theLostWizard
🧙♂️
Relevant
What are you reading?
- Thread starter nodamagedone
- Start date
I went with The Road as my first McCarthy book. I enjoyed it, it was bleak, stress inducing and filled with anxiety and sadness. Will check out more of his work.
The description on the back cover should probably just be a giant content warning.
“…so if you’re prepared for all the aforementioned violence, hate, and brutality, then saddle up, we’ll throw in a dash or two of heartbreak to top it off..”
Blood Meridian, followed by The Crossing are my two favorite McCarthy novels. The first sojourn in The Crossing could stand alone as a harrowing, beautiful, picaresque novella. It is stunning in its depth and emotionality.
I recently read Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. It’s short enough to read in a single sitting (120ish pages) and it’s quite unusually written - there’s no dialogue and the main characters (always referred to as a pair) have no real interiority. The unnamed narrator is the only real character. It’s one of the most insightful books I’ve read about the way we live in the current moment. The impact of lives lived through screens, the encroachment of finance into every aspect of our lives and the resulting emptiness of our lives are what the book is exploring and it’s done beautifully. The writing is exquisite (translated from Italian btw) and the insights are quite profound. I really enjoyed it.
Just finished the first one as well. Downloaded the remaking six this morning.
I find myself listening to these books after work to decompress. Keep thinking if it would be worst to be in the dungeon or stuck working a corporate job for the next 10 plus years.
I’ll let you know what I decide as I keep reading the series.
Well that was fun, silly, and a quick read. I've gone ahead and placed a hold on book two.
Finally finished this after getting it up a few years ago and multiple attemps of trying and failing to get into it. About halfway through the book, the author writes that in order to combat extremism/white supremacy, one has to understand the origins and myths they tell themselves. However, the book fails to do that, always scratching the surface without actually going deeper, jumping chapter to chapter from incels to extremist youtubers to white-only dating sites without ever presenting a way to understand and combat each's existence. I picked this book up after reading Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home hoping it would be in the same vein but was left disappointing. Also, to no fault of the author, it feels extremely dated when talking about extremism and immigration during Trump 1.0, having been published before J6 and what feels like the subsequent exponential rise in open extremism.
BigFrank
Forbidden Chicharron
Just finished the Wright Brothers by David McCullough. I think everything I knew about them before could be summed up in a couple of sentences. So much more interesting facts to the story/ Rivals and colleagues...getting people to believe what they had done...commericializing the work. Worth reading.
Did it mention Katherine Wright?
Should probably be known as the Wright family, as opposed to brothers…
BigFrank
Forbidden Chicharron
It did! She was a huge influence on them, very supportive when they struggled. She seemed much more fun than these two guys.
Interesting that neither guy ever seemed to date and they lived with her for a long time as adults. She finally left the family home when she was in her 50’s. Orville was said to feel betrayed by her departure and wouldn’t have contact. Pretty weird to me.
I'm about a quarter of the way through this, and it's super interesting revisionist history for a cold war/nuclear weapon nerd. I like that the author pulls a lot from the contemporaneous diaries of Truman and Stimson (secretary of war) to get a understanding of their thinking.
The blurb, "President Truman’s choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if Truman’s actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was?
Eight decades after the bombing of Hiroshima, the conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or use the atom bomb in the hopes of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils.
But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened. Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used."
furley
Super Sports Nerd
yep. that was some book. 8.5/10.
Just about finished with this.
The book was published in 2019. The stories were recorded from about 2014-2017. These kids crossed multiple borders over multiple days, in dangerous conditions, and still live in fear of being deported.
It is awful to know these children fear for their lives and experienced so much trauma before turning 18. Given the current state of the country right now, I hope they are all still safe.
The book was published in 2019. The stories were recorded from about 2014-2017. These kids crossed multiple borders over multiple days, in dangerous conditions, and still live in fear of being deported.
It is awful to know these children fear for their lives and experienced so much trauma before turning 18. Given the current state of the country right now, I hope they are all still safe.