OS Book Club Pt II

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Got like 5 chapters into Huck Finn, which is nothing there's over 40, and just wasn't feeling it. Dunno if it was the vernacular, the premise, just didn't do much for me. I need to be hooked in the beginning. Back on the list it goes.

Needed something else, so I read Night by Elie Wiesel. It relates to one of my favorite random quotes, a Jew writing on the wall of a concentration camp, "If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness." Just such a powerful statement.

So obviously Night is about Wiesel's time surviving in the Holocaust. The way it made him react toward the idea of mercy, and the way he explains how systematically hope was destroyed by the Nazis is intense. The wild thing was how long it took. I guess as people we think relatively, this situation being better than that situation, but I can't imagine the level of hopelessness you'd get to being forced to walk until it starts to become a positive that you're approaching the place that you're supposed to die. It is a different level of awareness of the inhumanity of the time when you hear it from the victim. It actually makes me want to see if there's a first person or even remotely autobiographical account of the Trail of Tears.

Spoiler

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself. Never."

"And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased with Noah's generation, You brought the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom you have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!"

" The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. His son searched him, took the crust of bread, and began to devour it. He didn't get far. Two men had been watching him. They jumped him. Others joined in. When they withdrew, there were two dead bodies next to me, the father and the son. I was sixteen." Son kills his father for bread, gets killed for same bread, wild

I want to read the other two parts of the trilogy, they're both short. They're fictional continuations of the effects of the Holocaust on survivors, so that should be interesting. I'll be interested to see what led him back to his faith after it being decimated so thoroughly. For now though, onto Colson Whitehead and the Underground Railroad.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I am about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which is the same length as most novels. Most of this progress has come over the span of the past two nights. It has been awhile since I've wanted to keep reading like an addict, but have forced myself to go to sleep so I wouldn't pay for it the next day. Despite the burnout I started to experience during Goblet of Fire Rowling has brought me fully back into the world of Harry Potter.

For me, as I'm re-reading through the series, there is a cloud that hangs over this book unlike the others (I have not read Year 7 before) and its name is Umbridge. There is no other character I so thoroughly despise than this witch. I have to commend Rowling for creating such a deplorable character to create such anxiety BEFORE starting my re-read this weekend.

Despite my hatred of her actual character Umbridge serves a pivotal role in the series. Prisoner of Azkaban is when the series starts to mature and gives the series a much more serious overtone compared to Years 1 and 2. Coming off the heals of Goblet of Fire's climax Order of the Phoenix takes a similar step-up in maturity as Rowling introduces a handful of complex themes through Umbridge such as civil disobedience, corrupt authority, roles of government, and character assassinations.

Developing these themes allows Rowling more room to expand the drama. The omniscient threat of Voldemort is still there and builds throughout the book through these themes. The drama feels more compelling and tangible as a result.

As much as I absolutely despise Umbridge I love what Rowling did through her (and does to her eventually).

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Lol such vitriol for Umbridge. I remember everyone hating her, but again I was young when I read those so I don't know if our reasons were justified or if she was just the literary equivalent of everyone's worst nightmare teacher. They seem to have been justified lol.

I finished Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It was very good, although any fiction book about slavery has to compete with Beloved which is impossible. Still, he weaves the story in a way that despite switching perspectives, the plot stays clear. The Underground Railroad in this is also a legit kinda cross country subway system, which is cool but doesn't really have a huge impact from if it were just a trail with safe houses and whatnot. The antagonist kinda reminded me of The Judge from Blood Meridian but just ideologically. The way he accepted the terms of the world he lived in and carved out his role for himself, he didn't care for whether it was good or bad, just whatever it took to survive. The plot was captivating, lots of twists and turns.

Spoiler

"Here was the Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor - if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave, or continent. The American imperative."

"In the light of morning she convinced herself that her scheming had been a dream. Those were not her thoughts, not at all. Because to walk around with that in your mind and do nothing was to die."

"The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it."

"All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man."

"We can't save everyone. But that doesn't mean we can't try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothings going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers."

Shout out to Oprah, it was one of her book club picks last year. The current one is Behold the Dreamers so I will be adding that one to the list as well.

Moving on to another off the Great American Novel list, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I was going to do a GAN for my 50th book of the year (after Invisible Man), between Moby Dick, Grapes of Wrath, and To Kill A Mockingbird. Not looking forward to 600+ pages about a whale so Moby was out. I read TKAM in high school, and considered it for a long time to be my favorite book, but wanted something new. So it ended up being Grapes...except that I've seen people gushing over East of Eden seemingly every day for the last few weeks, so I'm doing that instead. Still Steinbeck. After that, I'm taking a hard pivot into some sports stuff. Boys of Summer, Ball Four, there's so much sports stuff I haven't even touched yet.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Lol such vitriol for Umbridge. I remember everyone hating her, but again I was young when I read those so I don't know if our reasons were justified or if she was just the literary equivalent of everyone's worst nightmare teacher. They seem to have been justified lol.

Its been 10 years since I've read these books so I was wondering if my anxiety towards Umbridge was entirely justified or if, like you said, she was just a nightmare of a teacher. Before reading I honestly didn't have any specific memories of her save her fitting demise, but there was anxiety knowing she was there.

Suffice to say its justified, BUT partly because she is the personification of the Ministry of Magic. All of the decrees and governmental functions throughout the book involve her. While she's an acting agent of the state she is still the face and a more immediate character than Minister Fudge. Her glee in subjugating Hogwarts and its students (particularly her detention tactics) is what sticks with me the most and builds animosity quickly.

What I really find interesting as I'm thinking about this is Rowling keeps the focus of this animosity on Umbridge (and to a lesser extent Percy Weasley and Fudge) and not on the Ministry itself. I think its an important distinction to notice and raises an interesting topic about government corruption. After all we have members of the Order whom are employed by the Ministry, too.

Rather than hating the government Rowling focuses on specific government representatives and their abuses of power.

Some powerful themes for a "children's" series, but typical of the best children's novels.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The thing I remember about her is the pen that made your hand bleed and her making Harry write the same thing over and over again. That, as a little kid, was like a horror movie plot lol.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

That chapter is immediately where you worst thoughts about her come true. Sadistic.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished up The Order of the Phoenix last night as I sped through the last 250 pages.

I won't go into too much length on it since I've already done two posts about the book as I was reading it last week, but I will say it has become my favorite of the series thus far.

I'm going to the beach next week so I don't want to dive into anything lengthy before then. I'm taking Galapos with me as well as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. I'll spend this week hopefully finishing up The Destruction of Black Civilization and might spend a night reading Matilda since some of its themes closely align with Harry Potter.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Took me long enough with stuff going on but I finally finished Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, one of the books on my Great American Novel list and my new favorite book ever, unseating Souls of Black Folks by Du Bois.

I just loved it. I could write a paper on it. Very profound book, especially in these times. It's all about identity and answering the question of who you really are, the person other people see when they look at you or the person you see when you look in the mirror. It's about the importance of maintaining self and what that means. A pretty clear rebuke of the things that the communist parties at the time were trying to pull off, but still appropriate for today.

Spoiler

"Irresponsibility is part of my invisivility; anyway you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

"Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self assuring, self starting and self spotting, self warming and self justifying. When you have it, you know it."

One of my favorites "Play the game, but don't believe in it - that much you owe yourself."

"Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically. Why, goddammit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the *** struggle, debasing both us and them - all human motives?"

"If I couldn't help them to see the reality of our lives I would help them to ignore it until it exploded in their faces."

The one that stuck out most to me, from the epilogue:

"No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. I've come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under that assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health."

So yeah, like I said, the GOAT. Next is East of Eden by Steinbeck. I got caught up in work stuff last week and there's no way I can get heavy into sports stuff like I wanted. After Eden I wanna get into Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Welp, I managed to get 2/3 of my planned reading done. The beach proved to be not such a suitable setting to try and get into Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as I read the first part of the Overview and set it down for the remainder of the week.

I ran through Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, however. While the structure of the book differed from what I had imagined as it presents itself as more of historical fiction in the style of a memoir/history text the literature itself was great. The sarcastic outlook on life was right up my alley. All the little quips about modern life and technology were fantastic and on the nose in many ways. An interesting book to read on the shores.

I also sped through Roald Dahl's Matilda. It has been a long time since I read the book and just as long since I've seen the movie. It's a fabulous read and in many ways reminds me of Harry Potter. A children's story, sure, but it hits on some complex themes that flew over my head as a child. Dahl has a way to wring out the humor in even the most dire of situations.

My goal for the week is to finally finish up The Destruction of Black Civilization and then move onto Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. I'm not sure what's next on the fiction front other than re-reading Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I think I'm going to really try to stick to alternating fiction and nonfiction. It's the closest I can get to planning ahead, so many more things pop up that I want to read and get in the way.

Pynchon is on my radar for Gravitys Rainbow, it's on the GAN list. Inherent Vice is an appealing read to me in that it was written by a high rate author and that it has a movie adaptation by a high rate director. Might be fun to go in there and see how it holds up between the mediums.

On a random note I was watching A Time to Kill for the 814,000th time this weekend and googled the best legal movies, and was surprised to find out there's an old movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird that's really highly acclaimed. So whenever I get back to reading that, I'll want to watch that.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Alternating seems like the best plan for me, too. I tried reading Destruction concurrently with Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter, but I'm finding that once I get hooked into a story then that takes precedence over anything else I'm reading.

Its funny you mention Gravity's Rainbow, because for some reason that kept popping into my head while reading Galapagos even though I've never read it. Just the black comedy and sarcastic premise of Gravity's Rainbow seems totally in line with Vonnegut.

Inherent Vice is a great read. The movie is well-done, but like most movies loses a bit of its allure in the transfer of mediums. The visuals are fantastic and establish the themes superbly. The cast is wonderful. The book features more mysticism and paranoia and fleshes out the conspiracy much better, but it's a great movie nonetheless. Inherent Vice seems to split the Pynchon fanbase a bit based on the reviews, but I found it to be fantastic.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

So I'm getting through East of Eden. Finished part 2 of 5, almost halfway there. I can already see I should've followed up Invisible Man with something shorter than this but it's great so whatever. Steinbeck is getting added to the list. An incredible writer, probably speaks to the times but for as eloquent as he was, he really gets through just simple, human ideas.

Spoiler

"When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grace little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an event less time would seem indeterminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull event less times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."

"And I guess humility must be a good thing, since it's a rare man who has not a piece of it, but when you look at humbleness it's hard to see where it's value rests unless you grant that it is a pleasurable pain and very precious. Suffering - I wonder has it properly been looked at."

So yeah, on my way. The other thing I noticed is in OMAM we have Crooks, the Black servant who was treated like less than a man but showed himself to be arguably closest to true humanity. In this, we have Lee, who is a Chinese servant who speaks pidgin around those who expect him to but regularly around characters who he feels comfortable around. He's the wise one so far in this. Steinbeck was very aware of the world be lived in, and the different things that led to social separation.

I'm just getting into the direct biblical allusion part after the kids are named. It's funny because they mention there's only been one man named Cain (obviously from the Bible). I immediately started thinking if I knew anyone named Cain, and the only person I could think of was Cain Velasquez the MMA fighter. In a strange and almost definitely unrelated twist, he's from Salinas, where Steinbeck sets most of his books. Small world.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Steinbeck on East of Eden: "It has everything in it just have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years."

Man it shows. The whole book is the tale of a family (and their relations with another family) over 3 generations. The way he shows the family traits and relationships developing over the generations, the way the grandfather impacted the father, and the way that impact went down into the sons was incredible. The key moment and idea is based around the Cain and Abel story from the Bible, and translations of the original text. One translation gives an order to triumph over sin, another says that triumph over sin is destined, and the last, timshel (thou mayest), leaves it as an option. Sin can be triumphed over but it's not inherent and an active choice must be made.

So the whole book is the different family members deciding whether or not the way others perceive them or even the way they perceive themselves is the deciding factor in their future or if they can take the bull by the horns so to speak and will what they want into experience.

Small plot spoiler

Spoiler

At one point Lee (my second favorite character) is reading from a book he stole from Sam Hamilton (my favorite character). The book? Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, another book I read earlier this year and LOVED. It's currently sitting at 3 on my top 10 books list, seeing it mentioned in another book that I loved was just wild.

More quote greatness:

Spoiler

"There is more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar." Lee

" It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it."

"Humans are caught - in theirs lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and wood of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story."

"I guess this personal hide and seek is not unusual. And some people are it their whole lives - hopelessly it." Lee

"When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you're your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It's worse, but it's much better too." Abra

After shedding the expectations of someone who wanted perfection:" And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." Lee

Masterpiece. 50 up and 50 down. Going into Postman for nonfiction. For the next fiction I'm gonna flip a coin between Flowers for Algernon and The Hobbit. I just beat Shadow of Mordor last night so I'm kinda interested to get into Middle Earth suddenly.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Done with Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. A little over 200 pages, definitely nice to be able to get through something quickly and put it down. It's like if E Unibus Plurum, the essay on TV by David Foster Wallace, and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life had a baby (and he actually references Hofstadter and Anti-Intellectualism).

The theme was how different forms of media are inherently biased towards certain forms of discourse, or how the emergence of a new form of media can influence culture just as much as culture influences it. He compares 1984 and Brave New World, and says he believes more in the Huxleyan vision than the Orwellian. Some of the points he made were interesting, about how different forms of media favor different qualities in communication. Like how in a print based society, you only have that one chance to get your point across, and have your word on paper so it can be easily checked. This made people more prepared to receive information in large doses. He mentions the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that they each went on for 3 hours straight for the audience, at one point getting so late that Lincoln told them to go home and come back in the morning because he didn't want to keep them up. And they did. He talks about how TV favors small, bite-sized, attention-grabbing images and shifts focus to the appearance of the person conveying information and away from the information itself.

Spoiler

"Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented."

"As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there is very little of it to use."

"Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz show of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful Trivial Pursuit." (the reality of this hit me and cracked me up as someone who loves Jeopardy, the amount of random information people know is amazing)

"Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore - and this is the critical point - how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged."

"The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products."

"There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque."

"But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"

Another good one. The Hobbit won the coin toss so into Middle Earth I go. Next non-fiction will be Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier, about game development. I need to know what happened to 1313. Never forget. Then Flowers for Algernon. By then, Hillary's book should be out.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Hobbit

Spoiler

Got through The Hobbit. I liked it a lot. I wish I would've read it as a kid because obviously the sense of wonder would be greater but it's interesting seeing it as an adult. As far as children's books go, it's pretty much perfect. The writing is descriptive without being too verbose, the way the narrator is kind of a character in his own way making it seem like someone is telling you a story, the fact that the protagonist is small so kids could get behind it. There's a lot of dope stuff here, you almost can't help but "sing" the songs/poems in your head while reading. Even after Bilbo has returned a hero, Gandalf basically tells him "the things that happened weren't chance to make you great, you just rose to the occasion when needed", good for kids to hear. He really paints the world and lore of the universe too, the way the narrator refers to events in the past. I laughed when Bilbo says "escaping goblins to be caught by wolves" and that that turned into "out of the frying pan into the fire" as a proverb. The world just feels full and already existing in a way that makes the story easier to follow.

On to Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Just came out last week, now I've got 2 more new releases in the next month to look forward to.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Spoiler

All about game development, follows the process of 10 different games being made (or scrapped in one case). Covers a wide range of games from the one man army Eric Barone in making Stardew Valley all the way to Activision acquiring Bungie and all the crap that led to in the development of Destiny. The best 2 chapters for me followed The Witcher 3 and Star Wars 1313.

The Witcher because those guys have the reputation of being like the Chance the Rapper of game development (or is Chance the CDPR of rap?) and they live up to it. Started off in a country where games were being pirated, came up by publishing foreign games, localizing them and adding in enough bonus incentive to convince people to spend money instead of pirating. All the way through basically making no concessions in The Witcher 3. Just awesome to read, gotta support these guys. I was thinking about trying the Witcher again anyway but this basically seals it.

1313 is just sad. Should've been great, Star Wars fans were too hyped. It just got dragged around. The movie guys telling the game guys they needed to add in certain characters, then changing the main character completely, then the sale of LucasArts basically buried them. Just unfortunate.

The other thing I found interesting was the focus on crunch, basically hellish work weeks toward the end of development to get everything as close to finished as possible. I follow other software development so it shouldn't surprise me that games work the same way, but man it just sounds brutal. The fact that a lot of it is driven by passion should probably make it better but I'm not sure it does. Just a feature of the field I guess.

On to Flowers for Algernon and then What Happened.

Flowers for Algernon

Spoiler

So just reading this synopsis of this I knew it would be impactful for me, but man I had no idea. There's so much to say I feel like there's nothing to say. If you havent read this, you should. It's the journey of a once mentally ******** man who is given vast intelligence via an experiment and has to come to grips with the world he didn't understand before. Heartbreaking some of the things he comes to discover, the way his relationship with his old teacher plays out. The way he sees his future in Algernon and the way they bond because of it. Amazing book.

Spoiler

"Prof Nemur said but why did you want to learn to reed and spell in the first place. I tolld him because all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnian's class at the school I forget a lot."

"Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be."

"People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem - they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples."

"I am learning to control my resentment, not to be impatient, to wait for things. I guess I'm growing up."

"How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes - how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence."

"Only a short time ago I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all."

Again, great book. I just beat AC Syndicate, met with Darwin, Marx, and Dickens, will look to add something from each of them to the list. For now, Hillary.