What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

[Ajidica]

I watched the SciFi channel Dune miniseries over the weekend, I when I was home for Memorial Day I dug out my copy of Dune.
You know, the book about what would happen if Lawrence of Arabia took a lot of drugs and spent his time high as a kite.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I'm listening to an audiobook called Whispers of the Gods, interviews with the men who played baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. It's enjoyable enough, but I was hoping for something like the audiobook of The Glory of their Times, which had the actual interview audio. There are few things better to me than listening to old men telling stories, except maybe watching young women sing. Whispers has the stories but we don't get the actual men telling them, and the narrator's use of inflection/emotive emphasis/etc is liable to be very different. The content itself is interesting, though: one player was obsessed with Shoeless Joe and (in his youth) hunted down one of Jackson's contemporaries to get the real scoop on the Black Sox affair. The contemporary believed that Jackson was used as a scapegoat. There's also disagreement between the interviewed players over things like the introduction of Jackie Robinson: some said there wasn't any hazing, some said there was hazing but it was the same as any new guy would get to make him prove himself, and others who said Jackie was targeted. World War 2 is a big factor in a lot of these guys stories: one man said the first time he saw a major league game, he was pitching it -- just a couple of months out of high school. That happened in part because so many of the players went off to war, of course. A lot of these interviews happened for the authors' other baseball books, so it's not the deliberately created record that Glory is.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Great book

Welcome to Off Topic!

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just finished Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, in which a man from corporate America quits his job and begins spending time in 'back row' America, the ghettos, slums, and forgotten rust belt towns. The author, Chris Arnade, spends considerable time in some areas and is forced to reconsider some of his views and values -- but in other areas, he visits only briefly and they're used to illustrate a narrative of what he already believed. I'm intimately familiar with one of the towns he visited and was positively disgusted by how cavalierly he treated it. On the whole, though, this was a good read about the fallout of globalization, the arrogance of America's coastal elite, and the limits of prevailing notions of how people escape poverty, crime, etc.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Great book

I picked up a copy of that myself, a little while ago. Haven't started it yet. Vonnegut has long been one of my 'blindspots.'

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

The only Vonnegut I've read so far was Player Piano, and I enjoyed it immensely. The man really knows how to write.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I'd recommend Hocus Pocus, my favourite Vonnegut novel. Not really Sci fi, more social satire set in the near future, very dark humour.

 

[Takhisis]

Just read Don Julio, the unauthorised biography of Julio Grondona, ‘strongman’-for-life of Argentina's football and vice-president of FIFA who was very aptly named ‘the godfather’ and was one of the major figures who helped shape professional association football into what it is today.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The only Vonnegut I've read so far was Player Piano, and I enjoyed it immensely. The man really knows how to write.

I'd recommend Hocus Pocus, my favourite Vonnegut novel. Not really Sci fi, more social satire set in the near future, very dark humour.

I enjoyed Cat's Cradle and am hoping to make ice 9 in the freezer one day.

 

[FriendlyFire]

To the Ends of the Earth
So far excellent retelling of 1945 Pacific war, including Japanese sources.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hans Christian Andersen, The Shadow.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Still only halfway through Antony & Cleopatra. At this point I'm wondering why anyone was stupid enough to trust Antony with an army.

 

[Takhisis]

Actually, Antony was a capable military leader.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Actually, Antony was a capable military leader.

That's not the impression I get from this novel. Of course this is just one person's perspective.

 

[Takhisis]

For dramatic purposes maybe? At the battle of Philippi Brutus defeated Octavius while Antony defeated Cassius.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Still only halfway through Antony & Cleopatra. At this point I'm wondering why anyone was stupid enough to trust Antony with an army.

Supposedly like Ney he was a lion on the battlefield

For dramatic purposes maybe? At the battle of Philippi Brutus defeated Octavius while Antony defeated Cassius.

Although Cassius was supposedly much more warlike than Brutus. it was Cassius who took over after Crassus was killed was killed at Carrhae.

 

[Takhisis]

I know! But still Cassius lost a battle which, judging by the abovementioned article's chronicle, showed rather poor leadership in general. Including Cassius losing his nerve and killing himself because he thought Brutus had lost rather than won.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Still plodding through Zanoni, and I've saved some choice passages:

Spoiler :

His ambition of art was associated with the applause and estimation of that miserable minority of the surface that we call the Public.

Spoiler :

Do you remember, when I told you to struggle for the light, that I pointed for example to the resolute and earnest tree? I did not tell you, fair child, to take example by the moth, that would soar to the star, but falls scorched beside the lamp.

Spoiler :

We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.

Spoiler :

As some lord of the forest wanders abroad for its prey, and scents and follows it over plain and hill, through brake and jungle, but, seizing it at last, bears the quarry to its unwitnessed cave,—so Genius searches through wood and waste, untiringly and eagerly, every sense awake, every nerve strained to speed and strength, for the scattered and flying images of matter, that it seizes at last with its mighty talons, and bears away with it into solitudes no footstep can invade.

Spoiler :

...the darkness of a child’s heart is often but the shadow of a star.

Spoiler :

Fool! in what age of the world, even if the Madmen of France succeed in their chimeras, will the iron of law not bend itself, like an osier twig, to the strong hand of power and gold?

Spoiler :

...and from the bosom of the imperishable youth that blooms only in the spirit, springs up the dark poison-flower of human love.

Spoiler :

“The transport and the sorrow, so wildly blended, which have at intervals diversified my doom, are better than the calm and bloodless tenor of thy solitary way—thou, who lovest nothing, hatest nothing, feelest nothing, and walkest the world with the noiseless and joyless footsteps of a dream!”

Spoiler :

Who, indeed in his first youth,—youth when the soul is nearer to the heaven from which it sprang, and its divine and primal longings are not all effaced by the sordid passions and petty cares that are begot in time,—who is there in youth that has not nourished the belief that the universe has secrets not known to the common herd, and panted, as the hart for the water-springs, for the fountains that lie hid and far away amidst the broad wilderness of trackless science? The music of the fountain is heard in the soul WITHIN, till the steps, deceived and erring, rove away from its waters, and the wanderer dies in the mighty desert.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Inspired by the chatter about Vonnegut I've just reread Mother Night, about a German-American playwright who becomes a Nazi propagandist and a US spy, the moral being be careful what you pretend to be. Very funny and dark.
Now going to have to hunt down some others I haven't read for a few years.

 

[Kyriakos]

Reread the End of Dr. Knelge, by Hesse. One of my favorite stories of his.

I like that the unassuming Knelge - who was just a retired secondary education philologist - tragically becomes the archenemy of "ape Jonas", a man who reverted to ape and abandoned all use of language, in some large german institute for vegitarians and assorted alternative lifestyle people in Asia Minor.