror Dreams by Susan Faludi, she discusses how gender terminology and portrayal was pumped up in the media after 9/11. I didn't notice many John Wayne references at the time but apparently they were there in great number.
Fri, 2009-07-31 21:49
#54
I just finished working my way through an essay by Christopher Michael Langan, a bouncer who apparently has the highest IQ in the United States (between 195 and 210). Here's the essay:
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf
And here's a link that will take you to the primer for the theory (it's at the bottom of the page). For god's sake, if you're going to read the essay, read this first:
Spectrum, I have a suspicion you might enjoy this. Unionist, not so much.
Fri, 2009-07-31 23:20
#55
I'm re-reading Patrick O'Brian's The Mauritius Command. Wonderful sense of the language, manners, customs and scientific knowledge in his sea-farin' yarns set in the time of Jane Austen, but dependent for action scenes on the war she and her characters largely ignored. O'Brian did a deep six in '99, unfortunately for his readers. ( Edited to correct spelling of the author's name. And I'm also sick of politics, religion, apocalyptic environmental stuff.)
Mon, 2009-08-03 23:02
#56
I'm re-reading Patrick O'Brian's The Mauritius Command. Wonderful sense of the language, manners, customs and scientific knowledge in his sea-farin' yarns set in the time of Jane Austen, but dependent for action scenes on the war she and her characters largely ignored. O'Brian did a deep six in '99, unfortunately for his readers. ( Edited to correct spelling of the author's name. And I'm also sick of politics, religion, apocalyptic environmental stuff.)
I think we can agree that he was a great writer and it is a great series. I recall that many of the novels in the series take place around 1812 or so and I find these to be logistically challenging (too much voyaging in a short period of time) though, but this is a minor quibble. The first book in the series (Master and Commander) is largely based on the exploits of Lord Cochrane in the Royal Navy (as opposed to his later career).
Sat, 2009-08-15 14:04
#57
I've just started reading Volume 1 of Capital by Karl Marx, well just part of the introduction by the translator thus far. It's 1000 pages. Since it's translated from German it'll probably feel like 4000 pages. There are three volumes so that makes 10,000 pages. I should be done by 2015.
Mon, 2009-08-24 08:06
#58
I read Che's Motorcycle Diaries on the weekend. Good travelogue withglimpses into the Che's nascent class consciousness.
Mon, 2009-08-24 21:51
#59
After watching Paper Moon recently, I became interested in whatever happened to Tatum O'Neal, so I read her autobiography, Paper Life. What a mess. Hollywood is a sewer, by her description.
Speaking of Tinseltown, I'm reading Frank Zappa's autobiography again. I saw his son Dweezil perform Zappa's music a week ago and am hence renewing my Zappa zealotry these days.
Mon, 2009-08-24 22:20
#60
Last week I finished "The Gargoyle" by Andrew Davidson.
A nice summer read. I'd never heard of it until Rebecca West recomended it to me, but apparently it's been all the rage.
Canadian fellow, Andrew Davidson, and a damn good story teller.
It's a great love story (love stories) but not, I dunno, so mushy a guy couldn't, um, burn through this page turner.
Tue, 2009-08-25 11:10
#61
I am almost finished Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" which I am reading for the second time. I wanted to re-read it because I have heard that her new fiction, "After The Flood" Is another futuristic speculative fiction.
O&C is about genetic engineering, personal alienation, and a new world in which humans and other animals are replaced by strange new genetically- engineered living beings. The title refers to Oryx, the child prostitute who becomes a creatrix-goddess to the strange new humanoids of the future, and Crake is the young genetic engineer who designs the new life forms and posthumously becomes the 'creator-god' to those beings.
I have heard that "After The Flood" is about a world devastated by floods and climate change. It's being released next month and I have reserved a copy for myself at the Toronto Public Library.
Tue, 2009-08-25 11:36
#62
"Oryx and Crake" gave me nightmares, which is a testimony to its power, I guess. Thanks for the tip on her next read.. if I can handle it.
I finally read "Monkey Beach" by Eden Robinson. Set in Kitamaat/ Haisla Nation territory, I picked it up because I lived on the northern West Coast years ago. It took me right back... but more than that it's a haunting description of land, spirituality and death. Hard to summarise. I am not sure if she wrote another but I hope so as this one was short listed for the GG Prize.
Tue, 2009-08-25 15:59
#63
I've never read anything by Eden Robinson before. I'm always looking around for interesting new things to read, books that I get into. Land, spirituality, death... I'll make a note of it and check it out sometime.
Tue, 2009-08-25 16:50
#64
I read Oryx and Crake a while back. Quite enjoyed it.
For someone with a professed fear and laothing of CanLit, I seem to end up reading and enjoying a lot of CanLit.
Tue, 2009-08-25 16:58
#65
I used to go looking for Can Lit. Not so much anymore.
I liked Nino Ricci's "Lives Of The Saints" and its 2 sequels but when I read his newest, "Origin Of Species" I didn't want to finish it. In one part of the book some of the characters are at a party making chit-chat. I felt like if I was at this party i would want to leave, so I did. I never found out what happened after that.
Thu, 2009-08-27 09:56
#66
I am reading The Family by Jeff Sharlet. It is a tough slog and I must admit I skipped a bit of it but it is necessary to know the influence the false Christians have on the US and other governments. It is extremely well researched and very scary. I say false Christians because they have interpreted Christs's teaching in such as way as to benefit themselves totally and to firmly believe they are right while ignoring anything Christ said that goes against their best interests.
Thu, 2009-08-27 10:03
#67
I'm currently reading Filthy Lucre, and The Appeal by John Grisham.
Thu, 2009-08-27 10:17
#68
I'm trying to wrap up both Taras Grescoe's "Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood" and Judy Rebick's "Transforming Power".
Fri, 2009-08-28 12:39
#69
working on "Free Women of Spain". I really need to stop leaving books on my desk if I am unprepared to explain the concept of an anarchist women's militia to coworkers.
But it is a really good book which gives a good understanding of working class anarchism and feminism in Spain during the revolution.
Sat, 2009-08-29 21:58
#70
I've just started reading Volume 1 of Capital by Karl Marx, well just part of the introduction by the translator thus far. It's 1000 pages. Since it's translated from German it'll probably feel like 4000 pages. There are three volumes so that makes 10,000 pages. I should be done by 2015.
Took a break last night to read the Communist Manifesto. Pamphlets were clearly more literary and sophisticated in the 1800s when literacy rates were lower. Nowadays the universe gets reduced to some meaningless point form arguments. At some point, we became stupid.
Sat, 2009-08-29 22:53
#71
At some point, we became stupid.
On the other hand an article in Scientific American indicated that it's publication has become more difficult to read since the turn of the century.
Someone with an English lit degree can probably tell us why, but I've noticed that a lot of stuff from the late 1700's is pretty easy to read, but stuff written during the Victorian era not so easy.
I'm not sure that the stuff from the 1800's into the early part of the last century was more intelligent, just, well, more verbose, with tangled subclauses, parenthetical diversions (interestingly enough, I eshchew the paranthetical trips Tolkien takes when I read "The Hobbit" to Snarfy the Wondergirl, made it easier to read aloud) and what editors today would regard as fantasical run on sentences that never seem to end, going on and on forever, like a man sliding slowly down a roof surfaced with black welsh slate and applied by tradesmen whose skill no longer resides in this age of ashphalt shingles.
Sun, 2009-08-30 01:49
#72
"I'm not sure that the stuff from the 1800's into the early part of the last century was more intelligent, just, well, more verbose, with tangled subclauses, parenthetical diversions..."
Many of the English novels of the 19th century were serialised in before becoming books, so it was in the interest of the authors to drag out the stories. They were paid by the word or by the installment.
Mind you, that dosn't explain Tolstoy, although I don't know what parts of War and Peace I'd cut out.
I'm reading Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint again.
Sun, 2009-08-30 08:32
#73
Stories serialized in the weeklies and monthlies were important when there were weeklies and monthlies. And although we tend to talk about "we" in the language of politics, certainly the proletariat today would not turn out for a weekly go at Karl in the local library. A study of content analysis and reading habits of industrial workers in my undergrad years showed all read the daily, but only occasional magazines.
I would think there is even less reading today by those folks. At least, looking at newspaper distribution and library attendance. But then, maybe I'm behind the IT times, and that study was 35 years ago.
I'm taking another run at Victor Klemperer's diary of the Nazi years. It is an amazing look at the world, even outside Germany, and from memories of that world pre-1933, the year he began his diary.
Arthur Koestler wrote in a bio, Arrow in the Blue, that he could not understand how the nation with the greatest circulation of newspapers, per capita, could let itself be so totally deluded. Although he did point to the economic screws being applied to publishers by 1930.
(Hey, that's happening today, eh?)
Sun, 2009-08-30 09:06
#74
And here's a link that will take you to the primer for the theory (it's at the bottom of the page). For god's sake, if you're going to read the essay, read this first:
Spectrum, I have a suspicion you might enjoy this. Unionist, not so much.
I hate websites with light-coloured fonts on dark backgrounds - at least, ones which actually are meant to be read. So your suspicion is correct, Michael, at least until I get past appearances...
Sun, 2009-08-30 11:55
#75
Diogenes
I just finished working my way through an essay by Christopher Michael Langan, a bouncer who apparently has the highest IQ in the United States (between 195 and 210).
Since he is the smartest guy in the US, does this mean that somebody in some other country determined this? Who and where? And how does the smartest person in the world determine who he or she is? Do they get the second smartest to agree, or receive an endorsement from a universe that is obviously smarter than us?
Just wondering.
Mon, 2009-11-23 19:17
#76
Speaking of "smartest guys", Roger Pearson's Voltaire Almighty: a life in pursuit of freedom, is worth reading if only as an example of what the "freethinker" can accomplish in a society like that of France in the early middle 18th century. This is one VERY enjoyable look at the fellow who brought "the Enlightenment" to France (from England) in 1733, and one Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet. Emilie, who was the first woman "scientist" of France (she translated Newton's Principia into french, the common language of Europe at the time), lived with Voltaire in a country estate for more than a decade (visited occasionally by her husband) , studying and writing with Voltaire, her lover.
The book introduces us to the leading thinkers in arts, science and theology at the time. And reads almost like a novel, "with chapters promising sensational changes of fortune...or salacious tattle. " (Observer)
Mon, 2009-11-23 19:40
#77
Catchfire
This is one VERY enjoyable look at the fellow who brought "the Enlightenment" to France (from England) in 1733...
Of course, everyone knows that England caught the Enlightenment from the Scots...
Mon, 2009-11-23 20:22
#78
Yeah, yeah. "How the Scots Invented the Moden World" etc. But the Scot materialists like Hume were only "developing" when Voltaire visited England in the middle 1720s. There were the poets like Pope, and there was the science of Newton (not a Scot). Empiricism to replace Descartes and his fuzzy ideas in France (and it was one helluva struggle). There was Locke, in England. And not a helluva lot else.
Tue, 2009-11-24 08:15
#79
Armaggedon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut. A posthumous collection of pieces on war and peace by a man who lived through the Dresden bombing.
Sat, 2009-12-12 22:59
#80
I finished the Twilight books.
Entertaining, though the ending was a bit rushed. It's a nice love story and I think the people who decry the book as anti-feminist should read it more carefully. Bella changes a lot as a character.
Sun, 2009-12-13 09:29
#81
Charles Stross, "Halting State", Penguin (Berkley) 2007.
Needed something for the bus ride home so I grabbed it off the remainders table at Chapters, based on my usual random technique of opening books to a middle page and I buy the first one where I can make it through two or three paragraphs without getting put off. It works very well for me, though it takes longer than you might think sometimes. I usually end up with non-fiction -- too much fake-sounding dialogue in most novels for my taste -- but this one is sci-fi.
A Scottish detective in 2018, post-independence, is called to a dot-com's offices in a former nuclear bunker, where a live-action internet role play game's virtual vault has been robbed. The characters are recognizable to me based on friends who have done gaming. The mundane technology of the day is super-cool, and that's a big part of the appeal. There are strong female characters, albeit androcentrically so and with some really bad ideology around relationships. But there are also some cool technical ideas from insurance and medicine -- turns out (from the flyleaf) the author is an accountant and pharmacist, as well as an established writer.
It's a quick read, fun, some enduring cautionary IT security ideas, and will be a perfect present for a friend who is a brilliant programmer (he hacked Microsoft) and inveterate gamer now working in the insurance industry. I will be interested to hear his take on it.
Sun, 2009-12-13 19:16
#82
N.Beltov
Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano.
Sun, 2009-12-13 22:53
#83
Charles Stross, "Halting State", Penguin (Berkley) 2007.
Needed something for the bus ride home so I grabbed it off the remainders table at Chapters,
CAIA (Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid) launched the campaign to boycott Indigo Books and Music Inc. in December 2006 with the demand that its controlling owners, Heather Reisman and Gerry Shwartz, publicly cut all financial ties Heseg - Foundation for Lone Soldiers. Since then the campaign has grown in Toronto and across Canada with Chapters and Indigo stores being boycotted in most major cities.
HESEG - which was founded by Ms. Reisman and Mr. Schwartz - provides scholarships and other support to former "lone soldiers" in the Israeli military - individuals from outside Israel with no family in the country who join the Israeli military and participate in all aspects of its repression of Palestinians. In January 2009 HESEG Representatives handed out $160,000 worth of "thank you" gifts to Israeli soldiers participating in the attacks on Gaza.
Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid
What can I do to support CAIA's boycott of Indigo Books and Music Inc?
Mon, 2009-12-21 11:24
#84
The Hemingses of Monticello, by Annette Gordon Reed.
Fri, 2010-01-01 11:55
#85
Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean. I just have to see what whe does with this period in the life of Aristotle - from the eyes of the philosopher in the first person. She has certainly done her homework about life at the time. So far so good, anyway.
Fri, 2010-01-01 12:09
#86
Refuge
Just finished The Blindside Book. Much better than the movie, more gritty and truthful. If you are not a football fan (which I am not) there were a few chapters that leave you more confused than entertained but the rest of the book quickly makes up for it.
Sat, 2010-01-09 22:18
#87
Yann Martel hss written What is the Prime Minister Reading, a collection of the letter essays he has mailed along with a book every two weeks since April 2007. A pice from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix says:
"The choices Martel has mailed range from To Kill a Mockingbird to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The latter includes one of Martel's most pointed letters, written in reaction to a potential cut to small literary journals and an increase in funding for business degrees.
"But you're an honourable man and you must know what you're doing," Martel writes and repeats, using the same sarcastic words that Antony uses in the play to turn the crowd against Brutus."
The library must have a copy of this one.
It did, and the true title is What is Stephen Harper Reading? And Martel explains his project is validated by the fact that "once a citizen is elected to public office, then their finances do become our business, and politicians routinely have to account for their financial dealings. It's the same with their imaginative dealings. Once someone has power over me, I have the right to probe the nature and quality of their imagination, because their dreams may become my nightmares....'
"An up-to-date public record : www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca and www.quelitstephenharper.ca
Wed, 2010-02-10 13:43
#88
Just finished up Spook Country by William Gibson. I did that in a single sitting - freakin' amazing. I cannot say how good that book was and recommend it to everyone and anyone.
Right now, though, I am reading The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Less exciting.
Wed, 2010-02-10 14:41
#89
So many good books to read. Thanks everyone.
I read The Bonfire of the Vanities along time ago. I think I enjoyed it.
Currently I am hooked on White Oleander by Janet Fitch.
Mon, 2010-02-15 20:21
#90
People who enjoyed Ronald Wright's What is America are going to see his sketches of life in the wesgtern hemisphere fleshed out by a guy who really goes into anthropological detail : Charles C.Mann's 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Sumer was so nouveau by comparison with the not so new world.
Mon, 2010-02-15 20:32
#91
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London
Mon, 2010-02-15 20:42
#92
I'm wondering if I read that one. A down and out friend recommended it to me when we were both down and out.
If I had more time, I would be reading Law for the Elephant, Law for the Beaver: Essays in the Legal History of the North American West
Mon, 2010-02-15 22:45
#93
Hmm if you had jas, I think you would remember. Hearing what George had to say about his fellow down and outer 'george' chills my bones
Wed, 2010-02-24 19:45
#94
Be good to hear what you think of Jacoby's Age of American Unreason in light of Bageant's take on the unread in Deer Hunting, aQ.
Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools (sequel to his Three Cups of Tea) is a good update on events within Afghanistan in the last 30 years, and the kids for whom he is making education a reality are so anxious to be educated...I'm reminded of my partner's Grade 2 classroom in a "United Nations"-like Mississauga. And Mortenson began building them way out in the mountainous extremities of northeast Afghanistan between the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Range where the old Mujahadeen can still defy the excresence of Taliban suppression of girls and women. The agency that Mortenson is using to marshall funding and co-ordinate construction in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan has one requirement...that spaces for girls in the schools become equal to the number for boys. It is an eye-opener of a book, and as culturally revealing in some ways as Rory Stewart's The Places in Between.
Wed, 2010-02-24 20:07
#95
remind
The Prince
Wed, 2010-02-24 20:11
#96
I'm going through a bit of a Harry Turtledove period. I can shut my brain off and just have fun.
Wed, 2010-02-24 20:23
#97
I'm reading Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo is the guy who ran the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. God, this is depressing stuff. Between the book, my sinus infection, and working in Downtown Vancouver during the @#%$! Olympics, I'm starting to feel kind of miserable. The website for the book is here: http://www.lucifereffect.com/
Wed, 2010-02-24 23:37
#98
Be good to hear what you think of Jacoby's Age of American Unreason in light of Bageant's take on the unread in Deer Hunting, aQ.
Something Jacoby says in her introduction got me thinking about the great...read(?) of babble. She notes how there are now two camps that are poles apart and which refuse to listen to each other. According to Jacoby, this was not the case 40 years ago, when left and right-wingers would still despise each others' ideas, yet go to lectures in which they'd listen to someone in the opposite camp express these ideas.
babble has become something like the former; any newcomer suspected of harbouring rightist views is usually denounced on sight and summarily banned, which is unfortunate for a place that purports to be a forum for discussion. I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have tails or horns, and that they might occasionally have something worthwhile to say, and maybe even help us sort out our own positions better.
Thu, 2010-02-25 02:01
#99
N.Beltov
Something Jacoby says in her introduction got me thinking about the great...read(?) of babble. She notes how there are now two camps that are poles apart and which refuse to listen to each other. According to Jacoby, this was not the case 40 years ago, when left and right-wingers would still despise each others' ideas, yet go to lectures in which they'd listen to someone in the opposite camp express these ideas.
If this is true, I wonder if this isn't a reflection of the change brought about by the right wing offensive since the times of Thatcher and Reagan, "wedge" strategies, the increased influence of religious fundamentalism in right wing politics (when, at one time, there was much more "avoidance" of politics by the religious right), neo-conservatism, dominionists, and so on. These ideological changes could even be said to reflect the abandonment of the post WW2 "consensus" of Keynsianism/Keynes & neo-classical synthesis in economic policy after the stagflation and other crises beginning in the early 1970's.
There has, after all, been an unrelenting class war since the Thatcher/Reagan era. I think you must be aware of that. During this time, a huge transfer of wealth has taken place ... so much so that even orthodox sociologists admit that the rich are getting richer and the living standards of the rest of us are declining. This class war has its consequences in politics and political culture, I think.
babble has become something like the former; any newcomer suspected of harbouring rightist views is usually denounced on sight and summarily banned, which is unfortunate for a place that purports to be a forum for discussion. I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have tails or horns, and that they might occasionally have something worthwhile to say, and maybe even help us sort out our own positions better.
You may have a good point but it is also true that babble has a steady stream of trolls and what have you. And I don't think that making conservatives welcome, - especially if they're the new conservatives in this class war mould I've described - for the occasional worthwhile and important thing they have to say, should trump making babble's left of centre audience welcome.
Thu, 2010-02-25 08:17
#100
Be good to hear what you think of Jacoby's Age of American Unreason in light of Bageant's take on the unread in Deer Hunting, aQ.
Something Jacoby says in her introduction got me thinking about the great...read(?) of babble. She notes how there are now two camps that are poles apart and which refuse to listen to each other. According to Jacoby, this was not the case 40 years ago, when left and right-wingers would still despise each others' ideas, yet go to lectures in which they'd listen to someone in the opposite camp express these ideas.
babble has become something like the former; any newcomer suspected of harbouring rightist views is usually denounced on sight and summarily banned, which is unfortunate for a place that purports to be a forum for discussion. I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have tails or horns, and that they might occasionally have something worthwhile to say, and maybe even help us sort out our own positions better.
You make an important point, aQ, but we need to define the line between acceptable and unacceptable, hereabouts, as NB makes clear...i.e. a Gallowglass would just be a pain in the ass. Anyone who comes on as anti-intellectual/anti-science, would be difficult to correspond with.
Perhaps we could take discussion on this to an independent thread elsewhere? Both Jacoby and NB point to an ideological line drawn some four decades back, and NB points to a specific period. I would futher refine the line drawn to the appearance of the Chicago School and its political outcome (Naomi Klein underlines that in its violent international aspects, Robert Reich in Supercapitalism describes the gradual effect on class structure in the U.S.... which resulted in the world that Jacoby described in terms of intellectual interest.)
If someone enters babble country with an obviously open interest in our assumptions here - and can challenge them showing supporting published works - by all means, we should "throw wide the doors". It would greatly help if ALL were ready to roll up their sleeves in working at the challenges to a reasonable future facing our progeny...while also finding relief from that work in the world of the mind, here in this thread.
Fri, 2010-02-26 10:29
#101
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London
I've been suspicious of restaurant food ever since reading that one.
I just finished Paul Maher's Empty Phantoms: interviews and encounters with Jack Kerouac, and have started Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.
Some other books I've read in the last few months include:
Tariq Ali's
- Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali
- Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree
- The Book of Saladin
Joe Bageant Deer Hunting With Jesus
Larry Tye The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations .
Barbara Tuchmannn A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Naomi Klein No Logo
Hans von Luck Panzer Commander