What are You Reading?

[mike carey]

This is a little bit brilliant!

[Rod Hagen]

[Rod Hagen]

On 7/25/2022 at 9:09 AM, mike carey said:

This is a little bit brilliant!

I dislike the Handmaid's Tale so much I'm inclined to tell people I didn't read it.

[RealAvalon]

2 hours ago, Rod Hagen said:

My favourite kind of guy, a fucking intellectual 

[RealAvalon]

On 5/22/2022 at 2:03 PM, Charlie said:

Robert Morrison's The Regency Years, about the years in the early 19th century when the future King George IV was ruling as Regent in place of his insane father George III. He divides the book into topics, and one of the longest chapters is Ch. 3, "Sexual Pastimes, Pleasures and Perversities." There is a lot in it about homosexuality, including male brothels, in Merrie Olde England.

I took it out of the library, but only got about 30 pages in.  Other things going on.  Should I have persevered?  

[+ Charlie]

15 minutes ago, RealAvalon said:

I took it out of the library, but only got about 30 pages in.  Other things going on.  Should I have persevered?  

If you want to know about gay life in the Regency years, you should have started with Ch. 3 ("Sexual Pastimes, Pleasures and Perversities," sections VII, VIII and IX)).

[mike carey]

17 hours ago, Rod Hagen said:

I dislike the Handmaid's Tale so much I'm inclined to tell people I didn't read it.

I haven't read it, but I know enough about it to say I have no intention of doing so. Don't deny, tell people what you think about it (but except for in here, however no need to offer your opinion to readily!).

The only book I can remember that I found disturbing was The Time Machine but I suspect HMT might be another.

[Danny-Darko]

7 hours ago, mike carey said:

I haven't read it, but I know enough about it to say I have no intention of doing so. Don't deny, tell people what you think about it (but except for in here, however no need to offer your opinion to readily!).

The only book I can remember that I found disturbing was The Time Machine but I suspect HMT might be another.

All I can say is the book is far better than the TV show. And the sequel 'The Testaments' is even better than 'The Handmaid's Tale" as it explains a lot about what happened eventually after the story ends and also explains how that particular society came to be. It's a reminder that societies change and evolve, history in some instances repeats itself if lessons aren't learnt or if forgotten, and life isn't and hasn't always been pleasant for everybody everywhere.      

[BtmBearDad]

Finished my last three - Shuggie Bain, Say Nothing, and Good Behaviour - I would highly recommend all three! 👍🏻

My current trifecta comprises: 

• Killing Snows by Charles Egan. First in a trilogy of novels covering An Gorta Mór, (The Great Hunger, The Irish Famine, The Irish Holocaust - it’s called all three). What I find interesting about this trilogy is apparently it’s inspired by a couple of boxes of letters from the time found in a cottage in the West of Ireland. 

• Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves. It’s been called the best WWI autobiography. It starts with his Victorian youth, leading up to the War, what he experienced, saw, and how he returned to England a changed man. 

• When All Is Said by Anne Griffin. It was her debut novel, and was shortlisted for a number of awards. Tells the tale of 84 year old widower Maurice having a conversation with his son, in his head, recounting his life, revealing his secrets as he makes 5 toasts at a hotel bar over the course of one night. 

[Rod Hagen]

On 7/28/2022 at 3:34 AM, mike carey said:

The only book I can remember that I found disturbing was The Time Machine but I suspect HMT might be another.

Love Time Machine.  Didn't find HMT disturbing, just dumb.  And was forced to read it in so many courses in the '90s,.  That and Woman Warrior.

[Luv2play]

On 6/17/2022 at 3:14 PM, Lucky said:

It's not incompatible!

Thanks for clarifying that. I thought incompatible was going to be a hatchet job. 

[Luv2play]

I'm currently reading Rebellion in the Mohawk Valley by Gavin Watt (2002). Its a detailed account of the St. Leger expedition in 1777 which tried to put down the American Revolution in that part of upper New York State that was largely inhabited by Indians and intrepid settlers who had experienced the French Indian War two decades earlier.

Here in Eastern Canada where I live we are still dealing with the fallout of those conflicts as many Mohawks who aligned themselves with the British eventually migrated north to Canada to escape retribution from the victorious American rebels or Patriots, depending on your viewpoint.

[guy7777]

The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979).

A very interesting book that seems to reflect the current time we live in

[+ Charlie]

I realized while reading the Owen Wister biography that somehow I had never read anything by Jack London, so a few days ago I took Call of the Wild out of the library. I have just finished it, and I feel strangely exhilarated by the experience. I feel like howling.

[BtmBearDad]

4 hours ago, Charlie said:

somehow I had never read anything by

Same with me, Charlie. I actually had a conversation some years back about thinking I must have read something by “____” or that I had read certain classics. So the friend I had the conversation with, who also confessed she was in the same boat, decided we’d both tackle one of the “best books of all time” lists. We’re slowly making our way thru it! 📖 📚 

[+ poolboy48220]

I'm putting together my vacation stack of books.  I saw a new book in the library, a novel based on the Buckaroo Banzai movie, author "The Reno Kid".  "Buckaroo Banzai against the World Crime League, and others : a compendium of evils".  I hope I have time to get to it, it's a big stack of books.

[+ Just Sayin]

A friend recommended Colm Toibin's "The Master" about Henry James and I read it while in Italy a couple of months ago, so that was fun; I am 2/3 through his "The Magician" about Thomas Mann and greatly enjoying it; Toibin, who is gay, has a way of expressing each author's interior head space (both James and Mann were attracted to men); here's a link to an article about him and his technique in the September 21, 2021, issue of The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-colm-toibin-burrowed-inside-thomas-manns-head

 

Edited July 31, 2022 by Just Sayin

[+ Charlie]

Interesting that in the front row, The Handmaid's Tale is the only one that is not a true "classic." (It's also the only one I have never read.)

[+ WilliamM]

Appointment in Samarra   by John O'Hara is a true classic

[+ WilliamM]

The Pope At War: The Secret History Of Pope Pius XIi, Mussolini, and Hitler is a must read, especially for Catholics and Jews.

Pope Pius XI was a much kinker  man

[rn901]

Right now, a good mix of fiction and nonfiction. On my list for the next month or two are:

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey J Kaye
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military by Randy Shilts
The Married Man by Edmund White
Of America by Susan Sontag
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

[+ Charlie]

Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, is by Jennifer Raff, a Professor of Anthropology and Genetics. It's an attempt to analyze the evidence--genetic, anthropological and archaeological--for and against various theories about where the variety of peoples in the Americas that the first European explorers encountered, when they began arriving on the Atlantic shores in the 15th century, had come from. As soon as they realized that this wasn't Asia and these people weren't "Indians," they had to try to find some explanation for their existence. The Europeans arrived with the belief that everything worth knowing about history was in the Bible, yet it said nothing about these continents or people and their societies. The early beliefs, such as that  these were the "Lost Tribes of Israel," didn't pan out, and as modern sciences developed, what knowledge they provided led to many new theories that were advanced and discarded.

The scientific discoveries in geological sciences led most of us who were educated in the first two-thirds of the 20th century to be taught that the inhabitants of the Americans had crossed a land-bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and had traveled south once the glaciers that covered much of North America receded, However, the developments in genetic science during the last decades have led to questioning of many of the details that were originally proposed by anthropologists and archaeologists. Raff is a highly trained geneticist, who takes the reader through the process of extracting information from human remains, as well as the evidence from archaeology and anthropology that are coordinated with the genetic evidence, but many of the chapters may make your mind reel while trying to keep everything straight. The short story is that, yes, the basic theory of the crossing from Siberia is correct, but the timelines and the distribution of the peoples who came are much more complicated than we were taught in high school.

I can't pretend to remember all of it, or even understand some of the conclusions, but I found the journey fascinating.

[Danny-Darko]

No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs.

by Nury Turkel

A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel that lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million Uyghurs, placing them in what it calls “reeducation camps,” facilities most of the world identifies as concentration camps. There, the genocide and enslavement of the Uyghur people are ongoing. The tactics employed are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, but the results are far more insidious because of the technology used, most of it stolen from Silicon Valley. In the words of Turkel, “Communist China has created an open prison-like environment through the most intrusive surveillance state that the world has ever known while committing genocide and enslaving the Uyghurs on the world’s watch.”

 As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis. Born in 1970 in a reeducation camp, he was lucky enough to survive and eventually make his way to the US, where he became the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree. Since then, he has worked as a prominent lawyer, activist, and spokesperson for his people and advocated strong policy responses from the liberal democracies to address atrocity crimes against his people. 

The Uyghur crisis is turning into the greatest human rights crisis of the twenty-first century, a systematic cleansing of an entire race of people in the millions. Part Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, No Escape shares Turkel’s personal story while drawing back the curtain on the historically unprecedented and increasing threat from China. 

[+ poolboy48220]

Finished my vacation camping reading:

• Cara Mori, the new book by Thomas Harris, author of Silence of the Lambs:  I wasn't impressed.  Not up to the level of his other works.
• Irontown Blues, John Varley: he's one of my favorite science fiction authors, this one's set in his "9 worlds" universe & refers to other characters from "Steel Beach" and "Golden Globe".  I loved this.  The protagonist has a genetically enhanced dog, every few chapters it's told from the dog's perspective.  I was ugly-happy crying at the end.
• I started but haven't finished "Where the Crawdads Sing" and I'm liking it so far.
• The Umbrella Academy graphic novels: good, but honestly I thought the Netflix series did a better job of fleshing out the characters.

I also splurged on an iPad before vacation and re-read the first Harry Potter book on it.  I liked the iPad more than I thought I would. 

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Currently, midway through Growing Up Getty by James Reginato.

Fascinating book about the dynamics of this level of family dynasty.