OS Book Club Pt II

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

It's something that was really apparent to me while reading Beloved and something I've been noticing while reading I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - putting these voices in my head with different effects.

Morrison puts you into the head of each of her character while writing from an omnipresent perspective which I find astounding. Ng approaches the same way, but not all of her characters have a voice and the ones that do are quiet compared to Morrison. Maya Angelou reads like you're sitting down with her and a cup of coffee having a conversation. Bradbury replaces your own reading voice with his and you don't even realize it until the flow of his words are tumulting through your mind like waterfalls.

It's fun to pick up on. As much praise as video games get for letting you explore worlds books are still the premium in that area to me.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I might read The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman or Kindred by Octavia Butler instead of doubling up on Langston Hughes just to get another author in.

Ordered my first batch of Library of America books:

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial set (essentially everything he ever wrote or thought lol)
Baseball A Literary Anthology
Becoming Americans: 4 Centuries of Immigrant Writings
Both sets of American Speeches (over 1600 pages of speeches from the Revolution until Clinton, I live for this)
W.E.B. Du Bois Writings

Went through the whole site and these are the ones I still have to get (thanks for bankrupting me Fresh):

Spoiler

The Writings of John Adams
Frederick Douglass Autobiographies
Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures
Basketball: Great Writing About America's Game
Football: Great Writing About the National Sport
Collected Works of Zora Neale Hurston
Thomas Jefferson Writings
John Marshall Writings
Constitution Debates
Independence Debates
Richard Wright Edition
Mencken Prejudices
The Cool School
William T. Sherman Memoirs
John Steinbeck Collection
George Washington Writings
Slave Narratives
Harlem Renaissance Novels

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Those LoA volumes are great. A little unwieldy depending on their size, but they were worth the price easily.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Those LoA volumes are great. A little unwieldy depending on their size, but they were worth the price easily.

I don't doubt it. I'm trying to figure out how I want to tackle the Baseball anthology. I looked through some of the contributors, and the list is incredible: Amiri Baraka, Don DeLillo, Robert Frost, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen King, Phillip Roth, among others. Looks like 60+ articles/stories. I might do one per day starting in March. I'm dying for baseball.

[dickey1331]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Just finished all 4 books of "The Destroyer" fantasy series by Michael Scott Earle.

Really enjoyed it.



It's about a man, Kaiyer, who is awakened by humans in a tomb but doesn't have any memory of how he got there, or how he was asleep.

He can't even understand their language.



The humans wake him to fight off a race of Elves who are stronger and superior to humans in every way. But according to legends, Kaiyer is even stronger and more fierce than them.

The legends tell of him raising an army and nearly wiping the Elves off the face of the earth.

But now the Elf's are back and they need his help.



Throughout the books the story is told from Kaiyer's perspective and a few other secondary characters.

But what makes the series unique is that Kaiyer's chapters flash back and forth between his timeline. And he has several different points to his history starting from when he was a slave to the Elves all the way to his assent in the Human army.



The sex is overly gratuitous - almost to the point you'd swear it was written by a 14YO horndog.

But there's only about 2 scenes in each novel.

The story is very unique and because you don't get the full history of Kaiyer and what happened to him until Book 4, it makes you want to devour all 4 books as quickly as possible.



Book 5 is apparently on its way. Will be looking forward to that.



P.S. For what it's worth, I'm not a big fantasy reader. I've read my share, but it's not my go-to genre.

This book isn't 'high' fantasy whatsoever. It's a simple read and a really cool concept, IMO.

I noticed the first book is free on the Kindle store. I’ll have to add it to my list.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Money99]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I noticed the first book is free on the Kindle store. I’ll have to add it to my list.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

That's how I got hooked.
On the recommendation from a friend, I was actually looking for a Conan book and that book came up in a search.
It had a good review rating and was free so I figured, Why not?
Glad I did.
Hope you enjoy it as well!

Sent from my LG-K210 using Operation Sports mobile app

[hvegasooner]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Just finished Booker T my rise to Wrestling royalty By Booker T Huffman it covers his career from the beginning to WCW, WWE, TNA and then back to WWE and up to the hall of fame. he won 35 titles and the many stories he tells are amazing. and a candid story of his family life outside the ring. Great book 4 stars

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

My only complaint is the book ends. Angelou seamlessly weaves together small vignettes of her life and fashions them together in a search for identity for herself, her womanhood, and her race. Her tone is an unguarded one as she retells the peculiar and spectacular events of her early life. Some of these would break others, but she rose above her tribulations and confronts them in a matter of fact manner that creates a poetical flow from bluntly describing her life.

As I explained above I think the greatest authors have the ability to put their voice in the head of the reader. I had the sense throughout much of the book that Maya was sitting across the table from me, coffee in hand, and she was telling me about her life in a conversational way. She didn't bat an eye during the hardest parts, but she was pointed in her retellings of her emotions and thought process. As different as my life is from her's I still found it easy to connect to her life and her issues with confidence, her teenage curiosity, and her ability to extrapolate logic even if it was faulty. There is never a sense of a victim when reading this and considering the trials she conquered it would be easy to excuse her for doing so. Yet, she looks back on her life with an "it is what it is" attitude and brings the reader into her life without regret or pity, but with a bevy of understanding through her beautiful mastery of words and phrase.

Spoiler

If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news.

We learned the times tables without understanding their grand principle, simply because we had the capacity and no alternative.

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

But what mother and daughter understand each other, or even have the sympathy for each other's lack of understanding?

Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft.

Momma could not take the smallest achievement for granted. People whose history and future were threatened each day by the extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.

Through food we learned that there were other people in the world.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

My goal is to read the rest of her memoir series throughout the year.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Jonathan Abrams is releasing a book tomorrow called All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire. People here may remember him from Grantland, the book is an oral history, which he did for Grantland and were always fantastic. His book, From Prep to Pros, on different cases of high school kids and how they prepared to go straight to the NBA while that was allowed is great so I'd expect this to be great as well.

I haven't seen The Wire but I already know a relative I'm gonna get this for.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Well that's an automatic purchase. I was planning on going through the series again this Summer. Might as well add supplemental reading for it.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Baldwin's second to last novel, first person from the perspective of a 19 year old girl in the 70's trying to get her boyfriend out of jail who's been falsely imprisoned. Not much to say, Baldwin is my favorite author/writer/human, it's another hit. I thought it was even better than Go Tell It on the Mountain. I'm excited for the movie. I will continue the quest of reading everything he ever wrote sometime later this year. I especially want to read Just Above My Head, his last novel, seems to encompass a lot of the themes of his smaller novels into one big one. I think I'll love that. People that don't like James Baldwin, don't like themselves.

Spoiler

"The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are."

"The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more then the mind does, why what clings to it clings. But once whatever it is lights on you, it doesn’t go away"

"To do much is to have the power to place these people where they are, and keep them where they are. These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned. To do much is to have the power and the necessity to dictate to the damned."

On to Ruling Over Monarchs, autobiography of a Negro League umpire. Should be good.

[WaitTilNextYear]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Finished my romp through some Star Wars canon and near-canon works. In addition to Darth Plagueis, I finished Tarkin (which is a sort of partial biography of Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin) and then Catalyst (which is a direct prequel to the movie Rogue One and centered on the Erso family).

Catalyst was the quickest read and probably had the best story. Tarkin is a bit shorter and also an interesting character study. Plagueis is more dense and longer and will test your patience. Ultimately worth the read to see Siddious' origin story though. All of those books were authored by James Luceno.

Picking up The Arm by Jeff Passan next...

[Qb]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Put in a library request for The Storm Before The Storm by Mike Duncan, author/host of The History of Rome podcast. It focuses on the late Republic leading up to the rise of Caesar, which is something I don't remember too much from my college classes. I feel like we spent more time on Caesar and the subsequent civil war & transition to the Principate. Maybe I'll be surprised; I listened to Hardcore History on the conquest of Gaul (around the same period) and it was more familiar than I expected.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants, and Stars: True Tales of Breaking Barriers, Umpiring Baseball Legends, and Wild Adventures in the Negro Leagues by Bob Motley

Baseball is life. Baseball history is American history, for better or worse.

This is the life story of a man who dreamt of becoming a major league umpire. He originally wanted to play, but after a Negro League team came into his hometown and basically let him try out on the spot and he embarrassed himself, he changed his sights. He fights in a segregated regiment in WW2, comes back to umpire in the Negro Leagues, tries to get into umpire school (can't for years because of his race), then finally gets in and graduates from umpire school at the top of his class only to be told he can't work in the league because of his race.

Where the story shines for me is when he's telling tales directly from his time in the Negro Leagues. To have seen players like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks before they became who we know them as just sounds incredible. The idea that we could've missed out on Willie Mays because of racism is insane. How good was Satchel Paige in his prime if he came into the majors at 41 and pitched to a 165 ERA+? How many homers would Josh Gibson have hit?

The thing that stood out to me is the joy and showmanship he describes as having been key to the Negro Leagues success, and it's importance to the community. It became clearer to me why I've been falling further and further away from baseball and more towards basketball. Maybe I need to start watching Winter League games, seems like they're more in tune to the spirit I want to see. Baseball being fun, and people being allowed to have fun within it, seem foreign to me. Hearing that pastors would have to hurry up their sermons to let everyone out and that towns would close down their shops to go to the game, it was like football is to certain towns now. Finding out the Negro League all star games were often outdrawing MLB all star games was cool. I'll add quotes later.

Next up is Kindred. I want to find books about Willie Mays and Buck O'Neil now as well, along with a more comprehensive history of the Negro Leagues. I'll save that for later.

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I read The Hobbit for the first time in about 15 years, and I loved it. It's one of the only books that I can count on one hand that I rated a 5 stars on GoodReads. And it's also one of those books that, regardless of your age, you can just sit down and enjoy anywhere. I've downloaded The Fellowship of the Ring on my Kindle app, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to breeze right through it like I did the Hobbit.

I still have Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to finish (I'm about halfway through). And I plan on listening to Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell on audiobook when I get the chance.