OS Book Club Pt II

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I either completely missed they were doing a Fahrenheit 451 adaptation series on HBO or it just completely left my brain.

Funnily enough I was waffling between Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles for my next Bradbury and ultimately chose The Martian Chronicles with the plan to read 451 a month or two after.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In The End - Atul Gawande

Atul is a practicing surgeon in Boston and the son of two Indian immigrant doctors. In this he explores the pattern of aging and death for many Americans while also glancing around the world for several comparisons. He basically raises questions and explores answers on how we treat the aging and how we try to "treat" death rather than just dying gracefully with acceptance of our fate.

There are several patients stories throughout the book that Atul uses as driving examples of his points. His approach is methodical. The book begins by looking at what causes us to lose our independent selves as ailments basically culminate until one is suddenly too much and then we deteriorate quickly thereafter. Atul reiterates throughout our independent self is one of the most important aspects to keep and protect as we age and lose functionality of our bodies. From that launching pad he explores dependence upon others (looking at both family members and hired strangers), the conundrum of independent assisted living and nursing home facilities, the growing need of hospice care, and trying to find a path that is dignified for everyone involved in the dying process.

This was a very fascinating read to me and I recommend it to all especially those that are going through these stages with their parents or other family members. Watching my father and his family go through the final year of my grandmother's life it's hard to witness and I can't imagine the toll it takes on everyone involved in any decision making process. My mother and her family are struggling with wanting to balance the independent lives of their parents (who are in their 80s living in the same house they've lived in for 60 years in the middle of the mountains) and wanting to ensure their safety and health.

I'll probably give this to my mom for her to read. Even at the age of 31 I was thinking about how I would react in these patient situations. It's easy to say, "I want to die gracefully," but harder to actually do as pressures from doctors and family mount along with the general fear of dying. A truly fascinating read and opportunity to reflect on aging and dying.


After finishing this I started The Two Towers this weekend. At first I was hesitant because it had been a good 2-3 months since I read Fellowship of the Ring, but this world is so easy to slip back into that I felt right at home by the end of the first chapter.

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I started the year reading one of the books on my "To Read" shelf for quite a while now- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I was only able to reach page 35 or so until I gave it up and just couldn't get into it. The long blocks of text, which seemed to me was all over the place, turned into a chore night after night just to get through each page. I've got until May to read (for fun) as much as I can... (I'm going to grad school, as I just mentioned in a previous thread), so I didn't want to waste my time dragging through a story I can't really get into. The word is that it takes almost 400-500 pages for that novel to start getting interesting, and I just can't bring myself to invest that much effort right now. Now I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It seems like an easygoing summertime read, but I'm only about 30 or so pages in. I'm a huge fan of "coming of age" types of stories, so I've definitely seen this book get recommended many times. And on audiobook, I'm more than halfway done with The Power of Now by Eckert Tolle. If you can get past the creepy voice, I find the book to be a very powerful read.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yeah, I'm at like 440ish now, everything really fell into place somewhere in the 300's, the separate storylines start to come together in a way that you can recognize how things relate to each other. There's a bunch of online companions that will run back quick plot details, it's pretty necessary when you've spent 3 pages reading a single sentence. Trying to read a hardcopy of this without all of the advice I found beforehand would probably be infuriating. I think I have a good enough handle on it that I'll probably take a rain check on the companion reader and save it for later in the year after I've had some more distance from it.

Having said that, the book is really great. It's not something that I think I'll ever recommend just for the sheer difficulty of getting through it, but it's something I'll definitely come back to and read again. Just an incredibly impressive work.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Nearing the end of Fellowship and I can see why so many hold this series/world in such high esteem. I keep catching myself being completely in awe and mystified by Tolkien's world building and I know I haven't read anything else that comes close to what he did.

It is the small things in how he builds the world of Middle Earth to make it feel like its existing somewhere other than a shared imagination. Things like the subtle nuances and differences in characters' vernacular, having multiple names and explanations depending on the tribe speaking, or just simply by not explaining everything upon its introduction. Everything he does builds off of itself and works together to create a world that feels alive.

Its even more fascinating to think Tolkien did this 100 years ago.

I finally finished Fellowship. It was all I could do to keep myself from immediately turning the page and starting The Two Towers, but I want to try and stick with my plan of reading one book per season. Or, at the very least, give it a month or so before I dive back in.

Either way this was an amazing read. Tolkien's world craft, as I said above, is fantastic and unmatched in my experiences. As much acclaim as Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire have now those books are a long trudge through a marsh laden swamp compared to Tolkien's work. Having watched the movies there are certain parts I wish I came into fresh, but still the attention to each character is great. The turn of Boromir. Sam's unwavering loyalty. Aragorn's self-doubt. Aragorn's journey in the films always seemed so straight and flat to me and even more so now that I've read the book.

I'll reserve the rest of my thoughts until I complete the other books. Entering the world and journeying with the Fellowship was great and I feel like a void has been filled by now having read this wonderful work.

I have other novels I want to read for the Summer, but I want to catch up on my non-fiction works for a good week or two. I have The Social Contract on my night-stand, Collection of Baldwin Essays, and The Destruction of Black Civilization.

Then some leisure beach reading!

For some reason I thought I read Fellowship much later in the year last year. I didn't realize it's been a little over 6 months. Damn. I'm glad I didn't realize that until I finished The Two Towers because I was hesitant about reading it without reading Fellowship immediately prior.

What's funny, though, is that a lot of details of Fellowship are still vivid in my head. The smaller details have left, but the nuances of the character encounters and the major beats still felt relatively fresh as I dived back into Middle Earth.

Similarly to the first book The Two Towers is split into 'two books.' Unlike the first book, however, each book focuses on separate circumstances. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas work to defend Helm's Deep and overtake Orthanc in the book first. Meanwhile, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum/Smeagol journey their way to the bounds of Mordor.

Admittedly I was a little worried how this division would affect the pace of the book. The first book is more action oriented with several battles and many encounters and I knew the journey on foot had the potential to be drab and slow. To my surprise the second half of the book is somewhat more nuanced featuring deeper character development with an incredible breadth of world building. Then again this may just be a case of enjoying the most of what I've currently read. I pushed myself to read more for want of continuing and staying in the world throughout the whole book. Aragorn continues his slight transformation into his destiny. Gimli and Legolas shine a beacon of loyalty and friendship amongst the most unlikely of races. Sam's loyalty and steadfastness is *********, compelling, and rewarding action.

The whole book continues Tolkien's nuanced stringing of words as he builds detail upon detail with easy control. Our heroes' paths winds through open fields, dense forests, bogs, deadly marshes, steep black mountains, and intertwine with many encounters along the way. The world continues to build upon itself expanding it's bounds, adding depth to those features introduced in Fellowship, and introducing a bevy of interesting characters with their own set of circumstances and motivations. Middle Earth is one of the most fully realized worlds - complete with a nuanced history that is referenced off-the-cuff in a way that makes everything feel long established and lived in. Everything in the world seemingly has a backstory and rich history. From the small phial of light that clings to Frodo's chest to the giant spider lying in wait. Somehow Tolkien manages to give a compelling backstory to a spider without affecting the pace of his story. It is amazing to behold while reading.

I'm hoping I can get to Return of the King by/in March. Depending how well Return of the King goes I'm hoping to go through all three books back to back at the end of the year if I get ahead of my reading goal schedule.

For now I'm diving into The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Around page 700 now in IJ. Should be able to finish it this week. Loving it. So many great sentences/passages:

Spoiler

"Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?"

and

Spoiler

"One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely."

Spoiler

"It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul."

Spoiler

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

The last one is the one I saw a couple of years ago that made me want to read the book in the first place, getting there and reading it in context was powerful. RIP DFW.

Not sure if I'll finish Thursday, Friday, or over the weekend but I may try to get another book in before the end of the month. Still haven't gotten my BHM slate down yet.

I'm gonna try to get through 6 of:

Spoiler

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriett Jacobs (it's the supplemental text in my African American History class so I have to read it)

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois (wasn't taking notes the first time the way I do now, I need my quotes)

Native Son by Richard Wright

Ways of White Folks or The Big Sea by Langston Hughes (one fiction, one non-fiction, I gotta get some Hughes in, it's about time)

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley

I Never Had It Made by Jackie Robinson

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou

So gotta get it down from a list of 12. Dunno how I'll do it, maybe flip a coin...a series of coins.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

What do you use to take notes?

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I just write all my favorite quotes down in a binder. I actually started with Why We Can't Wait which was before Souls, I don't know why I didn't write them down for that one. I have quotes from it, but not all of them and they're mixed up in a list of a bunch of other quotes instead of just that book's quotes like everything else has. I also didn't take any quotes from the book FDR, and just ended up spending days reading speeches and writing down my favorite actual FDR quotes for that. I'll probably type everything up one day. A cool thing is goodreads saves all the quotes you highlight in your kindle automatically, thank our Amazon overlords.

Now thinking of Why We Can't Wait and Where Do We Go From Here, I'm adding the book they put together as MLK's autobiography on my list. So now up to 13.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

That's an amazing feature for the Kindle. I keep thinking about asking for one for Christmas or something, but I love my library and I love just the feel of the paper on my finger tips. It's the same things I love about my vinyl collection. If Amazon/BAM/Barnes & Noble ever started bundling digital copies with physical books I would be all over that.

I need to get a composition notebook or something. I just take pictures with my phone of passages I really like so I can go back later and add them to this thread.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Just finished Infinite Jest. It's bittersweet, I'm both sad that the book is now over and there's no more story to read and relieved that I won't have to read anymore Eschaton matches (a game in the book which combines tennis, geography, and math, it's like acting out a World War on a tennis court).

I'll have to make sure the companion book I read gets into the climate he wrote this under. From what I've seen online, it's supposedly "post-postmodern" (post-modern being defined by irony, rejection of grand narratives). The big TV essay he wrote that I read had a lot to do with the idea that irony is a mask that becomes one's true face over time, there's a lot of that in IJ. It's hard to sum up, the book is just massive and endlessly expansive. His goodreads page describes him as trying to write books that explain what it's like to be human. This book in a really strange way accomplishes that to me.

It drags on at times. It's cumbersome to have to stop in the middle of something to read a 3 page footnote about something completely different. The writing sometimes reminds me of the episode of Friends where Chandler and Monica need Joey to write a letter of recommendation and he thesauruses every word, so instead of saying they had big hearts it says they have oversized aortic pumps. All of that to say it reads almost like it's written by a robot sometimes...

But it so clearly isn't. Just the way things come together, the emotional beats, they're just the work of an (probably) obsessively attentive person who had a lot of pain inside of him. The issues that the book deals with are shockingly universal to be a book essentially written about genius, private school tennis prodigies. The depression parts were especially hard to get through. So much of it is depression and addiction. There's a couple references to Sylvia Plath (one where someone calls her Sylvia Plate and another that just mentions a bell jar) that I thought were pretty cool. It was written with allusions to Hamlet but I've never read it and don't know anything outside of To be or not to be so there's another thing to put on the list.

If I was rating solely on the highs reached, it's probably my 2nd favorite fiction book after Invisible Man, that suicide passage is just haunting. But the length and sheer difficulty take it down a little, it's far from a perfect book, like I said earlier, I wouldn't recommend it to someone just randomly. I'm definitely glad I took the time to get through it though. The thing I kept thinking about the whole time is what must his parents have thought reading it, or did they? His mom was an English professor...the main character's mom in the book was a linguistics specialist. The whole book is based around junior tennis, he was a junior tennis player. I wonder what they took away from it, if anything.

I wanted to get Altered Carbon done before it came out but I probably needed to finish this last week to get that done before BHM, so I'll just get started early and go into Gather in My Name, the second in Maya Angelou's autobiography series.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished up The Martian Chronicles, read through A Monster Calls, and started Little Fires Everywhere.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
I was somewhat hesitant to read this at the onset. I understood this was a collection of short stories loosely tied to exploring and living on Mars. For being a multitude of tales concerning the Martian planet the book itself is tied tightly together as Bradbury maps the history of planet from first contact to it's inevitable long suffering demise. Each story features Bradbury's hallmarks of dark humor creating a foundation for the slow burn of a smile that diminishes into frightened frown with more understanding. Isolation, greed, corruption, jealousy, discovery, exploration, and destruction are themes that run throughout. There are parallels to the discovery of America - the mass destruction of a native civilization and their home. Parallels are drawn to WWII as immigrants on Mars are called to come back home to fight the war. It is a fascinating read that chronicles the short-time frame of a planet with human interactions while focusing on stories of human conditions as the characters explore their Martian landscape as well the interpersonal dynamics around them.

While this isn't quite on the level of Something Wicked This Way comes there are still many instances of Bradbury's poetic imagery. The covers are full of his macabre sense of humanity and he's able to find humor in the darkest places. After reading this I have the creeping suspicion Bradbury will end up being a favorite of mine. An author I will end up having fill half my library as I venture to read everything he's written even if that means buying a copy of a telephone book.

Spoiler

We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.


And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.

There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
If forced to this would invariably be called a children's story. It's themes are simplistic and abundantly reinforced throughout the short 200 pages of the book. There's some illustrations. Glossy pages and a beautifully illustrated hardcover. Despite all of that it succeeds in bringing you onto whatever level it's operating on. It succeeds in transporting you to a childlike vulnerability and naivety and doesn't relent until you're blind with tears and wetting the glossy pages of the book.

Normally I would give a synopsis, but I really don't want to spoil anything about this book since the narrative is fairly straightforward and everything builds off of and up to it. With that said it is a great book and worth the short read.

Spoiler

Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

I'm already about a third of the way through Little Fires Everywhere, but it's fascinating so far. I'm hoping to get Beloved this weekend to start on BHM and will most likely follow that up with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Souls of Black Folk. Invisible Man might end up replacing a selection or two, though.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Invisible Man is the best.

Have to reiterate that Infinite Jest was ****ing LONG, like dear god it really occurred to me today. Kindle has read times, most books I read are between 8 and 12 hours. Infinite Jest was 60 hours. I was routinely hitting points where it would say "6 hours and 14 minutes left in chapter". It was just so long lol. I'm quite proud of myself for having made it all the way through.

Anyway, I started and finished Gather Together In My Name, the second in Maya Angelou's autobiography series. If she had lived a boring and uneventful life, it would probably still have been worth reading just because of her way with words. But her life is wild, and it's awesome to hear her tell it. I noticed in I Know Why, but she takes such big broad concepts and boils them down into incredibly few sentences. I think, especially after reading David Foster Wallace who intentionally drug out sentences and paragraphs using the most obscure words possible, what stands out is how concise she is. No wasted space, short passages with impact. Another cool thing is she is not afraid to criticize herself when she was wrong, or say she was being childish when she was.

Spoiler

"Thus we lived through a major war. The question in the ghettos was, Can we make it through a minor peace?"

"I had written a juicy melodrama in which I was to be the star. Pathetic, poignant, isolated. I planned to drift out of the wings, a little girl martyr. It just so happened that life took my script away and upstaged me."

"You think 'cause you've been to California these crazy people won't kill you? You think them lunatic cracker boys won't try to catch you in the road and violate you? You think because of your all-fired principle some of the men won't feel like putting their white sheets on and riding over here to stir up trouble? You do, you're wrong. Ain't nothing to protect you and us except the good Lord and some miles." Her grandma, after which she was sent off to live in California with her mom, which I thought was funny in a kind of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air way

"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"

"Sparkling young men who were hopes of the community had thrown themselves against the sealed doors set up by a larger community, and not only hadn't opened them, but hadn't even shaken the bolts. The potential sharp-tongued lawyer, keen-eyed scientist and cool-hand surgeon changed his mind about jimmying the locks and took to narcotics so that he could float through the key hole."

"Anyway, man had always needed something to help him though this vale of tears. Fermented berries, corn, rice and potatoes. Scotch or magic mushrooms. Why not the residue of poppies? The maids and doormen, factory workers and janitors who were able to leave their ghetto homes and rub against the cold-shouldered white world, told themselves that things were not as bad as they seemed. They smiled a dishonest acceptance at their mean servitude and on Saturday night bought the most expensive liquor to drown their lie. Others, locked in the unending maze of having to laugh without humor and scratch without agitation, foisted their hopes on the Lord. They shouted loudly on Sunday morning at His goodness and spent the afternoon preparing the starched uniforms to meet a boss's unrelenting examination. The timorous and the frightened held tightly to their palliatives."

"Life, as far as I had deduced it, was a series of opposites: black/white, up/down, life/death, rich/poor, love/hate, happy/sad, and no mitigating areas in between. It followed Crime/Punishment."

I'm probably going to try to tackle Crime and Punishment at some point this year. Also, after her brother, the first name in the dedications (due to alphabetization, but still) is James Baldwin, which is awesome. I miss Baldwin already and am going to read If Beale Street Could Talk at some point in February, as soon as the hold at my libraries comes through. It's also labeled as a Young Adult novel, so there it is, I can say I've read one lol.

On to No Longer at Ease, the second in the African Trilogy, by Chinua Achebe.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Oh hell no. I hope you can turn off that feature. I don't need to see "6 hours left in this chapter." Talk about an uphill battle; don't need to look outside of myself and see me struggling lol.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

You can toggle it. It'll tell you either the page location (which is just a weird Kindle thing for when books don't have page numbers), the page number, time left in chapter or time left in book. I normally set it to show nothing and switch to see how much time is left if I'm dragging or going super quick and want to see what's left in the book. It'll also give you the percent you're at in the book.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Bill Gates has a new favorite book of all time, Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, comes out at the end of February.

I've got one of my March nonfictions picked out already!