OS Book Club Pt II

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I always think holiday weekends are going to give me an abundance of free time to really dive into things, but the reality is that I have even less free time than a typical two-day weekend.

Suffice to say I went a week without reading thanks to Memorial Day stuff and being sick.

I dived back into The Destruction of Black Civilization. I have to say I thought this would be a dry read, but so far it is very engaging and keeps flowing well. I've read the Overview and am getting ready to start on Egypt as Williams begins to draw the curtain back and dive into the details and analysis. Its fascinating reading how a whole continent of people lived both before invasion and during not to mention just re-adjusting my basis of world history and re-aligning that with actual human history.

I won't get into the Euro-centric history curriculum that is found in every school in America and how washed that curriculum is in favor of European ancestry. That becomes increasingly obvious as one reads about world history outside of Europe and Asia. What strikes me the most profoundly while reading is the Critical Thinking that the book subtly implores from the reader. By connecting a rough time-line to Arab and European invasion/conquerors you suddenly realize how old the human race actually is and how it has ebbed and flowed throughout time. It asks the reader to question motivations for various actions and provides points for discussion to really think and learn - not just repetition and regurgitation. The Critical Thinking notches up when you start reviewing what you've been taught and what's been hammered home since kindergarten. As a kid these other civilizations just kind of exist and pop up overnight and nobody thinks to ask "well, what were they doing BEFORE people wrecked their ****?" much less teach about it.

Anyway, I encourage anybody who is a self-proclaimed historian to grab this book and read it ASAP.

The past week or so I've been coming up with a make-shift "Summer Reading List" that will undoubtedly bleed into Fall and Winter reading, but for now is more of a goal than a hard-line to-do-list. I went through my bookshelf and pulled out a handful of titles - a nice mixture of books I've read and those that I haven't. I also ordered a handful from Amazon yesterday to supplement:

Spoiler

Summer Reading List

Matilda - Roald Dahl*
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut*
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life - Richard Hofstadter*
Rights of Man - Thomas Paine*
On the Social Contract - Jean Jacques Rousseau*
Lord of the Rings (Fellowship of the Ring) - JRR Tolkien
Lies My Teacher Told Me - James Loewen
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
William Shakespeare's Star Wars Trilogy - Ian Doescher
Maplecroft - Cherie Priest
The Fire Next Time/Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin
The Destruction of Black Civilization - Chancellor Williams
Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling
The Godfather - Mario Puzo

*Amazon order

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm like 40 pages in Lovecraft Country. I'm in a rut. I haven't gotten downhill yet, I figure it'll happen when it gets wackier. Just can't get through the Jim Crow ****. I like this quote:

"The most hateful rarely bothered to conceal their hostility, and when for some reason they did try to hide their feelings, they generally exhibited all the guile of five-year olds, who cannot imagine that the world sees them other than as they wish to be seen."

Gonna keep going but I needed a companion book, I don't know what it says that the book I chose as the pick me up is Superintelligence Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. I'm about at the point where I'm ready to declare my summer reading a "No Human" zone and only read about machines. I'm about sick of us for the time being lol.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

There is definitely some buildup especially with the Jim Crow encounters the first 50 or 60 pages. Things really get started once the main characters are on their journey (about 60 pages in) and really gets going after 100 pages or so.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Went on /r/books, found a thread for books people wished they had been given after their college graduation, ended up reading an essay by David Foster Wallace called This is Water. Reddit loves him, Infinite Jest is already on my list, but I got the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The idea of reading a damn near 1000 page book about depression (Infinite Jest) doesn't get me going so I'm gonna work through the essays while I read other stuff and see if there's anything worthwhile in it. I've read bits and pieces of his essay on TV and it's role in fiction before so I'll get to finish that.

I love love love This is Water, really puts into words how easy it is to get caught up in the nothingness most people experience on a day to day basis and how hard it can get to understand what's important. It never ceases to amaze how absorbed in trivialities people can be while ignoring the things right in front of them. Seems like my reading will mostly end up split between how terrible people are and the hope that the machines will save us from ourselves lol. I also want to check out The Brief Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

So gonna try to finish Lovecraft this weekend, at least this month I want to get through that, Things Fall Apart, Founding Brothers, The Alchemist (a teacher relative recommended it), Superintelligence, Wallace's essays, and Ashlee Vance's biography on Elon Musk. Also Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. If we're even remotely close to the point where we can download data directly into the human brain I'd let to be the test subject because it seems like I see 5 more books I want to read everyday and I'll never have time to get to all of them.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Let me know how you like The Alchemist. That keeps popping up randomly for me.

I went to Facebook and asked for suggestions. I got a handful aviator/fighter pilot memoirs/bios from several different people. I thought that was a little odd, but they all sound really interesting so I added them to my wish list.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Random and irrelevant but there was an article in my local paper today about the Negro Motorist Green Book, which I had not known to be a reality lol. It's like the editor of the paper had a dream that I was reading Lovecraft and threw some real life in there for me. I'm gonna throw Shoe Dog in for this month as well, I keep seeing it brought up as an excellent memoir. I really wish Thurgood Marshall had written one, I can only imagine hearing his story in his own voice.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Ha. I have that on my wishlist, too. Just to keep as a reference or a relic from a by-gone era.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Keep getting pulled away from Lovecraft, I've been swamped. Halfway done, it'll get finished by the end of the week.

I did end up reading the first 2 essays from "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", the first of which was pretty good and about his love for tennis but the second, E Unibas Pluram, which was about the way that irony in television is damaging to the culture of American fiction and life in general. I loved it, hit home in a way I didn't expect it to. Here's a passage:

"For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about "seeing through" the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependant on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters unending put downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social interiors and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving one self open to others ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotions, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete. The well trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier."

This is one of those times you look at a book and see your own thoughts on the page. As the generation gap is there, I think of it more in terms of the Internet. The idea that now, as people are more connected than ever, we seek acceptance rather than understanding. Also, as current events unfold, I worry that the Internet will become like TV anyway but that's beside the point...mostly. Regardless, the idea that TV shows us who we think we want to be, which then causes us to act more like people on TV is thought provoking for me. It's always been funny to me that the Internet exists for most people to show off exactly how much they're like everyone else, but I really am curious the repercussions of Twitter and Instagram on the generations that grow up in their ubiquity. At what point does the callousness and disrespect people show each other online start to seep further into everyday life? How do you break the loop? If people go to TV (or the Internet) to see who they want to be, and then get all their feedback from the Internet, where do we end up?

"Indifference is just the 90s version of frugality for US young people: wooed several hours a day for nothing but our attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it."

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished Lovecraft Country late last night. It was good. I like the way it bounces between stories and characters, my favorite being Hippolyta visiting Ida on the other planet. Going through it I felt a lot of different feels:

Spoiler

I said in the beginning that the Jim Crow stuff was hard to get through, and in the middle I felt kinda the same way about some of the more fanciful occurrences (Haunted House stuff), but by the end it all felt like it made sense. I have a harder time in general getting through fiction for a number of reasons but 2 of them jumped out to me while reading this. The first being that I have a difficult time picturing things that aren't real, programming has killed my imagination lol. So there were times when an inanimate object would act on its own and it just takes me a second to see it. The second being something that occurred to me while reading Go Tell It On The Mountain, which is how you kinda lose the escapism factor and get a different feeling of the book when the main character and their struggles are related to your own. Even so, like I said, I enjoyed it.

"It never fails," Montrose said. "No matter what they do to you, afterwards it's like nothing happened. You're supposed to just be grateful you're still breathing."

"But there was a difference between having people talk about you or at you and having them talk to you, believing you were one of them and expecting you to think as they did."

"That's the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you're helpless to help him. Nothing worse than that. Nothing worse."

"What is it you're trying to scare me with? You think I don't know what country I live in? I know. We all do. We always have. You're the one who doesn't understand."

From an interview with the author, he was talking about how the book was originally a TV series pitch and he wanted to have a reason for the main characters to run into new monsters every week: "But the real reason he'd keep running into monsters was because he was Black, and when you're Black in America, there's always a monster. Sometimes it's Lovecraftian Elder Gods, sometimes it's the police, or the Klan, or the Registrar of Voters."

So yeah, good stuff. He recommended a bunch of books to read at the end. I'm ignoring anything about history, I've got enough of those on my plate lol. The ones I picked out were an essay by Pam Noles called Shame he said was about the troubles of being a sci-fi fan and Black, I figure that'll be interesting, if not relatable. The other was The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. He says it tells one of Lovecraft's most racist stories from the perspective of a Black person (that story being The Horror of Red Hook).

For now though, back to DFW and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Done with that as well. Wallace's writing is verbose, but once I got past that and got into my flow, it was a smooth read and surprisingly funny. He's so exact in his description of things that it almost made having to have a tab dedicated to dicationary.com worth it lol. Most of these essays are just him describing things, there's so much of his personality in them that it makes me sad to think how it all wound up. He had some things to say for sure.

Spoiler

From his trip to an Illinois State fair, he's from Illinois and went to college in Massachusetts:

He compared how people in rural areas who see more land than people are drawn to large gatherings of people whereas big city people want to get away from crowds: "The real spectacle that draws us here is Us. The proud displays and the paths between them and the special treat booths along the path are less important than the greater-than-sum We that trudge elbow to elbow, pushing strollers and engaging in sensuous trade, expending months of stored up attention. A neat inversion of the East Coast summer withdrawal. God only knows what the West Coast is like."

"There's an atmosphere in the room - not racist, but aggressively white. It's hard to describe. The atmosphere's the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It's not like if a Black person came in he'll be ill-treated; it's more like it would just never occur to a Black person to come in here."

On Michael Joyce, a tennis pro:

"We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities level athletics require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small."

"But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art - something so few of us get to be. It's allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure."

The star of the show (other than the TV essay) , the essay the book is named after, about a boat cruise:

"The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me, it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard."

"An ad that pretends to be art is - at absolute best - like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on u: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It caused despair."

"It's in port that I feel most implicated, guilty by perceived association. I've barely been out of the USA before and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port - even up here above it all on Deck 12, just watching - I'm newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I'm suddenly conscious of being white every time I'm around a lot of nonwhite people."

Another book of essays that I loved. Never imagined I'd like reading them so much. Back to back fiction up next with The Alchemist and then Things Fall Apart.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished The Alchemist, after being recommended it by a relative who's a teacher. It's well written, very optimistic (almost nauseatingly so for someone who leads more toward pessimism), and just a fun read. She said her students (high school) love it, and I can see that, the moral basically being find your path. It's almost as much of a self help positivity book as it is a novel, the themes aren't subtle, most of the wisdom to be found will be explicit, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Spoiler

"Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."

"Don't forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else." I agree with this, though find it odd because one of the themes of the book is the universal connectivity of life.

"What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing."

"But many times you'll walk the sands of the desert, thinking that maybe you could have left... That you could have trusted more in your love for Fatima. Because what kept you at the oasis was your own fear that you might never come back."

"If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you find was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing in your return."

"Trust in your heart, but never forget that you're in the desert." I'm a quote hoarder, and I love this because it reminds me of one of my favorite JFK quotes, "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." Just awesome.

So from dark fantasy, to depressing nonfictional essays, back to inspiring fiction, and now to historical fiction. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe on deck, I think after that I'm gonna get into Our Souls At Night by Kent Haruf, I've heard good things. Also, there's something special about love that is captured infinitely better on the page than on screen.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm in a rut or something similar to what you probably experienced with Lovecraft Country. I'm halfway through the current Harry Potter book and I just want to read something else. There are other books pulling me towards them, but I want to finish this before tackling any other novels.

Blah.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yeah I hate that feeling. I used to go through the same thing with games too, I hate starting something and then not finishing it. Helped me to listen to the audio book, made a huge difference. Those books are also just long after a point, could be worse: you could be 150 pages into Order. I try to keep most of my books to less than 400 pages because of it, don't want to get caught out in the middle of the ocean with no sight of land lol. I'm trying to figure out a way to plan Infinite Jest to get around that aversion, but I think when something has been dubbed an encyclopedic novel, that ship has probably sailed.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Hell I haven't turned on my PS4 since the end of March.
I'm enjoying reading Harry Potter and they're light reading despite the page number, but I just need a break to chill with some other characters for a bit.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I think I'm going to push through and try to finish the second half of the book by this weekend. There's just too much of everything else I want to read to let 300-350 pages stand in the way. I have my stack of Summer reading books on the buffet in the dining room so each evening it catches my eye and calls my name, but I keep telling myself "not yet, gotta finish this one first."

With that said...

Where is a good place to start with Stephen King? I have The Shining, but also have the first book of the Dark Tower series saved for later on Amazon.