OS Book Club Pt II

[ProfessaPackMan]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Fresh, if you liked the book then you’ll definitely love the movie. Denzel’s performance was simply amazing and Spike did a great job on this one.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Fresh, if you liked the book then you’ll definitely love the movie. Denzel’s performance was simply amazing and Spike did a great job on this one.

Yeah, I was checking Netflix, Prime, etc for any Spike Lee movies. Nothing really out there without renting or buying. Which is fine. I just need to make time for 3.5 hours of movie.

Surprisingly Spotify has a couple of albums collecting some of his speeches. Should be fun.

[ProfessaPackMan]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Yeah, I was checking Netflix, Prime, etc for any Spike Lee movies. Nothing really out there without renting or buying. Which is fine. I just need to make time for 3.5 hours of movie.

Surprisingly Spotify has a couple of albums collecting some of his speeches. Should be fun.

Netflix must’ve removed it because I know they had it on there for the last few months.

Why they decided to remove it a month early, I have no idea.l.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Similarly to reading the Malcolm X autobiography this book has been stuck in my head ever since I started reading it. It's premise is fairly common - a world/society in the throes of collapsing. Fortunately, current events weren't quite what they are today. While reading this book I didn't extrapolate nearly as much onto our own society as I would have if I read it this past week. Considering the timeline is set 4-5 years from now I suppose it doesn't feel like quite a stretch of the imagination as Butler crafts her dying world around limited resources, the fall of economies, and the decimation of human decency in the face of extinction.

Butler tells the story of Lauren - a late teenage girl living with her family and neighbors in a walled off community in an outskirts suburb of Los Angeles. The book starts with the gradual increase of attacks and plundering attempts of the neighborhood by roving bands of thieves, drug addicts, and any other person desperate enough to risk the attempt. Eventually the dam bursts and the tide floods in. Lauren is forced to leave her community and trek out in search of a safe haven for her and her followers.

While others have been clinging to the last remnants of the way things were Lauren has been preparing for this eventuality. She's been reading instructional books on survival skills, gardening, hunting, field medicine, as well as preparing supplies for the day its time to actual leave and escape. She is not only looking to survive, but to chart a new way of survival and living. Part of this is her preparation, but largely she is shaped by thoughts and writings that she chronicles under the Earth Seed religion.

Throughout the book Lauren weaves her spiritual and philosophical beliefs into poetry and verses. The beginning of this is her definition of God which at its most basic is Change equals God. Her principle idea is to not only prepare for Change, but to also to try and harness its power to enact Good Change. It's an interesting premise that Butler weaves throughout the book. Not only the invention and development of a practical religion, but exploring it's philosophy in the face of destruction and chaos - essentially two of the biggest catalyst for change. It creates a fascinating backdrop that doesn't seem too far fetched.

Butler's crumbling world is built with surprising logical detail. There's zealot politicians. Water and food shortages. Cities fully owned and run by corporations as people trade food and safety for indentured servitude. Fires ravage the landscape and threaten to transform into monstrous threats at drop of a hat. Its a backdrop that wasn't as familiar in the early 90s when it was written as it has been in recent memory.

This book has been circulating in my head a lot since I finished it. The teaching of the Earth Seed religion in and of itself is truly fascinating, but Butler also weaves an interesting and entertaining narrative that addresses our base indecencies, but also our lofty ideals and generosity. The crumpling of a society and the verge of looking into the precipice is all too real currently, but even if this wasn't going on I can't think of a book with a more thorough or more logical look at the destruction and chaos that ensues.

Spoiler

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

None of us goes out to school anymore. Adults get nervous about kids going outside.

They're desperate or crazy or both. That's enough to make anyone dangerous.

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

How many are going to starve later because of destroyed crops? That's nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don't hear the warnings until it's too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where's safety for them anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? We're almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we'll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have. How will God - my father's God - behave toward us when we're poor?

'We can get ready. That's what we've got to do now. Get ready for what's going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don't know what they're doing!'

'Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven't been wiped out by a plague so they're still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they'll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they're waiting for the old day to come back.'

What is it in young boys that makes them want to wander off alone and get killed?

'They kill little kids. Out here in the world, they kill kids every day.'

Children were the keys to most of the adults present.

I've been reading Maya Angelou's fourth memoir book Heart of a Woman, but with everything going on the past week haven't read much since last Monday. Hoping to finally get back to that and probably start one of the tomes I've been putting off for awhile. Working from home through at least April 5th so probably be a good opportunity.

[DJ]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Farenheit 451

Read this one again recently and 60-plus years later, so many themes and commentaries about our future society ring true to this day.

Montag on the run gives off some The Running Man vibes, too, which I find very interesting. Have to imagine Stephen King (one of his Bachman novels) was inspired in some way by 451 when he penned that one.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou

The fourth memoir in her autobiographical series, The Heart of Woman finds Maya navigating through the tumultuous times of Civil Rights in the late 50s and early 60s as well as navigating from New York, to Cairo, and Ghana.

Her previous memoir focused on her singer/dancegirl/performing artist which ended with her touring Europe with the production of Porgy & Bess. Returning home from touring she weaves a path that crosses across Billie Holiday Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, numerous African political leaders, and countless Pan-African contributors. She recounts her time as office admin for the SCLC helping to promote the speeches, teachings, and call for equality of Martin Luther King Jr. She moves on to form her own group of black women artists, performers, and writers wanting to contribute to any and all civil rights groups successfully putting on a play production and unsuccessfully staging a protest at the UN in the aftermath of Patrice Lumumba's assassination. Meanwhile, Maya's social circles begin to encompass more and more Pan-Africanism activists and geopolitical leaders from Africa. She meets her future husband Vusumzi Make and travels with him to Cairo before eventually leaving him and ending up in Ghana by the end of the book.

Of course, not everything revolves around her activism. She continues to provide and raise her son Guy trying her best to provide for him and guide him into becoming a man. As with any child there are struggles and moments of levity. One of the most vivid moments in the book comes when Maya visits the grandmother of a local gang-leader who has been troubling her son. She goes with pistol in purse and effectively threatens everyone under the grandmother's roof if her son is troubled anymore.

For all that she does during this time in her life she is still full of insecurity and low self esteem. Perhaps the most eye-opening part of the whole book is simply watching her continue to grow, make plenty of mistakes. She works to move past them and tries to use them to better herself in someway. Her self-growth is as interesting as her crossing paths with Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. She offers insight that rarely anyone gives. We see these people as already achieving their status - already experiencing success and being the top of their game, but from the other-side that feels to not ever really be the case. Maya continues to grow, continues to evolve. She experiences success and successes many of us can only dream of, but she also experiences her own failures. Her insecurity is an obstacle that she has not successfully navigated around as it leads her down some poor decision paths.

As with the previous three books I cannot recommend this enough. Maya's turn of phrase is remarkable - she captures the unease, obsession, fear, and inner turmoil of being herself during a time where her peers are being killed and beaten for practically nothing. She brings levity to her dark moments and as always she is not one to beat around the bush as she reminiscences through her mistakes on her own journey.

Spoiler

I had to trust life, since I was young enough to believe that life loved the person who dared to live it.

'Remember, Billie Holiday told you, 'You can't get too high for somebody to bring you down.''

I fretted at the unrelenting diatribe, not because I disagreed but because I didn't think whites interesting enough to consume all my thoughts, nor powerful enough to control all my movements.

Youthful cynicism is sad to observe, because it indicates not so much knowledge learned from bitter experiences as insufficient trust even to attempt the future.

If I ended in defeat, at least I would be trying. Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition.

Despite the harshness of their lives, I have always found that older black women are paragons of generosity. The right plea, arranged the right way, the apt implication, persuade the hungriest black woman into sharing her last biscuit.

Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.

The cliche of whites being ignorant of blacks was not only true, but understandable. Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon's scalpel.

Maybe the cook's gin bottle was a lamp, and I had certainly been rubbing it.

Every ill I knew at home, each hateful look on a white face, each odious rejection based on skin color, the mockery, the disenfranchisement, the lamentations and loud wailing for a lost world, irreclaimable security, all that long-onerous journey to misery, which had not ended yet, had begun just below our plane. I wept.

So instead of starting the tome that is Sanderson's Way of Kings I've decided to read The RZA's Tao of the Wu.

[mattlanta]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I'm currently listening to The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Body Varty. It's an audiobook that my friend recommended to me, and so far, it's only been alright. I didn't think it would be this simple, but I guess it's not a bad listen when I'm driving to work. I signed up for Amazon's Audible services, so next month I figure I'll buy a book with a more interesting subject. Maybe Sapiens or Brief History of Nearly Everything. I'm not much of a podcast listener, so maybe I can listen to these when I'm driving or doing work around the house.

Also, since I have more free time on my hands, I may dabble in reading some of the Witcher books.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

The Diabolic by S.J. Kincaid.

Picked this up like a year ago, and somehow it found its way to my coffee table recently.

My most revealing comment on it would be that there are at least two more books in the series, and I don't plan on reading them.

The concept was interesting enough. A kind of body guard engineered to singularly protect a single person, and then that bodyguard gets sent to masquerade as that individual when she is summoned to be a political hostage. I expected some mixture of action (genetically engineered bodyguard) and court intrigue (political hostage). The story missed the mark on both accounts.

[KSUowls]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Has anyone ever read the Warhammer books and have a suggestion on where to begin?

It's always been a fascinating universe to me (from the games), but there are SO many different authors out there.

[dickey1331]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I've been reading the Mistborn series and currently on the 2nd book. I have enjoyed the series so far but something just seems off. I like the series but I feel like it moves really slow and can be a drag sometimes. Its hard to describe the feeling. Ill set an hour to read but after 20-30 min I just have to take a break.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

Sweet another Mistborn reader in here.

I've had that happen to me before, but I think for me it was just lack of true motivation. Unfortunately, I haven't read anything in the past month or so.

[JohnnytheSkin]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I've been reading the Mistborn series and currently on the 2nd book. I have enjoyed the series so far but something just seems off. I like the series but I feel like it moves really slow and can be a drag sometimes. Its hard to describe the feeling. Ill set an hour to read but after 20-30 min I just have to take a break.

I found the second and third books didn't hold my interest like the first. Kind of turned me off Sanderson. Still waiting to see how Stormlight Archive turns out. Heard good things but it's a work in progress.

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[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I personally liked the second and third books better particularly with regard to developing the political climate of the world and expanding it that way. I haven't dived into the second era yet.

I keep going to start Stormlight, but then put it back down as soon as I pick it up.

Just haven't been motivated to read for the past two months.

[dickey1331]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

I also have some of the books in the Stormlight series in my collection and I’ll eventually get to them. It’s supposed to be 10 books which is nuts. He will probably finish them before we even get the next GOT book.


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[tarheelguy4736]

Re: OS Book Club Pt II

In the past couple of weeks I have read a few books, as I have plenty of time to do so right now lol.

Batman: The Court of Owls (Novel) - For anyone that knows of Scott Snyder's New 52 run of Batman that introduced the Court of Owls, I highly suggest reading this book. Its very well done and follows the original story line perfectly. It takes place a few months after the Court of Owls story line ends in the comics. It sheds light on some of the workings of the Court and their true motivation. I really enjoyed it and hope to see more novels done about Batman.

The Atlantis Gene - This is my second time reading through. I enjoyed it the first time but that was a few years ago. Given everything going on in the world, it seemed to be fitting to read it again now. For anyone who likes sci-fi, conspiracy type novels, then I suggest this one as well. Its part of a 3 book series (The Atlantis Gene, The Atlantis Plague, and The Atlantis World - written by A.G. Riddle). The author delves more in to the science of things, which I like, and tries to explain how humans came about and how we evolved in to who we are today. I am currently on The Atlantis Plague after finishing the first book and still enjoying the series. Definitely suggest to anyone wanting a series to read.