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Spoilers What Book Are You Reading?
- Thread starter Huntn
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takes a bit of time to get started... you'd be done reading if you just started reading.
I love reading in the area of "writers writing about writing" so of course I've glommed onto a copy of Robert Caro's just published book Working. Looking forward to starting it next week.
Robert Caro is probably best known for his voluminous efforts to leave no stone unturned in the biography of Lyndon Johnson. I'm still making my way through the early volumes of that in audiobook format, even as Caro continues to write about the dude!
Still, Caro's mid-1970s book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is how I first bumped into his extensively researched approach to biography. In fact I first encountered references to Robert Moses' 23-page public denunciation of Caro's work (a far more entertaining harangue than any of Trump's even most irate tweets these days), and only then went out to scout up a copy of the book itself, figuring anything worth trying to demolish at that length must be a pretty good read. I was right. There are parts of that book that amount to an ethnographic study, as Caro embedded himself in a Bronx neighborhood for awhile to experience first hand what it was like to live in an area directly affected by construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, a project that did not not necessarily represent application of the will of any voter in any borough of NYC.
That book became a classic treatise on acquisition and use --some would and did say abuse-- of power. It brought Robert Caro among other awards the first of two Pulitzer prizes for biography. Anyway I look forward now to Caro's glance back at his work on the Robert Mose bio and other adventures in Working.
Robert Caro is probably best known for his voluminous efforts to leave no stone unturned in the biography of Lyndon Johnson. I'm still making my way through the early volumes of that in audiobook format, even as Caro continues to write about the dude!
Still, Caro's mid-1970s book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is how I first bumped into his extensively researched approach to biography. In fact I first encountered references to Robert Moses' 23-page public denunciation of Caro's work (a far more entertaining harangue than any of Trump's even most irate tweets these days), and only then went out to scout up a copy of the book itself, figuring anything worth trying to demolish at that length must be a pretty good read. I was right. There are parts of that book that amount to an ethnographic study, as Caro embedded himself in a Bronx neighborhood for awhile to experience first hand what it was like to live in an area directly affected by construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, a project that did not not necessarily represent application of the will of any voter in any borough of NYC.
That book became a classic treatise on acquisition and use --some would and did say abuse-- of power. It brought Robert Caro among other awards the first of two Pulitzer prizes for biography. Anyway I look forward now to Caro's glance back at his work on the Robert Mose bio and other adventures in Working.
I will have to check out the 'Lyndon Johnson' book after finishing the 'Churchill: Walking with Destiny' book, which is an excellent read.
I do want to read that. The NYT reviewer opined that it's the best of any one-volume efforts. If my 4-county library system even has the ebook, I would expect it to have a long wait list. Anyway it's over 1100 pages as a hard copy so I'm not sure borrowing it in any format for three weeks is the way for me to go, even with one renewal allowed. Time to remind some literate kin they may owe me a treat from the bookshop in town, and if not, then there's no time like the present to get next year's Christmas shopping out of the way.
On the Caro LBJ biography: that thing is up to a tetralogy and counting, Vol 5 is in the works... although Caro is getting on in years, and each earlier effort has taken 8 to 10 years to end up at the publisher.
- The Path to Power (1982) covers Johnson's life up to his failed 1941 campaign for the Senate.
- Means of Ascent (1990) commences in the aftermath of that defeat and continues through his election to that office in 1948.
- Master of the Senate (2002) chronicles Johnson's rapid ascent to and rule as Senate Majority Leader.
- The Passage of Power (2012) details the 1960 election, LBJ's life as vice president, Kennedy assassination and LBJ's early days as president
I will put my present reading on hold to read 'The Mueller Report' that is being released shortly. I will read with an open mind the report. A full coffee pot will be needed I think.
Just picked up Getting Things Done by David Allen.
It’s my third trip into the book, and I’m finding myself reading a bit slower, taking a few more notes, and trying out some ideas as it goes.
In conjunction with reading GTD I’m watching a five-hour series of video tutorials on OmniFocus 3, which I have installed on my iPhone, iPad, and iMac, but have used very little.
OmniFocus was originally developed with GTD in mind. It’s an impressive piece of software; I just have to give it an honest try to determine if it’s worth the cost for me.
Anyway, GTD seems to be about as good as it gets in the realm of personal organization. Lord knows I need it.
It’s my third trip into the book, and I’m finding myself reading a bit slower, taking a few more notes, and trying out some ideas as it goes.
In conjunction with reading GTD I’m watching a five-hour series of video tutorials on OmniFocus 3, which I have installed on my iPhone, iPad, and iMac, but have used very little.
OmniFocus was originally developed with GTD in mind. It’s an impressive piece of software; I just have to give it an honest try to determine if it’s worth the cost for me.
Anyway, GTD seems to be about as good as it gets in the realm of personal organization. Lord knows I need it.
Just about finished with my Churchill book and the Mueller Report. I do recommend 'Churchill: Walking with Destiny'. The Mueller Report is going to require further research by me. My next historical book will be about Virginia Hall; she was an unsung hero in WW II, working for the SOE and OSS. She is finally getting the recognition for her heroism. There a couple of books now out about her and her 'sidekick', Cuthbert. The one on my reading list is 'A Woman of No Importance' Sonia Purnell. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Hall at reunion many years ago.
Well I have embarked on a reading of Anna Burns' novel Milkman. This is a book that it probably pays to read a little about it before even opening it. Otherwise if one has heard nothing of it, it's disorienting in a way and at a pace that one may never have encountered before, no matter how many classical, avant garde or experimental tomes may be in the rear view. It can be offputting enough to end up unfairly abandoned, in fact.
I was stunned by the time I'd got through ten pages. I set it aside thinking right well I have read some strange books in my life, but this one... maybe this one is not for me.
However I then read a few reviews including one by Mark O'Connell for Slate. That one (and not only for its wicked bits of humor) made me decide to go back and resume reading Milkman, linger in it where I liked, not get hung up on anything else along the way.
https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/milkman-booker-prize-novel-review.html
I liked this bit:
It was another way of looking at what I was reading, one that made Burns' spiky, bewildering use of language seem inevitable rather than arbitrary.
I'm having a blast with it now, and I completely understand why this exasperating, comical, heartbreaking tale got the Man Booker Prize last year, despite some ill-formed or misaligned passages (which one may forgive but only even recognizes as "off" after finally managing to start surfing on --rather than wondering if drowning in-- the waves this author raises).
The compounded polarizations in the book remind me that the essence of what we're living through in the States [again?] right now was owned by the fractured Irish for more than a hundred years and at that was only borrowed from yet other breaking waves throughout human history. But Burns in this book draws some different lines in the sand, asking if our patriarchs ever really got to set all the boundaries, yet she still limns as at once tragic and ludicrous the very concept of trying to define "encroachment" from the standpoint of an oppressed figure or community.
I was stunned by the time I'd got through ten pages. I set it aside thinking right well I have read some strange books in my life, but this one... maybe this one is not for me.
However I then read a few reviews including one by Mark O'Connell for Slate. That one (and not only for its wicked bits of humor) made me decide to go back and resume reading Milkman, linger in it where I liked, not get hung up on anything else along the way.
https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/milkman-booker-prize-novel-review.html
I liked this bit:
Certainly much of the discussion around its Booker victory centered on its supposed difficulty. A number of reviews, including Dwight Garner’s in the New York Times, have referred to it as a “stream-of-consciousness” novel. (Just to clear up a basic technical question, the narrative is voice-driven, but it no more employs the device of stream of consciousness than American Psycho or Pale Fire—or for that matter Dwight Garner’s review in the Times.) Garner also declared the book “willfully demanding and opaque,” claiming that literary modernism had given us “eyes for the poetry in a novel like ‘Milkman,’ but an attentive reader will spend days between stations while searching for it.” This conclusion echoed certain dismayed responses to Burns’ Booker victory in the U.K. press, such as a review in the London Times which concluded, of a representative passage, that “this could all have been said much more snappily.” When I read this particular complaint, I have to admit I laughed out loud, so perfectly did it seem to me to encapsulate a certain understanding of the critic as inconvenienced customer of literature. It bears noting that some of the most memorable passages in all of fiction— Borges’ exhilaratingly comprehensive attempt to describe his glimpsing of the universe in miniature in “The Aleph,” say, or Beckett’s description of Molloy’s insanely logical methodology for sucking 16 pebbles “in impeccable succession”—are also remarkably deficient in snap.
And this sold me in:
The book’s long sentences, its penchant for the exhaustive, can at times be challenging, and there were stretches where I found its uncanny energies stagnated for too long. But it also seems clear to me that these insistent strategies are in service of the book’s mood of total claustrophobia, and that they contribute to, rather than diminish, its overall effectiveness. As with so much of the national tradition from which she emerges—Synge, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, the whole collectible beer-mat set of the overwhelmingly male canon, few of whom get hassled for being insufficiently snappy—Burns seems to convey through her style a deep ambivalence about the English language itself. Because it would be strange, would it not, to write a book about a community for whom every conceivable aspect of the “country over the water” was an object of obsessive and justified suspicion, and to write it in the language violently imposed on one’s people by that colonizing nation, and yet to do so in a manner that did not convey that there was something uncanny, something essentially off, about that language as the community’s primary means of self-expression?
It was another way of looking at what I was reading, one that made Burns' spiky, bewildering use of language seem inevitable rather than arbitrary.
I'm having a blast with it now, and I completely understand why this exasperating, comical, heartbreaking tale got the Man Booker Prize last year, despite some ill-formed or misaligned passages (which one may forgive but only even recognizes as "off" after finally managing to start surfing on --rather than wondering if drowning in-- the waves this author raises).
The compounded polarizations in the book remind me that the essence of what we're living through in the States [again?] right now was owned by the fractured Irish for more than a hundred years and at that was only borrowed from yet other breaking waves throughout human history. But Burns in this book draws some different lines in the sand, asking if our patriarchs ever really got to set all the boundaries, yet she still limns as at once tragic and ludicrous the very concept of trying to define "encroachment" from the standpoint of an oppressed figure or community.
Ordered "East West Street" by Philippe Sands as it was strongly recommended by a colleague. Amazon informs me that it has already been dispatched (having been ordered last night); I return home late tonight - tomorrow.
Continuing my journey of reading free books, I just finished...
Mysterious Island - Jules Verne
I remember seeing the 1961 movie at the drive-in as kid when it came out, so I thought I had good grasp of the book
LOL, Hollywood completely rewrote that screenplay and about the only thing they saved was that there was an island with a volcano and Captain Nemo was there
The book has no women (couldn't make a movie without love interests!), no giant chickens, bees or crabs, no underwater adventures and Nemo only appears briefly
Actually, the book was pretty good... after having read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days
In the midst of those books, I read Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling and found it to be quite good
I also diverged from the free books for a moment to read the latest installment of the Expanse series, Tiamat's Wrath
I've really enjoyed the Expanse series, although I found the last one, Persepolis Rising to be a little weak
This one was stronger, and sets up for another book quite well
Mysterious Island - Jules Verne
I remember seeing the 1961 movie at the drive-in as kid when it came out, so I thought I had good grasp of the book
LOL, Hollywood completely rewrote that screenplay and about the only thing they saved was that there was an island with a volcano and Captain Nemo was there
The book has no women (couldn't make a movie without love interests!), no giant chickens, bees or crabs, no underwater adventures and Nemo only appears briefly
Actually, the book was pretty good... after having read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days
In the midst of those books, I read Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling and found it to be quite good
I also diverged from the free books for a moment to read the latest installment of the Expanse series, Tiamat's Wrath
I've really enjoyed the Expanse series, although I found the last one, Persepolis Rising to be a little weak
This one was stronger, and sets up for another book quite well
Do you watch the tv series? I do and have been wondering about reading the books.
I watched the first 2 seasons and liked it, but I always like books better than movies or shows
While they got some of the characters right, I didn't particularly like the casting for Naomi or Holden, it was OK, but not spot on
Amos plays the character well enough, but physically he wasn't quite right either
Chrisjen Avasarala was perfect though
I really like the book series, and I have read all the short stories and novellas associated with it too
I pre-order the books and read them as soon as they come out, and at one point got tired of waiting on the new one and went back and re-read all of the previous ones
If you are enjoying the TV series and have an interest, you should definitely check out the books
Skimmed Caro's "Working" on @LizKat recommendation. Very interesting, but for now I won't read it cover to cover.
Also skimmed Jock Colville's "Fringes of Power", his diary during his time working for PM Winston Churchill. I read it a few years ago, it was nice to re-read a few pages.
Also skimmed Jock Colville's "Fringes of Power", his diary during his time working for PM Winston Churchill. I read it a few years ago, it was nice to re-read a few pages.
Have you had a chance to read Stephen King's book "On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft"? Highly recommend it. I too like reading about how others write as well as the how and why.
Still working my way through Dune. There are some parts that have dragged on for me and I remember someone mentioning the religious piece/portion of the book. You were not kidding. Holy smokes, I didn't realize religion was so baked into the book. I have just under two hundred pages left.
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The biggest thing I have taken away from the GTD way of thinking, is you can't be lazy. Period.