OS Book Club Pt II

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Got hipped to a life hack for the ebook readers:

So most local libraries will lend out Kindle books with a card. Someone on Reddit mentioned that there are a few huge libraries that allow you to maintain a membership even living out of state, the Brooklyn Public Library being one of them. I checked their catalog on Libby to see if they have any of the books I plan to read, they have almost all of them. $50 a year for ebook checkouts of almost every book I want to read, glorious. I can save my money on hardcover copies.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I was shocked how much I loved this book. I was worried the Halloween fantasy theme wouldn't work for me, but Bradbury is such an incredible writer I think I could read him write about anything. He's vivid in his descriptions without bogging down the narrative. Such a fun ride, I read the majority of it yesterday and was excited to be able to get back and finish it this morning. Really a great piece of writing, like Fresh said, Bradbury really takes you into the scenes. All of those quotes you posted stood out to me when reading as well. Some others:

Spoiler

"The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world."

"Deep forests, dark caves, dim churches, half-lit libraries were all the same, they tuned you down, they dampened your ardor, they brought you to murmurs and soft cries for fear of raising up phantom twins of your voice which might haunt corridors long after your passage."

"Somehow, irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp."

"Eyes shut, you’d be lost. Eyes open, you’d know such utter despair, such gravities of anguish would weight you, you might never drag past the twelfth turn."

That's probably my favorite fantasy book I've read so far, this and The Hobbit give me hope for the genre. Bradbury's writing make me excited to read the Martian Chronicles and re-read Fahrenheit 451.

Next is my first BPL checkout, Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. I've got big expectations for this. After that, another I've got big expectations for, Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Hopefully I can get those done in time for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee during Thanksgiving week.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

It's an instant favorite in every sense of the word and will be read every year. It's the type of book you look forward to sharing with others and reading to your kids.

I started Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and am through the first two "introductory" parts. So far it's very dry and can be a little dense, but when he gets rolling on a topic it's fairly compelling. I'm hoping the rest of the book is more of this way since each part is a focused look through various lenses (religion, education, etc).

I still need to read the last two Harry Potter books before the end of the year, but I want to push through Anti-Intellectualism and read Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee first.

[War Eagle!]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Just finished up Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. I enjoyed the book. Noah's story telling is inviting and exciting, he's pretty darn funny.

The book starts with Trevor's journey through apartheid. He broke down a couple of the different classes of the system with consequences of mingling with others than your own. Hadn't studied apartheid prior to the read but as Noah described it, it was racism perfected.

There were parallels with America present through much of the story. Things like schooling, hustling, and policing were very similar to the way things operate in America. For a while I had a misconception about Africa as a whole being somewhat uncivilized but Noah's book proved quite the contrary.

I gained a new respect for Noah after listening to the book. The man is a hustler that's for sure and the way he built his career leaves me with nothing but respect for him. I would definitely recommend you all check it out. I grabbed the audible version which he narrates himself which I think brought even more to the book.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Born A Crime is definitely on my list. Heard tons of praise for it. One thing that worries me is I've seen numerous times people say that the audiobook is the definitive version, that the voices he does adds to the narrative and hilarity of it all. I hope it translates decently to the page when I get to it.

Anyway, finished Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston . Where to begin...

The foreword, by Maya Angelou, sets the stage in a strange way. It's kind of lukewarm, like Angelou is conflicted. Having read this now, I understand why. A lot can be learned from Hurston in her telling her own story but not necessarily the things that she says. Another thing is the book was edited to take certain sections out to make it more palatable, and those IMO are some of her best.

Her background was in anthropology and folklore, studying people and the stories they tell about themselves. She mentions early on that as a kid she would create stories, adding details until they became indistinguishable from reality...an interesting trait given the way the autobiography is told. Angelou mentions that growing up in the South when she did, it is surprising to see lack of racial tension in the story.

I think there are 2 reasons for this, one kinda pushing the other along. She mentions many times that she doesn't believe in race prejudice, that racial pride of any kind has been damaging to the world. This is hard to square with the idea that she basically spent her whole life studying a race of people. It's odd. Ellison was a strong believer in the individual, but Hurston takes it a step further than he did. Where Ellison simply saw race as something not to be judged upon, Hurston sees it as something that should be forgotten.

As such a strong individualist, I think she believed it would take away from the power of her story if she told it from the standpoint of "Well they did this, so I had to do this." So she refocused it in a way that made her the central force.

This leads to some strange moments as a reader. Early, she is called the n word by someone and immediately says "I knew he meant class and not my race." You're like.... Sure OK. Then later she's a little girl, and older people, almost to their amusement, are constantly asking her to read difficult passages of books. She says she has no idea why they wanted to hear it. It's like... Probably because they didn't believe what they were seeing. But I guess if you had taught yourself to forget those things, it wouldn't occur to you that things are happening because of them.

Overall I was really conflicted through most of the book. Despite it being so well written, I found myself scratching my head at the ideology behind her opinions, trying to figure out how 2 and 2 came together to equal 5. When Coates says he was inspired by "Morrison, Baldwin, Hurston" I was a little confused. Regardless of the way she came to her way of thinking, it's a testament to the fact that people do think differently. Her fierce independence as a person played into the way she told her story, one in which she is the central character and everything that happens does so as a result of a decision or a choice that she made, and no one else. Made me sad to read about the way she ended up, as a broke maid struggling to finish her last book. Not the first talent to die mostly unheralded, but sad nonetheless.

Having said that, it's one of the best books I think I've read this year. A great glimpse into a clearly talented mind who thinks very differently than I, it's something I can appreciate in the long run. Makes me angry (once again) that Clarence Thomas's book is not on Kindle, I'm gonna have to send someone an angry email.

Quotes: I ended up with 75+, between the way she spoke and the things she said, just a ton to sift through.

Spoiler

"A cosmic loneliness was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me really touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams."

"I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself why afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."

"Each moment has its own task and capacity,and doesn't melt down like snow and form again. It keeps its character forever. So the great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night's moment to a day which has no knowledge of it."

"We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own. If the patient dies from the treatment, it was not because the medicine was not good. We are positive of that. We have seen it work on other patients twice before it killed them and three times after. Then, too, no matter what the outcome, you have to give the doctor credit for trying."

"I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her."

"With the eye of faith, some have beheld me at Hells dark door, with no rudder in my hand, and no light in my heart, and steered me to a peace within. Some others have flown into that awful place west and south of old original Hell and, with great compassion, lifted me off of the blistering coals and showed me trees and flowers. All these are the powers and priceless privileges of friendship."

On to the next one, Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward. It won this year's National Book Award for Fiction and the book podcast I listened to compared her to a young Toni Morrison which is extremely high praise.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I started Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee this morning, but only managed to get through the introductions and first chapter. The bulk of the book focuses on the final, definitive push of Western settlement through the remnants of native tribes. As such the first chapter cruises through 350 years from Columbus to Jamestown to the continuing expansion of the mid 1800s. Already I'm making mental notes to revisit later, but the mass systematic genocide is astounding already. It's not really a matter of not knowing anymore, but a matter of confronting those facts with one's own eyes and mind.

[youvalss]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finally finished reading Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. Wow, all I can say is wow. I didn't want to finish it, just wanted it to keep going and going.

With all the negatives (some of which I knew before), I now see MJ as even greater, if that's even possible. What an amazing book, what an amazing life.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I read the Jordan Rules last year, but growing up to hate Jordan and also being young so I never had the impression of him being a great teammate or anything, so it didn't hit me very hard. I thought it was ok. I'd like to read a biography on him some day, I'm sure he's had quite a life.

Had no time to read the first 3 days this week, and now I've blown through Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward yesterday and today. Very moving book. I get the Toni Morrison comparisons, mainly for the story. It's beautifully written for sure, and there's some incredibly poignant passages, but it's a tier under Toni Morrison in that respect (which is no insult, Toni Morrison is on the highest tier for me). It really does play out like a modern day Beloved.

It's set in modern day Mississippi. About a Black mother with a White boyfriend (who's parents do not approve of their relationship) and their 2 kids and their families. The boyfriend is getting out of jail and the mom, who is addicted to coke, takes the kids to pick him up. There's a lot going on. It's told from 3 points of view, the mother Leonie, her son JoJo, and a ghost of a kid who knew Leonie's father when he was younger. It's worth the read for sure.

Spoiler

"She’d come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the coast, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that’s what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her from her home in the middle of the day. Brought her here, and she learned the boats didn’t sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world."

"I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds."

"Even though the words were harsh, I saw hope in her face when she said them. She thought that if she taught me as much herbal healing as she could, if she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate."

"He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot."

It's the first fiction book released this year that I've read, but if it's the best one of the year (as the NBA said it is) then I'd say it was a pretty good year. On to Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I just binged the first 3 episodes and of The Defiant Ones on HBO and have the strongest urge to read a Tupac biography so I'm pivoting to Holler If You Hear Me (garbage title) by Michael Eric Dyson real quick, I'll come back to Bury My Heart before the end of the year.

[Qb]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Haven't read anything for a while, but with the semester winding down at work and a vacation looming, I picked up The Accidental President by A.J. Baime. It covers the first four months of Harry Truman's presidency, which of course were rather eventful to say the least.

[dsallupinyaarea]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Truman post made me remember.



Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America


Recently finished this on a flight. Given current events, it's an eerie, almost predictive text.


It's long, it's dry but that's kind of my speed.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished Anti-Intellectualism. Oh man, such a relief. Great, great book but not fun to read at all. I went on Amazon to see what else he's written and I think I'll end up reading more of his stuff, especially The American Political Tradition, which is a book of essays that follows changes in political thought through all the presidents.

Part V - Education

Spoiler

We were the second people to establish free common school, after Prussia, but didn't want to support it. "They would stand close to the vanguard among the countries of the world in the attempt to diffuse knowledge among the people, and then engage drifters and misfits as teachers and offer them the wages of draymen." Kinda interesting how that played out. Over time they came to decide that it was hard to find good teachers, so they settled for whatever, and then because the teachers sucked, they decided it must not be a profession worth paying. Also, it's a public position. So they put it under the umbrella of "can't pay public officials too much" but I guess ignored the Founding Fathers who also knew the presidency couldn't be paid too little or it would shrink the pool.

What helped was women teachers. Also interesting because the fact that so many women went to teach reinforced the idea that the position didn't need to be well paid because they thought women didn't need to be paid anything, catch-22 there I guess. Old stats but "in 1953 this country stood almost alone among the nations of the world in its feminization of teaching: women constituted ninte-three percent of its primary teachers and sixty percent of its secondary teachers. Only one country in Western Europe (Italy, with fifty-two percent) employed women for more than half of its secondary school personnel."

Gets into why it became harder to get good teachers. As education became more widespread, the need for great teachers at the university level to make something out of them and the higher pay made it worse for lower levels. Fights over what the purpose of school was. Universities said should be to prepare the mind, others said to prepare for work. When immigrants started pouring in in the early 20th century they scrambled to make an effort to teach how to be a good citizen so that kids could go home and teach their parents. They basically kept changing the focus of education away from critical thinking more toward utility or practicality. In 1893, there for 40 subjects, 27 real ones. By 1941, there were 274+, 59 of which "could be classified as academic studies." (as opposed to vocational.

Their justification for the vocation focus in education was that 60% of kids had no shot at success if educated in a way to promote their own thinking, and had to be taught to work instead. Then they tried to argue that because learning doesn't compound, it doesn't make sense to keep doing the same subjects as if it reinforces it (which obviously it does). Lots about John Dewey.

Conclusion

Spoiler

Basically sums everything up. Talks about artists and alienation in his time.

"We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition - "the tradition of the new."

"Alienation has ceased to be merely a fact of life and has taken on the character of a cure or a prescription for the proper intellectual regimen."

"Once one has accepted the idea that alienation is an inevitable consequence of the assertion of certain artistic or political values, it is easy to slip into the assumption that alienation has a kind of value in itself, much as one may assume that because genius is commonly "temperamental" one can begin to have the manifestations of genius by cultivating temperament."

"Our society is sick in may ways; but such health as it has lies in the plurality of the elements composing it and that freedom to interact with each other."

Very true for today: "Dogmatic, apocalyptic predictions about the collapse of liberal culture as the disappearance of high culture may be right or wrong; but one thing about them seems certain: they are more likely to instill self-pity and despair than the will to resist or the confidence to make the most of one's creative energies."

Feel like I just took an American History course. Amazing book, I loved it, but it'll be a minute before I jump into something similar. On to Of Mice and Men and Huck Finn.

I finally finished this and I share your sentiments exactly. A great book that I'm glad I read, but also glad that I finally finished it. It's a very interesting read throughout the majority of the book, but some parts are dry and meandering. Still, all of the topics are well structured and I found enough interest in all of them to read somewhat leisurely. Surprisingly the most interesting topic he covered was following the intellectual thread in Religion from the time of the Puritans to the 18th and 19th centuries.

Much is made of the Puritans somewhat strict views of society, but their adherence to and importance stressed upon intellect and learning was completely new to me. They're responsible for the structure of intellectual communities and colleges in the beginning of the country. Very interesting to read. For me the rest of the book wasn't nearly as interesting, but that speaks more to subverting a learned view of the Puritans from 12 years of history classes and not being familiar with the history of the remaining topics of the book.

With this being written in the 1960s after the conclusion of McCarthyism it's interesting to see some of these aspects of business, politics, and education repeated in various cycles. Some of these topics still have the same problems that were developed in some cases over 100 years ago. Even the "in-fighting" of intellectuals as they struggle between mass acceptance and voluntary alienation and individualism continues to this day.

Overall a great read and something I'm glad to have read. It's an interesting perspective on American history and one that I would easily recommend to any history buff or anyone looking to pinpoint problems of a modern "stupid" society.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Truman's actually the first president I ever really knew anything about. My dad was on the USS Truman for a while so his name was always familiar, I did a project on him in 3rd grade. I still remember FDR was 32 because of Truman (33) - 1.

Reading the description for Nixonland it sounds interesting, but man, you weren't kidding about it being long. Goodreads says almost 900 pages. It's something to look into, the 60's are a time I want to learn a lot more about but feel like I could spend a whole year doing it.

Finished Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac, by Michael Eric Dyson. It's part biography, part...explanation, thesis I guess on Tupac. It's less about the "who" than it is about the "how" or "why", as in the circumstances that led to Tupac becoming the person he was. Takes a lot of the facts surrounding Pac and contextualizes his rhymes and thought process through them. I thought it was pretty cool, just seeing rap (or a rap figure) dissected in such a manner was fascinating to me. Tupac, of all rappers, kind of begs explanation as to his huge impact and Dyson gets into explaining the things that made the man who he was. Talks about his childhood, his thoughts on education, his love for reading, his love for women, his love for his mom, his tattoos, etc. This one quote basically sums it up:

Spoiler

"Tupac’s ghetto sainthood features all of the elements that render historic figures as embodied presences of divine inspiration. It is surely difficult to trace the anatomy of his spiritual power, though the acclaim he continues to receive from youth across the world is adequate testimony to his enduring significance. But Tupac evoked black gods—of pain, truth, and poetry—with a beauty and power that are reserved for those who transcend greatness and leap straight into a mythic, spiritual, and saintly stratum. His strong black body bore the sins of his generation with restless fury. His eyes recorded the pain and agony that millions of others saw but could never as eloquently express. His hands wrote words of unsparing honesty about the self-destruction that dogged him once he made a name for himself. His voice spoke poetry of such haunting sincerity that all who heard it were moved—not necessarily in a positive fashion, but he could not be ignored."

My next fiction book will be another of the most acclaimed of the year, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. I was deciding between this and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which kinda sounds like a Korean East of Eden from the descriptions I've read. I'm going to do Bury My Heart after Little Fires Everywhere, and then decide what I want to do afterwards when I get there. I do know I want to start Infinite Jest at the top of the year. I had plans to start with something else, but I just want to get into it already.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Just finished Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste NG . Incredible book. It's hard deciding now which I prefer between this and Sing Unburied Sing. Sing Unburied Sing took place in the rural South (as opposed to the suburbs, like Little Fires did) so there were more descriptions of the environment and the scenery to set the stage. The setting in LFE is important but not because of the way it looks, moreso the way the people in the little town act.

It's hard to say even what it's about without spoiling too much: I'll just say it's about 2 families, one that's affluent and one that is more in the starving artist vein, and how they impact and interact with each other and change each other's perception of their own and the other family's lives. It's all about the characters, which I love. You really get the sense the people are real, with real motivations, and there's a lot of issues brought up that make you think. I'm still unsure how I feel about the resolution of the main conflict, I'll be thinking about it and the ending of this book in general for a while. Like Sing Unburied Sing, the story follows a path that kind of shows you there's only one way for this to end, but you still can't believe it as you're reading it. Just great stuff, I wanna read Celeste Ng's other book now for sure.

Spoiler

"To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layer in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image."

"It was just the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart."

"Every time she did this she was confronted by how Pearl smelled exactly the same. She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she carried alongside her."

"All up and down the street the houses looked like any others - but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors."

On to Bury My Heart take 2.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I started up Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday and got about a third of the way through already. I'm taking Bury My Heart slowly because each chapter is fairly depressing, alarming, and basically shakes the whole foundation of American History and imperialism.