What are you reading?

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri Apr 10, 2020 1:56 pm

I really liked Saramago's "All The Names," which is about ARCHIVES

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 1:48 am

It is! Archives and Banality! ♡ ♡

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:21 am

Wait, so I should read Vandermeer? Cause I haven't. Where should I start?

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:24 am

I don't particularly like VanderMeer but he just has a really particular/idiosyncratic vibe that's about overwhelming psychedelic lushness and mushrooms and things growing in an intense and almost Cronenbergian way. I liked Annihilation actually, maybe read that?

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:25 am

The reviews I read of his books all sounded like the readers had just woken up from some hypnotized vague state of 'weird.' Not altogether encouraging, but not altogether off-putting either...

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 9:10 am

yeah that sounds right!

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 11:05 am

The thing that’s most actively made me want to read VanderMeer is this one very fantastic Elvia Wilk essay connecting Annihilation to the lore surrounding female medieval mystics, which I think I already sent to Ritchey:

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/20529 ... rd-divine/

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:40 pm

I like Vandermeer's milieu and interests, but I don't usually like the narratives that much. I like that he exists, I guess? I usually wish things took a different turn or were written differently, but I love the extremely psychedelic nature vibes.
Mixed bag?

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:44 am

I'm halfway through the Three-Body Problem and I don't think I can continue. I truly never say this about a book but I think it is TOO BORING for me. It's literally just people talking about math and physics problems. I'm not joking. There is a plot, but it's mostly just an excuse to move people around to different locations where they can talk to other people about math. There's an epic virtual reality immersive video game but all people do in it is TALK ABOUT MATH. I feel like I'm going crazy. This book is an international bestseller. Do you have to know about math to find it compelling?? Has anyone read it? I need HELP

Evan.V.N.S.J. · Post by **Evan.V.N.S.J.** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:19 am

m o l l y wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:21 am Wait, so I should read Vandermeer? Cause I haven't. Where should I start?

Yeah you should read Annihilation! The whole "Southern Reach" trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) is really good. Clara is a big supporter of his books but those are the only 3 I have read.

The first one is the most psychedelic, the second one is kind of like an x-files type thing and the third one is ... kind of impossible to describe without knowing what happens in the first two I guess.

If you haven't already, you should see the movie too! It's really different from the books beyond the basic premise but it's pretty good as its own thing.
----
Other than work stuff, I have mostly been getting into like uh Celtic mythology. I guess it is kind of more like work stuff than most leisure reading. Same shit, different continent or whatever. But it's cool.

I read the Mabinogion, which is a Welsh cycle of stories that sort of intersects with King Arthur stories in a weird way (except everyone's names are weird and Welsh) and am very slowly reading Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which was apparently pretty heavily 'edited' to take out all of the truly wild stuff (Like how Cuchulain hulks out into a disgusting ogre thing with one eye popping out and his guts flying out of his mouth when he has to do violence to people) but it is still pretty charming imo.

Evan.V.N.S.J. · Post by **Evan.V.N.S.J.** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:26 am

ritchey wrote: ↑Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:44 am Three-Body Problem
...
Do you have to know about math to find it compelling?? Has anyone read it? I need HELP

Oh yeah I forgot I wanted to talk about this too!

I liked it - the math stuff is kind of heavy in the middle, but if I remember right it gets a little easier to deal with towards the end. I would say to power through if you found the first part at all interesting. I still think the opening chapters are the best. I've also heard that the translator sort of added some things to flesh out the human characters a bit more, but I'm not sure what.

The author Liu Cixin is kind of a weird guy, his mentality as an author is basically that science is more interesting than people, and his goal is to write stories that play out in like geologic time rather than on a human scale. But then you read his novels and they are just kind of full of ... boring people? But I think the math / physics stuff is what really interests him.

I liked the first one ok, but I tried to read the second book in the series a few years ago but got similarly sort of bored in the middle of a very long and detailed description of like the physics of space ships flying through space. So I never finished it or read the third one...

The translator Ken Liu writes his own science fiction and fantasy, it is much more character-focused and definitely not as much "hard sci-fi" as the Three Body Problem. His short story collection The Paper Menagerie has some good ones in it (some are kind of bad though). And he is in the middle of writing a huge trilogy that is kind of like a reimagining of Chinese history in a sort of polynesian inspired fantasy setting? I liked the first book a lot but haven't had time to read the second one yet. They are long.

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:43 am

Thank you, this is very helpful and again (as with your Skyrim post) validates my impressions! It def reads like a book by somebody who finds people boring and math extremely interesting. Which I totally respect, just not sure I can hang with such a mind. The Ken Liu trilogy sounds rad, it's going on my list.

I've been thinking a lot about translation while reading it. Translation is such a fascinating art. First of all there's all the footnotes explaining all the intricacies of Cultural Revolution iconography/ideology/etc. which is interesting to think about (e.g. a Chinese audience not requiring those footnotes, I assume?) But I've been wondering a lot in recent years about how much of a translated book is the author and how much is the translator. Like what if what I love about the Elena Ferrante novels actually has more to do with their English translator than with they themselves?? And there's no way to know, save by becoming idiomatically fluent in Italian and then reading them in the original.

I have also wondered/worried that this is why I don't like Haruki Murakami. Is it his translator's fault??? Or, more existentially, is it the fault of the English language itself, which (like any other language) is only capable of truly authentically embodying thoughts/images/impressions formulated in itself, all other linguistic modes being imperfect fits with its grammar? I will NEVER KNOW

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 9:45 am

It's like how the French thought Edgar Allan Poe was a great literary artist, up there with Hugo, but it seems like it was probably just because BAUDELAIRE was the guy who translated him into French, and took many liberties in doing so.

And then again, what does it even mean to "take liberties" when translating a text??? It's like all you DO as a translator, is take liberties. It's a weirdly creative art, not a one-to-one code to crack.

I wish I spoke a million languages

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Tue Apr 21, 2020 10:05 am

Murakami though! I have read so many of them and every single time I feel like, the stories are great but there must be something lost in the translation because they feel like they are kind of always just describing the plot? If that makes sense?

alexshred420 · Post by **alexshred420** » Wed Apr 29, 2020 3:53 pm

Just finished "Planet of Slums" by Mike Davis (also the author of the excellent "City of Quartz" about the history of Los Angeles) and gosh it's dark. IMF/World Bank/Reagan/Thatcher/neoliberal financial policy has really done a number on the world, but especially poorer megacities.

Does make me think that it's the future of all cities, this dystopian separation of the uber wealthy in gated enclaves, guarded by private security (and "public" police), surrounded by poverty and desolation.

freddy · Post by **freddy** » Wed Apr 29, 2020 4:09 pm

I read the audiobook of Mr. Loverman (available through the MultCoLib for those of you Portlanders) and really enjoyed it. For one thing, it's a story about two married people in their seventies, and I just feel like you often don't get novels about a lifetime together. For another, the protagonists are two Caribbean immigrants to Britain who came over in the 1950s, and that's a subculture I don't know anything about, so I enjoyed that. Also, the audiobook readers were fantastic, especially since I don't know British-Caribbean patois, like, at all. I'm not telling you all much about the story because I don't want to spoiler some plot points, but it was engrossing.

willowowow · Post by **willowowow** » Wed Apr 29, 2020 4:14 pm

Thank you, Freddy! That sounds great. I'll add the audio version to my library holds.

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:10 am

Oh yeah that book is by Bernardine Evaristo, who shared the Booker prize with Atwood. Did anyone read Girl, Woman, Other, the book that she won it for?

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri May 01, 2020 8:17 am

Every night before going to sleep I’ve been reading a small slice of this mid-60s J.G. Ballard called The Drought (also known as The Burning World) which is a very surrealistic mid-apocalyptic avant-garde novel about a horrific drought and the cast of misfits and holdouts still living alongside a mostly drained river in their beached houseboats. It’s extremely vivid and full of these wildly beautiful images: the city is emptied out and the zoo animals are roaming everywhere, every third house is on fire, everyone is sort of inexplicably drifting toward the sea even though there’s no solution there, and the fishermen have formed a sunbaked cult and are fishing for human beings with giant nets in the abandoned, dusty streets, etc.

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Fri May 01, 2020 8:41 am

didn't he also write a mid-apocalyptic novel about a flooded world?? Exploring all the angles!

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri May 01, 2020 9:33 am

The Drowned World, only a couple of years earlier! A VERY similar book in many ways, equally caught up on these rapturous painterly details. In the Drowned World the planet has reverted to a primordial state, with giant Triassic ferns returning to prominence and all waking life moving down the brainstem into lizard consciousness. Everyone in that book is inexplicably driven to head towards the equator and into the sun. There’s an amazing section where they temporarily drain London somehow and one of the main characters explores the abandoned dome of a planetarium that has been submerged in brackish hot swamp water for decades, and “like a pelagic Cortez” he interprets the barnacles and pond scum on the dome as the constellations of the new world.

ritchey · Post by **ritchey** » Fri May 01, 2020 10:45 am

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sat Jun 27, 2020 10:13 am

Bringing back this thread!

I had a really hard time reading the first few months of quar, but now I’m catching up as time slows to a crawl. Here’s some books I’ve enjoyed recently:

- Ursula K Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching (inspired by [mention]w0lf[/mention]) — usually I’m leery of these kind of “poetic translations” made by people who don’t actually read the original language but Le Guin was a lifelong Taoist and she is very transparent about what she knows and doesn’t know, and it’s a beautiful text with some very elegant and thoughtful footnotes. I’ve found it super helpful for getting at peace with this moment.

- Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room, which is pretty much a scene-by-scene meditation on Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” and more largely a book about art and being indebted to other artists. Jona and I met Geoff Dyer at a dinner party last year and I’ve gotten really into his work. He has a way of expressing very complex things in plain language that is (to me) the mark of a great writer.

- Ahkil Sharma’s “Family Life,” a friend sent this to me via an internet book club, it’s a novel about an Indian family that immigrates to the US in the mid-1970s and immediately experiences a random and horrific medical tragedy. Read this one in a day, it’s extremely spare and honest and drily funny even though it’s about something extremely sad.

- An as-yet-unreleased book by Xiaowei
Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm, about tech in rural China (I got a galley for Blurbing Purposes) that absolutely blew my mind. Among other things, Wang visits these remote farming villages that have become e-commerce hubs (Taobao Villages) specializing in the small-scale manufacture of, for example, Halloween and theater costumes, which they sell all over China and worldwide via drop-shipping. It’s kind of a socio-technological travelogue examining how technology is reshaping rural life / deconstructing the idea of “innovation” / showing these very human-scale, emergent consequences of globalization.

- Now I’m working through the new Mike Davis, Set The Night on Fire, a “movement history” of 1960s Los Angeles, a street-level account of the civil rights movement and the struggle for school integration and fair housing in LA (so far, it’s like 500 pages long and I’m just into 1963). A fascinating & vital history to know, and as ever I’m amazed we don’t teach these histories in school, probably because if we did people would know how to fight for change more effectively. It’s really depressing because a lot of the city politicking is exactly the same in 2020, we still have a deeply racist police force, the city council is still bought & paid for, and people in charge still offer meaningless incremental change when what people need is for the system to be completely overhauled!!!

Anyway, what’s everyone reading?

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sat Jun 27, 2020 4:09 pm

Oooh, those all sound great. I'm still struggling to read in the way I'm used to, and yet I just keep buying books and creating this tower of summer reading that I won't be able to finish. I also have a big pile of PDFs/research to get to... at some point.

- Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
So far really great, a polish novel about an old woman living in the countryside. Tokarczuk won the nobel prize in 2018!

- Milkman, Anna Burns
Another novel I'm halfway through. The setting and author are Irish and the language is really fascinating. Sometimes it's hard to get into the zone, but then feels very hypnotic and hard to put down.

- The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste Olalquiaga
Cultural study about kitsch. It's focused on the Victorian era and ideas about nature, modernity, keepsakes, souvenirs, etc. So far up my alley it's actually lodged inside of me and just lives there now!

- Stamped From The Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi
A history of racist ideas in America. So, so , so good. Really just GREAT, fascinating, educational, historical, etc.

The rest of my stack that I haven't started yet (please help me to stop buying books?):

- The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes (romanticism, the romantic age, science, etc)
- Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg
- The Fruit Hunters, Adam Leith Gollner (literally about fruit/plant history)
- Photography's Other Histories, Christopher Pinney (essays r.e. photography outside of the canon)
- Feeld, Jos Charles (poetry)
- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong (fiction)
- Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo (fiction)
- An Indigenous Peoples' History of the US, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- Me and White Supremacy, Layla Saad
- The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sat Jun 27, 2020 4:11 pm

I want to read the Stalker book! Geoff Dyer has done some great writing about photography, that's so cool that you got to meet him.

And, whoops, I've now just bought one of those Dyer photography books

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Mon Jun 29, 2020 3:00 am

Yes! I'm glad this thread lives. Your lists are inspiring; lots of new open tabs.

I just got a copy of Rutgar Bregman's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History. He's the Dutch whippersnapper who went to Davos and told everyone to pay their taxes. I've only read a taste of it so far, but I feel like it might do me some good. It is his argument, based on historical anecdotes, that contrary to all of our neoliberal systems being based on the contrary, humans actually lean toward generosity and unselfishness and generally want to live in healthy sharing communities.

I have also decided to reread a stack of Kurt Vonnegut books this summer. I know that rereading an old white dude's literary canon is not exactly in step with the current zeitgeist. I consistently use a couple of his letters and short stories in units I teach and I admire his is life and worldview. I recently watched a lecture of his on story shapes and the meaning we assign to experiences and it made me want to get into his worlds again. I also had not read one of his novels since I was an actual child.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 10:20 am

Coming in hot with a book rec: "Semiosis," a 2018 science fiction novel by Sue Burke. It's the first contemporary SF book I've read in a LONG time (I'm kind of a "nothing written after 1979" kind of SF purist, insufferably) and it's a multigenerational space-colony story about castaways from Earth attempting to fit into the ecosystem of a distant planet one billion years older than the Earth, where plants have evolved conscious intelligence and the capacity to communicate. I found its re-framing of the "alien" totally transgressive and the implications about planetary mutualism most thrilling! It kind of reminded me of Philip José Farmer's "Strange Relations," if anyone's read that?

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 11:30 am

I read it! It's super weird and good, took me to places I really wasn't expecting! Also, surprisingly action packed and tense!

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 11:33 am

My book pile progress has been slooow but I just finished On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, and predictably loved it a lot. Just lovely, pained, honest, and both frilly and spare in its language.

Now I'm deeeeep in teaching prep and only reading for my classes, so either history of photography or photography and the internet. It's good, I *love* it, but my brain feels very stuffed and I would love to read a novel next to a swimming pool before summer is over.

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 1:56 pm

yourfriendclaire wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 10:20 am Coming in hot with a book rec: "Semiosis," a 2018 science fiction novel by Sue Burke. It's the first contemporary SF book I've read in a LONG time (I'm kind of a "nothing written after 1979" kind of SF purist, insufferably) and it's a multigenerational space-colony story about castaways from Earth attempting to fit into the ecosystem of a distant planet one billion years older than the Earth, where plants have evolved conscious intelligence and the capacity to communicate. I found its re-framing of the "alien" totally transgressive and the implications about planetary mutualism most thrilling! It kind of reminded me of Philip José Farmer's "Strange Relations," if anyone's read that?

Would love to read this. I've had a delightful summer with Kurt (Vonnegut) and after like 6 books I think I'm ready for not Kurt.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 3:38 pm

meadows wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 11:30 am I read it! It's super weird and good, took me to places I really wasn't expecting! Also, surprisingly action packed and tense!

Totally, I loved how it shifted gears between generations! Like all of a sudden it’s a murder-mystery? Okay!

I just found out there’s a sequel so I’m gonna hit that next!

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:54 pm

[mention]yourfriendclaire[/mention] OH SHIT

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:47 pm

Now I'm reading a book I must've bought at an estate sale or thrift store years ago and forgotten I owned until I got really into Six Feet Under and rediscovered it on my bookshelf: "The American Way of Death," Jessica Mitford's 1963 heavily-researched exposé about the abuses and frivolities of the funeral industry.

An inspiration for Six Feet Under, I'm sure, as well as for the film "The Loved One." I'm sure a great deal has changed, although maybe it hasn't changed that much, but it's really a corker, a great window into postwar American capitalist perversion, full of all this inside-baseball stuff about the funeral industry's trade magazines, its semantic acrobatics ("the loved one," "the slumber room," "the memorial park," etc) and all the ways it took advantage of grief and shock and the general public's willful ignorance of death to bamboozle bereaved people into buying things they definitely don't need and which aren't even required by law.

Did you know that the US (at least in the '60s) is the only country which embalms corpses? It serves no hygienic or legal purpose whatsoever! It's just so the funeral industry can sell expensive caskets for viewing the body and then expensive vaults and plots for preserving the casket and the body, which of course rot regardless.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:49 pm

Also Jessica Mitford was cool as hell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Mitford

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Sat Aug 22, 2020 2:08 am

Wow, sounds like a good read.
I remember going to the funeral home with my mom when my grandmother died and being so fucking angry with the way they tried to milk her grief for money. Telling her she needed to buy a funeral sign-in book, which just a blank book bought from a funeral home, the cheapest of which being over $100 . Trying to upsell her on an urn, the cheapest of which is in the $500 range (15 years ago). FOR A BOX THAT HOLDS ASHES IN THE GROUND. They count on your love and your grief and likely your guilt and the fact that you are likely spending the desceased's money anyway. It is very sick.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sat Aug 22, 2020 11:42 am

Yeah, it's deeply fucked. There are particularities to the funeral home transaction that are so unique--people have no idea what's customary or normal, they're in shock, they have no ability to shop around, and often they're spending insurance money, so the funeral directors know exactly how much to milk them for. They know that the deceased would likely never have chosen the lavish things they're selling (in fact when people come in to organize their own funerals "pre-need" they tend to select the cheapest option) but guilt is a powerful motivator.

The whole embalming/casket industry is centered around the idea that it's important for "grief therapy" to have a "beautiful memory picture of the deceased" lying in repose. But the only time I've seen a body was my embalmed grandmother and it HORRIFIED me—it didn't give me a "beautiful memory picture" at all. If anything the horror of seeing her as a rouged corpse made her death harder for me.

I would love to read an updated version of this book. I'm sure the funeral industry has gone mega-corporate since the days of the independent local funeral home.

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sun Aug 23, 2020 2:22 pm

Same r.e. viewing an embalmed grandparent. A waxy, still, heavy object devoid of meaning or spirit that I couldn't get away from, always in the corner of my eye no matter how far across the room I positioned myself. It really upset me, and is so not how people are in life or in death.

I once went to a funeral museum somewhere in Texas (killing time on a work trip) without realizing it was attached to a mortuary school. They had a very strange and interesting gift shop and some interesting Victorian mourning objects, but the entire place reeked of embalming fluid and gave me a ripping headache. There was a door that led into the mortuary area, not locked or anything, and behind it... sinister goings on.

Death industry is real gross.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Sun Aug 23, 2020 3:52 pm

Whoa funeral museum!? Where in Texas? Sounds horrible and fascinating.

In a sense seeing my grandma's embalmed body did serve one purpose for me: seeing this waxy nightmare utterly devoid of whatever "spark" once inhabited it made me hyperaware that a body is truly just a vessel and is completely meaningless on its own. In a very real sense (to me) it just wasn't her. It didn't even look like her. Not to be woo-woo but this is something that my very occasional meditation practice also hammered home for me, because whenever I'm at peak brainwave state I feel my entire Self as just a tiny dot just bouncing around inside my body. I guess I believe in a soul? Uh oh

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Mon Aug 24, 2020 10:57 am

It's right outside of Houston. I don't really recommend it! There were a few cool things to see, but you could also see them online or somewhere else. The whole experience was just very weird and the smell was oppressive. But, knock yourself out!

marijke · Post by **marijke** » Mon Aug 24, 2020 5:11 pm

So many different experiences and individual darknesses.

I swear I saw my father's open casket, though my mother once said she consulted a child psych who told her my brother could be allowed in during the viewing but my sister and I were too young. My memory of it is so clear, and she was so wrecked at the time and can be an unreliable narrator of our past, that I wonder whose memory is correct? I remember it as strange and frightening.

On the other side, when my brother died we couldn't see the body and the surreality of that was/is haunting. About 8 months later my neighbor's daughter died of brain cancer and her family had her laid out in the dining room for three days while they partied in loud Irish Catholic style. It was so shocking and cathartic to me, so unlike my own family's ways. She had definitely been embalmed, but it was altogether beautiful.

I guess the lesson is that everyone should write a will with very specific instructions, it's kind to loved ones.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Thu Sep 17, 2020 12:02 pm

Here comes Your Friend Claire with another book report!

I'm currently reading "Hard Times," an oral history of the Great Depression compiled by the great Studs Terkel. Another random unread tome from my shelf that kinda floated to the top of my consciousness as a potentially illuminating read for the moment. Terkel published this book in 1970, and it contains hundreds of firsthand accounts from people of all walks of life about their experiences in the early '30s: miners, labor organizers, automotive workers, hoboes, bankers, jazz musicians, rum-runners, nurses, artists, industrialists, newspapermen, farmers, etc. First of all the sheer richness of the American vernacular on display in this book is a feast of language. I mean just on a literary pleasure-level.

But then it's also incredibly illuminating, obviously, about so many things. How hard-fought American labor's victories of that era were--people getting killed for unionizing Appalachian coal mines, monthlong sit-in strikes in Detroit--and just how much our social conception of poverty has changed. Something that comes across in so many of these accounts is that people didn't experience poverty as an individual shame. They knew something was wrong with the machine, not them. There wasn't this criminalizing-the-poor thing that we have now. And, of course, people helped each other so much more. Hoboes would ride the rails together and roll up to small towns across the US and just knock on doors, get a sandwich from a stranger, get a bath and a bed for the night, walk away in the morning with an old pair of shoes and a snack for the road. Can you imagine?!

marijke · Post by **marijke** » Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:45 pm

Sounds like a good read. Couple nights ago I watched Harlan County, USA, a doc from the mid-seventies about a miner strike in Kentucky. Lots of the folks had also lived through the bloody strike of the thirties. It sounds wild.

It’s an interesting film, if a bit unstructured. Seems like it could be a good watch to follow that!

I’m reading Mary Karr’s Lit but not getting into it. There’s something sing-songy about the writing style that I find off-putting... like when someone does that cheesy fast-talking that’s supposed to sound like a clever person from the fifties. And generally purple writing. :/ I just listened to the critics from the NYT book review talk about how they selected the books for their 50 best memoirs list and it made me want to read a grip of those. A few on it I had read and loved. Another Karr made the list (The Liar’s Club)... maybe I oughta started there, it’s older and from before the peak era of this obnoxious style.

I just finished Famous Father Girl, written by Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. It trails in the end but was a great escape... witty family with lots of fun in jokes, living in the Dakota in the 60s/70s, vacationing and hobnobbing with cultural elite. I like when Leonard Bernstein, known to live on the toilet and hold lengthy conversations there, is reading a symphonic score on the can and tells his daughter to wait until he “finishes this movement”.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Tue Sep 22, 2020 9:55 am

Ooh [mention]marijke[/mention] thanks for the tip on Harlan County--gonna watch soon!

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:25 am

Love Studs Terkel! The great interviewer! It has been a while but now might be an interesting time to read his book, Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. I loved The Good War and Working.

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:54 am

Just inhaled Real Life by Brandon Taylor and it's very good and will poke you right in the heart meat.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:59 am

[mention]m o l l y[/mention] I just bought Working! Really excited to get into it next. I got into Studs Terkel tangentially because some dot-com era folks I profiled in Broad Band published a '90s update of Working called Gig, which covers new jobs like media entrepreneur, UPS driver, and heavy metal roadie. Highly recommend.

yourfriendclaire · Post by **yourfriendclaire** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:11 pm

Reading Timothy Leary's autobiography ("Flashbacks" lol) and it's batshit. He's done SO much acid!

m o l l y · Post by **m o l l y** » Sat Feb 06, 2021 2:05 am

Just whizzed though the new comic book version of Slaughterhouse 5. They did a nice job! I just can't get enough of that Vonnegut.

RCH · Post by **RCH** » Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:04 am

I'm tearing Duolingo up!!

meadows · Post by **meadows** » Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:30 am

what language??