OS Book Club Pt II

**dickey1331** · 05-16-2020, 07:53 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished the 2nd Mistborn book and the 2nd half of the book was much better. Definitely picked up and with a good suspenseful surprise at the end.

I’ll be starting the 3rd book now.

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**ESPOMAN** · 05-16-2020, 08:15 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished reading I, Robot and now I am going to read the rest of that series.

**Fresh Tendrils** · 05-16-2020, 10:36 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by dickey1331

Finished the 2nd Mistborn book and the 2nd half of the book was much better. Definitely picked up and with a good suspenseful surprise at the end.

I’ll be starting the 3rd book now.

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Looking forward to your thoughts when you're done. The ending to book three is wild.

**JohnnytheSkin** · 05-16-2020, 06:19 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I've been trying to ramp up the pleasure reading so as to avoid the deluge of bad news here and abroad. Reading Different Seasons by Stephen King, which is a collection of short stories, three of which have been adapted into movies. I've read the first two, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil. The latter film was hot garbage compared to the story, while the former was top notch in both forms.

Next up is The Body which was adapted as Stand by Me.

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**dsallupinyaarea** · 05-19-2020, 02:29 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I've read quite a bit while we've all been on house arrest. Filtering out the overtly political I've got:

The Velvet Rope Economy by Nelson Schwartz- The premise is as wealth becomes more concentrated in the few, companies begin to cater more and more to where the money is, creating a velvet rope society. What it means to have a society with very few communal experiences. I.E. it used to be once you paid your admission at DisneyWorld, everyone had the same experience on the other side of the gate. Now, there are $600 an hour tour guides that allow folks to skip the line. Or how a baseball game used to be a very communal experience and now every stadium has very clear (spoken and unspoken) class lines drawn throughout. Hell, I went to a Phillies game once and because my ticket was behind one of those class lines, I had access to a special bathroom lol. One rich tech dude was quoted in the book saying he hadn’t waited in a line in over 10 years.

The Great Influenza by John Barry – This is widely considered the definitive book on the 1918 flu pandemic. It’s a masterpiece. Obviously topical. The author starts with the founding of modern epidemiology (and John Hopkins Hospital) and brings us through the beginnings of the outbreak, how WWI impacted the coverage* and how the 2<sup>nd</sup> wave just absolutely devastated society (rough estimates are 50+ million people died). It’s just really well written. There’s a chapter toward the end when the author is describing how the flu just ravaged remote parts of the globe where the immune system’s had minimal exposure to outsiders. People would travel to Alaska with supplies/aid only to find settlements with piles and piles of bodies. Just brutal stuff.

*(It’s only called the Spanish Flu because Spain newspapers were the first to write about it. Spain was not yet involved with the war and thus had no incentive to silence the press. It’s believed that the disease started in the US and was exported when soldiers deployed.)

The Victory Machine by Ethan Strauss – A book detailing all the major players in the Warrior’s run. You get interviews with the owner of the team, the GM, the coach. It’s different from most sports books because it chronicles what broke the dynasty up vs. how they triumphed. I appreciated the different perspective.

American Nations by Colin Woodard – This is about the founding of the country. The story we’re told is a pretty lazy tale about like 15 dudes coming over and magically building a country. The truth is different areas of the country were settled by distinctly different colonies and the culture and characteristics of those colonies largely reflect things about our society today. I could go on and on but I wouldn’t do it justice. It’s a great book.

Sapiens by Yuval Harari – I feel like everyone had read this but me. It does a good job documenting our species evolution from cave dwellers to modern society. It touches on how major innovations (agricultural, language, fire, etc.) moved us to the top of the food chain, how a lot of our modern behaviors can be traced back to caveman necessities, etc. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Lebron, Inc. by Brian Windhorst – Something different from a sports book. Windhorst details most of the business decisions Lebron made off the court. Bron has been around so long you forget a lot of the early machinations that made him the success he is today. I had totally forgotten how controversial it was for him to fire his agent and hire Rich Paul. A short, easy read.

Jordan Rules by Sam Smith – Re-read during The Last Dance. Nothing much to say here. If you know you know.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom – If you’ve watched Sports Reporters, you know who Mitch Albom is. This is book is about him reconnecting with an old college professor diagnosed with a terminal illness. This book is soooo 90s. Very after school special-y, life lessons vibe. Most of the takeaways feel pretty stale in 2020. It’s still a good book. Short and a nice story. I checked it off the list because it’s literally one of the best-selling books of all time.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti – It was ok. It’s an economist describing our move from a nation of manufacturing into a nation of tech/ideas. He explains why certain jobs clustered in certain areas, how that’s beneficial and harmful to both the cities they cluster in and the cities left behind by the move out of manufacturing.

The problem with some non-fiction is a lot of the writers aren’t natural story tellers. They’re researchers, academics, reporters, etc. So often the books can feel like an information dump. This is that. Not bad but ok.

Dreamland by Sam Quinones (only about 75% through) – So this one is a deep dive into the opiate crisis sweeping America. The author covers the corruption from all angles including the manufacturers, the pill mill doctors, the pharmacies, the functional users, the addicts and the importing of black tar heroin from a small state in MX. You see how the opiate crisis descends upon a town from two opposite sides (a small opium farm in MX and a pharmaceutical boardroom in DC). If you’ve ever watched The Wire, this book is interesting because you see how the heroin trade differs in rural and suburban areas of the country. My only complaint is about midway through it starts to feel like the author is telling the same origin story just with different names in a different city. A good 15% could have been cut to move the story arc along.
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**dickey1331** · 06-08-2020, 10:04 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by Fresh Tendrils

Looking forward to your thoughts when you're done. The ending to book three is wild.

Finished book 3. That book certainly was different than what I was expecting. I don’t really know what to think about it. Makes me wonder what books 4-6 are like. I’ll eventually read them.

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**Fresh Tendrils** · 06-08-2020, 10:50 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by dickey1331

Finished book 3. That book certainly was different than what I was expecting. I don’t really know what to think about it. Makes me wonder what books 4-6 are like. I’ll eventually read them.

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My mind was blown and then he just kept going. I really can't believe he pulled it off that way, but man it was a hell of a ride.

I also haven't started on Era 2 yet. Hard to move away from the original trilogy.

I'm currently halfway through Sanderson's Way of Kings. So far so good. The world building in this is the best I've read from him.

**dickey1331** · 06-08-2020, 10:55 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by Fresh Tendrils

My mind was blown and then he just kept going. I really can't believe he pulled it off that way, but man it was a hell of a ride.

I also haven't started on Era 2 yet. Hard to move away from the original trilogy.

I'm currently halfway through Sanderson's Way of Kings. So far so good. The world building in this is the best I've read from him.

He had a note at the beginning basically saying he tried his best to make a good ending and that really each book could be on its own and I certainly believe that. Each book really is it’s own story.

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**Fresh Tendrils** · 06-09-2020, 09:23 AM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by dickey1331

He had a note at the beginning basically saying he tried his best to make a good ending and that really each book could be on its own and I certainly believe that. Each book really is it’s own story.

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All the hints he puts right in front of your face, too.

I need to reread these.

**DieHardYankee26** · 06-16-2020, 02:34 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Heritage by Howard Bryant

The heritage is basically the lineage of Black athletes who, when America didn't appreciate their brains, used their bodies to make a stand for the issues they believed in. I wanted a more in depth history of us in American sports history and it kinda gave that for a while, but then Bryant turns his attention to the way that since 9/11 politics have been made one with sports, as our showing appreciation for our favorite athletes and our country became one in the same. He talks about the DoD pay for press scheme, and lots of other things. The actual heritage part isn't that long, mostly you know Jackie, and then Kareem/Bill/Ali, and then it was stabbed repeatedly and dunked on by the _J's, O and M. He tries to grapple with what it means to have the new generation of activists be doing so in a way that is corporation approved and questions if that's activism at all. (Unrelated but he mentioned Sartre's "Election A Trap for Fools" with Kaep's refusal to vote and having read it I do understand the stance a little more, still don't agree but eh, actually I agree with a lot of it but there's a practical aspect to life that it doesn't work with). What I really appreciated is I feel like he gives a good overview of the way the military/cop worship came to be and how pervasive it is in our culture.

Spoiler

Political, fans think, describes an individual act of dissidence, not a collective one perpetrated against the public by the state, the mainstream media or your local sports team. Kaepernick walking off the field after beating the Rams, raising a fist in the air, the “Power to the People” salute of the Black Panthers, as he entered the tunnel to the locker room? Political. The Los Angeles Dodgers hosting “Law Enforcement Appreciation Night” in the scarred city of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson during a time of high racial tension between minority communities and the police? Not so much.

“Some in the room were wary,” Carillo said. “One of them said to her, ‘If we do this we could lose everything.’ Billie won the room, won the fight, with this: ‘We have nothing. Don’t you see that? We have nothing to lose.’

The meritocracy has been treated like a basic, obvious concept in sports, and yet Auerbach was treated like Abraham Lincoln for having the courage to play his best players. The real American vein wasn’t a meritocracy. Sports was just too visceral a place to maintain white hypocrisies. It was one thing to segregate a classroom, quite another to put Bill Russell on a basketball court and argue he wasn’t good enough.

ALCINDOR: Yeah, I live here, but it’s not really my country. GARAGIOLA: Well, there’s only one solution: maybe you should move. ALCINDOR: Well, you see, that would be fine with me, you know; it all depends on where we are going to move. GOAT

Jackie Robinson no longer stood for the national anthem because he felt betrayed. He was the army veteran who thought the anthem’s words sounded hypocritical. He had outlived Malcolm X by seven and a half years and now saw that Malcolm’s acidic realism was neither hysterical nor hyperbolic after all. It was just based on the facts of his life as he saw them. Robinson now saw it too.

“I tried to tell them what it was like for us, and you could tell they weren’t even listening,” Sabathia recalled. “They were trying to tell me what my life was like. They heard nothing. They didn’t want to hear anything, so I said **** it. I don’t even bother anymore.”

“It’s a question of having skin in the game,” Burns said. “When you have a draft, no matter how unfair it was with its loopholes in the 1960s that benefited the well-to-do to avoid it, the poor with fewer options were going to serve a disproportionate amount. But a lottery system is a huge boon to the antiwar movement because everybody and their mothers, especially their mothers, has skin in the game. “Today, we have a separate military class that suffers the wounds of war for the rest of us with no pushback. It permits the worst kind of ‘patriotism,’ where you get to grandstand and politicize and say ‘Thank you for your service,’ which is no longer a real thing, but just a way to end a sentence.”

The Heritage was never about sports but about America making sports—quite specifically the black body in this country—so economically and socially important that the people needed the player to be present for them. This is the inheritance of the black athlete, his coat of arms, and no contract or endorsement deal has yet ever been big enough to make that obligation go away. It is a responsibility the black player will carry until America values the black brain over the black body, and the black people, like all the others, rise through education and not touchdowns. Then sports for black people can finally be reduced to what it should have always been in the first place—just a game.

Cactus League by Emily Nemens

I missed baseball and this was a fiction book about baseball so I read it. It was pretty good, whole thing revolved around the star player during a single Spring Training, and how the people of the town around all come into contact with him. The only issue I had is the same with all books that change perspectives, sometimes you find one you like and don't want to leave or vice versa.

I started The End of Policing by Alex Vitale trying to get a concrete idea of what life without the police would look like or how we would go about getting there. Didn't get far enough it before summer classes kicked in, but starting with the simple idea that police are there to protect the interests of the rich and not to protect and serve is how to get me in. I'll be finishing it as soon as I get the chance.

**dickey1331** · 06-20-2020, 07:58 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished reading Misery last night. I thought it was decent. I saw the movie before but its been years and I dont remember any of it. It was nice reading a book that had really short chapters for once. I wouldn't call this book one of Kings best works but it was decent. The Stand will always be my favorite King book.

**ESPOMAN** · 06-22-2020, 01:31 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I am now reading the Shelby Foote Civil War books. I am not the first one. I seen people say they are not 100% accurate and Battle Cry of Freedom is better. So I will read that after as I am enjoying the Foote book. I will read finish the I, Robot series after this.

**DieHardYankee26** · 06-29-2020, 01:02 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Watching JK Rowling go out super sad completely unprovoked:

**Fresh Tendrils** · 06-29-2020, 01:15 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Originally posted by DieHardYankee26

Watching JK Rowling go out super sad completely unprovoked:

2020 has been an interesting year for sure.

But - I'm not exactly surprised. She's made questionable off-hand comments previously with no inclination to "open her mind," so it what it is. They'll abandon her like they did George Lucas and keep going at this point.

**DieHardYankee26** · 06-29-2020, 04:36 PM

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

It doesn’t feel the same, maybe because there was already a Star Wars EU so it existed outside of Lucas but there’s no HP without JK Rowling in it. Star Wars without Lucas has been a disaster anyway so if that’s the best case we’re screwed lol.

OS Book Club Pt II

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