OS Book Club Pt II

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished The Bell Jar. It's a semi-autobiographical fiction novel by poet Sylvia Plath, kinda chronicles the main characters descent into madness. Another very interesting book. As someone who deals with depression, it is hard to read at times, the prose is fantastic but the detachment of the author from the main character despite the fact that the character is basically her is frightening to read, especially given the real end to Plath's story. I really loved it. It's hard enough to deal with depression in a vacuum, to have to add that on to all of the other troubles an independent woman in the 50's would face is daunting. She does an incredible job at putting the reader in her state of mind, there's so many times when you just want to jump in and tell her something. The symbolism of being trapped in a jar relating to the way it feels like madness descends and just engulfs you sometimes was very relatable.

Spoiler

"The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further."

"I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, odorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

"My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up and coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters."

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

"I wanted to tell her that if only something something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything."

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."

From sadness back to anger, We Were Eight Years in Power on deck.

[youvalss]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Started reading Michael Jordan: The Life (by Roland Lazenby) a couple of weeks ago. What in interesting biography! I'm only about 1/6 way through (it has about 700 pages) and it's so interesting, it's a must for any MJ fan.

I will probably have to renew (extend) the due date again and again (I don't read that fast), but I'll make it to the end of the book. It's great.


Also, I have read almost every Paul Auster book (maybe except for the last one or two). If you are looking for those unique books that are like no others, get some of them.

[War Eagle!]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Currently reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Coleman. Ive been working at it for about a month now. Not a long read but there is much to learn. I've been reflecting upon what ive read and applying it which has sparked awareness of different situations and alternative ways of handling them which have been very fruitful.

fishin for wisdom

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a collection of essays written during the last 8 years chronicling the feelings of the last presidency. It's awesome to see the quality of Coates's prose improve over the course of the book in the essays. By the epilogue, I was just in awe. Not that we didn't know he couldn't write, but just how powerful every sentence was. Aside from the essays that had been released through the years, there's reflections on them beforehand that were newly written. He basically explains his state of mind when writing the essay, what it meant to him then and what it means now.

My favorite of the previously released essays was probably the Epilogue. It's his newest, which as he keeps getting better means it's his best written. It's just very powerful in what he's saying and how he says it. Second would probably be the Case for Reparations, just a really well researched and interesting piece. My favorites of the new reflection essays were Notes from Year 5 and Notes from Year 7. In Year 5, he gets into how he came into his religious beliefs, which I've said before is always very interesting to me. Year 7, he talks about how great Baldwin was, and wanting to follow in the footsteps of him and the other greats. Of all the essays I've read this year, my favorite has to still be Letter to my Nephew, the one TNC used as inspiration for Between the World and Me, and Baldwin is still my favorite writer.

Spoiler

"I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy."

"Art was not an after school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all its brutality and its beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be co-opted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us."

"The world was brutal - and to eschew that brutality, to indulge all your boyish softness, was to advertise yourself as prey. The message was clear, even if I had trouble accepting it: Might really did make right, and he who swung first swung best, and if swinging was not enough, you stabbed, you shot, you did anything to make this whole heathen world understand that you were not the one."

"They act like they don't love the country. No, what it is, is they found out their country didn't love them." - Poet Lucille Clifton

"And the beauty of Baldwin's prose that I connected to was not ancillary to the dream-breaking but central to it. The beauty in his writing wasn't just style or ornament but an unparalleled ability to see what was before him clearly and then lay that vision, with that same clarity, before the world."

"I am talking to young writers now. Your heroes are not mystics nor sorcerers but humans practiced at the work of typing and revising, and often agonized by it. I know this because I have chased before. I have chased the work of Nas. I have chased the work of E.L. Doctorow. I have chased the work of Black Thought."


"As much as I loved the culture of France, and I did, I knew that I was lucky not to have been born there. Their particular philosophy of merit, the intense focus on grades and tests, the rigid class stratification, would have made my story impossible. It is, I think, the chaos of America that allowed me to prosper."

Great, great book. Next up, The Shining. I'll probably start Monday, but I've got the day off, so maybe Tuesday.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished Maplecroft by Cherie Priest on Saturday. This is one of those books that would ideally take a rainy weekend to complete as I ran through the second half of the book Saturday morning.

A rare occasion, but I am coming up with very little to say positively or negatively towards the book. It is well written and paces itself nicely. The action, by the end of the book, is enticing and rewarding. The characters are engaging enough, but most are fairly flat. There are some noticeable holes in relationships and characters that end up depending on suspension rather than development. The Lovecraftian components lend enough to be thoughtful, but the monster/monsters crowd in the shadows and reflect little of the main characters in their blind, seaglass eyes.

Still, it was a fun read and I enjoyed the whole far more than the sum of its parts would suggest. Priest writes in an efficient way, but is not short on style as you can almost hear the flap of Lizzie Borden's dress as she swings her ax in terrible, decapitating arcs. Unraveling the mystery of the monstrous scourge alongside the characters while witnessing the transformation of another is a fun and at times grossly compelling ride.

Overall, this is a good book for those that enjoy the Lovecraftian niche of monsters, lore, and science. While I would never stoop to call this a "guilty pleasure" reading it is clearly something for pure entertainment as it offers little for those wanting to delve in. Frankenstein this is not. Still, there is a place for the B movie monsters and this book would shine right alongside.

-----

Yesterday, I started Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I'm only about 60 pages in, but I can already tell this will end up being a favorite for this time of the year. Bradbury's poetic style is superb. He creates the nostalgic, late October atmosphere immediately. Each sentence builds upon the atmosphere until the reader is breathing in that cool, crisp October air and can hear the leaves crunch with the turn of each page.

I will be surprised if this book lasts until the weekend.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yesterday, I started Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I'm only about 60 pages in, but I can already tell this will end up being a favorite for this time of the year. Bradbury's poetic style is superb. He creates the nostalgic, late October atmosphere immediately. Each sentence builds upon the atmosphere until the reader is breathing in that cool, crisp October air and can hear the leaves crunch with the turn of each page.

I will be surprised if this book lasts until the weekend.

The book survived until 4PM Saturday - somehow. Part of the time was spent rereading a couple chapters and paragraphs. Not necessarily for comprehension sake, but because you can blindly throw a dart and hit on a sentence that is exquisitely, poetically written and each one asks for an instant replay. Just read these examples:

Spoiler

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

----
Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience.

--------

Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever.

----

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

The writing itself is masterful and the narrative is the same. A coming of age tale bracketing a fight between good and evil ("Good to evil seems evil"). A story that is concurrently standing one leg in the past, the other in the present, facing the future. Bradbury writes in such a way that waxes nostalgic as he easily transports the reader back to a date-less time of innocence and naivety of maturity. He drives this nostalgia home with his poetic prose giving even the simplistic act of a falling leaf it's own impactful spotlight. Memories are powerful and Bradbury's writing strives to capture that power to great success.

This one has quickly become a personal favorite of mine hitting me at the right time. The emotions and feelings throughout the story are powerful and drive right out from your stomach. My jealousy of nostalgia fueled my own understanding of any one's motives to advance or rewind the carousel of life. It's a nice thought. An escape from today back into yesteryear or to speed into the future where it's all figured out. Yet, as the creepy climax saunters and works itself into a jog and finally a blind sprint you reconcile the present is a present. Happiness is contentment with that present. Living arm stretched out the past while sprinting toward the future will miss you out on so much. To fight those temptations of jealousy, longing, and angst is to live.

This one I will have to work into my rotation every October. Despite this year's more tropical October I always felt that rush of stinging, cooling, leaf-flavored air when I opened the book and turned a page. I heard the trampling of dry, sidewalk leaves into brown dust under worn out tennis shoes. The sting of sweat beading down the forehead and pool across the arms beneath shirt and jacket from running on a cool autumn evening.

Instant favorite and Bradbury made it look so easily done.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Man I am struggling with this book. It's not bad, as a matter of fact it's very well written. As I sit here on Kindle page 238 in the middle of a chapter full of newspaper articles about the hotel I'm just like... Come on dude get to the story lol. So much world building, it's almost exhausting.

I'm gonna finish it out of sheer obstinance but there's not a chance in hell I'm picking up IT.

[dsallupinyaarea]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery by Bill James



Bill James (the baseball guy) posits the theory that a string of connected murders in the late 1910s actually started all the way back in 1898. He presents his case by examining the facts of the known crimes with other home invasion homicides reported in the papers during the time. He makes a pretty compelling case and, if he is right, he's unearthed the most prolific serial killer in history.


It's not a particularly well written book as it's more or less an information dump. He goes off on random tangents and the timeline is disjointed. After you pick up the book's style, you sort of learn what to "skip" and it makes for a more enjoyable read. It's short and interesting so I'd recommend it once the price drops a bit.


I was put on to the book by this Ringer podcast with him:

https://www.theringer.com/2017/10/2/16403520/bill-james-on-crime-and-the-man-from-the-train

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Amazon is having a 30 year anniversary sale for Kindle books, I picked up a bunch of stuff, the most expensive being $3.99:

Seed to Harvest (The Patternist series), Liliths Brood (Xenogenesis Trilogy), Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents - all by Octavia Butler
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Dark Matter - Blake Crouch
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm

The backlog grows!

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I haven't picked up anything since I finished Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes apart from We Were Eight Years In Power. I have The Haunting of Hill House, but no real motivation to actually grab it off the mantle and start reading it yet.

Nothing on the stack really speaking to me the last week or so. NBA tip-off had my attention and hype last week. Hopefully I will finished Coates this week and jump in to some kind of fiction this week before Assassin's Creed and Wolfenstein 2 drop on Friday.

[dsallupinyaarea]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Hillbilly Elegy

Good read even if I disagree with some of the author's points. A bit too much finger wagging for my taste and while the author seems to understand the advantages he had, I don't think he truly grasps how that makes his situation wholly unique from other kids in his neighborhood.


As a city kid through and through, this was an interesting look into a world I didn't even know existed.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished The Shining, I'll try not to ramble...

OK so this is a really good book, probably a great one. Stephen King is a great writer. Everything is basically in place, but it never came all the way together for me to say I loved it. I don't tend to like horror, or I guess I should say supernatural things, hard for me to wrap my head around. It's like "oh they're running through the hallway, they got tripped by the newly animated chair, OK". That's strike one.

It took me a while to read because I kept getting lost in descriptions of stuff and having to take a break. It ended up being 660 Kindle pages, I feel like it could've been done in half that. Having said that, that's a really personal gripe. I was reading on Reddit yesterday, a thread where someone said if you don't want all the whaling expertise knowledge in Moby Dick, just read the abridged version and everyone saying to do that is to lose what makes Moby Dick a classic. I feel there's a similar thing here. Stephen King has written a million stories, and has millions of fans, I'm willing to bet that a big part of what they like about him is the atmosphere that he creates, and he does that by putting you in the world. He walks you through every action, shows you what the characters see, even goes off on slight tangents on what things make them think about like no one I've ever read. I felt by the end of the book I knew the Torrance family as well as some of my own lol.

Spoiler

Quotes:

"When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps nest, you hadn't made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you."

"There was no place he could run where the Overlook was not. He recognized it suddenly, fully, painlessly. For the first time in his life he had an adult thought, an adult feeling, the essence of his experience in this bad place - a sorrowful distillation: (Mommy and Daddy can't help me and I'm alone)."

"It shrieked ; it shrieked but now it was voiceless and it was only screaming panic and doom and damn action in its own ear, dissolving, losing though and will, the webbing dalling apart, searching, not finding, going out, going out to, fleeing, going out to emptiness, notness, crumbling. The party was over."

All that said, I liked it but didn't love it. I liked King's style, but would've preferred all of the description to be in a book with a bigger scale. It's a contained story for the most part, and by the end, the Overlook is a character of its own, which is very cool. A lot of my complaints are a result of my wanting to get through it, which I think is just not the way the book should be read. You have to really want to be in the hotel with the characters. It's something that if I had let it, given the imagery, I could've really gotten lost in. I'm going to watch the movie and see how it compares. I've seen all the "It's a great film but a terrible adaptation" takes and am interested to see how I feel. Def getting a hardcover copy to keep in the freezer. I think I'll appreciate this more reading it in the future.

On to Shadow and Act by my guy Ralph Ellison. I told Fresh this but I think having found essays so easy to get through for nonfiction, I should try for short stories for fiction. When I try to get into another Stephen King book, it'll be one of the short story collections or The Green Mile.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Unreal timing, making my way through a Ralph Ellison book, when Variety announces Hulu is adapting another Ralph Ellison book for a TV series, my favorite book of all time, Invisible Man.

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/invisible-man-hulu-series-1202599486/

It's really hard for me to picture this as a series, but I'll be watching to see how they pull it off. Any press for the book is good by me, it's a masterpiece.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison is a genius. 5/5.

Just on him, he's fascinating to me. Wrote Invisible Man, it was his first novel, spent the rest of his life trying to write another and never finished, he's like the black male Harper Lee. It wins the NBA, regarded as a great American work of fiction, and he never puts out another novel (though, 2 attempts have been taken at boiling down his manuscripts into a full story, I was reading reviews for the latest one, over 1100 pages, the consensus seems to be that the prose is fantastic and the premise interesting but that it doesn't go anywhere, which makes sense as he didn't finish it, I think I'll still read it eventually anyway).

On to this, it's a collection of some number of essays split into 3 sections, the first primarily being essays on literature, the second essays on music, and the third just about American society and what he saw deemed as "black culture".

Off top, he's an amazing writer. Probably tied with Baldwin now for my favorite (they're both incredible but in different ways. I look at Ellison as being the head and Baldwin the heart, they wrote about many of the same things from different angles). Someone on Reddit described Invisible Man as "like reading jazz" and I didn't really get it but I kinda do now. There's just a rhythm, or flow to the way he writes. It doesn't bog you down, very free flowing.

I could talk about this book, this guy, these essays for probably ever so ill just leave some quotes:

Spoiler

"One thing is certain, ours was a chaotic community, still characterized by frontier attitudes and by that strange mixture of the naive and sophisticated, the benign and malignant, which makes the American past so puzzling and its present so confusing; that mixture which often affords the minds of the young who grow up in the far provinces such wide and unstructured latitude, and which encourages the individuals imagination - up to the moment "reality" closes in upon him - to range widely and, sometimes, even to soar."

"Too many of us have accepted a statistical interpreting of our lives and thus much of that which makes us a source of moral strength to America goes unappreciated and undefined."

"Mark Twain was alive to this irony and refused such an easy (and dangerous) way out. Huck Finn's acceptance of the evil implicit in his" emancipation" of Jim represents Twain's acceptance of his personal responsibility in the condition of society. This was the tragic face behind his comic mask." So I'm gonna have to get back into Huck Finn I see...

"Thus what for Twain was a means to a moral end became for Hemingway an end in itself. And just as the trend toward technique for the sake of technique and production for the sake of the market lead to the neglect of the human need out of which they spring , so do they lead in literature to a marvelous technical virtuosity won at the expense of a gross insensitivity to fraternal values."

On Mahalia Jackson:" There are certain women singers who possess, beyond all the boundaries of our admiration for their art, an uncanny power to evoke our love. We warm with pleasure at mere mention of their names; their simplest songs sing in our heart like the remembered voices of old dear friends, and when we are lost within the listening anonymity of darkened concert halls, they seem to seek us out unerringly. Standing regal within the bright isolation of the stage, their subtlest effects seem meant for us and us alone; privately, as across the intimate space of our own living rooms. And when we remember the simple dignity of their immediate presence, we suddenly ponder the mystery of human greatness."

"The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion for the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly reminds if of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion."

"To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action but illusion."

"Ones identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One 'is' literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a 'displaced person' of American democracy."

So yeah, incredible. He mentions The Waste Land by TS Eliot as the work that drew him to writing, so I'm adding that to my list. Also, he talked about Native Son and Black Boy by Richard Wright so I really want to get into those eventually.

But for now, following Fresh in reading Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates this weekend. A lot of this was new to me as I started following him about the time his article The Case for Reparations came out, but it's essentially eight feature articles from the Atlantic during Obama's time as President. Between each article is a short chapter that acts as a memoir of sorts as he attempts to explain his thoughts, feelings, and writing process.

The topics of the book won't lend themselves to discussion here since, unfortunately, they would all lead down a road that's not in adherence to the site's TOS, but I will say Coates has always had a knack for writing unabashedly. He writes bluntly - some may feel he writes sharply like a pin to a balloon - and faces his topics squarely. As his writing progresses his topics begin to incorporate more research and knowledge. By the epilogue he is seamlessly interweaving his mind-space with background and data in a forward-moving flow.

After following him for several years it's amazing to see his career compressed in such a way to showcase his growth as a writer. Reading through it's a pleasure to witness this especially since it makes his growth even more obvious and consistent.