OS Book Club Pt II

[SPTO]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Any of you guys use scribd? I just learned about it tonight and with my eyes these days it's easier for me to read via an electronic device. So any review would be nice.

$8.99 USD a month for ebooks and audio books with a HUGE library of selections sounds awesome. They have a 30 day free trial so i'm thinking of doing that when I go to Miami on the 17th.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

An ebook service without Kindle support?!? - 0/10, if you use another device it might be worth it, the free trial can't hurt. You can search the catalog without signing up to see if they have the kind of books you're usually into. Ebooks are like $10 new so if you read a lot the price covers itself easily. Their faq says they can limit you in certain areas so I'd look into that, don't like the sound of it.

Do the libraries up there let you check out ebooks?

[SPTO]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Do the libraries up there let you check out ebooks?

Yep they do, may need to look into that as well.

Well thanks for your thoughts

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I've been reading through the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. I loved the syfy show, and so I always wanted to check these out. I'm currently on book #4 "Summer Knight".

The series does not start out very strong. Jim Butcher has a great idea, but the writing isn't of of the same quality at the start. I'm not saying that the writing in the first book was bad, but it certainly was not great. Fortunately there have been significant improvements with each subsequent book.

There are a lot of similarities between book and show, but there are also quite a few differences. In the show Harry Dresden had a lot of people who didn't like him, but weren't necessarily openly hostile to him. The book version of Dresden is not so fortunate. This is probably my biggest gripe with the books so far. Many of the characters we met in the show lack the same kind of depth they had in the show. Several of them are either wholly bad or just simply mindless. One good thing though is that the books do explore the magic world much more than the show did though, and Dresden does more to take advantage of his abilities in the book.

The TV show ended before we could really explore the universe of the Dresden Files which was disappointing. So, it's pretty cool to get to see a bit more of this urban fantasy world with the books. I do wish the books went to even more detail though. The series is written with similar pacing of an hour long tv show and they only cover about 70-100 pages each book/episode.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

Spoiler

“Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.” Dostoyevsky

Camus believes that man's search for meaning in the face of a universe without any is absurd and asks whether or not it means one must commit suicide. He mentions philosophical suicide, which he basically terms the abandoning of reality for belief in other things, and at one point says Kafka fails as an absurd writer because his books have too much hope lol, but it's an interesting viewpoint. He compares all of this to the Greek legend Sisyphus who had to carry a rock up a mountain, watch it fall, and do the same next day, saying when he realizes how absurd the state of his existence is, he can begin to appreciate it. Kinda that the struggle against hopelessness is the only source of hope that you need. Hard to summarize, I'll let the quotes go, I get why David Simon loved this guy. There were other essays, all related in one way or another to the absurd. Really great read.

Spoiler

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.

Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless.

Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their task amid the most stupid of wars without considering themselves in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude nothing. There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

One becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that borders on waste.

It is essential to overcome the indifference and profound apathy felt in this country the moment there is any question of choosing between two shows, two careers, and, often, even two women. People make up their minds only when forced to do so. And advertising is well aware of this. It will assume American proportions, having the same reasons, both here and there, for getting desperate.

We, too, have conquered, moved boundaries, mastered heaven and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert. What imagination could we have left for that higher equilibrium in which nature balanced history, beauty, virtue, and which applied the music of numbers even to blood-tragedy? We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Spoiler

Fiction book about a guy who doesn't cry at his mother's death and falls into a series of unfortunate events ending up with him killing someone. Meusault is indifferent to life essentially, his mom dies and he feels nothing, can't even remember the day. A little time passes and he marvels how it's like nothing really changed, grim but you see what he's getting at, what does it even matter, yadda yadda. In jail he talks to a priest who can't believe that even after being sentenced to death he doesn't have any interest in God. There is a goodreads review that gets into the way Camus portrays, I dunno how to put it, normal human behavior, I like this part a lot:

"I don’t know that the world is completely meaningless, it is conventional rather than meaningless. That those conventions are arbitrary (decided by the culture we grew up in) doesn’t make them meaningless, it makes them conventional. I don’t think I would like to live in a world where people go up and kill Arabs pretty much at random and with impunity, but then again, we have already established this is precisely the world I do live in. My point is that it would be better if we did adhere to some sort of moral principles and that these should be better principles than ‘he should be killed because he didn’t cry at his mum’s funeral’."

Probably a weird response to a book, but it's a weird book.

Spoiler

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business. So I went back to work. I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.

He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. “Do you want my life to be meaningless?” he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn’t have anything to do with me, and I told him so.

Now, as I think back on it, I wasn’t in a hollow tree trunk. There were others worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of Maman’s ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get used to anything.

One day when the guard told me that I’d been in for five months, I believed it, but I didn’t understand it. For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to do. [YOU ONLY DO 2 DAYS]

I was listening, and I could hear that I was being judged intelligent. But I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.

“Well, so I’m going to die.” Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.

According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me.

Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Soren Kierkegaard

Spoiler

Read this because Camus talked about it a Kierkegaard in The Myth of Sisyphus. I really loved like half of this book, and the other half I didn't get a ton out of because I'm not religious. The title comes from the story of Lazarus, the argument is that because death is only the end of your human life, not your eternal (Christian) life, the true sickness is failing to realize one's true self. The word self appears at some times like 12 times in a sentence, it's hard to read at times, wiki is better for this:

"There are three kinds of despair presented in the book: being unconscious in despair of having a self, not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself. The first of these is described as "inauthentic despair," because this despair is born out of ignorance. In this state, one is unaware that one has a self separate from its finite reality. One does not realize that there is a power that created and continues to create one, and accepts finitude because one is unaware of possibility of being more inherent in selfhood. The second type of despair is refusing to accept the self outside of immediacy; only defining the self by immediate, finite terms. This is the state in which one realizes that one has a self, but wishes to lose this painful awareness by arranging one's finite life so as to make the realization unnecessary. This stage is loosely comparable to Sartre's bad faith. The third type is awareness of the self but refusal to acknowledge one's dependence on love, i.e., the power that created one. In this stage, one accepts the eternal and may or may not acknowledge love, but refuses to accept an aspect of the Self that one in reality is, that is to say, the self that one is in love. Kierkegaard identifies this type of demonic despair as the most heightened form of despair."

There's a lot of good stuff in the first half or so dealing with despair that can apply to non-religious thinking, but the second half mostly revolves around sin so your mileage may vary there. Dense read, but the parts that make sense make too much sense.

Spoiler

On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die. In this it has much in common with the condition of the mortally ill person who is in the throes of death but cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as though there were hope of life. No, the hopelessness is that even the last hope, death, is gone. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life. But when one learns to know the even more horrifying danger, one hopes for death. When the danger is so great that death has become the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die.

The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.

The world thinks it is dangerous to venture in this way, and why? Because one might lose; the prudent thing is not to venture. And yet by not venturing it is so dreadfully easy to lose what would be hard to lose by venturing and which, whatever you lost, you will in any case never lose in this way, so easily, so completely, as though it were nothing – oneself. For if I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven’t ventured at all, who helps me then?

The believer possesses the ever-sure antidote to despair: possibility; since for God everything is possible at every moment. This is the health of faith which resolves contradictions. The contradiction here is that in human terms the undoing is certain and that still there is possibility.

The youth despairs over the future, as a praesens in futuro [present in the future]; there is something in the future he is not willing to take for his own, which means that he does not want to be himself. The adult despairs over the past as a praesens in praeterito [present in the past] which refuses to recede further into the past, for he is not so much in despair as to have succeeded in forgetting it completely.

The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and joy. But it is easy on closer examination to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country [STRINGER BELL?!] , that really he rules over nothing; his position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment. Ultimately it is arbitrarily based upon the self itself. Consequently, the despairing self is forever building only castles in the air, and is always only fencing with an imaginary opponent. All these experimental virtues look very splendid; they fascinate for a moment, like oriental poetry; such self-discipline, such imperturbability, such ataraxy, etc. border almost on the fabulous. Yes, that they do for sure, and beneath it all there is nothing.

Envy is concealed admiration. A man who admires something but feels he cannot be happy surrendering himself to it, that man chooses to be envious of what he admires. He then speaks another language. In this language of his the thing he admires is said to be nothing, something stupid and humiliating and peculiar and exaggerated. Admiration is happy self-surrender, envy is unhappy self-assertion.

Comprehension is man’s circumference in relation to the human; but to believe is man’s relation to the divine.

As a rule, people are only occasionally conscious, conscious of the major decisions, and the everyday is not registered at all. They are spirit after a fashion once a week for an hour – which is of course a rather brutish way of being spirit. Yet eternity is the essential continuity, and demands this continuity of man, that he be conscious of himself as spirit and have faith.

‘From men man learns to speak, from the gods to keep silent.’

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine

Spoiler

Don't really know what made me pick this up, might've been a sub-conscious reaction after getting through Kierkegaard. Got the Christian take, now the other side. Thomas Paine's take on Christianity, he's a Deist like many of the Founders and others of the Enlightened generation. I like it because it's written in two parts: the first was him starting off by saying anyone can believe what they want, he's just going to give his take. You can tell even this disclaimer was not enough and he must've gotten mountains of **** because the second half he's like "oh you guys wanna question me? I'll go book by book and show you why this is wrong". The first half was much better but the second half was funny just because of the way it came about. The main argument in the first half is basically that none of us saw any of the events happen so believing the stories as they are with no proof is more showing strong faith in man than in God, and as we know man lies or makes mistakes so often, it's more likely the unbelievable things are just not true. Says that the only way we can discover God is through his creation, basically we can never know, can only observe, praise science and all that.

Spoiler

A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given.

The more unnatural anything is, the more it is capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration.

Learning does not consist, as the schools now make it consist, in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names.

We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

IT has often been said, that anything may be proved from the Bible, but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.

Religion, by such means, becomes a thing of form, instead of fact—of notion, instead of principles; morality is banished to make room for an imaginary thing called faith, and this faith has its origin in a supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. A man, by hearing all this nonsense lumped and preached together, confounds the God of the creation with the imagined God of the Christians, and lives as if there were none.

We can know God only through his works. We cannot have a conception of any one attribute but by following some principle that leads to it. We have only a confused idea of his power, if we have not the means of comprehending something of its immensity. We can have no idea of his wisdom, but by knowing the order and manner in which it acts. The principles of science lead to this knowledge; for the Creator of man is the Creator of science; and it is through that medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Spoiler

I really loved this book. The feels just build and build and build and then hit you in the face at the end. I didn't know what to expect after reading and loving Little Fires Everywhere and then going backwards but I'm glad I did. Equally as compelling a read and the way it all comes together is just beautiful.

The book starts in 1977 and a 15 year old Asian girl named Lydia has gone missing before soon being found dead and her family is trying to piece together what happened, was she killed, did she kill herself, etc. You go back in the past to meet her parents: her dad is an Asian man who his entire life has been side-eyed and made fun of because he was the only Asian guy in rooms full of white people in the 40's and 50's. All he wants for his daughter is for her to be looked at as normal. He encourages her all her life to make friends and be personable because that's what everyone wants, to be popular. His mom is a White woman who grew up wanting to be a doctor at a time where she was told there was no need to work that hard when she's as beautiful as she is and her mom (Lydi's grandmom) was the quintessential housewife, even keeping her house just as clean when her husband left her and her daughter moved out. When the father and mother met, the mother was a student and the father a grad student teacher, she got pregnant, they got married, she ended up having to give up school and become the housewife her mother wanted her to be. All she wants for her daughter is to be able to do whatever she wants to do and never be held back by her mother in the way she was by hers. She buys her all kinds of science and anatomy books to encourage her to become a doctor, and Lydia loves her mom so much she goes along with anything she says. There's a catalyst for that particular kind of love but I don't want to spoil it. There's 2 other kids too but they have their own roles in trying to figure out what happened. That's really just backstory. The plot goes from present to past, from one character to the next, but it flows in a way that makes it easily readable. Between this and Little Fires, she's on the auto-buy list. The title is perfect, this is human miscommunication perfectly captured in a book. Hug your family, man. This one really will get to you.

Spoiler

How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.

You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.

You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.

Everything that loomed so large close up—school, their parents, their lives—all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they’d never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

There is nowhere to go but on.

Now onto The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esme Weijun Wang, who is a mental health advocate and former lab reasearcher at Stanford and suffers from schizoaffective disorder. She's trying to show how wide ranging schizophrenia really is. Should be interesting, not sure what I'll get into after this. Still need to get into Black Leopard but I want to really have time to sit with it when I do. We'll see.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Damn. I need to get back on here. I set a goal for the rest of the year so we'll see how it goes. Nothing is really calling to me. Even video games and tv shows are feeling bland to me.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I need quick hitters right now, it's too easy for me to get bogged down in a 600 pager and lose momentum. 300 pages or whatever Everything I Never Told you was perfect. My plan for sticking to stuff from this year is ruined but there's still a couple things I need to check out. I'm thinking either the first in the Witcher books or starting up the Zahn-Thrawn Trilogy, I can use some restoration of faith in the Star Wars universe lol. I'll get into Black Leopard before the summer is up.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

There are two (maybe three) Witcher books that are basically compiled short stories. Good for summer reading and won't get you bogged down in anything. I'm hoping to finish the Binti trilogy, start back up with Baldwin, and work my way up to this 1200 page Sanderson book I've had sitting on my dresser since October.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Steelheart is also on my shortlist speaking of Sanderson. Feel you on working your way up, theres a superhero book I really want to get into but it's like 800 pages so I'm waiting for the right time.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Steelheart is also on my shortlist speaking of Sanderson. Feel you on working your way up, theres a superhero book I really want to get into but it's like 800 pages so I'm waiting for the right time.

That reminds me I need to finish the Darker Shade of Magic series so I can jump into Villains.

[DieHardYankee26]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Interesting I guess

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/harry-potter-non-fiction-ebooks-history-of-magic-jk-rowling-pottermore

[SPTO]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I finished up Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers which was originally published in 1984. Like all of Peter Golenbock's sports oral histories this one was excellent. It was very lovingly written and goes beyond just the old Brooklyn Dodgers players and the many years there but he also spoke to fans who grew up in that era including Larry King. The book took detours to do chapters on various aspects such as the importance of radio, the ethnic makeup of Brooklyn, the youth culture of the time and profiles on various players. It bogs down a little at the end but overall it's a first class read.

4 out of 5 stars.


I'm struggling to find another book to read. I started one on the '86 MLB postseason but it's written in a dry reportorial style that doesn't suit me. I do have a few other books saved on Scribd and will try once again early this coming week. It'll most likely be The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer a 2011 book that looks at the author's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Mass. General Hospital and explores the history of the accursed disease.

[rockchisler]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Slowly reading at the mountains of madness by HP Lovecraft.


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Ordered a couple of books as I have been getting that urge once again. Something about reading just makes me feel better and I haven't had that feeling for awhile unfortunately. At least the motivation is coming back.

Anyway, I ordered The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (must have a thing for Angela's). Criminal Justice reform is something that I have been steadily becoming more and more interested in and passionate about.

When I get home I'm going to go through my bookshelf and pull out a couple of interest to read after I get restarted on Binti.

I will also try to use this as a starting point to start keeping a notebook for quotes, notes, and thoughts on whatever I'm reading. A diary of sorts I suppose. One of my ideas was to track all the spells used in Harry Potter the next time I go through those again.

[JayCutlersCig]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Reading “Sharp Objects” by Gillian Flynn. Not a fan of her writing style, but it’s somehow entertaining to read.

Finished “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” the other week and it’s a book I couldn’t recommend more. It’s a little pretentious, at times, but the satire is biting and downright hilarious. It gives a fresh perspective on America’s most controversial conflict and it really makes you think about what the servicemen and women *actually* go through.

But don’t watch the movie...mother of mercy don’t watch it.


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports